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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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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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To Where the Damned Have Howled Away their Hearts

I stumbled back against the hall table, sending a crystal vase of red roses crashing to the floor. Water and glass and torn petals all over the rug. The despair threatened to drown out my own thoughts. Softly, gently, Elsa reached out and covered my hand with hers. Her skin was cold, her touch insubstantial, so light, as if she were barely there. But I was overwhelmed by the understanding implicit in her gesture. Grateful for her care. “Mrs. Winchester, we have been seeing some pretty amazing things here in your fabulous mansion lately,” Elsa said, “some true signs from God. I’m talking angles. I’m talking miracles. I’m talking End of Times. Do you believe?” “That is just the point, my dear Elsa. In believing you, what do I have to lose?” I replied. “I’m here to tell you that everything can change for you. I’m here to take you to a place where you can begin to be the person you might have been…if certain things had not happened. I’m here to tell you…” She broke off. We had reached the library. “What, tell me what?” I said. We were eye to eye and Elsa seemed wrapped in a calm that my fear could not penetrate. The library was dark, lit only by a skylight, and the single open door through which we has passed. It was vast and shadowy filled with books and desks and lamps. It was an important place for me, a place that I surely always had a glorious time in. This sense of elation was familiar. It was like the way one feels after being sick for a spell and suddenly a clearheaded good feeling comes over you, and life seems worth living again. Else sat perfectly still beside me and I could see the light in her eyes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 4

“God loves you,” she said softly, almost dreamily. “I’m here to offer to offer you another way.” I went quiet. I saw all of these things suddenly, tumbling through my mind, and that is when the pounding began. The noise was not very loud at first; it sounded as if someone was knocking on the wall with one’s knuckles. I felt along the walls, but it was the strangest thing. The pounding did not really seem to be coming from the walls at all. I could not really tell where the sounds were originating. When the books and the chairs started to move, Elsa began to scream hysterically that she wanted to leave my home. She was in extreme distress. Her face was ashen, and she appeared about to faint. We watched the chair do a complete flip, then gently return to its upright position. “He’s fighting for you hard. He doesn’t want to let you go,” Elsa said. Unable to explain the source of the commotion and thus unable to provide a source of relief for the traumatized young lady, I suggested she show herself the way out. I could feel myself shaking again. I was not afraid. Every ten minutes or so, the entire mansion would seem to tremble, as if we were experiencing an earthquake. The beautiful decorative frescoes and artwork started to fall and crack. I saw a man standing at the back of the library and I approached him to see why he was trespassing. When I drew near to the fellow, he simply disappeared. The man seemed very real and I had not thought about ghosts until he vanished into thin air. As I opened the door to another room on the third-floor and pressed the button to turn on the light, I was astonished to see a strange young woman, standing before the full-length mirror, admiring herself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 4

Before I could ask her who she was or what she was doing, the stranger ran into the closet next to the mirror. I walked over to the closet to find out who this intruder was and what she wanted. I was breathing rapidly, my body carrying the weight of all this, but my mind felt wondrously clear. Opening the doors and sliding the dresses around on their hangers I found nothing. I felt the urge to cry, to dissolve into a state of weakness. Frantically, I shoved the clothes out of my way, even removing some of them and tossing them on the bed. However, there was no one there, and no visible escape route from the closet. “Why? Why have you come here for me?” I asked. My voice broke. I turned my back on the closet. I felt like I was walking into a wall of blackness. It had been a cold winter and a bone-cracking winter wind came sweeping through the room. Even with a fireplace in this room, I could feel the chill. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something at the window. As I turned on the light, I saw a child’s face, hovering outside the window, peering in at me. The strange thing was that the little boy’s face was blue—the odd, pinkish-blue cast taken on by human skin after it has been exposed too long to cold temperatures. Shocked and frightened at a face levitating in the window three stories off the ground, I ran from the room. In the hallway, the words “Help me,” were scrawled on the wall in blood. #RandolphHarris 3 of 4

