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The Only Way for America to Survive is Manifest Destiny

With many people driving cars that are flashy and very expensive, carjacking is a subject of concern. Need was not the only factor implicated in carjacking. Some carjackers indicated that they were influenced by the appeal of targets that represented effortless or unique opportunities (exempli gratia, isolated or weak victims, vehicles with exceptionally desirable options, rare vehicles). Here, risks were so low or potential rewards so great that, even in the absence of substantive internal or external situational inducements, they decided to commit a carjacking. Such opportunities were simply too good to pass up. Po-Po (short of “Piss Off the PO lice”) described just such an opportunity-driven incident. She and her brother had spent the day successfully pickpocketing individuals at the Golden 1 Center, in Sacramento. On their way out, she noticed an easy target, an isolated woman walking to her car, preoccupied with the lock on her car door. Po-Po: “It was a fancy little car. I don’t know too much about names of cars, I just know what I like. A little sporty little car like a Mercedes Benz like car. It was black and it was shiny and it looked good. I just had to joy ride it. She was a white lady. It looked like she worked for [a news station] or somebody. We just already pick pocket[ed] people in the arena, but f*ck. So we just walked down stairs and [I] said, ‘You want to steal a car? Come on dude, let me get this car.’ I didn’t have a gun on me. I just made her think I had a gun. I had a stick and I just ran up there to her and told her, ‘Don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t do nothing. Give me the keys and ease your a** away from the car.’ I said, ‘You make one sound I’m going to blow your mother*cker head off and I’m not playing with you!’ I said, ‘Just go on around the car, just scoot on around the car.’ Threw the keys to my little brother and told him go on and open the door. And she stood around there at the building like she waiting on the bus until we zoomed off. We got away real slow and easy.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Likewise, Kow, and older carjacker and sometimes street robber, was on his way to a friend’s house to complete a potentially lucrative drug deal when he happened on an easy situation—a man sitting in a parked car, talking to someone on a pay phone at 2A.M. INT: “What drew you to this guy? What were you doing? Why did you decide to do this guy?” KOW: “Man, it ain’t be no, ‘What you be doing?,’ [it’s] just the thought that cross your mind be like, you need whatever it is you see, so you get it, you just get it. I was going to do something totally different [a drug deal] but along the way something totally different popped up so I just take it as it comes. I was like, ‘Whew! Get that.’ I don’t know man, your mind is a hell of a thing. On our way to this other thing. It just something that just hit you, you know what I’m saying? Plus, [he looked like] a b*tch. I don’t know, it’s just something, he look like a b*tch, just like we could whip him, like a b*tch, you know what I’m saying. Easy.” Not all irresistible opportunities were driven solely by the prospect of monetary gain. In a city the size of Sacramento, offender run into one another all the time, at restaurants, malls, movie theaters and night-clubs. As a result, individuals with shared histories often encounter unique chances for retaliation or personal satisfaction. Goldie emphasized how such opportunities could pop up at a moment’s notice. While cruising the north side of Sacramento, he spotted an individual who had sexually assaulted one of his girlfriends. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Goldie: “I did it on the humbug [spontaneously]. I peeped this dude, [saw that] he [was] pulling up at the liquor store. I’m tripping [excited] you know what I’m saying, [as I’m] walking there [towards the target]. You know, peep him out, you dig? He [was] reaching in the door to open the door. His handle outside must have been broke cause he had to reach in [the window] to open the door. And I just came around you know what I’m saying. [I] put it [the gun] to his head, ‘You want to give me them keys, brother?’ He’s like, ‘No, I’m not givin’ you these keys.’ I’m like, ‘You gonna give me them keys, brother. It’s simple as that!’ Man, he’s like, ‘Take these, motherfu*ker, f*ck you and this car. F*ck you!’ I’m like, ‘Man, just go on and get your a** home.’ [Then I] kicked him in his a**, you know what I’m saying, and I was like, ‘F*ck that, as a matter of fact get on your knees. Get on your knees, mother*cker…’ Then I seen this old lady right, that I know from around this neighborhood. I was like ‘F*ck!,’ jumped on in the car [and] rolled by. I wanted to hit him but she was just standing there, just looking. That’s the only thing what made me don’t shoot him, know what I’m saying? ‘Cause he’s f*cking with one of my little gals. ‘Cause he f*cked one of my little gals. Well, she was saying that he didn’t really f*ck her, you know, he too the p***y, you know what I’m saying? He got killed the next week so I didn’t have to worry about him. Motherf*ckers said they found him dead in the basement in a vacant home. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

That the apostle after Pentecost recognized and dealt with the denizens of the invisible World is evident both from the Acts of the Apostles and from references in the Epistles. During their three years’ training by the Lord, the disciples were being prepared for Pentecost and the exposure to the supernatural World resulting from the coming of the Holy Spirit. They had watched Jesus deal with the wicked spirits of Satan, and had themselves learned to deal with them too. So the power of the Holy spirit could be safely given at Pentecost to men who already knew the workings of the foe. We see how quickly Peter recognized Satan’s work in Ananias (Acts 5.3), and how unclean spirits came out at his presence even as they had with his Lord (Acts 5.16). Philip likewise found the evil hosts subservient to the word of his testimony (Acts 8.7) as he proclaimed Christ to the people. And Paul definitely knew the power of the name of the risen Lord (Acts 19.11) in dealing with the powers of evil. It is therefore clear from Christian Bible history that the manifestation of the power of God invariably meant active dealing with the satanic hosts; that the manifestation of the power of God at Pentecost, and through the apostles’ subsequent ministry, meant an aggressive attitude toward the powers of darkness. We can therefore conclude that growth and maturation of the Church at the end of the New Testament dispensation will require the same recognition and the same attitude toward these satanic hosts—with the same co-witness of the Holy Spirit to the authority of the name of Jesus—as was fond in the early Church. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

The Church of Christ will reach its high-water mark when it is able to recognize and deal with demon possession: when it knows how to “bind the strong man” by prayer and “command” the spirits of evil in the name of Christ, thus delivering men and women from their power. We want a theology which beats in rhythm with the pulse of modern life. Christian symbols must speak to and be understood by humans in present existential situation. Questions should spring from the depth and not the surface of existence, for we employ ontology. If one wants to know, one cannot escape ontology. Ontology removes us from those theologians who shun philosophy of any kind or who attempt to theologize in purely biblical categories. Ontology injects into our system a refreshing intellectual vigor and an antibody against narrowness. The result has unquestionably made a great contribution to the revival of metaphysical thinking within Protestant circles in our day. Since we represent the here and now existential situation, things tend to be vibrant, demanding, and so tends to steal the spotlight from the theological symbols which have already been on the stage for several thousand years. For us the Bible is not the unique source. The theological source, adequately understood, includes the history of the church, of religion, and of culture, for these are the areas in which revelation is received and expressed. Both Protestants and Catholics alike can profit from this enrichment of the wellsprings of theology in order to avoid the impoverishment of a narrow biblicism or of a cramped clerical view of the history of salvation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

The goal is to restore to theology its oft neglected historical perspective with an amplitude that surpasses the commonly accepted notion of tradition. If the Christian Bible is not directly employed, its influence is present in every part of the system. The goal is to produce mountains of information about what it the Bible meant to the people at the time it was produced by trying to make it more relevant in modern examples. The theological norm is the New Being in Jesus as the Christ as our ultimate concern. Ultimate concern appears to be not just an accessory gadget, but the mainspring of the system. The moment or act in which one is grasped by the holy is a thunderstorm at night, when the lightning throws a blinding clarity over all things, leaving them in complete darkness the next moment. Reality is seen as something new. Its ground has become visible in an ecstatic experience, called “faith.” Faith is equated with the ultimate concern: Faith is a total and centered act of the personal self, the act of unconditional, infinite and infinite passion. Some people feel like they do not belong no matter where they go’ somehow, as always, they are left in the cold, alone, by themselves. And no matter how much they try to be themselves and have friends, and be alive; each time, their friends depart, go their own way, achieve their goal, and one is left alone. It may have always been that was since one was a child. Some kids play alone in the backyard, planting flowers and trees, or making patterns and designs with things they find in the backyard. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

One may remain alone, and play by oneself, build something, grow something, or paint with paint or draw crayon pictures—they would be all right; one would feel strong and better; night, silence, these would not bother one at all. However, some may have felt like they never belonged in their own family, even though they turned to them so very much. But every family needs an individual to look down on to make themselves feel better. They all need someone to talk about and make fun or, someone to depress and ruin. The goal is to create something in the aloneness, then one will be all right, and will not really be alone and will not really suffer, for in being alone, you can grow. Faith is ultimate concern and infinite passion. Consequently its all-consuming urgency requires that it be an act of total personality. Faith is not a special faculty nor is it a special function of man’s being. Faith involves the whole person, and thus it is the integrating factor which gives unity and direction to all man’s other concerns. In the fact of faith every nerve of man’s body, every striving of man’s soul, every function of man’s spirit participates. An infinite passion is all-pervading, and no area of man’s being can escape it: one’s body, for ultimate concern is passionate concern; one’s unconscious strivings, for they relate to the symbolic expression of faith; one’s conscious life, for faith concentrates man’s activities upon the object of ultimate concern. Because faith is such a centered act, its identification with any one function leads to what is called intellectualistic, voluntaristic, or emotionalistic distortion of faith. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Since faith cannot spring from any of man’s spiritual functions, but implies a power which unites and transcends all of them, faith has a receptive character, its mere passivity in relation to the divine Spirit. This accords with the basic theology truth that in relation to God everything is by God. Man’s spiritual functions cannot attain the ultimate, although they tend toward it, but the ultimate can grasp all of these functions and raise them beyond themselves by the creation of faith. Although faith is in man, it is not from man. The passive character of faith has to be grasped. Faith is the state of being grasped by the ultimate concern. In contrast to this, faith healing is a psychological phenomenon of autosuggestion which emphasizes an act of intensive concentration and self-determination. However, nothing could be farther from the receptive character of genuine religious faith, the state of being grasped by the Spirit. Once a person has been grasped by the power of the ultimate, one possesses an absolute certainty of the fact which springs from an immediate awareness of it. In ecstasy, anxiety, an even in despair, one is as certain of the experience of the holy as one is of one’s own self. In fact, it is the self in its self-transcending quality. All this, of course, is on the subjective side of faith, for objectively there is always room for doubt about the content of faith. We may not grasp anything in depth of our uncertainty, but that we are grasped by something ultimate, which keeps us in its grasp and from which we may strive in vain to escape, remains absolutely certain. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Advances in science and technology have been so extraordinary since World War II they hardly need elaboration. If nothing had occurred but the invention of the computer and the discovery of DNA, the postwar period might still go down as the most revolutionary in scientific history. However, in fact, much more has happened. We have not only improved our technologies, we have begun to operate at deeper and deeper levels of nature, so that instead of dealing with gross chunks of matter, we can now create a layer of material so incredibly thin that the electrons in it are effectively moving in only two dimensions. We can etch lines that are only 20 billionths of a mete wide. We will soon be able to assemble things one atom at a time. This is not “progress,” but upheaval. The U.S. Nation Academy of Engineering in 1989 listed what it considered the ten most important engineering achievements of the previous twenty-five years. It began the list with the Apollo moon landing, which it ranked in history with the building of the Egyptian pyramids. Next came the development of satellites, micro-processors, lasers, the jumbo jet, genetically engineered products, and other breakthroughs. Since the beginning of the 1950s, when the new wealth-creation system began sprouting in the United States of America, humans, for the first time in history, opened the pathway to the stars, identified the biological program of life, and invented intellectual tools as important as writing. This is an astonishing set of achievements in what amounts to a single generation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

Nor is it only scientific or technological knowledge that has made, or is about to make, remarkable strides. In everything from organization theory to music, from the study of ecosystems to our understanding of the brain, in linguistics and learning theory, in studies of nonequilibrium, chaos, and dissipative structures, the knowledge base is being revolutionized. And even as this occurs, competing researchers in fields like neural networks and artificial intelligence are providing new knowledge about knowledge itself. These transformative advances, seemingly remote from the Worlds of diplomacy and politics, are in fact inescapably linked to today’s geopolitical eruptions. Knowledge is the “K-Factor” in global power struggles. Consider, for example, the implications of the knowledge factor for Soviet power Today’s historic powershift, as we have seen, has made two of the most basic sources of power—violence and wealth—increasingly dependent on the third source: knowledge. Because of the spread of knowledge-based technology and the relatively free circulation of ideas, the United States of America, Europe, and Japan have been able to leave the socialist nations in the dust economically. However, the same technology made possible a vast leap in military power as well. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

A fighter airplane today is the equivalent of a computer with wings. Its effectiveness depends almost entirely on the knowledge packed into its avionics and weaponry—and into its pilot’s brain. In 1982, Soviet military planners suffered a collective case of ulcers when eighty Soviet-built MiG fighters, flown by the Syrians, were destroyed by Israeli pilots, who lost not a single plane. Soviet-built tanks also did badly against Israeli armor. Even though the U.S.S.R. had brilliant military scientists, and nukes enough to incinerate the World, it could not keep place in the race toward super-high-technology conventional weapons or in the dash for strategic defense systems. The growing sophistication of information-based conventional weapons (which, in fact, are not conventional at all) threatened Soviet superiority on the ground in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the extremely knowledge-intensive Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) threatened to negate the vale of Soviet long-range missiles. Critics of SDI complained that it would never work. However, the very possibility alarmed Moscow. If SDI could, in fact, block all Soviet nuclear missiles before they hit the United State of America, they were useless. That would also mean that the United States of America could launch a first-strike nuclear attack without fear of retaliation. If, on the other hand, as is more reasonable, SDI was only fractionally effective, blocking some but not all warheads, it would leave Soviet war panners wondering which fraction of U.S.A. missiles would survive. In either case, SDI raised the ante, and made theoretical Soviet use of nuclear weapons, never very likely, even riskier for Moscow. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

On the ground and in space, then, the Soviets confronted a double threat. Faced with these sobering realities, plus its own economic decline, Moscow rationally concluded that it could no longer protect its Eastern European perimeter militarily, except at an unacceptable and skyrocketing cost. For both economic and military reasons, therefore, a reduction of its imperial commitments became necessary. In the end, what did in the Soviets was not arms or economics, but the K-factor—the new knowledge on which both military strength and economic power are increasingly dependent. The same K-factor helps explain the fragmentation of “developing countries” and the rise of three distinct groupings among them. For example, once the most advanced economies began to shift to computer and information-based technologies, yielding higher value-added products, they transferred many of the old muscle-based, less information-intensive operations to countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and now to Thailand and other places. As Europe, Japan, and the United States of America moved to Third Wave tasks to another tier of nations. This speeded their industrialization and they left the other LDCs behind. (Many of these “newly industrialized economies,” or NIEs, in turn, are now racing to pawn off Second Wave processes on still poorer, more economically backward countries—along with the accompanying pollution and other disadvantages—while they, in turn, try to make the transition to more knowledge-intensive production.) The different speeds of economic development have separated the LDCs from one another. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

And as far the inter-capitalist rivalry among Europe, Japan, and the United States of America, the fabulous success of the U.S.A. postwar policy, which promoted the rebuilding of both the European and Japanese economies, helped both of them restore their shattered industrial structures. This meant the chance for a fresh start and the opportunity to replace old prewar machines with the shiniest new technology, while the United States of America, whose plants had not been bombed into rubble, still needed to amortize its existing industrial base. For a variety of reasons, including a future-oriented culture and the regional economic stimulation resulting from the Vietnam War, and, of course, because of the tremendous hard work and creativity of its postwar generation, Japan leaped ahead. Its eyes always focused on the 21st century, it culture always emphasizing the importance of education, business intelligence, and knowledge in general. Japan seized on the computer and all its derivatives in electronics and information technology with an almost erotic passion. The economic results as Japan transited from the old to the new system of wealth creation were stunning—but they threw Japan into inevitable competition with the United States of America. In turn, a terrified Europe launched its drive for economic and political integration, after years of dawdling. At every step, the new knowledge-based system of wealth creation has been either a majority contributor, or a primary cause of, the great historical shift of power now reshaping our World. There are global implications. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

A memory of a very recent past. Several years ago, amid heated debates about the undervalued yuan and China’s currency manipulation, one of America’s major TV channels interviewed an owner-manager of a stocks-making company. He was bitterly complaining that he would not keep afloat if yuan did not appreciate and Chinese-made socks continued to sell for some 65 cents a pair. I understood his feelings. However, the more I listened to his talk, the more I felt that he was not on the right track: The yuan appreciation, perhaps, might somewhat ease his pain for a certain period of time, but, unfortunately, could not provide a solution. According to various estimates, the yuan is currently undervalued by 40-60 percent. Even if a miracle happens and its exchange rate goes up 60 percent right away, cost differentials between China and the United States of America will remain significant, as the average wage of a Chinese worker in the manufacturing industries is currently less than one-seventh that of his U.S.A. colleague (and the socks-producing industry is hardly an exception). The mentality has to change. Time has come to realize the U.S.A.—based markers of socks for everyday use are no longer in a position to compete with their Chinese counterparts—be it at their domestic market or anywhere else. Furthermore, it is hardly relevant and desirable for America to force its consumers to pay more for their everyday-wear socks—not least because for many of them global competition exerts strong downward pressure on wages. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

One more example from the recent past. In the mid-2000s, U.S.A. bedroom furniture makers formed the American Furniture Manufacturer Committee for Legal Trade and began to press the government to give them protection from Chinese exports, insisting that they threatened “our way of life, our culture and the competitiveness of American in the World.” Really confusing. So high and passionate wording was obviously in contradiction with the harsh reality, namely the racket to buy protection. Chinese makers paid cash to their American competitors who had the right to as the U.S.A. Ministry Commerce to review important duties. References to values and culture are hardly relevant. It rather resembles the World depicted in The Godfather by Mario Puzo. Essentially, there is no more economic rationale of U.S.A. and other Wester-based factories to produce goods belonging to the first and also, increasingly, the second segment. This is the golden rule of the globalized economy. In a sense, they do not have the right to produce them (it is not about a legal right, of course, but about the right stemming from economic common sense, and maybe even about the moral right if you assume that producers have to serve the society—do they not?), because Chinese and other Third World factories can provide the same customer value at a lower price (to repeat—even if the yuan becomes 1.5 times or even twice as heavy as it is now). Consequently, Western governments basically do not have the “right” to protect such producers by higher tariffs and other means, because it will have the vast majority of their countries’ households. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

If you play by the rules of the globalized economy, the only genuine solution for a Western-based manufacturer can be a shift to the third or the fourth segment: product differentiation. Trying to compete with Chinese-made products on price is mostly meaningless. In today’s World, whether a Western-based factory has the “right” and rationale to continue operating, depends on its ability to produce differentiated products—preferably those that are in demand internationally because the domestic market may be too small. If you want to continue makings socks in the United States of America, try to make them character goods, think of a peculiar design attractive for particular groups of customers, bet on special features like high durability, sweat-absorbing ability, or whatever. It is advisable to shift from regular socks as a mass product to high-grade socks as a fashion item and to do your best to establish the brand. (This may be why so many people support labor from people who have immigrated illegally. It tends to be less expensive, they want to stay in business, and the labor tends to be more affordable, but it may displace American workers and reduce their wages.) If you want to produce bedroom furniture, develop strong attractive American brands, popular not only in the United States of America but also around the World and capable of competing with internationally recognized Italian, French, Spanish, or Swedish makers. Otherwise you are doomed to lose, and the yuan appreciation will not be of help. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

The emergence of China as a major competitor brings about a deep polarization in the global manufacturing industry, creating three groups of winners and one group of losers. The winners are Chinese domestic companies, Western multinationals using China as a production platform, and Western non-multinationals making differentiated, especially high-end products and increasing their exports to rapidly expanding markets in China and other developing countries. The losers are numerous unrecognizable non-multinational companies in the West making mass products: largely, but not only, small and medium-size firms. The key issue is how the latter can address the challenge and what policy can help them to succeed. The first option is to pursue aggressive product differentiation. To switch to the fourth segment, establishing a position as a high-end goods marker. If you are a domestic market-oriented company, development of external markets is indispensable to expand the range of customers. (I still think there is a market for trucks and cars without all the computers and windows you can roll up and down by hand and doors you have to individually lock, but everyone is focused on high-end only.) However, it is more easily said that done. Many Western businesses are simply unprepared for it both psychologically—lacking the will and persistence to work hard to achieve the goal—and organizationally: most of all due to the shortage of capable human resources, both at the managerial and the shop-floor level. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Yes, the developed West has to make a very, very big step forward in human capacity building to train people capable of transforming its struggling companies and industries. The shift from mass to differentiated, especially high-end products making is usually a difficult and risky thing. You have to find or newly create your group of customers and appeal to them so that they become found of your brand name. You have to persuade people to pay more for every unit of your product than they did before. The number of buyers in your home country will inevitably become smaller, so you will have to expand or newly create your customer base overseas, including remote Third World countries whose markets are most dynamic. Most likely, you will have to make a tremendous effort and to bear a lot of expense to introduce more advanced technologies and more state-of-the-art equipment, to employ more high-skilled workers, to develop various products promotion channels, and so on—and you will have to do all this while you still remain in terra incognita, not knowing whether your potential customer will react in a beneficial way or not. The high-end product niches are usually already occupied by World-famous brand markers, which will make your mission even more challenging. Presumably, product differentiation, especially a shift to the fourth, high-end products segment, can be handled only by a small portion of Western companies, and those who fail to access the limited market space will be squeezed out or, for the best, will have to struggle to make ends meat. The process has already started. A narrow circle of successful Western factories are differentiating their products and establishing a strong global position—largely (but not only) in the high-end products segment, while most domestic producers, especially small and medium are either washed out or clutching to a straw. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

The overall number of manufacturers is falling. Take Japan, famous for its strong manufacturing base. On the one hand, a cohort of small and medium-size domestic manufacturers is successfully capturing or even monopolizing important niches of the global market due to their outstanding technological capabilities, vigorous quality control, dynamic innovation, and persistent market development in various parts of the World. Nippon Ceramic is the World leader in the production of infrared sensors for security systems. Teibo manufacturers about half of the World’s fiber pen nibs, praised by NASA for their ability to write in space. Nakashima Propeller controls that lion’s share of the global market for supersize screws for ships, and JAMCO for the lavatories for passenger planes. On the other hand, the overall number of manufacturing companies is decreasing, including companies belonging to the famous manufacturing clusters, like Ota Ward in Tokyo or Higashi-Osaka (Easter Osaka) in the Osaka Prefecture. Traditionally, clusters of this kind generated strong synergy effects stemming from regular intercompany interactions and networking, and contributed a lot to the country’s competitiveness in manufacturing. However, as much as 40 percent of the companies in those cluster areas closed down almost 40 years ago. Lots of manufacturers are frustrated. For instance, Japanese mold models (prototypes that produce objects) makers who were World leaders some 10 or even 5 years ago, are now facing strong competition from Chinese and Korean rivals, which appears to be very difficult if not impossible to overcome. In real life, more and more small entrepreneurs and their employees are left with no choice but to retreat and accept low-paid jobs in the service sector or even to shift (back?) to such traditional occupations as fishing to earn their living. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19


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The Body is the Sheath of the Soul