It was this, I think, the not knowing, that preyed on my mind. Not knowing what happened to him, how he had died, when he had died. Was I scared? I should have been, certainly. In the hall above, women were screaming, and men were shouting, children were crying. The sound of rook splintering and the clatter of metal on metal. Then the door thudded shut at my back and I was plunged into silence. To where the damned have howled away their hearts. One can only imagine the spirits of the Winchester Mansion, ancient dead descending from their graves to my home, the floating along passageways, emerging in this ghost ship, passing through rock and concrete and wood as they are wont to do, and materializing at times of their own choosing. Rising up from the Earth like water that seems to help draw them. Then, as they appear and disappear, sinking back into the labyrinthine. Death, who washes away this worrisome World, has guided countless souls to my home. By the end of the day, the weather had grown threatening, and the wind became aggressive and unpredictable. Windows and doors have been left open to the cold air all afternoon, and after closing them up tight, I built a fire. Without warning, all the lights in the house went out. I became motionless. A dark entity grabbed me. It twisted me around and forced me toward the floor. Gripped by terror immediately I started to have trouble breathing. I was hyperventilating. And I was convinced that the entity would murder me. I struggled, then the entity suddenly vanished. The violence was disturbing. #RandolphHarris 4 of 4

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All I Know, All there is a Reflection of You, a Home to this Body of Conflict

The body responds to extreme experiences by secreting stress hormones. These are often blamed for subsequent illness and disease. However, stress hormones are meant to give us the strength and endurance to respond to extraordinary conditions. People who actively do something to deal with a disaster—rescuing loved ones or stranger, transporting people to a hospital, being part of a medical team, pitching tents or cooking meals—utilize their stress hormones for their proper purposes and therefore are at much lower risk of becoming traumatized. (Nonetheless, everyone has his or her breaking point, and even the best-prepared person may become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge.) Some violent transactions (id est, murder, assault, and rape) take shape as one-on-one conflicts between known acquaintances. This is not generally the case with robbery. The vast majority of robbery offenders and victims have no prior relationship. More than 75 percent of robbery victims describe their attackers as strangers. Men, African Americans, and the elderly are almost never attacked by known assailants. Furthermore, unlike other violent crimes, only 5 percent of all robberies occur between individuals who are related to one another by blood or marriage. Almost all robbery transactions involve a lone victim; however, it is not uncommon for multiple perpetrators to join in the attack. Victim reports reveal that 94.5 percent of the persons who were rubbered in 2022 were alone at the time of the attack. The offender dynamic is somewhat different. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

In 2022, 43 percent of all robbery victims claimed that they were attacked by multiple assailants. No other form of violent crime experiences this level of group offending. A number of observations can be made about the setting of the average robbery event. One, robberies are equally distributed across daytime and nighttime hours. Two, victim reports suggest that robberies take place in a variety of locales; about half of the robbery victimizations take place in open-air venues (exempli gratia, in streets, parks) and another 30 percent take place at or near the victim’s home. Keep in mind that the data focuses largely on personal victimizations. Those offenders who target commercial establishments are largely omitted from these data. Fortunately, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports solicits information on the robbery setting. While these data show that public streets remain the favorite setting for robbery (a little less than 50 percent of known cases), commercial and/or financial establishments are targeted in roughly 25 percent of the cases, and private residence comprise another 13 percent of the cases. Given the risks and complexities that go along with pulling off a robbing in an institutional setting, one might expert that robbers would target the most lucrative businesses. This is not the case. Only a small fraction of these robberies occur at banking establishments (average yield in 2022 = $5,000) while a surprising majority transpire in “low budget” convenience stores (average yield in 2022 $700). The participants in the robbery transaction are disproportionately young, men. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

In 2022, individuals between the age of 12 and 24 experienced a robbery victimization rate that exceeded five per 1,000 persons or households. That victimization rate was roughly double the one for persons between the ages 25 and 49 and nearly five time the rate for persons 50 years or older. A similar age pattern emerges among the offender population. Roughly three and ten robbery victims estimate that their attacker(s) were under the age of 20 and an estimated six in tend claim that they were attacked by a person(s) under the age of 30. These data indicate that robbery is an intra-aged crime. The majority of robbery victims and offenders are men. Males accounted for two thirds of the robbery victims in 2022. This translated into victimization rates for men (3.8 per 1,000) that more than doubled that for women (1.7). Most robbery victims claim that they were attacked by male assailants—a man was present in 99.2 percent of all multiple-offender robberies and 93.9 percent of all single-offender robberies that occurred in 2022. Clear racial disparities exist among robbery offenders and victims. In fact, 80 percent of the robbery victims were white and 16 percent black. A full 21 percent identify themselves as Hispanic. When one factors in relative representation in the U.S.A. population, the following robbery victimization rates emerge: 5.3 (per 1,000) for Hispanic, 3.6 for African Americans, and 2.6 for whites. A more extreme picture emerges among the offender group. African Americans accounted for more than half (55 percent) of the robbery arrests that were reported by law enforcement authorities. This means that the robbery arrest rate for blacks is more than 6 times that of whites. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

The robbery victimization rate for the average American was estimated to be 2.8 per 1,000 persons or households in 2022. That same years, Hispanic males experienced a victimization rate of 7.9 percent; for black males, it was 6.4. In addition, black males between the ages of 16 and 19 were victimized at a rate of 27.6 per 1,000 persons or households. Most robberies unfold as extremely abrupt, but unmistakably volatile exchanges. Regardless of whether the attacks take form as a street mugging or bank robbery, it is in the offender’s best interest to move quickly and purposefully. Most robberies follow a set chronology of events. First, the attacker must get the victim’s undivided attention and clearly state his or her intentions—eight in ten (83.1 percent) robbery victims report that their attackers introduced some unprovoked threat or act of force into the equation. This defining moment is called the declaration of stick-up and can take on a variety of shapes, ranging from a verbal statement to the passing of a note to a bank teller. This initiating step is forceful, direct, and seeks to place the offender in complete control of the victim’s emotions and behavior. Next, the robber must go about his or her efforts to collect the desired money and/or valuables from the victim. This is clearly the most unpredictable stage of the game. Here, the attacker hopes that his or her threats and posturing will produce unwavering compliance from the victim. This is seldom without complication—only one third of all robbery victims simply submit to their attackers’ wishes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Once the robbery offender has successfully or unsuccessfully confiscated the victim’s valuables, he or she then goes about closing out the interaction. In addition to physically fleeing the scene, most offenders try to obscure their identity from any potential onlookers. Robbery offenders tend to have long, pronounced criminal careers. Criminal history checks revealed that 62 percent of the accused robbers had a prior felony rap sheet. Nearly one in three (29 percent) had at least five felony arrests to his or her credit. A full 40 percent of the robbers in the sample had been convicted of a prior felony. Furthermore, 70.2 of the released robbers in our recidivism study had been rearrested within 3 years. No other category of violent offenders lead such active criminal careers. It is tempting to think of robbers as offense specialists (id est, deal exclusively in robbery or similar offense). This is not an unrealistic suggestion given that would-be thieves have a host of targets from which to choose. There are clearly enough potential persons and financial institutions to keep a person busy in a one-dimensional criminal career. Recidivism explain that 20 percent of robbers who are released from prison are typically rearrested on another robbery within three years. However, interviews with known robbery offenders reveal the presence of a much broader criminal repertoire. Most robbers describe themselves as opportunists—persons who will pursue any course of action that is likely to yield desired ends. The drugs/crime connection serves to further solidify these individuals’ commitment to a diversified criminal portfolio. A survey of state prison inmates found that 30 percent claimed to have committed their most recent offense in an effort to get money to buy drugs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

On the whole, the available data suggest that most robbers are criminal generalists. They are individuals who grow accustomed to a certain way of life; a life that includes fast living, heavy spending, and habitual drug use. This Worldview requires offenders to seek a constant flow of cash that can be sustained only by a diversified and highly active commitment to crime. Few would disagree that there are instrumental motives resent in the mindset of the average robber. The most immediate goal of this type of offense is to deprive the victims of their valuables for personal consumption. Nonetheless, news reports are full of stories in which thieves expose themselves to high levels of risk in order to collect on very small sums of money. Convenience store robberies and/or the taxicab stick-ups are prime examples. The growing presence of these high-risk, low-yield robberies had led numerous researchers to conclude that expressive motives also play an important part in the cognitive aspect of robbery. For example, many robbers allege that they commit their crimes for emotional gratification or revenge. More importantly, these researchers have shown that inner-city street norms bestow a great deal of status onto individuals who are willing to live by the “survival of the fittest” credo. Many robbers commit their crimes while under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol. Nearly 33 percent of persons robbed in 2022 had reason to believe that the assailant(s) was under the influence of drugs or alcohol at the time of the attack. Not surprisingly, the accounts of known offenders suggests that the actual percentages may be somewhat higher. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