Upon thinking things over, I was pretty sure that the parlor maid, Elsa, was far too sensible and hard-boiled a young woman to risk tampering with poisons. She has a hard head and would take care of herself. Ersula, on the other hand was made of more dangerous stuff—unbalanced, carried away by impulse and definitely neurotic. The only reason she was even employed on my staff was because of my friendship with her mother. I had coffee on the terrace. I wish I could remember better how Ersula looked and acted. She did not seem excited in any way. Quiet and rather sad was my impression. What a devil that woman was! For it was a devilish thing to do—to poison a man in cold blood. If there had been a revolver about and she had caught it up and shot him—well, that might have been understandable. However, this was cold, deliberate, vindictive poisoning…and so clam and collected. She got up and said, in the most natural way possible, that she would take his coffee to him. And yet she knew—she must have known—that by now she would find him dead. Calder had only been employed for three weeks as a carpenter. Ersula had her eyes on him and believed that she had fixed him, but when she found out that he had eyes for Elsa, this threw her into a rage so terrible. I was just making an excuse to go after him when he came running up the stairs. His face was blue. He gasped out, “We must get a doctor—quick—Mrs. Winchester.” I sprang up. “Is he ill—dying?” We had forgotten Elsa for a minute. But she let out a sudden cry. It was like the wail of a banshee. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6

She cried, “Dead? Dead…” And then she ran. I did not know anyone could move like that—like a deer, like a stricken thing, and like an avenging fury too. Ersula wanted desperately to talk to me. To talk to someone. And then again, there was a hostility I perceived in her, a rather generalized hostility, as if the woman were superhuman and bristled with something instinctively alien to other human beings. Oh, I know that sound farfetched. Of course, she is not superhuman. However, if we think of these psychic powers we possess, then we can begin to think of the supernatural as not so unreal. I felt her differentness, so to speak. The dying of Calder also apparently left something precious behind as well. His soul. A few nights after his death, I was awakened by the familiar chime of a clock. It surprised me because, although I kept a clock in the Daisy Bedroom, I had never heard it chime before. A week went by. Then, once again, in the middle of the night, the clock chimed. Confused as to why the clock did not chime during the day on the hour, I resolved to investigate the next morning. However, with several businesses to run, and an estate to care for, by the time I awoke, the matter had slipped my mind. One even, I was having supper. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, through the hall and into the dining room echoed the rhythmic, melodious tones: dingdongdingdong…dingdongdingdong. Just below the mantlepiece in the Daisy Bedroom upon which the clock rested was a crawl space under the floor. It was a harmless relic of architectural expedience, and with the uneven, packed earther floors, it was also an excellent concealer of buried secrets. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6

Some areas of the house could be very scary, and the crawl spaces between the floor was a place I never entered. Mr. Hansen went down into the crawl space underneath the Daisy Bedroom. I had not said anything to him, and he came up and said, “Mrs. Winchester, it is very cold down there. It’s a strange feeling. Very cold, and it’s a hot day.” I proceeded to say, “well, I think that is the old section of the house and something may have been there decades about.” He came up quite alarmed at what was going on down there. I never go in there. Another curious addition to the crawl space is a series of large, ancient, wooden shelves. It looks as if there were bunks, as if servant lay there. The bunks are curved as if to hold human bodies. I had no idea how hold the shelves were in the crawl space, or if it was actually a concealed floor of the mansion. Mr. Hansen said it looked as if the wood had been dug into or clawed at. The clock that rested on the mantle was made in the state of New York, and the last time I visited New York, I stopped by the manufacturer of the clock. I spoke to the owner of the company. He said he remembered me well for I had requested such a clock of admirable beauty. I asked him why the clock was chiming at unusual hours. He explained to me that they have no mechanism to make chiming clocks. And there is not a chiming mechanism if you look at the clock. There is nothing there! I began to keep track of when the chimes were heard. The clock chimed on April 18, 1898. The next time it chimed again was on April 18, 1899. At least four other people beside me heard it. When I was away, they still recorded on the calendar for me when it chimed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6

However, it was not all at the same time. In fact, my niece Ms. Daisy heard it. Actually, she would not say anymore. I asked her how loud was the clock? Is it lough enough to hear in the entire house? “Oh, yes, Aunt Sarah. You can her it upstairs on the fourth floor.” “Could there have been a mistake as to where the chiming was coming from? Perhaps through the wall from a clock somewhere else in the house?” I asked. Her answer, “Oh yes. You can even hear it in the observation tower.” That evening, a cloud-like vapor took on human shape, clapped its hands in joy, and passed upward through the ceiling in the company of an angel. I was always aware that my mansion was a conduit-a vortex, if you will. There are horrors beyond horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all our deepest, most awful nightmare, a place where they would suddenly become nightmares. My fortune, a blessing, it was, but was also accursed and unhappy. Death, like the unbidden and unwanted relative, often times outstayed his welcome everywhere on this estate. At night, ghosts are not always seen, but heard. On many occasions, the servants have heard what sounds like a man whispering. The whisper is not loud enough to make out the words, but there is no doubt that someone is speaking. The whispers seem to be drifting down the chimney, of course, but there is no one there. A woman’s laugh can also be heard coming from the chimneys. I awoke one night and saw a woman standing there—only about two feet away from my bed—and I knew it was her. It was just a feeling, I knew I was her. She had long dark hair; she was really thin and has a shawl over her shoulders. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6

And a bright margin of light revealed that she was accompanied by a tall, dark-haired man, with deep-set eyes peering out at me from a very white face. He wore a robe of brown patterned silk, with the customary yellow bade on it. His high cheekbones appeared to be polished, so tight with his skin. After I gestured to get out of bed. The man and the woman vanished. It took me a moment but I slowly began to understand that those were not real human beings that confronted me, but rather inhabitants of the World as yet unknown to us. I had seen spirits before, and, for better or worse, was familiar with their shape, their demeanor, their “being.” I was not frightened. As I got out of bed, and was leaving my room, and descending down a brightly lit stairway, I suddenly froze. Standing in the bright illumination stood my husband William. I ran hurriedly down the stairs, brushing past the apparition and out of a door into the garden where I had become unconscious. When I came to and glanced up, I saw a white form advancing, a robed form. I was not able to see the robed figure’s face because it was turned away from me, but I was clearly able to observe its form, as the figure remained for a moment by me. Then it passed swiftly past the boxwood hedges, and glided toward me, but always turning his face in the opposite direction. Just before the passed through the wall and back int the mansion, it paused and left a gold coin on the porch. Then it dawned on me, it was our anniversary. This assurance made me aware that my beloved was with every moment, even in his death. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6

Emperor Lucifer, Master of all the revolted Spirits, I entreat thee to favor me in the adjuration which I address to thy minister, LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE, being desirous to make a pack with him. Via temporis, iam clamo ad te via spatti te ubio, aperire..Aperi! Via consurssus, tempos spatium admi ut imperior! I Do invocate, conjure, and command thee, O thou Spirit Marchosian and you 30 Legion of Spirits, to appear and to please show thyself visibly unto me before this Winchester Mansion in fair and comely shape, without any deformity or toutuosity; by the name and in the name IAH and VAU, which Adam heard and spake; and by the name of God, AGLA, which Lot heard and was saved with his family; and by the name IOTH, which Jacob heard from the angel wrestling with him, and was delivered from the hand of Esau his brother; and by the name ANAPHAEXTON which Aaron heard and spake and was made wise. I also beg thee, O Prince Beelzebuth to protect us in our undertaking. O Count Astarto! Be propitious to us, and grant that tonight the great LUCIFUGE may appears to us under a human form, and fresh as the ocean breeze, and that he may accord us, in virtue of the pact which we propose to enter into, all the riches which we need, O grand LUCIFUGE, I pray three to quit they dwelling, wheresoever it may be, and come hither to please speak to me, otherwise will I compel thee by the power of the strong living God, His beloved Son, and the Holy Spirit. Please Obey promptly. By the powers of AGLON, TETRAGRAM, VAYCHEON, SIMULATION, EZPHARES, RETRAGRAMMATON, OLYARAM, IRION, ESYTION, EXISTION, ERYONA, ONERA, ORASYM, MOZM, MESSIAS, SOTER, EMMANUEL, SABOTH, ADONAY Via temporis, iam clamo ad te via spatti te ubio, aperire..Aperi! Via consurssus, tempos spatium admi ut imperior! I conjure thee, Evil and Accursed Serpent TETRAGRAMMATON to appear at my will and pleasure in this place and accomplish my will. Please bring ancient treasures and prosperity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6


We all have odd feelings at times in certain circumstances; certainly no reason to move from a house after we have paid the rent or signed a contract. We are reasonable and logical human beings after all, even when confronted with the unknown, unseen and unexplainable…are we not? It must be simply a quirk that this one column of physical space that extends from the Heaven should remind us that each and every one of us will something ascend into our own oblivion. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

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Gravity’s Holding Me Back, I Want You to Hold Out the Palm of Your Hand

We must not pull away from our children. We must keep trying, keep reaching, keep praying, keep listening. Many of the offenders we spoke to indicated that their carjackings were guided by the power of immediate situational inducements. Such inducements could be internal (exempli gratia, money, drugs, the avoidance of drug withdrawal, need to display a certain status level, desire for revenge, jealousy)or external (objective or subjective strains, such as pressure from family members to put food on the table, the need to have a vehicle for use in a subsequent crime). Situational inducements could be intensely compelling, pressing offenders to engage in carjacking even under unfavorable circumstances, where the risk of arrest, injury, or death was high or the potential reward was low. Here, the individuals’ increased desperation caused them to target a vehicle or victim they would not otherwise consider (such as a substandard car, or one occupied by several passengers), initiate an offense at a time or location that was inherently more hazardous (exempli gratia, day-time, at a busy intersection), or attempt a carjacking with no planning whatsoever. Internal situational inducements usually were linked to the immediate need for cash. Most street offenders (including carjackers) are notoriously poor planners. They lead cash-intensive lifestyles in which money is spent as quickly as it is obtained (due to routine drug use, street gambling, acquisition of the latest fashions, heavy partying). As a result, they rapidly run out of money, creating pressing fiscal crises, which the produce other internal situational inducements such as the need to feed oneself or to avoid drug withdrawal. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

The sale of stolen vehicles and parts can be a lucrative endeavor. Experienced carjackers sometimes stripped the vehicles themselves (in an abandoned alley or remote lot) and sold the items on the street corner or delivered them to a chop shop owner with whom they had a working relationship. Of particular value were “portable” after-market items, such as gold or silver plated rims, hub caps, and expensive stereo components. Across our 28 respondents, profits from carjacking per offense ranged anywhere from $200 to $5,000, with the average running at $1,750. The cash obtained from carjacking served to alleviate ever emergent financial needs. Little Rag, a diminutive teen-aged gang-banger, indicated that without cash the prospect of heroin withdrawal loomed ahead. INT: So, why did you do that? Why did you jack that car? Little Rag: For real? ‘Cause it’s the high, it’s the way I live. I was broke. I was fiending [needed drugs]. I had to get off my scene real quick [wanted to get back on my feet]. I sold crack but I’d fallen off [ran out of money] and I had to go and get another lick [tempting crime target] or something to get back on the top. I blow it on weed, clothes, shoes, sh*t like that. Yeah, I truly f*ck money up.” The need for drugs was a frequent topic in our discussion with carjackers. Even the youngest offenders had built up such tolerances to drugs like heroin and crack that they required fixes on a daily basis. Many were involved in drug dealing and had fallen into a well known trap; using their own supply. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Whether they sold for themselves or in the service of someone else, the need for cash to replenish the supply or feed the habit was a powerful internal motivator. L-Dawg, a young drug dealer from the north side of Sacramento also had developed a strong addiction to heroin. Only two days before this interview with us, he had taken a car from a man leaving a local night club. L-Dawg: “I didn’t have no money and I was sick and due some heroin so I knew I had to do something I was at my auntie’s house [and] my stomach started cramping. I just had to kill this sickness, ‘cause I can’t stay sick. If I’d stayed sick I would [have to] do something worse. The worse I get sick, to me, the worse I’m going to do. That’s how I feel. If I’ve got to wait on it a long time, the worse the crime may be. If it hadn’t been him then I probably would have done a robbery. One way or another I was going to get some money to take me off this sickness. I just seen him and I got it.” External situational inducements could be just as compelling. Pressures from friends, family, other criminal acquaintances, or even the threat of injury or death were capable of pushing offenders to carjacking. For example, C-Low described an incident that occurred while he was with a friend in New Orleans. The two were waiting in the reception room of a neighborhood dentist when a group of men hostile to C-Low’s friend walked into the office. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

C-Low: “They knew him. I didn’t know them. It was something about some fake dope. I think it was some heroin. He got caught. We weren’t strapped [armed] at the time. We booked out. We left. We just left ‘cause he know this person’s gonna be strapped, and I didn’t know this. So my partner was like, “Man, just burn out man, just leave.” So we was leaving and they was coming up behind us [and started] popping [shooting] at us just like that, popping at my partner, just started shooting at him, so my partner he was wounded. We had no car or nothing so we were running through and the guy was popping at us. So, there was a lady getting out of her car, and he stole it. We had to take her car because we had no ride. She like a nurse of something. It was a nice little brand new car. Brand new, not kind you sort of sport off in like. She saw I was running. She heard the gun shots. I know she heard them, but she didn’t see the guy that was shooting at us though. She had the keys in her hand. She was getting out her car, locking her door, yeah. She had her purse and everything. [My partner] just came on her blind side, just grabbed her, hit her. She just looked like she was shocked, she was in a state of shock. She was really scared. And [we] took her car and we left. We could’ve got her purse and everything, but we were just trying to get away from the scene ‘cause we had no strap and they were all shooting at us. We just burnt on out of there. Got away. But then [later that day] he got caught though…somebody snitched on him and they told them [the police] that he had the car. He gave me the car but he for caught for it, they couldn’t find the car ‘casue I’d taken it to the chop shop. I sold the car for like twenty-seven hundred bucks and about 2 ounces of weed.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Similarly, Nicole, a seasoned car thief and sometimes carjacker described a harrowing spur-of-the-moment episode. She and a friend had been following a young couple from the drive-in, casually discussing the prospect of rubbering them, when her partner suddenly stopped their vehicle, jumped out and initiated a carjacking without warning. Nicole was instantly drawn into abetting her partner in the commission of the offense. Nicole: “My partner just jumped out of the car. He jumped out of the car and right then when I seen him with the gun I [realized] what was happening. I had to move. Once he got the guy out of the car he told me, ‘Come get the car.’ The girl was already out of the car screaming, ‘Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me!’ She was afraid because [she could see] I was high. You do things [when] you high. She’s running so I’m in the car waiting on him. He’s saying, ‘Run b*tch and don’t look back.’ She just started running…across the parking lot. [At] the same time he made the guy get up and run, ‘[Racial expletive] you don something, you look back, I’m gonna kill your mother*cking a**.’ As he got up and ran he shot him any ways.” It is increasingly clear that we must teach the gospel to our families personally, live those teaching in our homes, or run the risk of discovering too late that a Primary teacher or priesthood adviser or seminary instructor could not do for our children what we would do for them. Family councils have always been needed. They are, in fact, eternal. We belonged to a family council in the premortal existence, when we lived with our Heavenly parents as their spirit children. Everyone ought to be involved in helping to create proactive solutions and in setting their own goals. As families collaborate in making decisions, individuals will thrive, and the family will become more unified as a whole. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

People are hungry to be their own authorities in basic life matters, and, spurred by my own expression in these matters, they wanted it all the more, meaning they had to leave me to my own, too. If not filled with the substance of life-realized in depth, the vacuum of “being will gain so much power that our people will collapse inwardly in the clutter of their own psychic debris. How striking it is to contrast all this with the calm authority of Christ. He needed n rubric of adjuration, nor other formula of exorcism, and no prolonged preparation of Himself before dealing with a spirit-possessed individual. “He cast out the spirits by a word.” “With authority and power He commandeth…and they obey Him,” was the wondering testimony of the awestruck people. It was the testimony, also, of the seventy sent forth by Him to use the authority of His name. They found that the spirits were subject to them, even as they were to the Lord (Luke 10.17-20). “They obey Him,” said the people. “They”—the evil spirits whom the people knew to be real identities, governed by Beelzebub, their prince (Matt. 12.24-27). The complete mastery of Jesus over the demons compelled the religious leaders to find some way of explaining His authority over them. And so by that subtle influence of Satan with which all who have had insight into his devices are familiar, they cunningly accuse the Lord of having satanic power Himself, saying, “He casteth out demons through Beelzebub, the prince of the demons.” This reference to Satan and his position as a prince was left uncontradicted by the Lord. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

In the face of Satan’s lie, Jesus simply declared the truth that He cast out demons “by the finger of God,” and the fact that Satan’s kingdom would soon fall were he to act against himself and dislodge his emissaries from their place of retreat in human bodies. That Satan does apparently fight against himself is sometimes true; but when he does so, it is only for the purpose of covering up some scheme—for greater advantage to his kingdom. There is a difference between theology and philosophy. Several reasons force this issue to the foreground. The theological circle is drawn by ultimate concern about being, but the study of being has traditionally been the preserve of the philosopher. Moreover, the existential analysis performed by the theologian answers must be couched in ontological terms. Philosophy and theology cannot pass like ships in the night. After at least two thousand years of thought dedicated to the solution of this problem, it is not easy to offer a new solution. Nevertheless, it must be attempted in every generation as long as theology exists, for the question of the relation of philosophy and theology is the question of nature of theology itself. Theology was already been defined. Philosophy is defined as that cognitive endeavor in which the question of being is asked. Or, philosophy is the attempt to answer the most general questions about the nature of reality and human existence. Or again, philosophy is that cognitive approach to reality in which reality as such is the object. When we compare philosophy with theology, we find that they simultaneously diverge and converge. They diverge in many ways. Although both as the question be being, philosophy seeks to know the structure of being, while theology is concerned with being as it determines out being. The philosopher is detached in one’s research; the theologian is involved, committed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The philosophical source is the whole of reality, both subjective and objective logos, but the theological source is the logos contained in a particular event and received by the church. Although philosophy and theology both answer the question of being, the philosophy and theology both answer the question of being, the philosophical content is cosmological, descriptive of the Universe, while the theological content is soteriological, healing the disruption of the cosmos. The philosopher’s answer is abstract; the theologian’s is concrete. To sum up: religion deals existentially with the meaning of being; philosophy deals theoretically with the structure of being. The above divergencies, however, are balanced by a number of similarities which they share. Most important of all, thy both have being as their common object. They also converge in tht every creative philosopher is motived by a hidden ultimate concern and in that every theologian, in order to remain open to the ultimate, must be detached from the existential situation. The philosopher cannot avoid existential decisions, and the theologian cannot avoid ontological concepts. In a word, theology is basically existential and philosophy is basically theoretical, but each participates to a certain extent in the characteristics of the other. The distinction between philosophy and theology is not unambiguous. They are basically divergent, but partially convergent. They are not separated, and they are not identical, but they are correlated. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

There is no necessary conflict between them, and if philosophers and theologians clash, it is because one or the other has left one’s proper domain. Nor is there any possible synthesis between them in the sense of a Christian philosophy, for they simple do not share a common basis. Philosophy and theology in principle are essentially distinct, but in actual life they overlap. Their unity is emphasis by their mutual immanence as an actually, though fragmentarily, fulfilled eschatology. Their perfect, eschatological unity would be had when the philosophical analysis of the structure of being-in-itself would be untied with a theological expression of the meaning of being for us. However, even then there is a qualitative difference for unity does not exclude definitory distinction. However, leaving behind these abstruse formulations, there is an imaginary boundary. The boundary only divides philosophy and theology; it is also the point of contact. But the fact that metaphysics is directed towards being and its universal characteristics does not imply that it has no existential roots. It certainly has them, for the philosopher is human being, and in very philosophical school human interests and passions are a driving force. No philosophy is without an ultimate concern in its background, whether this is acknowledged or denied. This makes the philosopher a theologian, always implicitly and sometimes explicitly. From a winter of loneliness and solitude, friendlessness and suffering, a spring will arrive which promises the beginning of real meaning. One will begin search, and accept the meaning and price of growth and learning. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

In recent years, corporations have adopted many new and innovative ways, often called shark repellents, to prevent outside investors from taking over the company. Without commenting on the efficiency or even morality of these ploys, we present a new and as yet untested variety of poison pill and ask you to consider how to overcome it. The target company is Piper’s Pickled Peppers. Although now publicly held, the old family ties remains, as the five-member board of directors is completely controlled by five of the founder’s grandchildren. The founder recognized the possibility of conflict between his grandchildren as well as the threat of outsiders. To guard against both family squabbles and outsider attacks, he first required that the board of director election be staggered. This trick means that even someone who owns 100 percent of the shares cannot replace the entire board—rather, only the members had a staggered five-year term. An outsider could hope to get at most one seat a year. Taken at face value, it appeared that it would take someone three ears to get a majority and control the company. If a hostile party wrested control of the shares, the founder was worried that his idea of staggered terms would be subject to change. A second provision was therefore added. The procedure for board election could be changed only by the board itself. Any board member could make a proposal without the need for a seconder. However, there was a major catch. The proposer would be required to vote for one’s own proposal. The voting would then proceed in clockwise order around the boardroom table. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

To pass, a proposal needed at least 50 percent of the total board (absences were counted as votes against). Given that there were only five members, that meant at least 3 out of 5. Here is the rub. If one’s proposal failed, any person who made a proposal to change either the membership of the board or the rules by how that membership was determined would be deprived of one’s position on the board and one’s stock holdings. The holdings would be distributed evenly among the remaining members of the board. In addition, any board member who voted for a proposal that failed would also lose one’s seat on the board and one’s holdings. For a while this provision proved successful in fending off hostile bidders. However, then Sea Shells by the Sea Shore Ltd. Bought 51 percent of the shares in a hostile takeover attempt. Sea Shells voted herself one seat on the board at the annual election. However, it did not appear that loss of control was imminent, as she was one lone voice against four. At their first board meeting, Sea Shella proposed a radical restructuring on the board membership. This was the first such proposal that the board had ever voted on. Not only did the Sea Shells proposal pass, amazingly, it passed unanimously! As a result, Sea Shells got to immediately replace the entire board. The former directors were given a lead parachute (which is still better than nothing) and then were shown the door. How did she do it? Hint: It was pretty devious. Backward reasoning is the key. First, work on a scheme to get the resolution to pass, and then you can worry about unanimity. To ensure that the Sea Shells proposal passes, start at the end and make sure that the final two voters have an incentive to vote for the proposal. This will be enough to pass the resolution, since Sea Shella starts the process with a first yes vote. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Many proposals do the trick. Here is one of them. Sea Shells’ restructuring proposal has the following three cases: If the proposal passes unanimously, then Sea Shells chooses an entirely new board. Each board member replaced is given a small compensation. If the proposal passes 4 to 1, then the person voting against is removed from the board, and no compensation is made. If the proposal passes with a vote of 3 to 2, the Sea Shells transfers the entirety of its 51 percent share of Peter’s Pickled Peppers to the other two yes voters in equal proportion. The two no voters are removed from the board with no compensation. At this point, backward reasoning finishes the story. Imagine that the vote comes down to the wire: the last voter is faced with a 2-2 count. If he votes yes, it passes and he gets 25.5 percent of the company’s stock. If it fails, Sea Shells’ assets (and the other yes-voter’s shares) are distributed evenly among the three remaining members, so he gets (51 + 12.25)/3 = 21.1 percent of the company’s stock. He’ll say yes. Everyone can thereby use backward reasoning to predict that if it comes down to a 2-2 tie-breaking vote, Sea Shells will win when the final vote is cast. Now look at the fourth voter’s dilemma. When it is his turn to vote, there are either: 1 yes vote (by Sea Shells), 2 yes votes, or 3 yes votes. If there are three yes votes, the proposal has already passed. The fourth voter would prefer to get something over nothing, and therefore votes yes. If there are two yes votes, he can predict that the final voter will vote yes even if he votes no. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

The fourth voter cannot stop the proposal from passing. Hence again, if one sees only one yes vote, then one would be willing to bring the vote to a 2-2 tie. One can safely predict that the final voter will vote yes, and the two of them will make out very nicely indeed. The first two Piper’s board member are now in a true pickle. They can predict that even if they both vote no, the last two will go against them and the proposal will pass. Given that they cannot stop it from passing, it is better to go along and get something. This case demonstrates the power of backward reasoning. Of course it helps to be devious too. When it comes to businesses strategies, many Chinese companies are targeting the high-end products segment. The probability is high that by the end of this decade people around the World will come to know well a group of at least a dozen Chinese producers of nonelectrical and electrical machinery, electronic goods, apparel products, and so on, with internationally recognized brands, respected for high quality and originality of their sophisticated products. And even in the high-end sector the Chinese may also exploit their cost advantage. The emergence and expansion of such a cohort will be fostered by several driving forces. To begin with, China money is at work. Many Chinese firms have earned a great deal selling low-end goods, and are now heavily investing in products’ upgrading and technological innovation. Quite often they get significant financial support from the government. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

With a lot of cash at hand, they are beginning to attract the best talent from around the World: designers, researchers, engineers, and managers. The trend will gain strength. At the same time, the pool of high-skilled Chinese cadres, ready for high-end jobs, is widening too—both due to improvements in the educational system and the increase in the number of Chinese choosing to return home after studying and/or working in the West. To speed up production upgrading, Chinese firms are using their new financial strength to purchase parts, components, machinery, and equipment manufactured by the World’s best producers. The machine tools industry provides a valuable example of China’s drive toward the high end. In 2009, China became the largest producer of machine tools in the World. Until recently, however, it produced rather simple and inexpensive machines, while the high-end segment was dominated by German, Japanese, Italian, Swiss, and other makers from industrially developed countries. Having a sharp technological edge, the latter commanded high prices for their products. However, since mid-2000s thing have begun to change. In 2004, one of the leading Chinese makers, Shenyang Machine Tool Group (SMTCL), acquired Germany’s Schiess AG, which announced bankruptcy earlier that same year. Within a short time, European designers and engineers noticeably improved SMTCL’s products. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

The company rapidly increased the number of Japanese-made parts and components installed. It started to establish the image of a globally oriented producers of advanced precision machine tools, working hard to overcome users’ mistrust rooted in the concerns about made-in-China’s poor quality. Currently it supplies flat-bed CNC machining center and other products to customers in the United States of America, Canada, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, India, South Africa, and so on. The most famous examples of Chinese companies knocking at the higher-end segment door are the 2Hs—Huawei and Haier. Huawei, with Worldwide revenues of $105.1 billion, is the World’s second-largest network and telecom equipment supplier in the World after Ericsson, serves 31 out of 50 of the largest telecom operators around the globe. Haier, with a value of $16.3 billion, has become a World-famous producer of a range of household appliances, from air-conditioners to TVs. It commands the World’s largest market share in white goods. In it ranked first in three categories: refrigeration appliances, home laundry, and electrical wine cooler/chiller appliances. Having developed an array of original products, it is successfully competing in the medium and high-end market segments in the United States of America, Europe, and many developing countries, emphasizing stylishness and modernity, functionality, reliability, and the use of the very latest technologies—all this in combination with affordable prices. The Haier advertisement catches your eye when you stroll through the famous Ginza-4 Crossing in Tokyo, in the very center of Japan’s most lush area. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Few peacetime power shifts have been as dramatic as those Soviet bloc. Suddenly, immense power, centralized in Moscow for nearly half a century, shifted back to Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, and Berlin. In a few brief spectacular months the “East” splintered. A second shift has accompanied the breakup of the so-called South. The LDCs, or “less developed countries,” have never been able to form a truly united front vis-à-vis the industrialized World, despite efforts beginning as long as the Bandung conference in Indonesia in1955. In the 1970s, the United Nations rang with rhetoric about the common needs of “the South.” Programs of “South-South” technological exchange and other forms of cooperation were launched. Campaigns were begun to shift the terms of trade between the North and the South. Power did shift. However, not in the way the spokesmen for a united South had hoped. What happened instead has been the division of the LDCs into distinct groupings with very different needs. One consists of desperately poor countries still mostly dependent on First Wave peasant labor. Another group includes countries—like Brazil, India, and China—that are actually important Second Wave or industrial powers, but saddled with vast populations still scrabbling for subsistence from preindustrial agriculture. Lastly, there are nations like Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, which have virtually completed industrialization and are moving swiftly into Third Wave high technology. If power in the East Block has splintered, so, too, has power in the so-called South. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

The third immense shift of power has been the emergence of Japan and Europe into rivals of the United States of America, leading to hyper-competition as each fights to dominate the 21st century. The so-called West, too, is now splitting apart. While politicians, diplomats, and the press still treat these powers shifts as distinctly separate phenomena, there is a deep connection among all three. The global structure that reflected the dominance of the Second Wave industrial powers has been shattered like a crystal sphere under the blow of a sledgehammer. Naturally, such vast historical developments spring from many roots, and no single explanation can completely account for them. To reduce history to any single force of factor is to ignore complexity, chance, the role of individuals, and many other variables. However, by the same token, to regard history as a succession of patternless or unrelated accidents is equally reductionist. The future patterns of global power can only be glimpsed if, instead of looking at each major shift of power as an isolate event, we identify the common forces running through them. And, in fact, we find that all three of these epochal power shifts are closely linked to the decline of industrialism and the rise of the new knowledge-driven economy. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17


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When Everything Gets in the Way, Seems You Cannot be Replaced

We live in a World where many look on the marketplace as a ruthless arena where the buyer must beware, where no one is obligated to do more than the law requires, and where fraud is not fraud unless you can prove it in court. However, as American citizens, we must have a higher standard. Some seize wealth by trafficking in illegal drugs, or by carjacking. Carjacking is defined as the theft of an automobile by threat or force. Despite its growing reputation, little is known about the thoughts and behaviors of persons who turn to this hybrid form of violent crimes. To this end, we draw upon interviews with twenty-eight active offenders to illustrate how they engage in the planning, enactment, and aftermath of carjacking events. Offenders are described as opportunists who rely on carjacking as a source of reputation enhancement and income. The data show that stolen cars are sometimes used for short-term transportation but eventually get converted to cash through the use of a third party (id est, chop shops) or by personally selling off in-demand accessories (id est, rims, stereo components) on the street. A variety of internal and external pressures are shown to shape carjacking motivations. Offenders may choose to engage in the crime in response to peer pressure, boredom, or a perceived need for money, drugs, or transportation. The term “alert opportunism” refers to those theft in which the offenders do not actively seek to steal a car but take advantage of a soft target. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25

Conversely, the term “motivated opportunism” is used to describe a predatory state in which the offender actively seeks out potential targets. These findings demonstrate a loose rationality behind carjacking, one that is fueled by an ongoing need for cash and status, and leads to a number of patterned behaviors. With the exception of homicide, probably no offense is more symbolic of contemporary urban violence than carjacking. Carjacking, the taking of a motor vehicle by threat of force, has attained almost mythical status in the annuals of urban violence and has played an undeniable role in fueling the fear of crime that keeps urban residents off of their own streets. What is more, carjacking has increased dramatically in recent years. There is an aggregate annual average of 35,500 carjackings per year. Offenders used a weapon in 77 percent of all attempted and completed carjackings. Carjackings are most likely to occur in the evening and at night away from the victims home. Twenty-nine percent of carjackings took place in a parking lot or garage, and 45 percent occurred in an open area, such as on the street. Eighteen percent occurred at or near the victims home. Although carjacking has been practiced for decades, the offense first made national headlines in 1992 when a badly botched carjacking in suburban Washington, D.C., ended in a homicide. Pamela Basu was dropping her 22-month-old daughter at pre-school when two men commandeered her BMW at a stop sign. In full view of neighborhood residents, municipal workers, and a school bus driver, the two men tossed her daughter off with Mrs. Basu’s arm tangled in the car seat belt. She was dragged over a mile to her death. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25

This incident focused a nationwide spotlight on carjacking and legislative action soon followed with the passing of the Anti-Car Theft Act of 1992. Carjacking was made a federal crime punishable by up to a 25-year term in prison or—if the victim is killed—by death. Like other forms of robbery, carjacking bridges property and violent crimes. Although a manifestly violent activity, it appears often to retain elements of planning and calculation typically associated with instrumental property crimes such as burglary. Unlike most robberies, however, carjacking apparently is directed at an object rather than a subject. Mot of the research on carjackings is based on official police reports or large pre-existing data sets such as the National Crime Victimization Survey. From this research, we know that carjackings are highly concentrated in space and time, occurring in limited areas and at particular hours. These studies also indicate that carjackers tend to target individuals comparable to themselves across demographic characteristics such as race, gender, and age. We know that weapons are used in 66-78 percent of carjackings, and tht weapon usage increases the chance that an offense will be successful. Finally, these studies suggest that carjacking is often a violent offense; approximately 24-38 percent of victims are injured during carjackings. Despite these studies, much about carjacking remains poorly understood. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25

By their very large-scale nature, such studies are incapable of providing insight into the interaction between motivational and situational characteristics that govern carjacking at the individual level. What is more, they overrepresent incidents in which the offenders and victims are strangers. Recent literature on the nature of acquaintance robbery and drug robbery suggests that this limitation may represent a crucial gap in our understanding of the social and perceptual dynamics associated with carjacking. If, for example, offenders target victims who they know or “know of,” the chance of serious injury or death may increase because within-offense resistance and post-offense retaliation both are more likely. We conducted a field-based study of active carjackers, focusing on the situational and interaction factors (opportunities, risks, rewards) that carjackers take int account when contemplating and carrying out their cries. Drawing on a tried and tested research strategy, we recruited 28 active offenders (with three asked back to participate in follow-ups) from the street of St. Louis, Missouri, and interviewed them at length about their day-to-day activities, focusing on the motivations, planning, execution, and aftermath of carjackings. This methodological strategy allowed us to examine the perceptual links between offenders’ lifestyles and the immediate situational context in which decision to offend emerge, illuminating the contextual uses that mediate the carjacking decision. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25

Interviews focused on two broad issues: motivation to carjack ad vehicle/victim target selection, and aftermath of carjacking offenses (including vehicle disposal, formal and informal sanction risk management, use of cash, et cetera. The issue of how carjacking occurs (id est, offense enactment) is covered across the discussion of these two broader themes, because enactment represents a behavioral bridge that unites them. Thus, the procedural characteristics of carjacking naturally emanated from discourse regarding motivation, target selection, and aftermath. In area of motivation, our interviews focused on the situational and interactional factors that underlie the decision to commit a carjacking, and the transition from unmotivated states to those in which offenses are being contemplated. On its face carjacking seems risky. Why risk a personal confrontation with the vehicle owner when one could steal a parked car off the street? Respondents felt that car theft was more dangerous because they never knew if the vehicle’s owner or law enforcement might surprise them. Low-Down: “I done did that a couple of times too, but that ain’t nothing I really want to do ‘cause I might get in a car [parked on] the street and the motherfu*ker [the owner of the vehicle] might be sitting there and then it [might not] be running [any] ways. I done got caught like that before, got locked up, so I don’t do that no more. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25

“I can’t risk no motherfu*king life just to get into a car and then the car don’t start. That’s a waste of time. I would rather catch somebody at a light [or] a restaurant drive-thru of something like that.” Throughout the interviews, two global factors emerged as governing motivation, planning, and target selection: the nature of a given carjacking opportunity (that is, its potential risk and rewards) and the level of situational inducements (such as peer pressure, need for cash or drugs, or revenge). When these factors, in some combination, reached a critical minimal level, the decision to carjack became certain. Scheming promoters with glib tongues and ingratiating manners deceive their neighbors. Unlike carjacking, difficulties of proof make fraud a hard crime to enforce. However, the inadequacies of the laws of man provide no license for transgression under the laws of God. Though their method of thievery may be immune from correction in this life, sophisticated thieves in white shirts and ties will ultimately be seen and punished for what they are. Most of us can be relatively comfortable when a message on the Golden rule in the workplace uses examples like illegal drugs and theft by deception. What follows is more challenging. And it should be. If we measure our conduct against the Savior’s command, “I would that ye should be perfect even as I” (3 Ne. 12.48), we cannot be comfortable. To following the footsteps of the only perfect person who ever lived, we must expect to stretch our souls. Followers of Christ have the moral responsibility of earning their livings and conducting their financial transactions in ways that are consistent with the principles of the gospel and the teachings of the Savior. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25

Yes, evil spirits are at work today. The control of spirits over the bodies of those they possess is seen in several Gospel cases. The man with the legion was not master over his own body or mind. The spirits would “seize him,” “drive him” Luke 8.29, compel him to cut himself with stones (Mark 5.5), strengthen him to burst every fetter and chain (v. 4), “cry out” aloud (v. 5), and fiercely attack others (Matt. 8.28). They boy with the dumb spirit would be dashed to the ground (Luke 9.42), and convulsed; the spirit forced him to cry out, and tore him, so that his body became bruised and sore (v. 39). Teeth, tongue, vocal organs, ears, eyes, nerves and muscles are seen to be affected and interfered with by evil spirits in possession. Weakness and strength are both produced by their working, and men (Mark 1.23), women (Luke 8.2), boys (Mark 9.17), and girls (Mark 7.25) are equally open to their power. That the Jews were familiar with the fact of evil-spirit possession is clear from their words when they saw the Lord Christ cast out the blind and dumb spirit from a man (Matt. 12.24). It is evident also that there were men among them who knew some method of dealing with such cases (v. 27). “By whom do your sons cast them out?” asked the Lord. That such dealing with evil spirits was not truly effective may be gathered from the several instances given, where it appears that alleviation of the sufferings from evil-spirit possession was the most that could be done: exempli gratia, the case of King Soul, who was soothed by the harp playing of David; the sons of Sceva, who were professional exorcists, yet who recognized power in the name of Jesus which their exorcism did not possess. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25

In both these cases, the danger connected with the attempted alleviation or exorcism, because of the power of evil spirits to resist, is strikingly shown in contrast to the complete results achieved by Christ and His apostles. David playing to Saul is suddenly aware of the javelin flung by the hand of the man he was seeking to soothe. And the sons of Sceva found the possessed man leaping upon them, and overpowering them, when they used the name of Jesus without the divine co-working given to all who exercise personal faith in Him. Among the heathen also—who know the venom of similar wicked spirits—the best that can be accomplished is ere propitiation and the soothing of the spirits; hatred, by obedience to them. The language of theology consists of symbols and ontological terms. In a very strict sense, myth and symbol are not the language of theology, but of religion, id est, of man’s encounter with the holy. The task of theology is to interpret the Christian symbols of this encounter in relation to the existential situation and in ontological terms. In brief, theology speaks ontologically about Christian symbols. Symbols, therefore, necessarily enter into the theologian’s vocabulary and method. A sign—for example, the red light on the street corner—is an arbitrary convention that does not participate in the reality signified, while a symbol—for instance, the king of a country—does participate in the power and meaning of the reality symbolized. Symbols open up levels of reality that cannot be attained in any other way. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25

And corresponding to levels of reality, levels of the soul are also opened up by symbols. A watercolor, a poem, or a symphony mediates something for which another mode of expression or even another painting or sonnet is utterly inadequate. Thus symbols are irreplaceable; new ones cannot be invented. They are born out of the “collective unconscious” which produces or at least accepts them. They die when they no longer respond to the “inner situation of the human group.” When it comes to religious symbols, the level of reality they open up is the depth dimension, the ground of all reality, being-itself or the ultimate power of being. In the soul they excite the experience of this ultimate reality, of the holy. But caution must be hastened. Although symbols participate in the holy, they are not identified with it. The constant danger of symbolism is demonization. There are two levels within all religious symbols. The transcendent level goes beyond the empirically encountered reality and includes the idea of God, his attributes, and his acts. The immanent level is encountered within empirical reality and includes incarnation and sacraments. Now, we must consider the truth of religious symbols. Their truth is their adequacy to the religious situation in which they exist. They cannot be proven wrong or “killed” by historical and scientific criticism, but they die when they no longer mediate the religious experience of a community. Such was the case of the symbol of the Blessed Virgin Mary which died among Protestants because of their loss of the ascetic ideal of virginity and because of their rejection of any mediator between God and man. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25

However, the external criterion of all religious symbols which guard them from being demonized is the cross of Christ, for he who embodies the divine presence sacrificed himself so as not to become an idol. The theologian has in his hands the rich treasure of Christian symbols. How is one to interpret them? The method of correlation directs one to begin with an existential analysis of the religious situation. This analysis reveals that the questions asked are ontological ones, questions of being and non-being, of ontological anxiety, and of the ambiguities of life. Consequently, if the Christian symbols are to be relevant to the situation, the answers must also be in ontological terms. However, there now arise the serious objection that ontology is alien to the biblical message and that to use it is to betray the very source of theology. Biblical religion is characterized by its personalism, for, in the Bible, God appears as a person in the I-Thou revelator encounter. Ontology, on the other hand, asks the question of being-itself, describes the structure of being, and searches for ultimate reality. The extremes of these definitions serve to highlight the conflict: a concrete person versus abstract being-itself. One finds the same opposition in other concepts, for instance, faith. Biblical faith is passionate, confident, and committed, while ontology is detached, questioning, doubting. Each of the biblical symbols drives inescapably to an ontological question and answers are given by theology necessarily contained in the ontological elements. There is a hidden but close correlation between biblical imagery and ontological concepts once one probes beneath the surface. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25

China’s economic and military transformation has the potential to rival that of America. China is starting to pursue differentiation of their products: both low-tech and high-tech. One of their most popular tools to achieve this goal is buying the brands of internationally famous Western companies, along with acquiring their product departments, initiating tie-up arrangements, or, more and more often, acquiring them altogether. The trend gained strength in the 2000s. Lenovo became famous for its acquisition for the PC department of IBM in 2004. It made its own name recognizable all around the World and effectively contributed to the establishment of the Lenovo brand associated with an attractive cost-quality mix, dynamism, entrepreneurial spirit, newcomer’s aggressiveness (in the positive meaning of the word), quick learning, desire to innovate, openness, and readiness to integrate different business culture. Having invested more than $500 million, the country’s second largest TV maker TCL established a joint venture with the French electronic giant Thomson and became its majority partner. Thompson also owns the World-famous American brand RCA. The tie-up opened the way for producing under both Thompson and RCA brands and was also used to promote products under the brand of TCL itself, though mostly in the developing nations. Then, through its subsidiary, TCL also acquired the cellular phone business of Alcatel. Pearl River Piano, controlling 60 percent of China’s piano market, acquired a small British maker exporting pianos under the German brand Ritmuller. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25

However, buying the brand is not at all an easy and not necessarily a successful game. Its costs are very high—especially as Chinese firms usually target famous but ailing companies or poorly performing product divisions their Western counterparts are eager to sell. Thus, as a rule, Chinese acquirers have to bear a heavy financial burden without any guarantee that the company or the division they have purchased will be put back on track. TCL’s venture has been in the red from the very start. Lenovo’s profit margins are extremely low, and it is pressed back by Dell, HP, and Acer. In 2006, due to it poor performance, the Hong Kong Exchange removed it from the list of companies included in the key Hang Seng Index. In another development, step-by-step, slowly but surely, a cohort of domestic companies is gradually establishing international brands of their own, without embarking on costly acquisitions. For instance, sports apparel maker Li Ning is challenging Nike and Adidas in terms of design and product selection. In January 2010, it opened its first retail store in Portland, Oregon. Furthermore, it started design operations near Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, hiring American personnel. Tsingtao Brewery has become a popular name in many countries of the World as one of the symbols of the Chinese taste. Other examples of increasingly recognizable Chinese brands include air-conditioner producer Midea, telecom equipment maker ZTE, car marker Chery and Geely, clean technology company LDK Solar, and so on. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25

In the West it is often argued that, with a few exceptions, Chinese companies are lacking brand-building capabilities. Sometimes it is even considered proof that China is not an economic superpower. This argument is not convincing. True, China’s progress in this area is much slower than in others. However, besides the evidence of progress already achieved, we have to take into account the fact that most Chinese companies that are seriously working on differentiating their products are establishing brands in their own way, going through several stages. They start not from America, Europe, or Japan, but from China itself: the most rapidly expanding and the most familiar market in the World. Then they move or will move on to other developing countries, taking advantage of the markets’ dynamism and comparatively weak competition from other brand-builders. In the Third World they can also capitalize on their still relatively low production and sales costs. And only after that, having acquired brand-building skills and experience, some of them will go to America, Europe, Japan, and other developed states. The interviews conducted by the China Market Research Group with several hundred senior executives of Chinese consumer goods-making companies, showed that over 50 percent of the respondents expected to enter the United States of American in five years, but only after they target their home market and regions like Africa and the Middle East. If they realize their plans, in the second half of this decade Chinese and Western brands will start genuinely competing in the U.S.A. territory. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25

For instance, MINISO USA, a Guangdong-based seller of toys and household products, opened a flagship store in New York City’s SoHo in February of 2022. MINISO USA’s estimated annual revenue is currently $49.2M per year. MINISO USA has 156 Employee, and grew their employee count by 5 percent last year. When considering diversity, one of the characteristics of the Dark Age village was extreme xenophobia—hatred for the newcomer, or sometimes recent immigrants have hatred for established cultures (recent immigrants can be naïve for a city, for instance, but a high influx of them may migrate to a region where their culture is not dominant and create culture shock for the established culture). With the coming of the smokestack era, individual and mass loyalties were gradually transferred from village to nation. However, xenophobia, chauvinism, hatred of the outside, the stranger, the greenhorn, continued to be a tool of state power. Today’s shift to a knowledge-based economy requires more cross-national interdependence than the smokestack economy it replaces. Inevitably, this restricts the range of independent action by nations. This, in turn, leads to a xenophobic backlash in everything from commerce to culture. Today, governments throughout Europe are bracing themselves for an onslaught of imported culture, primarily television and movies, because of the integration of the European market. They are especially jitter about the packaging of news by newcomers. Le Monde charges that the EC’s plan for Television Without Frontiers “risks accelerating the implantation of Anglo-Saxon producers and distributors who have taken a decisive lead in the creation of all-European networks.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 25

Europeans were nervous about plans for a Moroccan network to begin satellite broadcasts in Arabic to Europe’s 44 million or more mainly Islamic immigrants. And they are projected to compose 8 percent or 58 million by 2030. Concerned has deepened as Muslin fundamentalists scored voting success in secular Algeria. This, however, is only a portent of things to come. Satellite technology and other new media tools are cracking open national cultures. In the opinion of satellite expert Dan Goldin of TRW, the day may well come when home satellite receivers can sold for a fraction of their already low price, and millions around the World will be able to pick up transmission from abroad—a Brazilian variety show, a Nigerian newscast, a South Korean drama, a Libyan propaganda program. This cross-communication, however, threatens the “national identity” that governments seek to preserve and propagate for their own self-serving purpose. When fears of culture deracination are intensified by large-scale immigration, identity becomes and explosive issue. The promoters of a European single-market, urging open borders for capital, culture, and people, seek to displace traditional nationalist sentiment with “supra-nationalism” instead. However, precisely because the new economy is becoming more globally integrated, exporting joblessness, pollution, and culture along with products and services, we see a mounting backlash and the revival of nationalism in the high-tech World. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25