Interviews with a sample of imprisoned robbers revealed that 40 percent were under the influence of drugs or alcohol when they committed the violent theft that led to their incarceration. This impairment can limit the offenders’ ability to make sound and reasoned decision. This speaks further to the drugs/crime connections that impacts robbery. Planning does not appear to play a large role in most robberies. Most violent thieves operate as alert opportunists—when in need of cash, they head out into the streets with the necessary weaponry and a behavioral script for how they would like to see the robbery event unfold. At the same time, they may have learned from past experience that most robberies are unpredictable, and thus view meticulous planning as a waste of time. Interviews with habitual robbers reveal that even the most seasoned thieves feel a need to invoke some sort of normative neutralization to help set themselves and other at ease about their behavior. Robbers often times blame the victim, claiming that the naïve fool had it coming. Others adopt a “survival of the fittest” mentality, asserting that they are simply doing what must be done to get by in life. Still others speak of a “natural order on the streets,” in which robbery is just another way of making a living. Regardless of the content, the message is clear: Robbers negotiate their identities like any other person. Among all the threats to man’s vital interests, the threat to his freedom is of extraordinary importance, individually and socially. And robbery certainly threatens these conditions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

In contrast to the widely held opinion that this desire for freedom is a product of culture and more specifically of learning-conditioning, there is ample evidence to suggest that the desire for freedom is a biological reaction of human organism. It is a remarkable fact that all human beings—the children of the powerful as well as those of the powerless—share the common experience of once having been powerless and of having fought for their freedom. While a person is struggling in lonely silence to find their way back to life again, to give birth to a new path that comes from within to restore one’s spirit and passion for life, one needs strong, unqualified affirming voices. When it seems, and indeed is true, that one’s life is dissolving around one, know that God is always there. In choosing yourself over your reflection of self, God will always be there. When one decides that, whatever the price, one has to be in touch with oneself, has to follow one’s own instincts, God will be there. God allows people to access their strong, unqualified, affirming voice. And many people are thankful for God. The Lord was always prepared to meet again the antagonist whom He has foiled in the wilderness, and who had left Him only “for a season” (Luke 4.13). So when He discerned Satan at work in Peter, He exposed him in one swift sentence, even mentioning his name (Matt. 16.23). Addressing the Jewish people, He likewise stripped aside the mask of the hidden foe and said, “Ye are of your father, the devil” (John 8.44); with keen-edged words He spoke of him as the one who was lying to them and prompting them to kill Him (John 8.40-41). #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

And when, in the store on the lake, He is awakened suddenly, He is at once alert to meet the foe, and stands with calm majesty to rebuke the storm which the prince of the power of the air had roused against Him and the disciples (Mark 4.38-39). In brief, we find the Lord, right on from the wilderness victory, unveiling the powers of darkness as He went forward in steady mastery over them. Behind what appeared “natural,” He sometimes discerned a supernatural power which demanded His rebuke. He rebuked the fever in Peter’s wife’s mother (Luke 4.39), just as He rebuked the evil spirits in other and more manifest forms, while in other instances He simply healed the sufferer by a word. Now note the vast difference between the attitude of Satan himself to the Lord and that taken by the lesser spirits of evil. Satan, the prince, tempts Jesus, seeks to hinder Him, prompts the Pharisees to oppose Him, hides behind a disciple to divert Him, and finally takes hold of a disciple to betray Him and sways the multitude to put Him to death; but the spirits of evil bowed down before Jesus, beseeching Him to “let them alone” and not to command them to go into the abyss (Luke 8.31). The realm of this deceiver-prince is specifically mentioned by the Apostle Paul in his description of him as “prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2.2), the aerial or “Heavenly places” being the special sphere of the activity both of Satan and his hierarchy of powers. Even the derogatory name “Beelzebub,” means “the god of the files,” suggestively speaks of the aerial nature of his powers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