The Le Penist movement in France, with its viciously anti-Arab propaganda, led by a former legionnaire who terms the Nazi gas chambers “a minor point,” appeals to the knee-jerk xenophobic emotions. His party holds tend seats in the European Parliament. The Republikaner Party in West Germany, formed by an ex-Waffen-SS non-com, Franz Schoenhuber, attacks not merely Turkish migrant workers but even ethnic Germans immigrating from Poland and the Soviet Union who are allegedly taking jobs, housing, and pensions away from “real Germans.” With links to the Le Penists in France and extremist parties elsewhere in Europe, the Republikaner won eleven seats in the West Berlin legislature in 1989, and six in the European Parliament. Under banners proclaiming “Germany first,” Schoenhuber, like Mr. Hitler after the Versailles Treaty, portrayed Germany—now one of the World’s richest countries—as a “victim” nation. Schoenhuber, according to the respected German analyst Josef Joffe, writing in The Wall Street Journal, has issued a “call to arms against the rest of the World, which seeks to oppress Germany by shacking it to the past”—meaning that the World will not let Germany forget Mr. Hitler’s ravages. (Schoenhuber has since quit they part, terming it too extremist.) Any country continually cudgeled for the sins of a much earlier generation can, of course, expect an eventual backlash, a reassertion of national pride. However, pride about what? Instead of urging Germany to become a World leader in developing a more advanced, 21st-century democracy, the neo-nationalists appeal to many of the anti-democratic pathologies of the German past, thus providing neighboring countries good cause for not wanting Germany to forget its alleged crimes. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25

With the Berlin Wall down and the de facto reunification of Germany well advanced, what happens in Bonn and Berlin has ramifications throughout Europe, and many all over the continent are watching the Republikaners carefully. However, similar nationalist movements are found all over Western Europe, from Belgium to Italy and Spain, wherever free-flowing culture and communication and border-crossing migrants threaten the old national self-conceptions. The resurgence of flag-waving xenophobia, however, is not limited to Europe. In the United States of America, too, there is a growing nationalist backlash. Fed by a fear that America is in economic and military decline, weary of being told they are too imperialist, materialist, violent, uncultured, et cetera, et cetera, even normally apolitical Americans are responding to nationalist demagogy. Anti-immigration sentiments runs hot, encouraged by eco-extremists who claim the influx of Mexican immigration is damaging to the U.S.A. environment. This born-again nativism, however, is only one manifestation of a new flag-waving nationalism. The 1990 ruling of the Supreme Court that burning the flag is a form of free political expression, protected by the U.S.A. Bill of Rights, led to an outpouring of high-octane emotion. Radio call-in shows were besieged by outraged callers. The White House instantly proposed changing the Constitution to ban the practice, which is something many Americans would still like to do to this very day. Another indication of the new mood is Japan-bashing, a popular sport these days among protectionist and ordinary Americans worried about the trade imbalance and the Japanese buy-up of U.S.A. companies and real estate. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25

In Japan, meanwhile, a parallel ultra-nationalism is spreading. Resurgent nationalists call for changes in the constitution to permit a more aggressive military buildup. Japan, they say, did “nothing to be ashamed of” during World War II—a view that upsets China and other nearby countries invaded by the Japanese. For suggesting that Emperor Hirohito may have shared responsibility for World War II, the then mayor of Nagasaki, Hitoshi Motoshima, became the victim of an attempted assassination. A leading daily Asahi Shimbun, one of those whose reporters had previously been murdered, presumably by nationalists, warns that such violence “will lead to fascism.” The ultras claim, moreover, that Japan has a national “soul” and language different from and superior to that of any other nation. The cult of “Yamatoism,” which promotes this concept of unique superiority, is called upon to offset a loss of national identity resulting from postwar Westernization. Having been treated patronizingly by the United States of America since the way, and sick of being criticized by others for economic policies that have brought it tremendous success, some Japanese are willing to listen to the nationalist pitch. This patriotic hubris comes hand in hand with extraordinary financial clout on the World scene and a fast-growing military capability, and is associated with the most anti-democratic forces in Japanese society. Finally, what makes the widespread resurgence of nationalism truly extraordinary is its reemergence as a powerful political force in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25

In fact, rather than democratic uprisings, the upheavals in Eastern Europe could equally well be described as nationalist uprisings among nations bent for nearly half a century to Soviet will. Reframing the concept of “nation” is one of the most emotional and important tasks to face the World in the decisive decades before us, and maintaining national control over certain functions, rather than allowing them to be either localized or globalized, is essential. However, blind tribalism and nationalism are both dangerous and regressive. And when linked to the notion of racial or God-conferred superiority, they gave birth to violence or repression Significantly, in the U.S.S.R., where ethnic passions rocked the state itself, they are often linked to both environmentalism and religious fundamentalism. Ecological themes are exploited to arouse ethnic sentiment against Moscow. In Tashkent a movement called Birlik, which started up to block the building of an electronics plant, has taken on an Islamic fundamentalist coloration. Even more significant than the mounting demands of ethic minorities in the Baltic regions, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and other parts of the U.S.SR. for autonomy or independence is the upsurge of ethnicism in the dominant Great Russian population. Writing about Tolstoi, the historian Paul Johnson described Russian nationalism in words that could apply today. It was, Mr. Johnson says, a “chauvinist spirit, the conviction that the Russians were a special race, with unique moral qualities (personified in the peasant) and a God-ordained role to perform in the World.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 25

This attitude is expressed in extreme form in today’s anti-Semitic, anti-foreigner Pamyat organization, which claims thirty branches around the Soviet Union, 20,000 members in Moscow alone, and has strong links to both the military and KGB, as well as best-selling authors and cultural figures are members. Pamyat, now facing criminal prosecution for spreading hate, resembles the Black Hundreds moment, which organized pogroms under the Tsar at the turn of the century. Pamyat and similar groups themselves as merely interested in preserving ancient monuments, or repairing the environment, but has as their goal the re-creation of the same village-based society that the Green fundamentalist exalt. Some call for a restoration of the Tsarist monarchy, linked to religious orthodoxy. Like Mr. Schoenhuber in Germany, who disclaims anti-Semitism but mouths Hitler-era propaganda about Jews, Pamyat claims innocence but issues virulent diatribes against “International Zionism and Freemasonary,” and its members threaten pogroms. A pamyat manifesto lashes out at all who have “reduced our churches, temples, monasteries, and graves of national heroes of our Motherland” and who have “reduced the ecology of the country to a catastrophic state.” It urges a massive return to the land—“Down with the giant cities!”—and a revival of the “centuries-old institution of the ploughman.” Here, then, we find xenophobic ethnicism explicitly linked to religious fundamentalism and eco-medievalism—all three in a single Dark Age package. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25

It is a combustible convergence of forces that could blow up in the face of democracies wherever they now exist. In its worst case, it conjures up the image of a racist or tribal, eco-fascist, theological state—a maximal recipe for the suppression of human rights, freedom of religion, and private property as well. Such a state seems hard to imagine—except, perhaps, as a result of some immense crisis and tragedy, an eco-spasm combining ecological upheaval with vast economic crisis, terror, or war. However, one need not imagine the worst-case scenario to feel a chill in the bones. It is not necessary for such movements, or a convergence of them, to seize control of a state in order for them to savagely restrict or destroy a form of democracy that, even in the high-tech nations, is already fragile because it is increasingly out of sync with the emerging economy and society. Governments controlled or heavily influenced by extremists who put their particular brand of religion, ecology, or nationalism ahead of democratic values do not stay democratic long. The system of advanced wealth creation now spreading around the Earth opens expanded opportunities for democracy. For the first time, as we say, it makes freedom of expression not just a political good but an economic necessity. However, as the old industrial society enters it terminal tailspin, counterforces are created that could destroy both democracy and the option of economic advance. To save both development and democracy, political systems need to leap to a new stage, as the economy itself is doing. Whether that enormous challenge can be met will decide whether the ultimate powershift tht approaches will protect or enslave the individual. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25

In the Powershift Era ahead, the primary ideological struggle will no longer be between capitalist democracy and communist totalitarianism, but between 21st-century democracy and 11th-century darkness. The three-way duel—three antagonists, Larry, Mo, and Curly, are engaged in a three-way duel. There are two rounds. In the first round, each player is given one shot: first Larry, then Mo, and the Curly. After the first round, any survivors are given a second shot, again beginning with Larry, then Mo, and then Curly. For each duelist, the best outcome is to be the sole survivor. Next best is to be one of two survivors. In third place is the outcome in which no one gets killed. Dead last is that you get killed. Larry is a poor shot, with only a 30 percent chance of hitting a person at whom he aims. Mo is a much better shot, achieving 80 percent accuracy. Curly is a perfect shot—he never misses. What is Larry’s optimal strategy in the first found? Who has the greatest chance of survival in this problem? Although backward reasoning is the safe way to solve this problem, we can jump ahead a little by using some forward-looking arguments. We start by examining each of Larry’s options in turn. If Larry shoots at Mo, what happens? If Larry shoots at Curly, what happens? If Larry shoots at Mo and hits, then he signs his own death warrant. It becomes Curly’s turn to shoot, and he never misses. Curly will not pass at the chance to shoot Larry, as this leads to his best outcome. Larry shooting at Mo does not seem to be a very attractive option. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25

If Larry shoots at Curly and hits, then it is Mo’s turn. Mo will shoot at Larry. [Think about how we know this to be true.] Hence, if Larry hits Curly, his chance of survival is les than 20 percent (the chance that Mo misses). So far, neither of these options looks to be very attractive. In fact, Larry’s best strategy is to fire up in the air! In this case, Mo will shoot at Curly, and if he misses, Curly will shoot and kill Mo. Then it becomes the second round and it is Larry’s turn to shoot again. Since only one other person remains, he has at least a 30 percent chance of survival, since that is the probability that he kills his one remaining opponent. The moral here is that small fish may do better by passing on their first chance to become stars. We see this every four years in presidential campaigns. When there is a large number of contenders, the leader of the pack often gets derailed by the cumulative attacks of all the medium-sized fish. It can be advantageous to wait, and step into the limelight only after others have knocked each other and themselves out of the running. Thus, your chances of survival depend on not only your own ability but also whom you threaten. If the stronger players kill each other off, a weak player who threatens no one may end up surviving. Curly, although he is the most accurate, has the lowest chance of survival—only 14 percent. So much for survival of the fittest! Mo has a 56 percent chance of winning. Larry’s best strategy turns his 30 percent accuracy into a 41.2 percent chance of winning. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25

Today’s duels are more likely to be fought between takeover specialist T. Boone Pickens and the target management over who will end up with control of the board of directors. However, if you do not think far enough ahead, things do not always come out as planned. Throughout my life I has associated with all classes of people. I have few prejudices and my greatest wealth lies in the fact that I have dear, true, faithful friends in all classes. Some of the wealthiest down to some of the poorest are my friends. I am proud to have these friends and proud of the fact that I can talk to them and speak out my heart to them, thus assisting them in some way. However, until now I could never help myself. I wanted to feel free but I never have. Every door I ever entered led to frustration sooner or later. I always got the feeling that I did not “belong.” When I made new friends and found new and interesting things to do I was happy for a while but soon I would become frustrated. I cannot control myself when it comes to spending money. I seem to always be in debt. I always seem tied down. I have always felt as though I were searching for a star that never existed. I have already been lonely! However, I have been given confidence in myself and confidence that I can help others. I consider every human being a sacred thing. Many do not. That is my greatest complaint against the World in general. What can I do to create a stream of sensitivity in the hearts of those around me so that they might consider others? #RandolphHarris 25 of 25


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You Know its Not the Same as It Was!

In mortality we have the certain of death and the burden of sin. As the cell door slams shut behind a person who faces the prospect of having to spend 5 to 25 years withing that same four walls, what thoughts and feelings go through their mind and heart? The overall picture that emerges from our research is that of offenders caught up in a cycle of expensive, self-indulgent habits (exempli gratia, gambling, drug use, and heavy drinking) that feed on themselves and constantly call for more of the same. It would be a mistake to conclude that these offenders are being driven to crime by genuine financial hardship; few of them are doing robberies to buy the proverbial loaf of bread to feed their children. Yet, most of their crimes are economically motivated. The offenders perceive themselves as needing money and robbery is a response to that perception. Though background risk factors, such as pressing financial need, predispose persons to criminality, they fail to provide comprehensive, precise, and deep explanations of the situational pushes, urges, and impulses that energize actual criminal conduct. Nor do such factors identify the “necessary and sufficient” conditions for criminal motivation to eventuate in criminal behavior. Focusing on the foreground attends to these problems. A foreground analytic approach identifies the immediate, situational factors that catalyze criminal motivation and transforms offenders from an indifferent state to one in which they are determined to commit crime. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Although the streets were a prime focus of much early criminological work, the strong influence of street culture on offender motivation has largely been overlooked since. Street culture subsumes a number of powerful conduct norms, including but not limited to, the hedonistic pursuit of sensory stimulation, disdain for conventional living, lack of future orientation, and persistent eschewal of responsibility. Street culture puts tremendous emphasis on virtues of spontaneity; it dismisses “rationality and long-range planning…in favor of enjoying the moment.” As if there is no tomorrow, offenders typically live like confident that tomorrow will somehow take care of itself. However, Matthew 6.34 says, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” This culture tends to accentuate the negative and can thwart a person’s attempts to find meaning and direction. On the streets, “every night is Saturday night,” and the self-indulgent pursuit of trendy consumerism and open-ended street action becomes a means to this end. The pursuit of fast living is more than symbolic or dramaturgical, it cuts to the very core of offenders’ perceptions of self-identity. To be cool, hip, and “in,” one must constantly prove it through conspicuous outlays of cash. The fetishized World of street-corner capitalism dictates that fiscal responsibility be jettisoned and money burned on material objects and illicit action that assert in no uncertain terms one’s place in the street hierarchy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Carefree spending creates the “impression of affluence” by which offenders are judged; it serves to demonstrate that they have indeed “made it”—at least for the time. On the streets, the image one projects is not everything, it is the only thing. To not buy into such an approach is to abandon a source of recognition offenders can get nowhere else or, worse, to state failure full in the face. It is not hard to fathom why many offenders in our sample regarded a lack of funds as an immediate threat to their social standing. The problem becomes one of sustenance; the reputational advantages of cash-intensive living can be appreciated and enjoyed to their fullest only if participants moderate their involvement in it. This requires intermittent and disciplined spending, an anomalous and untimely untenable proposition. Offenders effectively become ensnared by their own self-indulgent habit—habits that feed on themselves and constantly call for more of the same. These habits are expensive and create a pressing and pervasive need for cash—a need remedied through robbery but only temporarily, since the proceeds of any given robbery merely “enable” more action. The seductive attractions of street life appear to take on a power logic of their own; offenders burn money only to create (albeit inadvertently) the conditions that spark their next decision to rob. This self-enclosed cycle of reinforcing behavior starts with a predisposed background with risk factors such as: strain, broken homes, neglectful parent, social capital deficits, leading to participation in street culture. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Once an individual is involved in street culture, they enter a vicious cycle of: pursuit of illicit action/conspicuous consumption, financial desperation, robbery, disposable cash. As much as these offenders sought liberation through the hedonistic, opened pursuit of sensory stimulation, such a quest ultimately is both self-defeating and subordinating. Those hooked on street action may never see it this way, but objective assessments of reality are difficult to render when rationality is severely bounded as it is here. Suffice it to say that, for those in our sample, the “choice” to rob occurs in a context in which rationality not only is sharply bounded, it barely exists. If one takes the influence of context seriously, most offenders “decide” to commit robbery in a social and psychological terrain bereft of realistic alternatives. Street-culture participation effectively obliterates, or at least severely circumscribes, the range of objectively available options, so much so as to be almost deterministic. Offenders typically are overwhelmed by their own predicament—emotional, financial, pharmacological, and otherwise—and see robbery as the only way out. Chronic isolation from conventional others and lifestyles only reinforces their insularity, driving them deeper and deeper into a “downward life trajectory” of ever-increasing criminal embeddedness called “role engulfment.” Being a street robber is more than a series of offenses that allow one to meet some arbitrarily specified inclusion criteria: it is a way of behaving, a way of thinking, an approach to life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Stopping such criminals exogenously—in the absence of lengthy incapacitation—is not likely to be successful. Getting offenders to “go straight” is analogous to telling lawful citizens to relinquish one’s history, companions, thoughts, feelings, and fears, and replace them with something else. Self-directed going-straight talk on the part of offenders more often than not is insincere—akin to young children talking about what they are going to be when they grow up: Young storytellers…criminals…do not care about the [reality]; the pleasure comes in saying the words, the verbal ritual itself brings pleasure. Gifting offenders money, in the hopes they will reduce or stop their offending is similarly misguided. It is but twisted enabling and only likely to set off another round of illicit action that plunges offenders deeper into the abyss of desperation that drives them back to their next crime. The image of prison life might conjure up words like accountability, punishment, structure, and discipline. There is truth in all of those associations. However, just as relevant are words like repentance, Atonement, Spirit, and conversation. Church helps former inmates make better use of their time, association with others who are improving their lives, learn correct behavior through the modeling of ecclesiastical leaders, and learn gospel doctrines and principles. Other benefits are less visible but may be more enduring, such as when a former inmate’s soul is enlarged or expanded. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

The Final Judgement is not just an evaluation of a sum total of good and evil acts—what we have done. It is an acknowledgement of the final effects of our actions and thoughts—what we have become. This is good news: many within prisons, jails, and halfway houses are learning from their bad choices and are becoming what Heavenly Father would have them become. Many inmates wrestle with addictions. How they cope upon release is critical to their success. The manifestations of evil spirits through persons obtains footing and varies in character, according to the degree and kind of group they secure for possession. In one case in the Christian Bible, the only manifestation of the evil spirit’s presence was dumbness (Matt. 9.32), the spirit possibly locating in the vocal organs; in another, the person held by the spirit was “deaf and unintelligible” (Mark 9.25), and the symptoms included foaming at the mouth, grinding the teeth—all connected with the head—but the hold of the spirit was of such long standing (v.21) that he could throw his victim down and convulse the whole body (Mark 9.20-22). In other cases we find merely an “unclean spirit,” as with the man in a synagogue—probably so hidden that none would know the man was thus possessed, until, seeing Christ, the spirit cried out with fear, “Art Thou come to destroy us?” (Mark 1.24); or a “spirit of infirmity” (Luke 13.11) in a woman of whom it might be said tht she simply required a “healing” of some disease, or that she was always tired and only needed proper nutrition and rest—as some would say in the language of the twentieth century. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

Again, we find a very advanced case in the man with the “legion,” showing that the evil spirits’ possession reached such a climax as to make the person appear insane; for his own personality was so mastered by the malignant spirits in possession as to cause him to lose all sense of decency and self-control in the presence of others (Luke 8.27). That there are different kinds of spirits is evident not only from their manifestations recorded in the Gospels but also in later instances: in the account of the girl at Philippi, possessed by a “spirit of divination”; and in Simon the Sorcerer, who was so energized by satanic power for the working of miracles that he was considered to be “the great power of God” by the deceived people (Acts 8.10). In these cases, trickery was the game. If they really believe they are communicating with the spirits of the dead, spiritists of today are also deceived. Surely it is easy for designing spirits to impersonate dead people, including even saintly Christians: they have watched them (Acts 19.15) all their lives, and can easily imitate their personality traits and counterfeit their voices. Therefore, it is very possible that some criminals and some of the mentally ill may be possessed by evil spirits because they have some of these same traits. Some people may me tired of studying and deep in the throes of a loneliness trip—different that they have ever experienced—terrifying yet somehow good in its simple realness. The Savior is our Advocate with the Father. He knows our weaknesses. He knows how to succor those who are tempted. It is because of the Savior that all of us can make real progress—experience true conversion—in becoming what Heavenly Father wants us to become. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

The answers are contained in the revelatory events on which Christianity is based and are taken by systematic theology from the sources, through the medium, under the norm. The mutual dependence of question and answers can be explained in terms of form and content. Theological answers derive their content form from the existential questions. For example, if existential analysis reveals the threat of non-being, then God must be called the power of being that overcomes this threat. If history is an incomprehensible puzzle, then the Kingdom of God must be termed the unity, meaning, and fulfilment of history. Christian symbols must always be open to, and in correlation with, the questions of existence. Contrasting with other methods, the supranaturalistic method considers revelation as a strange bundle of truth that fell from Heaven. It has nothing but answers, and from them in manufactures the questions. The naturalistic or humanistic method never gets beyond human existence. It extracts the answers from the question themselves. Lastly, the dualistic method tries to construct a correlation, but fails. By such devices as natural revelation and the proofs for the existence of God, it seeks to correlate natural answers with Christian answers, instead of questions with answers. If the proofs for God are taken as a question—as they are in the method of correlation—and not as an answer, then their use is justified. The method of correlation is not foolproof. The answers may prejudice the questions, or the questions prejudice the answers. For theology, too, is ambiguous. Nor is the method of correlation new. As a method, it is as old as theology. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The U.S.A. government had a major problem trying to motivate several million teenagers to register for the military draft. Large-scale civil disobedience would make it impossible to punish everyone who violated the law. Still, the government had a big advantage: it set the rules. To see this advantage of moving first, imagine that the government is only allowed to punish one person who fails to register. How can they use this single threat to induce everyone to register? The government announces that it will go after evaders in alphabetical order. If he failed to register, the person with surname Aaron knows that he would be singled out for punishment. Then the Abrams conclude that since all of the Aarons will surely register, it is they who will be punished. And so on down the line right through to the Zhukovs and the Zweibels. A lawyer might argue that it is unconstitutional to single out people for punishment because of the alphabetical ordering of their names. However, nothing is special about the alphabet. The key point is that the order of punishment is pre-specified. A randomly chosen and announced order of birthdates, or social security numbers, does just as well. A few selective punishments go a long way in keeping everyone in line, and are much less expensive than offering market wages to attract an equal number and quality of recruits. For example, if Congress mistook appearances for reality, it might forbid that Draft Board to use alphabetical order as the means by which they choose who gets punished first, leaving open other equivalent methods. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

What is needed to stop the practice is to forbid the pre-announcement of any order. When the participants in a game are ranked in some order, it is often possible to predict what the person at one end will do. This knowledge influences the action of the next person, which in turn influences the third, and so on down the line. The story we have told is a bit extreme. By the time we get to the Zhukovs, someone will surely not register and then be punished. The Zhukovs do not really have to worry. With so many individuals, one expects a small amount of slippage. The point is that the number of punishments available need not be anywhere near the number of people to motivate. The capacity (and willingness) to jail a thousand protestors can deter several million would-be’s. From the World perspective, Chinese domestic companies have been strengthening their global position in several stages. During the 1970s to early 1980, Chinese markers established themselves as dominant players in the production and exports of a wide variety of low-tech-low-end mass product, defeating producers of similar items in the West. Myriads of Chinese-made affordable T-shirts, sneakers, lighters, toys, kitchenware, and so on and so forth conquered markets all around the World. In this segment, where price makes all the difference, Western producers were doomed to lose. Nowadays China’s dominance here is continuing, in spite of the fact that its rising labor and other costs have become a hot topic Worldwide. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

There is a lot of talk about the erosion of its cost advantage resulting in the shift of low-cost mass production to the countries of the next row like Vietnam, Bangladesh, Sir Lanka, Cambodia, or Laos. The only option for China, according to this school of thought, is to upgrade its industries and produce more high-value-added goods. This is wrong. China is unique. It will not be shifting from lower-value-added to higher-value-added products. It will handle both. In other words, China is and, for decades to come, will be moving up and up the value chain on the one hand while retaining its dominance in the low-tech-low-end segment on the other. In this regard, it is different from any other nations. Its growth pattern goes beyond the famous flying geese framework in its conventional sense. China’s ability to preserve dominance in the low-tech-low-end mass products segment can be easily explained. First, its labor and other costs are still quite low. They remain incomparable with those in the West and thus do not lose attractiveness for both western businesses and consumers. Second, no next-row country can compare with China in terms of size. Consequently, none of them is capable of replacing it as the major production platform for low-end simple products, even though their costs are lower. True, more and more often both Western and Asian businesspeople are complaining about the increase of China’s labor and other costs, and the mass media is willingly picking it up as a popular topic. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

However, read or listen to what they say attentively, word by word, and you will clearly see what it is all about. They are upset today Chinese costs are higher than in past years and higher than they initially expected them to be. Nevertheless, they continue to expand their direct investment to China on a much larger scale than to any next-row country. Actions, not talks, are serving as proof of China’s real cost competitiveness. In China, where the wages in the manufacturing have increase 75 percent in the last ten years, but it is 23 percent of USA manufacturing rates, which means that its cost advantages remain very significant. Though wage growth rates are high all across China (around 10 percent a year), labor (as well as other) costs are starting to bite, mainly in the economically advanced eastern coastal provinces. As of 2023, the average monthly wage in China’s manufacturing industry is US$1,000 a month, which is two and a half times more than it was in 2010. As of 2023, the manufacturing employees average wage in the United States of America is $2,583 a month. The average hourly wage in China’s manufacturing industry is about $6 an hour—versus $18.5 in the United States of America. Also, China does upgrade their industries and big cities in China are becoming service, logistics, education and R&D platforms, supporting industrial growth in the hinterland. No doubt, as time goes by, China will significantly enhance their international role as producers and exporters and attract a growing number of multinational companies to diversity the geography of their production activities. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

In the second stage, which started in the 1990 and has been continuing into the 2000s and beyond, Chinese companies are moving fast to capture global markets of technologically advanced low-end mass products, leveraging their increasing technological capabilities and cost advantages at one and the same time. Representative examples include TVs, AV products, mobile phones, personal computers, or, in the latest development, solar batteries. Entering this sector, Chinese makers exert competitive pressure on the Western companies positioned in higher-end market niches, usually by offering simpler various of similar products at a lower price. China has emerged as the World’s number one producer of solar panels. Their manufacturing exceeds 80 percent of solar panels Worldwide. Using industry-validated figures, Chinese solar panels are 30 percent less expensive than USA solar panels. This enables China to play a leading role in the global energy revolution. In fact, China’s average share of the solar panel supply chain has gone from 55 percent to 84 percent over the past 13 years. China also continues to lead in terms of investment, making up almost 66 percent of global large-scale solar investment. In the first half od 2022, the country invested $41 billion, a 173 percent increase from the year before. With Joe Biden’s ambitious new car pollution rules that could require electric cars to make up 66 percent of new cars sold in the USA by 2032, many people are concerned. China made about 75 percent of the World’s lithium-ion batteries in 2021, compared with 7 percent for the USA. And China currently controls nearly 70 percent of all minded cobalt needed in the electric vehicle industry. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

China already has 80 to 90 percent of the global rare Earth market. By 2029 the United States of America is expected to have only 3 lithium-ion battery mega-factories compared to China’s 88—of a total 115 lithium-ion battery mega-factories planned. Net profit for Chinese manufacturer CATL jumped 93 percent in 2022 to US$4.41 billion, as the World’s largest supplier of electric vehicle batteries. With EV batteries costing approximately $4,000 to $20,000 many people fear a future with electric vehicles because the economy is unstable and most people simply cannot afford to come up with that amount of money all at once. Some may say there are financing options, but that would be like financing a car, on top of making a car payment. They also fear making China richer than it already is and the USA more dependent on China. Across the World, a green tide is gathering momentum too. This movement for ecological sanity is essential—a leading beneficial example of ordinary people around the World leading their people. Propelling ecology to the top of the World agenda have been a succession of sensational catastrophes, from Three Miles Island and Chernobyl to Bhopal and the Alaska oil spill. Clearly, more lie ahead. Industrial society has reached its outer limits, making it impossible to continue putting toxic wastes in our backyards, stripping the land of it forests, dumping Styrofoam debris in our oceans, creating plastic islands, and punching holes in the ozone. The Worldwide environmental movement is therefore a survival response to planetary crisis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

However, this movement, too, has an antidemocratic fringe. It has its own advocates of return to darkness. Some of them are ready to hijack the environmental movement in pursuit of their private political or religious agendas. The issues are so complex and recalcitrant that the Green movement is likely to split into at least four parts. One part will continue to be the very model of legal, nonviolent democratic action. However, given a succession of ecological crises and tragedies, a second wing, which already exists in embryonic form, might well step up from eco-vandalism to full-scale eco-terrorism to enforce its demands. A further split will intensify the key ideological war already dividing the environmental movement. On one side: those who favor technological and economic advance within stringent environmental constraints. Unwilling to give up on imagination and intelligence, they believe in the power of the human mind—and therefore in our ability to design technologies that will use smaller amounts of resources, emit less pollution, and recycle wastes into reusable resources. They argue that today’s crisis calls for revolutionary changes in the way the economy and technology are organized. Oriented toward tomorrow, these are the mainstream environmentalists. Battling them for ideological control of the movement, however, are self-described “fundamentalists,” who wish to plunge society into pre-technological medievalism and asceticism. They are “eco-theologues,” and some of their views dovetail with the thinking of religious extremists. The eco-theologues insist that there can be no technological relief, and that we are therefore destined to slide back into preindustrial poverty, a prospect they regard as a blessing rather than a curse. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

For many of the reversionist thinkers, the issues are not primarily ecological but religious. They wish to restore a religion-drenched World that has not existed in the West since the Middle Ages. The environmental movement provides a convenient vehicle. This group reduces the history of our relations with nature to biblical allegory. First there was an ecological “Golden Age,” when humans lived in harmony with nature and worshipped it. The species fell from this “Eden” with the arrival of the industrial age, in which the “Devil”—technology—ruled human affairs. Now we must transit to a new “Paradise” of perfect sustainability and harmony. If not, we face “Armageddon.” This imposition of a Western, indeed Christian, parable on the far more complex history of our relations with nature is common to the “eco-theologues” who glamorize life in the medieval village. Rudolf Bahro, an influential Green theorist now living in West Germany, explicitly holds that what is needed is “theology, not ecology—the birth of a new Golden Age which cultivates…the nobility in man.” He reached back into the 13th century to quote Meister Eckhart, the founder of German mysticism, “who lived in the now despoiled Rhine River valley” and who told us that all creatures have God within them. Mr. Bahro finds the same idea in the poetic words of Mechtild of Magdeburg, another 13th-century Christian thinker, quoting her beautiful line to the effect that all creatures are “a flash of grace.” Ecological salvation thus, for him, is a matter of religion, something the secular World will never be able to offer. Mr. Bahro even approves of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s remark to Mr. Gorbachev that the Soviet leader should look to Allah rather than economic reforms to solve Soviet problems. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Another theorist, Wolfgang Sachs of the University of Pennsylvania, attack the Worldwatch Institute, a leading environmentalist research center, for its “specifically modern outlook” and dismisses Amory Lovins, the conservationist, for urging greater energy efficiency, whereas what is wanted by Mr. Sachs is “good housekeeping” in the tradition of “subsistence-oriented households.” Ivan Illich, one of our most imaginative social critics and author of several brilliant works bearing on ecological theory, is opposed to “managerial fascism” and simple-minded Ludditism. What he proposes, however, is “sustainability without development”—in short, stasis. For Mr. Illich, poverty is the human condition, and should be accepted as such; hence, who needs development? The new system of wealth creation, he says, has “injected new life into what would otherwise have been the exhausted logic of industrialism.” He fails to see that the new knowledge-based technological system actually contradicts the old logic of industrialism at many points. For Mr. Illich, too, the argument is ultimately theological. “God was the pattern that connected the cosmos” at a time when bare subsistence was accepted as normal and natural, a state we should return. So long as God ruled the medieval mind, humanity and nature remained in balance. “Man, the agent of disequilibrium,” upset the balance after the scientific revolution. Mr. Illich regards the concept of an “eco-system which, through multiple feedback mechanisms, can be regulated scientifically” as a snare and a delusion. Clearly, he implies, a return to a God-center ascetic World would be preferable. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Theo-ecological rhetoric contains within it more than a hint of the Christian notion of retribution. As the writers Linda Bilmes and Mark Byford have noted, the theological Greens insist “consumption is sinful,” while environmental blight is seen as “punishment for excessive consumerism, lack of spirituality, wastefulness.” As in a Sunday sermon, the implication is that we should “repent, and mend our ways.” Or, one might add, face fire and brimstone. This is hardly the place to try to resolve the profound issues raised by the ecology debate—as significant a philosophical debate as that raised by the Enlightenment thinkers at the dawn of the industrial age. What is important, however, is to note the congruence between the views of the eco-theologues and the fundamentalists revival, with its deep hostility to secular democracy. A shared emphasis on absolutes and the belief that sharp restrictions on individual choice may be required (to make people “moral,” or to “protect the environment”) point ultimately to a common attack on human rights. Indeed, many environmentalists themselves worry openly about the arrival of Green Ayotallahs or “eco-fascists” who impose their particular brand of salvation. Thus, Mr. Bahro cautions that “in the deep crises of humanity, charisma always plays a role. The deeper the crisis, the darker the charismatic figure who will emerge…Whether or not we will have a green Adolph depends…on how far cultural change advances before the next Chernobyl.” One may admire the integrity and creativity of a thinker like Mr. Illich, surely no fascist himself, while recognizing the deeply antidemocratic implications of his search for the absolute, the constant, the static, and the holy. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Criticizing the eco-theologues, the French sociologist Alain Touraine warns, “If we reject reason in the name of salvation from the ozone depletion, we will court a Green fundamentalism, an eco-theocracy of the Ayatollah Khomeini variety.” If such anxiety sounds too extreme, it may be worth recalling the Wandervogel youth movement of the 1920s in Germany, where the Green movement today is most militant. The Wandervogel were the hippie-Greens of the Weimar Republic, roaming the countryside with their rucksacks, carrying guitars, wearing flowers, holding Woodstock-life festivals, high on spirituality and preaching a return to nature. A decade later, Mr. Hitler was in control. Mr. Hitler also exalted preindustrial values, picturing the Nazi utopia as one in which “the blacksmith stands again at his anvil, the farmer walks behind his plough.” In the words of Professor J.P. Stern of University College, London, Mr. Hitler evoked “a pre-industrial rustic idyll.” Mr. Hitler’s ideologists constantly praised the “organic,” urged physical fitness, and used biological analogies to justify the vilest race hate. “Hundreds of thousands of youngsters passed through the Youth Movement,” writes George L. Mosse in The Crisis of German Ideology, “and many of them found it not very difficult to accommodate themselves to the ideological propositions of the Nazis.” Can one really imagine a Neo-Green Party, with armbands, Sam Browne belts, and jackboots, setting out to enforce its own view of nature on the rest of society? Of course not, under normal conditions. However, what if conditions are not “normal”? #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Consider the consequences of another Bhopal-like eco-catastrophe set in, say, Seattle, Stuttgart, or Sheffield…followed by back-to-back crises elsewhere…followed by confusion and monstrous corruption in the disaster relief effort…amid fundamentalists cries that the disaster was inflicted by God as punishment for “permissiveness” and immorality. Picture all this occurring in time of deep economic distress. Imagine an attractive, articulate “Eco-Adolph” who promises not just to solve the immediate crisis but to “purify” the society materially, morally, and politically—if only he is given extraconstitutional powers. Some of today’s eco-theological rhetoric has an absurdist flavor, as did that of the erstwhile Adolph and his ideologists. Nazi propagandists exalted the Middles Ages (especially the time when the Holy Roman Empire dominated Europe) as a period when Kultur reached its “highest peak.” Today, a British ecological “fundi,” or fundamentalist, writes in a letter to The Economist that “the goals of ‘fundi’ Greens like myself…[are to] return to Europe which existed in the distant past…between the fall of Rome and the rise of Charlemagne,” in which the basic unit of society “was the rural holding, scarcely larger than a hamlet…The only way for humans to live in harmony with nature is to live at a subsistence level.” What the eco-medievalists normally do not tell us is the political price. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

They seldom point out that democracy was conspicuously absent from those bucolic villages they hold up for emulation—villages ruled by the cruelest patriarchy, religious mind-control, feudal ignorance and force. This was the Kultur the Nazis glamorized. Not for nothing has the period between the fall of Rome and the rise of Charlemagne become known as the Dark Ages. By themselves the eco-theologues might be dismissed. They remain a small fringe on the far edge of the environmental movement. However, it is a mistake to view them as an isolated or trivial phenomenon. The religious revival and the Green movements alike breed ultras who would be happy to jettison democracy. At their extremes, these two movements may be converging to impose new restrictions on personal and political behavior in the name of both God and Greenness. Together they are pushing for a power shift toward the past. Society has gotten so advanced and expensive that many people feel nostalgia for the past. Nostalgia is a longing feeling for the past when things seemed better, easier, and more fun. It is the feeling behind countless number one hits. We all know the feeling. What psychological purpose does nostalgia serve? Well, for one, nostalgia serves as an emotional experience that unifies. One example of this is it helps to unite our sense of who we are, our self, our identity over time. Because over time we change constantly, we change in incredible ways. We are not anywhere near the same as we were when we were in high school. Nostalgia by motivating us to remember the past in our own life helps unite us to that authentic self and remind us who we have been and then compare that to who we feel we are today. And many people are nostalgic about the past when America was number one in manufacturing and Christianity was more accepted as the religion of America. Therefore to help America remain a superpower, please buy American cars, and appliance and other American-Made goods. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21


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The Fear Was Terrible

In was December. The air was ripe with the promise of the new year. The estate was full of life and sound. After the years of supernatural violence and denunciation, it seemed the demons had set their sights elsewhere and, for a while, we were at peace. There were, of course, the usual shadows lurking about. As we walked about the gardens, a boy came running out of the orchards. He was in a state of shock, swallowing his words and talking too fast for me us to hear what he was saying. Ms. Daisy managed to calm him and, with great patience, coax out of the terrified child that there had been massacres. That villages lower down the road had been put to the torch. If old men, women, cut down where they stood. Children, too. I turned cold. “Oh, dear Heavens.” We had no ways of knowing if the report was true. True or false, his testimony would spread panic and alarm. Far better to wait until to verify the stories and then decide what action to take. When I arrived at dinner, everyone was in good spirits. Living as we did, to come together to celebrate, with food enough for everyone and in the warmth, my heart wept at the knowledge that in a matter of hours, all this might be lost. So I sat, knowing what I knew and yet having to conceal it. And all the time, I was watching the door, waiting for my niece, Ms. Daisy. Later I learned she had questioned the boy further and was satisfied that she was telling the truth without embellishment. I instructed the servants to be on alert. My head was spinning with so much information. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

I instituted a search of the house. I sighed as I sat down in my chair. It was a grueling day. It was the middle of winter and the wind howled down the chimneys. Shuddering, I pulled my chair a bit closer to the fireplace. Listening to the domestic sounds from the kitchen made me smile. I was home and warm for the night. Tomorrow’s problems were not yet to be faced, and the warmth of the fire slowly lulled me to sleep. The sound of knocking at my front door startled me awake. The sounds seemed a bit faint, but they were persistent. I hurried to the door, wondering who could be out on such a bitter evening and what emergency would I find on the other side. I flung open the door and at first thought that no one was there, but then I was shocked to see a thin little girl no more than nine or ten years old, standing just before me. She was woefully underdressed for the blustery night. She wore thin shoes, a tattered dress, and a blue shawl that she had pulled tightly around her tiny shoulders. I wondered how the child stayed upright against the wind that buffeted her. The little girl did not wait for me to speak. “Mrs. Winchester, you must come, my mother’s sick bad and she won’t make it through the night without your help. Hurry!” Something about the wispy child and the intensity of her pleas moved me to action. “Some in my child, come in at once,” I said and shut the door. I quickly gathered my coat and scarf, pulled on my gloves and hat, and grabbed up my bag. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

We moved swiftly to one of the Victorian cottages on my estate. She ushered me into her home. Her mother was one of the housemaids. She was normally a sassy lass, but now she was reduced to a skinny rack of bones. Her body was woefully undernourished and she was indeed extremely ill. Upon closer examination, she was gravely ill. Indeed, the lass would not last through the night without quick intervention—she was suffering from pneumonia. As I tended the fire, I talked to the woman. I told her that she would be all right and that and that my servants were coming with medicine. I also spoke to her about the brave little girl who had come to fetch me. I inquired as to the child’s whereabouts. The ill woman looked at me with honor. “My daughter died a month ago. Her shoes and shawl are there in the little cupboard.” The woman broke off with a sob. I felt compelled to look in the close. Inside hung the little blue shawl that I seen the little girl clutching earlier. Her shoes lay on the shelf. I reached out to feel them and they were dry. It would have been impossible for those articles to have been worn that same night. I tended to the woman for a bit longer. As soon as the servants arrived, I ordered the cottage searched for the child I had seen. No child was found. I was amazed at the power of human love and the lost child who reached beyond the grave to save her mother from death. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

I returned home. The evening was nearly over, when I noticed a dark shadow to my left. However, when I focused my eyes directly on the spot, I could see nothing. I decided that perhaps my eyes were undoubtedly becoming tired. It was, after all, nearly midnight. A few moments later, I saw the shadow again. This time it crossed directly in front of me, moving toward the sofa. However, once again, when I focused directly on the thing, I saw nothing but the shadows of the dark room. I shrugged, distracted from the heading to bed. “Are you a ghost?” I asked, speaking toward the area in front of the sofa where I had last seen the shadow. There was no response. I went upstairs to bed. By the morning I had forgotten the entire episode with the mysterious shadow. Several moments later, a peculiar sound caused me to raise from my slumber, and I was surprised to see the shadow again. It crossed in from of my bed, then sat on an arm chair. Sometime between two and four in the morning I was awakened by the sound of artillery firing from the fields. It sounded like cannons firing one-at-a-time. I could hear there reloading between the shots. The fire lasted about ten minutes, then faded out, back into some mysterious fold of Time. Frightened, I did not look outside. I work my niece Ms. Daisy in the middle of the night to ask if she heard it. Unfortunately, she had been sound asleep and did not. However, I did not believe the sounds were figments of my imagination. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

My mansion served as the venue for a most remarkable connection between the dead and the living which seems to spanned the ages. I tried to sleep, but there was another odd noise that echoed across the fields of my estate. Faint at first, the sound was soon recognizable: drumbeats. I finally fell asleep, never understanding the source of the sound. Once again, I was awakened by bone chilling cold, so cold it sent me running from my room. There was an icy apprehension as I ran forward, as if I was running for my life. I came to a new pathway in my mansion and entered it. I felt the sharp coldness of the air, but I knew I had to keep going. The fear was terrible. As I came around a curve, blood ran through the corridor like water. A strange haze formed. The haze was a visage of a young man with brown hair and a moustache, sideburn in front of his left war, with his eyes gazing to the right. Then a woman walked through the streams of blood, she was moving at a fast walk. She had blonde hair and seemed in a hurry. As I moved down the pathway, she vanished, but there, hanging on the wall, was a shriveled, mummified, human arm. The hand was a contorted claw. I was also astonished to see, floating before my eyes, a white, glowing, disembodied arm pull back and vanish into darkness of the room. The pathway severed never-ending abyss of darkness and horrors than any human being could imagine. A strong hand grabbed me by the shoulder and shook me so violently that I passed out. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

I forced my eyes open once more, and I saw a pair of wooden clogs. I was lying on the fell, which was covered in blood. I struggled to push myself into a sitting position, dragging my legs round from under me, then tried to stand. “Let me help you,” an apparition said. The ghost’s strong hand was under my elbow, guiding me back to a parlor on the second floor. “Here.” I slumped down and leaned forward, elbows on my knees, waiting for the spinning to stop. I looked around the room. Clearly, it was morning. Everything was bathed in a flat, white light. The fire had burned out, leaving a pyramid of soft, gray ash in the grate. “We were concerned when you did not come down to breakfast, Mrs. Winchester. Why are you covered in blood? Have you been injured,” the butler demanded. “No. I slipped and fell in a puddle of blood in the new pathway recently built,” I said. “But Mrs. Winchester, the entire estate is as clean as we left in yester evening.” I frowned, trying to get the sequence of events clear in my mind. I had taken a bath, come back to the room, and enjoyed a cup of tea. Then I heard a cat in the room. As I looked around the room, there was nothing there. Within a short while, the tea cups started dancing about the table. Extended across the table, just inches from me and draped with what looked like some lacy fabric, was a woman’s arm, from the elbow down, the pale fingers eerily entwined in the tea cups. I screamed. The butler came running and saw the phantom limb. “What is it, devil is it Mrs. Winchester?” “There are forces in this house. Such power does not come from the devil. Do you see those books around you? They are full of stories of such persons, called in one place sorcerer, and in another witch, but what has the devil to do with such things? If you have such powers, what can and can they not do?” #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

The butler’s eyes grew large but his face was hard. His hands tightened on the arms of the chair and he cocked his head to the left as he looked the room up and down. I saw the look of fear coming to his face. The housemaid whispered: “She is reading our thoughts, Morgan, she can hide her own thoughts from us.” “Morgan,” Mrs. Winchester said, “what you have witnessed is terrible. I can see spirits. I have powers.” Morgan’s face was transformed from cold suspicion to sudden contempt. “Ah, witch!” he cried. “Why did you not tell me? Your house is full of witches! You are an order of Satan. This house is expanding so quickly because you have the power to stop time.” And then as tears poured down his face, I sobbed. He wrapped his arms around me. “We are all damned,” he said, “and you hide here in this mansion where they can’t burn you! Oh, clever, clever witch in the devil’s house!” “Wicked am I? A witch am I? Stopper of time? I will not have you speak to me in that manner!” Mrs. Winchester moved into the very center of the room and looking up and out the window, it seemed to the blue sky, she cried: “Come now Caim and you 30 Legions of Spirits Infernal! I entreat thee to favor me in the adjuration which I address to thy might minister LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE! Come hither to speak with me.” And at once a great dark shadow appeared in the window, as if the spirit upon whom she had called condensed himself to become small and strong within the room. “Damn you into hell, witch. I shall not be your warlock,” Morgan cried, and as the books began to fall around he, he feld the mansion, and the door slammed front doors shut after him and no one could pry it open ever again, try as they might. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7


Phantom limbs hovering over us, or playfully touching, or roughly shoving us. What could it be that allows the many manifestations of an active, viable, yet impossible World, sometimes seen, more often unseen, that apparently exists right next to us? What aberration in Time or Physics or Mass or Energy reveals to us this other land, usually unheard and invisible, that seems the dwelling place of the dead? https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

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Harris, You’re No Good Alone, Why are You Sittin’ at Home on the Floor, What Kind of Pills are You On?

We tend to live as though money, lots of money, is a necessity for the lives we choose to live. Some people wander from their faith because of the love of money. “For the love of money, people will steal from their mother. For the love of money people will rob their own brother. For the love of money people can’t even walk the streets because they never know who in the World they’re gonna beat,” those are the lyrics from the song “For the Love of My,” by the O’jays, and they are most certainly true. The decision to commit robbery, then, is motivated by a perceived need for cash. Why does this need express itself as robbery? Presumably the offenders have other means of obtaining money. Why do they choose robbery over legal work? Why do they decide to commit robbery rather than borrow money from friends or relatives? Most important, why do they select robbery to the exclusion of other income-generating crimes? That the decision to commit robbery typically emerges in the course of illicit street action suggests that legitimate employment is not a realistic solution. Typically, the offenders’ need for cash is so pressing and immediate that legal work, as a viable money-making strategy, is untenable: Payment and effort are separated in space and time and these offenders will not, or cannot, wait. Moreover, the jobs realistically available to them—almost all of whom were unskilled and poorly educated—pay wages that fall far short of the funds required to support a cash-intensive lifestyle. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

“Education-wise, I fell late on the education. I just think it’s too late for that. They say it’s never too late, but I’m too far gone for that…I’ve thought about [getting a job], but I’m too far gone I guess…I done seen more money come out of [doing stick-ups] than I see working.” Legitimate employment also was perceived to be overly restrictive. Working a normal job requires one to take orders, conform to a schedule, minimize informal peer interaction, show up sober and alert, and limits one’s freedom of movement for a given period of time. The “conspicuous display of independence” is a bedrock value on which street-corner culture rests. To be seen as cool, one must do as one pleases. This ethos clearly conflicts with the demands of legitimate employment. Indeed, robbery appealed to a number of offenders precisely because it allowed them to flaunt their independence and escape from the rigors of legal work. This is not to say that every offender summarily dismissed the prospects of gainful employment. If someone gave them a “good-job”—the emphasis on being goo–twenty-five of the 75 unemployed respondents claimed they would stop robbing. “My desire is to be gainfully employed in the right kind of job…If I had a union job making $20 or $25 [an hour], something that I could really take care of my family with, I think that I could become cool with that. Years ago I worked at one of the [local] car factories; I really wanted to be in there. It was the kind of job I’d been looking for. Unfortunately, as soon as I got in there they had a big lay off.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Others alleged that, while a job may not eliminate their offending altogether, it might well slow them down: “[If a job were to stop me from committing robberies], it would have to be a straight up good paying job. I ain’t talkin’ about no $12 an hour…I’m talkin’ like $20 to $21 an hour, something like that. But as far as $10 or $12 an hour, no! I would have to get like $20 to $21 an hour, full-time. Now something like that, I would probably quit doing it [robbery]. I would be working, making money, I don’t think I would do it [robbery] no more…I don’t think I would quit [offending] altogether. It would probably slow down and then eventually I’ll stop. I think [my offending] would slow down.” Even if the offenders were able to land a high-paying job, it is doubtful they would keep it for long. The relentless pursuit of street action—especially hard drug use—has a powerful tendency to undermine any commitment to conventional activities. Life as party ensnares street-culture participants, enticing them moment. Though functional in lightening the burdensome present, gambling, drinking, and drugging—for those on the street—become the proverbial “padlock on the exit door,” and fertilize the foreground in which the decision to rob becomes rooted. In theory, the offenders could have borrowed cash from a friend or relatively rather than resorting to crime. In practice, this as not feasible. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Unemployment, unskilled, and uneducated persons caught in the throes of chronically self-defeating behavior cannot, and often do not, expect to solve their fiscal troubles by borrowing. Borrowing is a short-term solution, and loans granted must be rapid. This itself could trigger robberies. As one offender explained, “I have people that will loan me money, [but] they will loan me money because of the work [robbery] that I do; they know they gonna get their money [back] one way or another.” Asking for money also was perceived by a number of offenders to be emasculating. Given their belief that men should be self-sufficient, the mere prospect of borrowing was repugnant: “I don’t like always asking my girl for nothing because I want to et her keep her own money…I’m gonna go out here and get some money.” The possibility of borrowing may be moot for the vast majority of offenders anyway. Most had long ago exhausted the patience and goodwill of helpful others; not even their closet friends or family members were willing to proofer additional cash: “I can’t borrow the money. Who gonna loan me some money? Ain’t nobody gonna loan me no money. Sh*t, [I use] drugs and they know [that] and I rob and everything else. Ain’t nobody gonna loan me no money. If they give you some money, they just give it to you; they know you ain’t giving it back.” When confronted with an immediate need for money, then, the offender perceived themselves as having little hope of securing csh quickly and legally. However, this does not explain why the respondents decided to do robbery rather than some other crime. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Most of the offenders had committed a wide range of income-generating offenses in the past, and some continued to be quite versatile. Why, then, robbery? For many, this question was irrelevant; robbery was their “main line” and alternative crimes were not considered when the pressing need for cash arose: “I have never been able to steal, even when I was little and they would tell me jut to be the watch-out man…Sh*t, I watch out, everybody gets busted. I can’t steal, but give me the pistol and I’ll go get some money…[Robbery is] just something I just got attached to.” Some of the offenders who favored robbery over other crimes maintained that it was safer than burglary or dope dealing: “I feel more safer doing a robbery because doing a burglary, I got a fear of breaking into somebody’s house not knowing who might be up in there. I got that fear about house burglary…On robbery I can select my victims, I can select my place of business. I can watch and see who all work up in there or I can rob a person and pull them around in the alley or push them up in a doorway and rob them. You don’t got [that] fear of who…in that bedroom or somewhere in another part of the house.” A couple of offenders reported steering clear of dope selling because their strong craving for drugs made it took difficult for them to resist their own merchandise. Being one’s own best customer is a sure formula for disaster. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

The following respondent seemed to understand well about why being one’s own customer is a bad idea: “A dope fiend can’t be selling dop because he be his best customer. I couldn’t sell dope [nowadays]. I could sell a little weed or something cause I don’t smoke too much of it. But selling rock [cocaine] or heroin, I couldn’t do that cause I mess around and smoke it myself. [I would] smoke it all up! Now you see what G-Eazy and Snoop D are talking about in their respective songs, “I Wanna Rock.” Without doubt, some of the offenders were prepared to commit crimes other than robbery; in dire straits one cannot afford to be choosy. More often than not, robbery emerged as the “most proximate and performable” offenses available. The Universe of money-making crimes from which these offenders realistically could pick was limited. By and large, they did not hold jobs that would allow them to violate even a low-level position of financial trust. Nor did they possess the technical know-how to commit lucrative commercial break-ins, or the interpersonal skills needed to perpetrate successful frauds. Even street-corner dope dealing was unavailable to many; most lacked the financial wherewithal to purchase baseline inventories—inventories many offenders would undoubtedly have smoked up. The bottom line is that the offenders, when faced with a pressing need for cash, tend to resort to robbery because they know of no other course of action, legal or illegal, that offenders as quick and easy a way out of their financial difficulties. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The clothing industry is one of the best ways to conceal drug dealing. Speaking of the clothing industry, China does not lead in manufacturing production and exports all across the board. Also, the range of its exports lead is narrower than the range of production lead because in many industries the increments in production are absorbed by the rapidly expanding domestic market. Besides, the rise in exports is supported by a dynamic growth of the imports of production inputs: intermediate products and equipment. Depending on China’s position versus other major producers and exporters, all manufacturing industries can be divided into three groups. Group One Industries: China is the top producers and top exporter. This group of industries consists of two major pillars. The first one is the office and telecommunications equipment sector, along with electrical machinery. The second is a variety of light industry goods: textiles and clothing, footwear, toys and games, travel goods, furniture, travel items and so on. In the 2000s, these sectors’ production in China increased dramatically, while in the West and other major producing nations, mainly Asian, it grew at a slow pace, stagnated, or declined. As a result, China established itself as the number one producer and exporter, often running far ahead of the follower. Office and telecom equipment, electrical machinery—the most vivid example is the office and telecommunication equipment sector. It consists of two big blocs. The first one is electronic data processing (EDP) and office equipment; the second is telecommunication and sound-recording/reproducing apparatus and equipment. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

EDP equipment means computers, printers, computer peripheral equipment, and software. Sound-recording and reproducing equipment includes TVs and various audio-video products. The data about production of the four key items belonging to this sector (LED TVs, drones, wearable electronics, powerbanks, cloud servers, telecom infrastructure, video products, mobile phones, and personal computers, and digital cameras indicating that China underwent a fundamental and abrupt change. Within two decades, China has become cemented as the World leader in producing these electronics with a global output of 40 percent. It is the World’s most extensive electronics manufacturing ecosystem with a labor force of electrical goods workers close to 150 million. The shares of North America and Europe in the production of all electronics plummeted. Therefore, when you shop for electronics and cars, please try to buy American made products so we do not continue to lose jobs and operate at a deficit. It is a very serious matter. East Asian countries have also drastically increased production of their parts, components, and materials, which in great part were exported to China, where final products were assembled. This is one of the major reasons why East Asian preserves the dynamism of its manufacturing industries. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Also, it goes without saying that China’s dramatic upswing to the number one position (as both a producer and an exporter) was largely the result of the production activities of multinational companies. However, in this regard, too, East Asian, not Western multinationals took the lead. The data on exports indicates that China’s shares have been rising at an enormous speed. In another important development, along with the office and telecommunication equipment sector, China established itself as the leading producer and exporter of electrical machinery (including home electric appliances). Its electrical machinery exports was US$898.96 billion in 2021. Electrical equipment manufacturing in the USA in 2023 is $49.2 billion. The market size of the electrical equipment manufacturing industry in America is expected to increase by 5.2 percent in this same year. In the production of textiles, in 2021, approximately 24 billion units of apparel had been produced in China. The U.S.A. industry is the third largest exporter of textile-related products in the World with value of $34 billion in 2021. As of 2022, China’s textile and garment export total is up to around $316 billion and their retail up to $672 billion. China has been ranked as the World’s largest manufacture since 2010. In 2020, China topped the ranking of the largest machine tool producing countries Worldwide. With machine tool production to the value of about $24 billion, China’s market share increased to 31 percent from 29 percent the year before. China’s motor vehicle production was reported at 27,020, 615 units in 2022. The United States of America comes in second with 9.17 million units, and Germany comes in 6th with 3.31 million. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

The steel industry is one of the most important in the World, not just in terms of direct value and job creation, but also because it is intrinsic to several other major trillion dollar industries such as the construction sector. Iron is used in the production of steel, which in turn is over 1,000 times stronger than iron. Steel is one of the smokestack industries and one of the oldest alloys in the World, with steel knives being dated back to the 11th century BC. The most commonly used metal in the World, total steel production in 2021 amounted to 1,951 million tonnes. The biggest steel producing country is currently China, which produces 60 percent of the World’s steel. Whereas the United States of America accounts for only 4 percent of steel produced in the World, but is reported to have some of the best quality steel known to man. Ethylene glycol is a useful industrial compound found in many consumer products. Examples include antifreeze, hydraulic brake fluids, some stamp pad inks, ballpoint pens, solvents, paints, plastics, films, and cosmetics. It can also be a pharmaceutical vehicle. In 2021, China was the country with the highest ethylene glycol (EG) capacity was 51.54 mtpa in 2021 and is expected to achieve an AAGR of more than 7 percent during 2021-2026. In the same year, the USA came to 40 mtpa. China’s production of the four major plastics (polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, and polyvinyl chloride) accounts for 32 percent of global plastic material production, making it the World’s plastic leader by far. The total Worldwide production of plastics in 2021 amounted to some 391 million metric tons. The United States of American produces about 10 percent of the global plastic production. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Overall, today’s China is leading in both production and exports of a wide and widening range of final goods, especially electronic/electrical products and light industry consumer items. It has also joined the ranks of major producers and exporters of electronic components. China exports much more than it imports. China’s annual trade surplus, one of the irritants that prompted President Trump to hike tariffs, has reached a record $878 billion. $404.1 billion of that surplus comes from China’s trade with the United States of America. Overall USA trade deficit with China grew 8.3 percent annually to $382.9 billion. Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have become big net importers. China’s imports for 2021 was $3,091.26 billion, an increase of 30.17 from 2021. Forecasters expect Chinese export growth to weaken as the possibility of recession in Western economies increases. We now face the ultimate political power shift. We can redesign democracy for the 21st century—or descend into a new Dark Age. One path moves power from the state toward the individual. The other threatens to shrink the individual to zero. Nothing in the foreseeable future is about to take the gun out of the hands of the state. Nothing will prevent the state from siphoning wealth into its hands and disposing of it for its own power-enhancing purposes. What is likely to change, as we have already begun to see, is the state’s ability to control knowledge. The new economy thrives on freer expression, better feedback between rulers and ruled, more popular participation in decision-making. It can produce a less bureaucratic, more decentralized and responsive government. It can create a greater independence for the individual, a power shift away from the state—not its “withering away” but its humanization. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Yet any new alliance of democratic groups will face three giant forces now racing toward convergence in the Worldwide crusade that could, if we are not careful, sweep us into a new Dark Age. Organized religion, in one form or another, had a virtual monopoly on the production and distribution of abstract knowledge in the pre-smokestack era, the time before the Enlightenment, before the birth of democracy in the West. Today, forces are at work seeking to restore that monopoly control of the mind. The resurgence of religio-politics around the World may seem to have little to do with the rise of the computer and the new economy. But it does. The knowledge-based wealth-creation system, of which the computer is the symbol, rings down the curtain on three centuries during which the industrial nations dominated the Earth. Within the smokestack nations, this period was marked by a war for the mind between the forces of religion, aligned with the power elites of the agrarian age, and secular forces that fought for industrial “modernism” and mass democracy. By the middle of the industrial era, these secular forces had managed to subdue organized religion, weakening its hold on the schools, on morality and on the state itself. However, a demon has moved in to become the opioid of the masses. The TV news media has choke hold on schools, no morality, and on the state. They focus on school shootings to promote violence on school campuses to make people unsafe and as a means of stripping the 2nd Amendment rights from the people, which may be very important in the foreseeable future. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

The media also wants people to be less moral, and not fear God so that violence in the streets will continue, making it easy for them to find things to report and compete with highly rated television shows like SWAT starring Mr. Shemar Moore. The made also has a choke hold on the state as it steals, leaks, and distorts government documents and takes control of election coverage where it commits voter fraud that goes unrecognized because no one investigates these criminal broadcasting systems. Also, the TV news media wants to take a fatalistic look on the World by doing nothing but presenting doom and gloom, and with its fatalistic outlook, people feel like the World is ending and all hope is lost. Because of the corrupt TV news media, the three great religions of the West, where industrialism had triumphed, have all seen their social, moral, and political power diminish. It is, however, precisely at this moment that the computer actually started changing the way wealth is produced. The technology that has most radically undermined the blue-collar, factory-based economy have moved more rapidly out of the laboratories and a few corporate and government installations, and into general use. Coinciding with this revolutionary development, most advanced in the United States of America, have arose the hippie movement, which launched a savage attack on the cultural premises of the industrial age, including its secularism. With the patchouli oil, lack of deodorant, and drug smoke came a bitter technophobia , hate of politics and religion, and widespread interest in musty cults and “free love.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

The movement looked at industrial society, hated what it saw, and urged a return to some haloed, mythical parts. The hippies reject the cutter cooker homes with clean lines, and family values They year for a return to preindustrial culture. This was the seed from which sprang today’s sprawling, burgeoning New Age movement, with its lack of regard for law and order. The signs of crisis in the old industrial society are everywhere. Life itself has been threatened. Urban systems, healthy systems, housing systems, banking systems, the automotive industry and education systems, all have plunged into crisis. Our greatest corporations have been forced to restructure. Our labor unions have declined. Our communities are torn apart by financial and mora conflict, devastated by drugs, crime, family breakup, and other agonies. The rejection of traditional Christianity, in a country founded on Christianity, upset the breakup of the familiar World, Christian fundamentalists have also began a counterattack on secularism that has taken the form of highly effective political action. Here, again, is a violent rejection of the messy, painful present and a search for absolutist certainties of the past. However, around the World, many people have followed in the footsteps of American colonialism, and today are in frenzy. However, they would not be if industrial civilization in America were not itself in a moral and social crisis, no longer offering a very attractive model for emulation by the rest of the World. Indeed, the industrial states, now torn apart internally, no longer seem a invincible as they one had. Now hostage-taker, terrorists, and petroleum sheiks were able to jerk them around, seemingly at will. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

The problem is that America has lost professionalism, religious foundations, family values, pride in their country. The uprise of feminism has promoted single parent homes, and has influenced men to transition into women because paternal dominance has been incorrectly labeled as deviant and accused of being responsible for all the ills in society. As the dominance of America has ended in production, its reigning philosophy has been attacked from within and without, from many sides at once, to the point that the United States of America’s Constitution has been thrown in the trash, along with the flag, Christianity and national pride. The flames have grown stronger as Christian farms are stolen, cattle mutilated, and Americans are being beaten and their cars and homes stoned by radicals whose ideas and social models were shaped by deviant subcultures and foreign ideas. This destructive model of rebellion has ripped across the United States of America, and destroyed peaceful, traditional suburban communities because rejects want revenge, no matter the cost, even if it requires breaking the law. What is happening is a sky-darkening attack on the ideas of the Enlightenment which helped usher in the most prosperous era in American history—the smokestack era, also known as the industrial age. Fanatics are breeding lazy and uneducated children who are committed to controlling the by popularizing entitlement, greed, theft, and the party life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Tolerance of diversity is the first commandment of the demassified society, including tolerance of the intolerant—up to a point. Because somethings are just not normal, nor are they acceptable. However, it is okay to be unique and love life, life your country, your family and God. We should not try to impose control on people who are seen as normal. What is not compatible with being America is to be at war with your people and your religion, your employ, your neighbor, your friends, law enforcement, nor the government. People need to go back to doing their jobs, following the rules and doing what is expected of them. In America, peace and respect and cleanliness is what is considered normal. Have you notice since we have outsourced our jobs and criticized the uniform style of the McMansion that the beautiful streets have become laces with crime and tent cities? This new lazy, live out loud, party generation has created a lethal combination of toxicity on the American way of life. They are determined to size power over the state, the country, your mind, private property, privacy, and own rule over every aspect of human life. They are also determined to roll back freedoms that make democracy possible and make being young and beautiful a sin They are the agents of a new Dark Age. The characteristics of these wicked spirits are, and how they able to dwell in the bodies and minds of human beings, as well as their power to interfere with, mislead and deceive even servants of God has amounted to such astronomical proportions that study groups have set up to monitor them due to the fact the there is some kind of ritual abuse going on. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Evil spirits are generally looked upon as “influences,” and not as intelligent beings. They have a desire of a dwelling place to rest, they possess great wickedness, much power of rage, and act as a combination of the maddest and most wicked persons in existence, but all their evil is done with the fullest intelligence and purpose. They know what they do, they know it is evil, terribly evil, and they will to do it. They do it with rage, and with the full swing of malice, enmity and hatred. They act with fury and bestiality like an enraged bull, as if they had no intelligence. And yet with full intelligence they carry on their work, showing the wickedness of their wickedness. They act from an absolutely depraved nature, with diabolical fury, and with an undeviating perseverance. They act with determination, persistency, and with skillful methods, forcing themselves upon mankind, upon the Church, upon America, and still more upon the spiritual man. The history of religion and of Christianity is an immense reservoir of religious experience, and in this sense it is content and, therefore, the source of theology. However, experience as event is the medium. The event is a revelatory event, id est, “the manifestation of the ultimate ground and meaning of human existence. It is a matter of ultimate concern. The theologian must share in the revelator character of one’s source, for we can speak of it only if it has become revelation for us, if we have experienced it existentially. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

The awareness of the ultimate, of being-itself, is inherent in the Christian message. Humans seek a reality to overcome the estrangement of existence, a reality of reconciliation and reunion, of creativity, of meaning, and hope. This reality is the New Being, and it is manifest in Jesus as the Christ. Therefore, the material norm of this systematic theology is the New Being in Jesus as the Christ as our ultimate concern. The Bible is far too general, and a more concrete norm is required—for example, Luther’s justification by faith. Hence, one can say that the norm is derived from the Bible, and then governs the use of the Bible. The question of the canonicity of the biblical books clearly shows that the Bible is a source, not a norm. The norm results from an encounter between the church and the biblical message. Consequently, the norm is provided in church history, and every era consciously and unconsciously contributes to its formation. Because the church does not live in a vacuum, the norm is conditioned by the particular religio-cultural environment in which it is produced. The norm is also dependent upon the theological medium, for it is born in and nurtured by the collective experience of the church. However, at the same time it is the criterion of this experience. In brief, the norm is derived from the Bible, produced in the church, conditioned by culture, and vivified by experience. Therefore, I will not participate in the gaiety around me when in my heart I know you are alone. I do not know the meaning of joy when I see the sadness in your eyes. I speak but the words embrace a darkness that no bright sun can invade. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

My footstep are weighted with not knowing. You move with a willingness and enter swiftly the dark clouds, the rainy nights and the setting suns. You merge easily with distant stars. I refuse to submit. I continue to live in conflict, stumbling, not knowing the way. I wonder if the darkness in me touches you and increases your suffering. For me, there is no substitute—only the pain fully expresses my love. I know that when the time comes, I will go with you into the unknow, not quietly but strongly protesting the injustice with every fiber of my being. The inevitable truth about gambling is that one person’s gain must be another person’s loss. This it is especially important to evaluate a gamble from the other side’s perspective before accepting. For if they are willing to gamble, they expect to win, which means they expect you to lose. Someone must be wrong, but who? The method of correlation explains the contents of the Christian faith through existential questions and theological answers in mutual interdependence. Revelation contains answers, but they are meaningful only if correlated with questions about the whole of human existence. And man can never get the ultimate answer to one’s own questions unless he seeks it in the revelatory events. The fact that man is able to ask the question of this existence reflect his essential unity with the infinite. The fact that he must ask it reflects his existential estrangement from it. Consequently, the procedure of the theologian is first to analyze the existential situation. One examines the cultural creations in which man expresses his interpretation of existence: philosophy, sociology, depth psychology, the novel, drama, poetry, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19


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I Did Not Come this Far, Just to Come this Far, and Not be Happy!

With few exceptions, the decision to commit a robbery arises in the face of what offenders perceive to be pressing need for fast cash. Eighty of 81 offenders who spoke directly to the issue of motivation said that they did robberies simply because they needed money. Many lurched from one financial crisis to the next, the frequency with which they committed robbery being governed largely by the amount of money—or lack of it—in their pockets: “[The idea of committing a robbery] comes into mind when your pockets are low; it speaks very loudly when you need thing and you are not able to get what you need. It’s not a want, it’s things that you need,…things that if you don’t have the money, you have the artillery to go and get it. That’s the first thing on my mind; concentrate on how I can get some more money. I don’t think there is any one factor that precipitates the commission of a crime,…I think it’s just the conditions. I think the primary factor is being without. Rent is coming up. A few months ago, the landlord was gonna put us out, rent due, you know. Can’t get no money no way else; ask family and friends, you might try a few other ways of getting the money and, as a last resort, I can go get some money [by committing a robbery]. This is why a lot of people are not judgmental of people who post content on sites like onlyfans. Some of them make more than doctors and the money is legal. Not that I am advertising for the site, nor encouraging people to use it, I am just saying it my decrease the crime rates for people who are desperate for money to pay rent. Of course, it is not an option for everyone. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Nonetheless, many offenders appeared to give little thought to the offense of robbery until they found themselves unable to meet current expenses. “[I commit a robbery] about every few months. There’s no set pattern, but I guess it’s really based on the need. If there is a period of time where there is no need of money…, then it’s not necessary to go out and rob. It’s not like I do [robberies] for fun.” The above claims conjure up an image of reluctant criminals doing the best they can to survive in circumstances not of their own making. In one sense, this image is not so far off the mark. Of the 59 other offenders who specified a particular use for the proceeds of their crimes, 19 claimed that they needed the cash for basic necessities, such as food or shelter. For them, robbery allegedly was a matter of day-to-day survival. At the same time, the notion that these offenders were driven by conditions entirely beyond their control strains offenders were driven by conditions entirely beyond their control strains credulity. Reports of “opportunistic” robberies confirm this, that is, offense motivated by serendipity rather than basic human need: “If I had $5,000, I wouldn’t do [a robbery] like tomorrow. But [i]f I got $5,000 today and I seen you walkin’ down the street and you look like you got some money in your pocket, I’m gonna take a chance and see. It’s just natural…If you see an opportunity, you take that opportunity…It doesn’t matter if I have $5,000 in my pocket, if I see you walkin’ and no one else around and it look like you done went in the store and bought somethin’ and pulled some money out of your pocket and me or one of my partners has peeped this, we gonna approach you. That’s just the way it goes.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Need and opportunity, however, cannot be considered outside the opened ended quest for excitement and sensory stimulation that shaped much of the offenders’ daily activities. Perhaps the most central of pursuits in street culture, “life as party” revolves around the enjoyment of “good times” with minimal concern for obligations and commitments that are external to the…immediate social setting. While the offenders referred to such activities as partying, there is a danger in accepting their comments at face value. Many gambled, used drugs, and drank alcohol as if there were no tomorrow; they pursued these activities with an intensity and grim determination that suggested something far more serious was at stake. Illicit street action is no party, at least not in the conventional sense of the term. Offenders typically demonstrate little or no inclination to exercise personal restraint. Why should they? Instant gratification and hedonistic sensation seeking are quite functional for those seeking pleasure in what may objectively be viewed as a largely pleasureless World. The offenders are easily seduced by life as party, at least in part because they view their future prospects as bleak and see little point in long-range planning. At such, there is no milage to be gained by deferred gratification: “I really don’t dwell on [the future]. One day I might not wake up. I don’t even think about what’s important to me. What’s important to me is getting mine [now].” The offenders’ general lack of social stability an absence of conventional sources of support only fueled such a mindset. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The majority called the streets home for extended periods of time; a significant number of offenders claimed to seldom sleep at the same address for more than a few nights in a row. Moving from place to place as the mood struck them, these offenders essentially were urban nomads in a perpetual search for good times. The volatile streets and alleyways that crisscrossed St. Louis’s crime-ridden central city neighborhoods provided their conduit. The open-ended pursuit of sensory stimulation was but one way these offenders enacted the imperatives of street culture. No less important was the fetishized consumption of personal, nonessential, status-enhancing items. The unchecked pursuit of such items—like anomic participation in illicit street action—emerges directly from conduct norms of street culture. The code of the streets calls for the bold display of the latest status symbol clothing and accessories, a look that loudly proclaims the wearer to be someone who has overcome, if only temporarily, the financial difficulties faced by others on the street corner. To be seen as “with it,” one must flaunt the material trappings of success. The quest is both symbolic and real; such purchases serve as self-enclosed and highly efficient referent systems that asset one’s essential character in no uncertain terms. “You ever notice that some people want to be like other people…? They might want to dress like this person, like dope dealers and stuff like that. They go out there [on the street corner] in diamond jewelry and stuff. ‘Man, I wish I was like him!’ You got to make some kind of money [to look like that], so you want to make a quick hustle.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

The functionality of offenders’ purchases was tangential, perhaps irrelevant. The overriding goal was to project an image of “cool transcendence,” that, in the minds of offenders, knighted them members of a mythic street aristocracy. Obviously, the relentless pursuit of high living quickly becomes expensive. Offenders seldom had enough cash in their pockets to sustain this lifestyle for long. Even when they did make the occasional “big score,” their disdain for long-range planning and desire to live for the moment encouraged spending with reckless abandon. That money earned illegally holds “less intrinsic value” than cash secured through legitimate work only fueled their spendthrift ways. They way money is obtained, after all, is a “powerful determinant of how it is defined, husbanded, and spent.” Some researchers have gone so far as to suggest that through carefree spending, persistent criminals seek to establish they very conditions that drive them back to crime. Whether offenders spend money in a deliberate attempt to create these conditions is open to question; the respondents in our sample gave no indication of doing so. No matter, offenders were under almost constant pressure to generate funds. To the extent that robbery alleviated this stress, it nurtured a tendency for them to view the offense as a reliable method for dealing with similar pressures in the future. A self-enclosed cycle of reinforcing behavior was thereby triggered. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

In manufacturing output, the shift of global power balance is drastic. In this sector the West has lost its dynamics, and all the growth energy has gone to China and other emerging economies. China’s manufacturing output for 2021 was $4,865.83B, a 26.04 percent increase from 2020. However, the U.S.A. manufacturing output from 2021 was nearly half as much at $2,497.13B, with only an 11.55 percent increase from 2020. Perhaps, to bring our jobs and factories back from China and become a manufacturing nation again, we need to decrease the value of the dollars below the Chinese yuan. I am sure this would hurt in the short term, but in the long term it would help us and it would be better than going bankrupt. If not dominant, China has emerged and consolidated its position as the World’s largest, producers of a wide variety of manufacturing goods, often leaving all other contenders far behind. In contrast, the range of major manufacturing items whose production is led by Western countries has significantly narrowed. If current differentials in the growth dynamics are preserved, already in the second half of this decade China’s production of manufactured goods will be greater than that of the United States of America and Japan combined. Besides, as in the case of GDP, comparisons based on the national currencies’ exchange rates have to be treated with caution: Their results may be biased in the West’s favor because one and the same product is usually less expensive in China than in the West. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

China is also exceeding predicted figures, they were only expected to account for 25 percent of the World’s total exporting, but are nearly at 30 percent. Since the early 1980s, China has at least doubled its share of the World’s merchandise exports every ten years, so this is something we should be very concerned about. As it stands, the United States of America has a 16.8 percent global manufacturing output. True, the best Western manufacturers are raising productivity and sharpening their competitive edge. However, the circle of these strong players is quite limited. They agony of weak manufacturers exacerbates the situation at the labor market: People losing their manufacturing jobs, even if they find a job in the service sector, often have to accept lower pay, worse working conditions, and less employment stability. Today, because the Law of Ubiquity has not yet completed it action, high-tech societies, and especially the United States of America suffers from a maldistribution of information—an “information divide” as deep as the Grand Canyon. A seemingly intractable problem in many of the high-tech nations is the existence of what has come to be called an “underclass.” The presence of this underclass is not only a moral affront to affluent societies but a menace to social peace, and ultimately a threat to democracy. It is simple-minded to assume that all those in the underclass are “victims” of society or unemployment. Many, perhaps, most are there for other reasons. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

What is increasingly clear, however, is that work requires higher and higher informational skills, so that even if jobs are available, most of the members of this group cannot match the knowledge requirements. Moreover, the knowledge needed goes beyond task-specific job skills. To be truly employable a worker must share certain implicit cultural understandings about things like time, dress, courtesy, money, causality, and language. Above all, the worker must be able to get and exchange information. These generalized cultural skills cannot come out of textbooks or training sessions alone. They presuppose a familiarity with how the World-beyond-one’s-own-street functions. That kind of knowledge comes increasingly from the media environment. It is from the media that people infer both social norms and “facts” about how things work. The nature of the media, the pictures they deliver, the groups they target, and the feedback they permit are directly related, therefore, both to employment and to the problems of the underclass. Furthermore, the cultural divide between the underclass and the mainstream society actually widens as the new media system spreads. National College Television (NCT) which uses satellites to distribute specialized programming to college students for forty-two hours a week, claims a student audience of 1,000,0000. Ranging in age from eighteen to thirty-four, these are citizens today and potential leaders tomorrow. If anything, they represent the polar opposite of the young people in the underclass. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

The U.S.A. college population of today probably includes within in it two future Presidents, a hundred senators, and thousands of corporate CEOs. Today’s college student of age 20 is the most video-sophisticated audience in history…Forty years ago Sesame Street went on air, specifically designed to educate infants and pre-school children with sophisticated television techniques including short (90-second) segments, dazzling video effects, interactive involvement, new heroes, easy daily access, et cetera. This audience migrated [as it grew older, to other programs like] Electric Company, Zoom, to Nickelodeon, MTV—each a move representing an inexorable progression…The audience created by Sesame Street now reshaped all of television! The TV programs are either all shown on the public—id est, educational—network or on cable channels, rather than on the major Second Wave networks. One of my favorite cartoons was Beverly Hills Teens. The term screenie is used to describe this video-drenched generation, which has digested thousands of hours of television, imbibing its “video-logic.” To that must be added, for many of them, more hours of interactive video games and, even more important, of work on their own personal computers. They not only follow a different logic, but are accustomed to make the screen do things, thus making them good prospects for the interactive services on the market today. Above all, they are accustomed to choice. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The vast divide between the youth of the underclass and the screenie, which now characterizes the United States of America, will widen in Europe, Japan, and other high-tech nations, too, unless steps are taken to bridge the informational Grand Canyon. In a knowledge-based economy the most important domestic political issue is no longer the distribution (or redistribution) of wealth, but of the information and media that produce wealth. This is a change so revolutionary it cannot be mapped by conventional political cartography. The new wealth-creation system will compel politicians, activists, and political theorists—whether they still regard themselves as left-wing or right-wing, radical or conservative, feminists or traditionalist—to rethink all political ideas developed during the smokestack era. The very categories are now obsolete. Social justice and freedom both now increasingly depend on how each society deals with three issues: education; information technology (including the media); and freedom of expression. In case of education, the reconceptualization now required is so profound, reaching so far beyond questions of budgets, class size, teacher pay, and the traditional conflicts over curriculum, that it cannot be dealt with here. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Like Second Wave TV networks (or for that matter all the smokestack industries), our mass education systems are in need of some fine tuning. Exactly as in the case of the media, education, however, will require a proliferation of new channels and a vast expansion of program diversity. (However, with the Internet, there is no reason only 30 percent of students are reading at their grade level and only 32 percent are performing in math at their grade level because there are free online tutors and examples to help them.) That was one of my concerns, is America becoming overpopulated with people who have intellectual disabilities? While China has students excelling in all fields. If schools are to prepare for economically productive roles, a high-choice system will have to replace a low-choice system. And students are going to need more guidance to help them find the resources they need to excel in school. The links between education and the six principles of the new media system—interactivity, mobility, convertibility, connectivity, ubiquity, and globalization—have scarcely been explored. Yet to ignore the relationship between the educational system of the future and the media system of the future is to cheat the learners who will be formed by both. Significantly, education is no longer merely a priority for parents, teachers, and a handful of education reformers, but for the advanced sectors of business as well, since its leaders increasingly recognize the connection between education and global competitiveness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The second priority involves the speedy universalization of access to computers, information technology, and the advanced media. No nation can operate a 21st century economy without a 21st century electronic infrastructure, embracing computers, data communications, and other new media. This requires a population as familiar with this informational infrastructure as it is with cars, roads, highways, trains, and the transportation infrastructure of the smokestack period. Not everyone, of course, needs to be a telecom engineer or a computer expert, just as not everyone needs to be a auto science engineer. However, access to the media system, including computers, faxes, and advanced telecommunications, must be as free and easy as access is today to the transportation system. A key objective of those who want an advanced economy, therefore, should be to accelerate the workings of the Law of Ubiquity—that is, to make sure that all citizens, poor and rich alike, are guaranteed access to the widest possible range of media. Finally, if the essence of the new economy is knowledge, the democratic ideal of freedom of expression becomes a top political priority, rather than a peripheral matter. The state—any state—is in business to stay in power. Whatever the economic costs to the rest of us, it will seek ways to harness the latest communications revolution to its purposes, and it will set limits on the free flow of information. When the industrial revolution brought mass media into being, just as the state invented new forms of mind control, it will search for new tools and techniques to retain at least some control over the images, ideas, symbols, and ideologies reaching its people through the new electronic infrastructure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Enthusiasm over the way the media were used to overthrow totalitarian regimes in Eastern Europe should not blind citizens to the more sophisticated mind manipulations that governments and politicians will attempt in the future. No society can tolerate total freedom of information. Some secrecy is necessary to all social life. Total freedom of information would mean total lack of individual privacy. There are moments of extreme crisis, moments of “clear and present danger,” when absolute freedom invites bad behavior contagion to spread across peaceful lands. Absolute freedom of expression is, therefore, no more possible than absolute anything else. However, the more the society advances toward a super-symbolic economy, the more important it becomes to permit an extremely wide range of dissent and free expression. The more any government chokes off or chills this rich, free flow of data, information, and knowledge-including wild ideas, innovation, and even political dissent—the more it slows down the advance of the new economy. For the vast extension of the global neural system coincides with the most important change in the function of free expression since at east the French and American revolutions. In the agrarian past, new ideas were often a threat to survival. In communities living on the thin edge of subsistence, using methods honed over the centuries, any deviation was dangerous to an economy that lift little margin for risk. They very notion of freedom of thought was alien. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

With the rise of science and the industrial revolution, a radical new notion came into being: that minds free of state or religious shackles were necessary for “progress.” However, the population to whom this applied was a fraction of the total. With the revolutionary rise of the new wealth-creation system, it is not a fraction of the working population but a substantial and ever-expanding number whose productivity depends precisely on the freedom to create everything from new product designs to new computer logics, metaphors, scientific insights, and epistemologies. Super-symbolic economies grow from cultures constantly provoked by new, often dissenting ideas, including political ideas. The fight for free expression, once the province of intellectuals, thus becomes a matter of concern to all who favor economic advance. Like adequate education and access to the new media, freedom of expression is no longer a political nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness. This discovery lays the basis for an unusual political coalition of the future—one that brings together two groups who have, since the early days of the industrial revolution, been frequent adversaries: intellectuals, scientists, artists, and civil libertarians, on the one side, and advanced managers and even shareholders and capitalists on the other, all of whom will now find that their interests depend on revolutionizing the education system, widening the access of the entire population to computers and the other new media, expansion of free WiFi, and protecting—even extending—freedom of expression. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Such a coalition is the best guarantee of both intellectual and economic advance in the economies of the 21st century. For Mr. Marx, freedom was the recognition of necessity. Those who wish to build 21st century economies could find that necessity is the mother of freedom. Now, the principle behind the efficient contract is to get firms to take into account the costs they impose on others by their actions. When each firms pays the other’s cost, they are each motivated to announce the truth and make an efficient go-ahead decision. However, this leads to a problem with budget balancing. So instead of paying the actual costs of the other firm each can pay the expected or statistical average of the costs its actions will impose. When each firm declares a low cost, this increases the chance tht the project will proceed and correspondingly the chance that the other firm will have to bear some production costs. To make each firm take into account the average externality it will inflict on the other type of firm, it should receive the statistical average of the project’s operating profit minus the average of the costs of the other type of firm it will be dealing with when the project goes ahead. If the firm inflates its own costs, it risks canceling the project more frequently and getting smaller receipts, while if it deflates costs this leads to a higher “externality” payment for the expected costs imposed on the other firm. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The Lord did not spend time attempting to convince the Pharisees of His claims as the Messiah; nor did He take the opportunity of alluring the Jews people by yielding to their desires for an Earthly kind. Is tht not striking? His one mission in this World was manifestly to conquer the satanic prince of the World by death on the cross (Heb. 2.14) and thereby deliver the devil’s captives from his control. He had come to destroy the works of the devil and his invisible hosts (1 John 3.8). The commission He gave to the twelve, and to the seventy, was exactly in line with His own. He sent them forth and “gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to heal all the manner of disease” (Matt. 10.1); to “first bind the strong man” (Mark 3.27), and then to take his goods; to deal with the invisible hosts of Satan first, and then to “preach the gospel.” From all this we learn that there is one Satan, one devil, one prince of the demons, directing all the opposition to Christ and His people; but myriads of wicked spirits called “demons”—lying spirits, deceiving spirits, foul spirits, unclean spirits—are subjectively at work in men. What is their form, and whence their origin, none can positively say. That they are spirit-beings who are evil is alone beyond all doubt; and all who are undeceived and dispossessed from satanic deception become firm witnesses, from personal experience, to their existence and power. They know that thing were done to them by spirits, and that those things were evil. Therefore they recognize that there are spirit beings who pervert, and know that the symptoms, effects and manifestations of demonical possession have active, personal agencies behind them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

From experience they know that they often have been hindered by these beings. Therefore, reasoning from personal facts, as well as the testimony of Scripture, they know that these malevolent spirits are tempters, liars, accusers, counterfeiters, cruel enemies, haters, murderers, and wicked beyond all the power of man to know. That is why sometimes people say, “How could a human do something like that?” perhaps the human was possessed by a demon. The names of these evil spirits describe their characters, for they are called “foul,” “lying,” “unclean,” “evil,” and “deceiving” spirits, as they are wholly given up to every manner of wickedness, and deception and lying works. Historical theology closely related blocks of source material: the Bible, church history, and the history of religion and culture. This threefold source may cause some Protestant and Catholic eyebrows to rise, but we must reject the assertion of neo-orthodox biblicism that the Bible is the only source. For the Bible can be understood only in the context of past religions and cultures, and it conveys a message to us only because the church experiences and participates in that message. Still, the Bible remains the basic theological source since it is the original document about the events of sacred history that led to the foundation of the Christian church. It is inspired in the sense that the inspiration of the biblical writers is their receptive and creative response to potentially revelatory facts. The Bible is a revelation according to which no revelation takes place unless someone receive it. This the act of reception is part of the revelatory event. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The theologian must also employ the history of religion and culture, because one’s spiritual life, one’s thought patterns, one’s education, and the very language one speaks is conditioned by religious and cultural antecedents. The link between the theologian and one’s sources is that experience is the medium through which the sources speak to us, through which we can receive them. For every theologian stands in an existential relation to truth in that one experiences, participates in, the religious power of one’s source before one analyzes them. Experience, as the theological medium, is receptive, not productive. No new revelation is produced, and the unique event of Jesus as the Christ remains at the center of Christian theology. Subjectivity is excluded in the sense that experience is not a source. However, subjectivity is active insofar as the theologian does not woodenly report one’s sources, but is seized by their power. Wise and philosophical ideas give us a better understanding of our soul. Loneliness has a quality of immediacy and depth, it is a significant experience—one of the few in modern life—in which man communes with himself. And in such communion man comes to grips with one’s own being. One discovers life, who one is, what one really wants, the meaning of one’s existence, the true nature of one’s relations with others. One sees and realizes for the first time truths which have been obscured for a long time. One’s distortions suddenly become naked and transparent. One perceives oneself and others with a clearer, more valid vision and understanding. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18


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And Finally the Spirits Drew Blood

Life-changing, miraculous, beautiful—it has been the scene of serious studies by aspiring intellectuals, of raucous parties filled to the brim with youthful enthusiasm. It was also been the dwelling place of Death. There was a persistent malevolent visitor within the walls of the house, who had an agenda of pursuit and manipulation for evil all of his own. By the time they reached my estate, Hendrick had a fairly good understanding of what the Winchester Mansion was, and he had assured Mr. Hansen that he would keep confidential forever what he was about to read in the files. Henrick loved the idea of the Winchester Mansion, the flashing, sparkling panorama of Santa Clara Valley. However, he grew coldly and unexpectedly calm as he puzzled over the catacombs, and reviewed in his mind all the popular myths he had heard about the apparitions, and this brief interlude of excitement began to fade. “Mrs. Winchester, I have to go on leave,” Hendrick explained. “It’s unavoidable.” How calm his voice sounded as all the color drained out of his face. I insisted that we go at once to a small screened porch off the back of the second story, and there, overlooking a formal garden with miles of green grass and fountains, we could sit down to eat. However, Hendrick insisted that he had to leave at once. Mr. Hansen showed him to the door. The atmosphere began to change. I felt a whisper of fresh air on my face. The floor suddenly veered precipitously upward. Tiny drops of blood began to fall from the ceiling. Rappings shook the walls. Then a large butcher knife appeared and menacingly headed in our direction. When ran into the morning room, and all the chairs therein fell over and danced about noisily. “The spirits are angry,” said Mr. Hansen. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6

I felt light-headed, intoxicated by the danger. There were noises, a myriad of them and terror-filled cries of the wounded and dying echoing long and pitifully into the night; disembodied rumblings from artillery, and even more mysterious, unidentifiable rustling in the darkness just behind my shoulder. Several knives and a large glass paperweight were thrown at us by invisible intruders, narrowly missing our heads. “Do angels really lack knowledge of the heart?” I asked Mr. Hansen as I wept. There was the dark melee, horrifying screams in the night. Night was always a time of icy fear and apprehension. It must stem from our most primal subconscious. It can bring sudden death. And sleep, if it should come, steals consciousness, our last warning system and makes us more vulnerable to Earthly creatures who would do us harm. Or to other entities not of this Earth with perhaps the same ambition. Perhaps sleep was the main portal through which ghosts came into our lives. I felt Mr. Hansen’s brown eyes sweep across my face. He shook his head. There was something about the translucent moon that gave me the impression he was made of air or water, rather than blood and bone. I looked at him more closely, scared that he might have slipped away. But he was still there. “I feared you had…” “Not yet,” Mr. Hansen said, reading my mind. Around and around the room an unexplainable jingling went, pausing first in one corner, then at another wall, until the sound was right next to us. Then it became a plopping sound like water dripping. We were being troubled by entities that seemed set upon us by a curse of black magic. Suddenly, a hooded figure appeared and was moving about the house. It appeared to be the image of a man with thinning white hair on the sides, and bald at the top. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6

There were secret passageways in the mansion, hidden from view. The tiniest opening in the mahogany walls lead to tunnels, hiding places, a labyrinthine sequence of passageways and caverns. As we entered a secret passageway to escape the ghost, I heard a whole bunch of voices whispering, but I could not understand them. They were all jumbled together. As we walked along the pathway, Mr. Hansen said my name right in my ear, and when I turned to look at him, he was gone. The voice was a demon voice: throaty, hoarse and very mean. It said to me, “Sarah, show yourself to me!” I could not actually pinpoint the exact location the voice had come from. But there was a black, floating swirling mass, about four feet high and three feet wide. It unnerved me so much that I feld the catacombs, and as I came out where the dining room was, something hit the wall with such a force that it knocked down several of the paintings. It looked like there had been an earthquake. And I was about to fall. However, something grabbed the collar of my collar of my shirt, and pulled me back to safety. No apparition could be seen, but the collar of my shirt had been pulled back. It was midnight when I went back to my room in the north wing. I rose early the next morning. Drawing back the curtain, then I saw a dark shadow of a woman entering my home. I could hear the dark figure ascending up their stairs and towards my room. The footsteps and voices got louder. The shadow of the woman appeared in the doorway to the room I was in. It disappeared as quickly as it manifested. I felt a cold wind pass by me, and the curtains closed and billowed as a shadowy figure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6

I decided to stay in my room until I fell asleep. Not only did I lock the door, but I put a chair against the door as an added safety measure from intruders. Late into the night, I was awakened by the loud rattling of the door and the chair. Frighteningly, the sound came from inside the room and not outside the door. It was as if someone was trying to get outside the room, not in. The room was dimly illuminated by a faint, green-glowing light. On the wall hangs a mirror, into which the light casts its luminescence. In a semi-awakened state, I gazed into the mirror and saw the reflected light begin to take the shape of a woman dressed in a beautiful dress. As I continued to stare at the apparition in the mirror, she was suddenly accompanied by a man dressed as a cavalry man, complete with high cavalry boots. How long I had been sitting in bed, I scarcely know; I had been half meditating, half dozing, mixing broken snatches of thought with brief glimpses of dreaming, when I was startled into wakefulness by a sound that was strange to me. As I opened my eyes, the sun risen. I inspected the chair and found that somehow it had been pulled out, away from the door about an inch. I stood transfixed. When suddenly my entire body flew back, and on to the floor. My eyes rolled into the back of my head. Mr. Hansen and Ersula overheard the commotion and burst into the room. “Mrs. Winchester, are you okay, where have you been?!” Ersula demanded as she and Mr. Hansen lifted me off the floor. “You are as pale as a ghost!” he said. “Never mind the sal volatile,” I said at last. “I am not ill; I have been startled, that is all.” Even now, I get the chills thinking about that night. I do believe there was something evil in the house. I have been quite reluctant to tell about the hauntings, for most people just do not want to know the truth about what is out there. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6

The spinning in my head slowed and then finally stopped altogether. As the last chime of the clock struck ten, I came downstair to the reception area. I felt my heart expand with the beauty of the same old World but seen through new eyes. Glancing out the skylight, a white winter sun hung low in the sky and it was bright but cold. A bird was singing. My plans for construction where castles in the air, dreams of sliver days. Places where I could spend countless dusks watching the sun sinking down into the Earth. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something move. A flash of blue, perhaps. I could not tell. A shiver crept down my spine. For a moment, I stood motionless. Everyone looked very dead now, very empty. There was no odor yet, but they were dead. The rigidity of Ersula’s face absorbed me. The body of Hendrick on the floor was dry and wrinkled. Not even murmuring melodies to myself of the songs I most liked to play meant anything to me. In my ears, I heard a din as if the imps of Hell were making a horrid music to drive me out of my mind. I whispered to myself to silence it. Shortly after discovering the bodies, I heard muffled voices and noises on the second floor, followed by a sharp crash. I rushed up stairs to find a large painting in the hallway had been flung violently across the hall into a freshly painted wall. The wall had been damaged by the force of the crash. I was terrified to hear the wails of a baby coming from the wall. Petrified, I remained on the second floor with the terrible cries until carpenters began a search and found me. Nearly incoherent when I was taken to my chamber, I told the carpenters about hearing the baby cry. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6

Emperor Lucifer, Master and Prince of Rebellious Spirits, as the agent of the strong living God, of His beloved Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and by the power of the Great ADONAY, ELOIM, ARIEL, and JEHOVAM, please appear instantly. I command thee to surrender me the nearest treasure, and I promise thee as a reward the first piece of gold or silver which I touch with my hands on the first day of every month. Such is my demand. Thou shalt purge me with hyssop, O Lord! And I shall be clean: Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. I Do invocate and conure thee, O Prince of the Rebellious Spirits; and being with power armed from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command thee, by BERALANENSIS, BALDACHIENSIS, PAUMACHIA, and APOLOGIAE SEDES; by the most Powerful Princes, Genii, Liachidae, and Ministers of the Tartarean Abode; and by the Chief Prince of the Seat of Apologia in the Ninth Legion, I do invoke thee, and by invocating conjure thee. And being armed with power from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command thee, by Him Who spake and it was done, and unto whom all creatures be obedient. Also I, being made after the image of GOD, endued with power from GOD and created according unto HIS will, do exorcise thee by that most mighty and powerful name of God, EL, strong and wonderful; O thou Emperor Lucifer. And I command thee and Him who spake the Word and His Fiat was accomplished, and by the names of God. Also by the names of AFONAI, EL, ELOHIM, ELOHI, EHYEH, ASHER EHYEH, ZABOTH, ELION, IAH, TETRAGRAMMATON, SHADDAI, LORD GOD MOST HIGH. Come thou peaceably, visibly, and affably, now, and without delay, manifesting that which I shall desire. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6


Something awakens you from a fitful sleep. You roll over in your bed and there, right at the foot of it, is a misty shape resembling a human. However, its features are hazy, unclear. The dress it wears is recognizable, but from an era long past, and it is tattered, as if it had spent too much time hanging in a closet, or lying in the damp mustiness of a coffin. The figure is, at first, an object of curiosity, since you immediately assume you are dreaming. However, its tendril-like arms begin to wave, to move towards you—no, to beckon you—and the face twists into the mockery of a smile. Now you begin to panic as you realize-despite your hoping it is not true—that you are fully awake, that this is no dream and there is no explanation for the horrid sight before you, except that it is real, in all its dead splendor. It is well known that, possessions, apparitions, and other supernatural intrusions have occurred what is now known as The Winchester Mystery House.
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Very few robbers operate in a lonerlike capacity. Instead, they interact with others members of the criminal element, rubbing shoulders, jointly partaking in illicit underground markets (exempli gratia, drugs, stolen property systems), and exchanging communications. This attachment to a criminal subculture means that many robbers operate in a colleague-like fashion. The same cannot be said about the robbers who work in groups. These individuals internalize the “safety in numbers” motto and choose to gang up on their prey. More often that not, conspirators rely on a loose network of fellow thieves, switching on and offer between collaborators as theft opportunities present themselves. In this regard, the social organization of most conspiratorial robbers is best described as peerlike—they do not get too cozy with one another but are willing to work together to achieve a mutually beneficial end. There is, however, a select minority of the offender population that interact in a much more stable and collaborative capacity. Movies such as Heat or Point Break depict robbery crews that forge long-term criminal associations with a clear set of roles and a well-defined division of labor. A teamlike social organization exists among some robbery specialists, particularly bank robbers. Those robbers who are active participants in the criminal subculture (id est, colleagues, peers, and teams) are provided ample opportunity to draw upon a host of socialization scripts that serve to shape and advance their criminal agenda. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Implicit and explicit messages serve to reinforce robbery as an acceptable means of survival. Street thugs are not explicitly tutored in “ways of the badass,” but rather come to internalize these norms and behaviors through imitation and street-level informal interactions. Robbery generally receives a firm formal response from the criminal justice system. The Model Penal Code classifies robbery as a second degree felony. If convicted, the perpetrator shall be sentenced to 1 to 10 years in prison. When the offender threatens or achieves “serious bodily harm,” he or she is likely to see the charge elevated to a first degree felony. In most jurisdictions, an armed robber, especially one involving a firearm, will result in this more sever statutory designation. A person charged with a first degree felony faces anywhere from 1 year to life in prison. A robbery must first be apprehended before facing these stiff penalties. Unfortunately, most offenders get away with their crimes. In 2022, law enforcement authorities reported a meager 25 percent clearance rate for the crime of robbery. If items are not marked with recorded serial numbers and no one knows who stole and sold them, they are hard to find, as well as the thieves. That means that roughly 75 percent of all robberies that are reported to police go unsolved. The 2022 Uniform Crime Reports reveal that law enforcement authorities made 108,400 robbery arrests that year, which translates into a per capita arrest rate of 39.8 per 100,000. When called upon to year robbery cases, our nation’s court system responds with considerable care. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Robbery cases comprised 7 percent of the total court dockets that were studied. It was discovered that the vast majority of the accused robbery offenders (87 percent) were offered some sort of pretrial release option (exempli gratia, bail), with the median bail amount observed at $25,000. Despite these release options, only 39 percent of robbery defendants were able to gain release prior to the final disposition of their case. Of those released, roughly one third (34 percent) violated the conditions of their release order and 22 percent were rearrested before their original case could be resolved. This is particularly disturbing when one considers that two thirds of the cases were resolved in less than 6 months. A review of the available adjudication data suggests that courts follow through a relatively hardline stance toward robbery offenders. We found that 70 percent of the robbery defendants in our sample were eventually convicted. A full 90 percent of convicted robbers face some sort of incarceration. While the median sentence was 5 years, nearly one in five were sentenced to more than 10 years in prison. Among all felony offenses, only murder and rape experience higher felony conviction rates and/or longer median sentences. On average, an imprisoned robber can expect to serve a little less than one half of one’s sentence behind bars before being paroled. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

It appears that informal social control plays a large part in the dynamics of robbery. Interviews with known offenders reveal that many stick-up artists specifically target other members of the criminal underworld. Some are even targeted for repeat victimization. These can include drug dealers (id est, drug robbery), pimps, prostitutes, or the run-of-the-mill street thug. These persons tend to have money or valuables (id est, cars, clothes, jewelry, drugs) in their possession and, more importantly, are not inclined to report their victimizations to the police. This sets the stage for “street justice” or vigilantism. A single robbery victimization can set in motion a contagious of violence in which escalating vendetta cycles get played out over extended periods of time. The origin of these cycles of violence goes largely undetected by police and usually spill over to other community members. Much lip service has been paid to the criminal motivation, yet very little systematic understanding has emerged on the topic. A need for money services as the primary and most immediate motivation for robbery. However, unwritten conduct norms of the street serve as the critical secondary motivator for these habitual offenders. A constant flow of cash is needed to finance a carefree lifestyle that includes new clothes, endless partying, and the never-ending ability to impress themselves and others. Over time, the cyclical pursuit of money and free spending transforms robbery into a central feature of the person’s everyday life. These observations thus provide valuable insight into both the proximate (day-to-day) and distal (long-term) aspects of robbery motivation and behavior. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Motivation is the central, yet arguably the most assumed, causal variable in the etiology of criminal behavior. Obviously, persons commit crimes because they are motivated to do so, and virtually no offense can occur in the absence of motivation. Though the concept inheres implicitly or explicitly in every influential theory of crime, this is far from saying that its treatment has been comprehensive, exhaustive, or precise. In many ways, motivation is criminology’s dirty little secret—manifest yet murky, presupposed but elusive, everywhere and nowhere. If there is a bogeyman lurking in or discipline’s theoretical shadows, motivation may well be it. Much of the reason for this can be located in the time-honored, positivistic tradition of finding the one factor, or set of factors, that accounts for it. Causality has been called criminology’s “Holy Grail,” the quest for which makes other disciplinary pursuits seem tangential, sometimes inconsequential. The search typically revolves around identification of background risk factors—behavioral correlates—that establish nonspurious relationships with criminal behavior. A panoply of such factor have been implicated over many decades of research—spanning multiple levels, as well as units, of analyses. They include, among other things, anomie, blocked opportunities, deviant self-identity, status frustration, weak social bonds, low self-control, social disorganization, structural oppression, unemployment, age, gender, class, race, deviant peer relations, marital status, body type, IQ, and personality. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Common to all such factor, however, is their independent status from the “foreground” of criminal decision making—the immediate phenomenological context in which decisions to offend are activated. Though background factors may predispose persons to crime, they fail to explain why two individuals with identical risk factor profiles do not offend equally, why persons with particular risk factors go long periods of time without offending, why individuals without the implicated risk factors offend, why persons offend but not in the particular way a theory directs them to, or why persons who are not determined to commit a crime one moment become determined to do so the next. Decisions to offend, like all social action, do not take place in a vacuum. Rather, they are bathed in an “ongoing process of human existence,” and mediated by prevailing situational and subcultural conditions. While the decision to commit robbery stems most directly from a perceived need for fast cash, this decision is activated, mediated, and channeled by participation in street culture. Street culture, and its constituent conduct norms, represent essential intervening variable linking criminal motivation to background risk factors and subjective foreground conditions. Now, the Gospel records refer repeatedly to the workings of evil spirits. They how that wherever the Lord moved, the emissaries of Satan sprang into active manifestation in the bodies and minds of those they indwelt, so that the ministry of Christ and His apostles was directed actively against them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Again and again we read: “He went into their synagogues through all Galilee, preaching and casting out demons” (Mark 1.39); He “cast out many demons, and He suffered not the demons to speak, because they knew Him” (Mark 1.34); “Unclean spirits whensoever they beheld Him, fell down before Him, and cried, saying, Thou art the Son of God” (Mark 3.11). Then came the sending out of the twelve chosen disciples, and again the spirits of evil are taken into account, for “He gave them authority over the unclean spirits” (Mark 6.7). Later He appointed seventy other messengers: they too, as they went forward in their work, found the demons subject to them through His name (Luke 10.17). Are we to conclude that Judea, Galilee and Syria were in reality overflowing with people who were insane and epileptic? Is it not evident, rather, that the Son of God dealt with the powers of darkness as the active, primary cause of all sin and suffering of this World, and that the aggressive part of His and His disciples’ ministry was directed persistently against them? On the one hand, He dealt with the deceiver of the World and bound the “strong man”; on the other, He taught the truth about God to the people, to destroy the lies which the prince of darkness had placed in their minds about His Father and Himself (2 Cor. 4.4). We find, too, that the Lord clearly recognized the devil behind the opposition of the Pharisees (John 8.44), and in the “hour and power of darkness” (Luke 22.53) behind His persecutors at Calvary. He says that His mission was to “proclaim release to the captives” (Luke 4.18), and He revealed who the captor was when, on the eve of Calvary, He said, “Now is the judgement of this World: now shall the prince of the World be cast out” (John 12.31). #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The theologian is a committed man, committed to the gospel message and committed to his task of interpreting it. He is a believing, self-surrendering, answering man. The theologian and the philosopher of religion have some things in common. Both of them are committed in the sense that even their most scientific efforts are directed by a mystical a priori—and immediate experience of something ultimate in value and being of which one can become intuitively aware. Examples of the mystical a priori and being-itself, universal substance, identity of spirit and nature, absolute spirit, and cosmic person. If, after scientific investigation, this a priori is discovered, it is only because it was present and operative from the very start. At this stage both theologian and philosopher are within a philosophical circle described by their mystical a priori, but there is no petition principii, for spiritual things can be understood only in circular fashion. However, the theologian steps inside the theological circle of commitment to the gospel message. The philosopher deals in the abstract, with universal concepts. The theologian works with a concrete message that claims historical uniqueness. The radius of the theological circle is shorter than that of the philosophical one. Since it is necessary that the theologian places oneself within the circle of Christian commitment, the problem arises: What is the touchstone for commitment? Who can be sure of one’s commitment, of one’s faith, one’s justification? Acceptance of the word of Christ as depends on one being ultimately concerned with the Christian message. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Our finite concerns about our work, our science, our money, and our nation will be taken from us by the melancholy law of transitoriness. However, everything seems the same and yet everything has changed, for we are grasped by the one thing needed, by the infinite. Ultimate concern is the abstract formulation of the great commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with al your heart, and with all your soul, and with all you might” (Deut. 6.5). Concern not only means that one is related to or interested in something, but it also implies an existential element of anxious solicitude. Thus, man is concerned about many things—food and shelter, knowledge, art, social problems, politics—with varying degrees of urgency. However, a concern becomes ultimate only when it demands total surrender and promises total fulfilment. Ultimate concern is unconditional, total, and infinite. Any concern less than this is a preliminary concern, for it is conditional, partial, and infinite. Preliminary concern can be related to ultimate concern in three possible ways. First, by a mutual indifference ultimate concern can be placed beside preliminary concern so that the former loses its ultimacy. It fails to transcend; it becomes secularized. Secondly, preliminary concern can be “elevated to ultimacy,” but in so doing it becomes demonic by usurping the place of the truly ultimate. Thirdly, preliminary concern can become a vehicle of the ultimate concern without claiming ultimacy for itself. It points beyond itself; it is transparent to the holy. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Extreme nationalism is one of our favorite examples of an ultimate concern—a demonic one to be sure, but all the more indicative of its unconditional character. In the name of the god Nation, all other concerns are ruthlessly sacrificed and systematically subordinated. However, unconditional demand is balanced by unconditional fulfilment more or less vaguely expressed in such symbols as the greatness of the nation or the conquest of the World. Exclusion from the promised fulfilment is a threat which reinforces the demand. The above points to the ambiguous nature of ultimate concern. Ultimacy and holiness go together, for the holy is the quality of that which concerns man ultimately. Only that which is holy can give man ultimate concern, and only that which gives man ultimate concern has the quality of holiness. When this holy, ultimate concern is directed toward the infinite, the unconditioned, the truly ultimate, then it is divine. When directed toward the finite, the conditioned, the preliminary, then it is demonic and its holiness is idolatrous. However, even in the latter case, the holy which is demonic is still holy. The ambiguity of ultimate concern lies in the fact that ultimacy consists of a demand for total surrender and a promise of total fulfilment, and even the demonic can demand sacrifice and offer promises. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Ultimate concern constitutes the basic credentials for admittance to the theological circle, this can be further refined by the theologian’s basic commitment by formulating two criteria for the theological statements. They are formal criteria, that is, abstracted from the content of the whole system. The first criterion states: The object of theology is what concerns us ultimately. Only those propositions are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of ultimate concern for us. This principle distinguishes theology from other sciences, for it rules out preliminary concern. The second criterion handles the content of ultimate concern: Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being or not-being. Only those statements are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us. In this statement, “being” does not refer to a man’s life in time and space, but to the whole of human reality, the structure, the meaning, and the aim of existence. When it comes to joint venters, the issue arises in personal partnerships just as in business ones. Imagine a working couple, both of whom dislike cooking but cannot afford to ear out more than one a week. They start with an implicit or explicit understanding that they will split the cooking chores equally—three days a week each. However, the wife, says, knows that the husband is not likely to walk out just because she cuts her share down to two days. She is tempted to discover essential work that demands her presence at the office for an extra hour on some days, making it impossible for her to get home in time to fix dinner even though it is her turn. The husband in turn should look ahead to this and try to arrange the initial deal in such a way that the wife’s future temptation is reduced. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Of course the personal and long-term aspects of a marriage often suffice to ensure that the parties do not try such tricks, or that they resolve such disputes amicably when they do arise. Businesses partnerships are less influenced by personal emotions, and the dollar amounts of the temptation to cheat are often higher. Therefore the kinds of contracts we will discuss are more relevant in this setting, even though the marriage analogy sometimes makes for more striking and amusing stories. What are the essential features of this class of situations? First, these situations involve projects that require simultaneous participation by two or more people or firms. Each side must make some investment up front—a stake it stands to lose if the relationships is terminated—or else the other side’s walking out will be no threat at all. Second, there must be some uncertainty about subsequent events that acts as a justification for reopening of the agreement, or else a simple clause that provides large punitive damages for any breach will serve the purpose. China and the United States of America are in a relationship. Globalization has entered a critical stage, as the ongoing economic disruptions have prompted many of us to reexamine its promises. The World today is characterized by pronounced fragility and heightened uncertainty, fed by external shocks and multiple crises that are dangerously reinforcing. Against the backdrop of these unprecedented challenges, we are witnessing an economic and geopolitical power shift from the developed to the emerging World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

By 2030, most of the World’s largest economies will be non-Western and more than half of the World’s 1,000 largest corporations will have their origins in the emerging countries. This will directly impact the way globalization work. As emerging economies rewrite the rules of globalization, the West is overly advocating more protectionism. One of the main criticisms made of globalization by its detractors has been that it is Western-drive and Western-centric—in other words, that the West calls the shots and that most benefits go to Western players. Yet, as globalization was gathering momentum, it assumed new and striking features that ran contrary to that Western-focused characterization. Non-Western players start to emerge as vital sources of energy and initiative in globalization; they have become its new engines, and their companies are strengthening their global position at an unprecedented pace. Chia is the leader of the emerging World. In the year 2022, its share of the global manufacturing exports reached 28.7 percent, this is up from 12.1 percent in 2009. The trend is likely to persist in this decade. Eventually, China will reach a point at which mounting labor costs trigger declining shares in low-end exports, offsetting gains in the mid and high-end value segments. However, we are not there yet. China’s goods are more high-end than before, but it is still predominately a labor-intensive, export power, excelling in production of commodities such as clothing, textiles, footwear, electronics, medication and toys. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

However, the future of exports from China will be led by equipment manufacturers, and, although they may not be penetrating Western markets, coemption in third markets is intensifying. The greatest shock that might face European and U.S.A. manufacturers is the full-scale export of Chinses manufacturing capability similar to that of the Japanese entry into the U.S.A. and European markers several decades ago. China wishes to establish its global image as that of a benign power in many sectors, but it will not be perceived as mature if it doles out money to spent causes. It brought into the U.S.A. debt, perhaps fueling too much credit and inflaming U.S.A. purchase of cheap Chinese-made goods. It will have learned that hard lesson, and now Europe has to behave in a more relevant way than the old United States of America did in order to be creditworthy in China’s eyes. That seems fair. The China-West rivalry (economic wars) are in particular fields: trade/currency, environment, natural resources, technologies, and company acquisitions. China is not only a World factory, but also a World research lab and leader in green business. China is an undisputed leader in export volumes of electrical/electronic products and light industry goods. Its presence in other merchandise export markets is much smaller. Having joined the ranks of important exporters of services, it still remains far behind the United States of America and other leading services nations. The Chinese state is emerging as effectively the World’s number one financial powerhouse (soon you will feel it stronger, as Beijing will become a key emergency lender for cash-strapped Western governments), but China’s private investors are still relatively new and financial assets of its households growing. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

One more country looked upon as a new great economic power comparable to China is India. No doubt, as the second-largest emerging economy, India is becoming increasingly important, but compared to China, it is in a different weight category and the global impact of its growth is much smaller. Compared to Western economies, China looks better in terms of not only average growth rates (this may be natural as economic development stages are different), but also growth stability. The rise of a new media system, corresponding in form with the requirements of a wholly new way of creating wealth, challenges those in power, giving rise to new political methods, constituencies, and alliances. Just as people at, say, the beginning of the 18th century could not imagine the political changes that flowed from the spread of a smokestack economy, so today it is almost impossible, short of the science-fiction-style speculation, to foresee the political uses to which the still emerging media system will be put. Take for example, interactivity. By allowing TV viewers to use, rather than merely view, the screen, interactivity could someday change political campaigning and candidates. Interactive media make possible far more sophisticated opinion polling than ever before, not simply asking yes-no questions, but allowing respondents to make trade-offs among many options. However, the possibilities go beyond polling. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Would a candidate, once elected, trade off jobs for environmental improvements—and if so, how many? How would the candidate respond to a hostage crisis, a race riot, or a nuclear disaster under differing sets of circumstances? Instead of trying to test the values and judgment of a potential President by listening to thirty-second commercial, the interactive video users of tomorrow could tune into a program, or insert a diskette, that would virtually show the candidate discussing and making decisions under a variety of conditions programmed in by the voter. Political platforms could be issued in a spreadsheet format, so that the voters could manipulate their underlying budgetary assumptions and ask “what if” questions. If large numbers can participate in a mass-appeal game show like Jeopardy with a computer tallying their responses, it does not take too much imagination to see how similar technology could be adapted to political polling or collective decision-taking—and political organizing of a new kind. Futurists, simulation experts, and others have long speculated about the possibility of organizing very large numbers of citizens in political “games.” Professor Jose Villegas at Cornell University developed models for such activity as far back as the late 1960s, including games that less affluent residents and transient populations could engage in as a form of political education—and protest. What was missing was the technology. The spread of networked interactivity will place the tools for political “games” in millions of living rooms. With them, citizens could, in principle at least, conduct their own polls, and form the own “electronic parties” or “electronic lobbies” and pressure groups around various issues. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

One can also easily imagine electronic sabotage, not as the act of individual hackers or criminals, but for the purpose of political protests or blackmail. At 2.25 P.M. on the afternoon of January 15, 1990, engineers in Bedminster, New Jersey, noticed read lights flashing on the seventy-five screens that display the status of AT&T’s long-distance telephone network in the United States of America. Each light indicated trouble. “It just seemed to happen. Proof, there it was,” said William Leach, manager of AT&T’s network operations center. That “proof” assed up to a massive breakdown in the U.S.A. long-distance phone system lasting for nine hours, during which an estimated 65 million calls were blocked. AT&T investigators concluded that the breakdown resulted from a faulty computer program. However, they could not “categorically rule….out” the possibility that it resulted from sabotage. It so happened that January 15 was the national holiday celebrating the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It also happened to be true that some racist Americans bitterly hated King and were outraged that a national holiday should commemorate him. The AT&T “blackout” may simply have been a random occurrence. However, it does not stretch credulity too far to imagine electronic political protests and sabotage in the future. One need not engage in sci-fi speculation, however, to recognize some of the profound social tensions already arising from the introduction of a new form of economy—problems relate to the way knowledge is disseminated in society. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17


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