The Lord’s description of Satan’s working through “fowls of the air” (Matt. 13.4, 19) strikingly corresponds to these other statements, together with John’s language about the “whole World lying in the evil one” (1 John 5.19)—the atmosphere itself being the sphere of operation of these aerial spirits. And this realm in which the whole human race must move is said to be now “in the evil one.” The foundation of Christian belief is not the historical Jesus, but the biblical picture of Christ. Existential experience of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans—ultimate concern—is destined to play a role in advancing the holy experiences to the idea of God. God is the abyss and ground of being. The holy is liberated from the dominance of the ethically good. The relation of religion and morality is not an external one, but the religious dimension, source, and motivation that are implicit in al morality, acknowledge or not. The holy is first experiences as a numinous reality and only secondly as a moral demand. Religion is no longer seen by some to be confined to institutions, cult, and doctrine—in a word, to the churches—but religion is now the state of being ultimately concerned. There is religion in the narrow sense of institutionalized and formalized religion, and in the large sense of being grasped by an ultimate concern. Justification through faith rends every human claim in the face of Hod and every identification of God and man, and yet man is justified in the midst of his guilt and doubt. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

In the light of this principle, the cross of Christ is seen as the embodiment of the divine Yes and No against the World, an interpretation which forms the core of Tillichian Christology and dogma. A union of this Protestant principle with the historicocritical biblical research may led some to reject nineteenth-century liberal dogmatic theology which replaces the crucified Christ by the historical Jesus, and which dissolves the paradox of justification into moral categories. The substance of my religion is and remains Lutheran. It embodies the consciousness of the “corruption” of existence, the repudiation of every social Utopia, including the metaphysics of progress, the knowledge of the irrational demonic character of life, an appreciation of the mythical elements of religion, and a repudiation of Puritan legality in individual and social life. In personal dimensions of life and tastes, there are things that may exercise a certain influence upon one’s theology, though perhaps indirectly. The ones some may consider are the love of the sea, one’s preference for the city, one’s interest in art. From the age of eight, I spent several weeks, even months, at the seashore every year. The meeting of sea and the land means for some a boundary-experience of the infinite and the finite. The sea with its never-resting, limitless expanse and depths become a symbol for the absolute, the ground and the abyss. Its dynamism suddenly erupts in an ecstacy of storm and waves which aggressively break over the land that quietly rests in its self-sufficient finitude. The sea provides an element of phantasy that one may consider essential to living thought. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

One’s love for nature, however, goes hand-in-hand with preference for the bustling life of the city. The city is indispensable for developing the critical side of intellectual and artistic endeavor. Furthermore, in a large urban center one finds concentrated all the important political and social trends. To the realism of the city, some attribute the escape from a romantic hostility against technology. And, strange to say, the experience of the city is analogous to the experience of the sea: The impression of the big city is somehow similar to that of the sea: infinity, openness, unrestricted space! However, beyond that it was the dynamic character of life in Berlin that affected me. The discovery of art (in the sense of the visual arts, but especially painting) is an event of far-reaching consequences. Turning to it by way of reaction during the fearful, ugly, destructive pandemic, allows one to discover the marvels of architecture. All the bookish church history in the World could never provide the kind of insights occasioned by the mosaics of the early Roman basilicas. For ultimate reality is experienced and expressed directly in religious symbols and myths, but the artists, while intending nothing but good art, cannot help but indirectly express ultimate reality. Besides being telescoped into the life of one man, these dimensions are linked together by other bonds of unity. In all of them one discerns the deep current of religious concerns—in the search for Christian community, in the theological view of history, in the quest for a philosophy that is realistic and open to the transcendent, and in a sensitivity to the presence of the holy in nature and art. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

One life can be unity because it unifies. It can unify by drawing together the conflicting elements of an age in transition: authority and autonomy, theory and practice, nature and technology, idealism and existentialism, World was and World unity. There is an urgent cry of human hope and despair not only in the thoughts of many people, but also in their experience as we deal with massive corruption, hyperinflation, and a president who does not represent the American people. Theology, as a function of the church, is the methodological interpretation of the Christian faith for the human situation. Thus, it mediates between two poles, the eternal and the temporal. The eternal pole is the Christian message, and one function of theology is to state its truth. The temporal pole is the human situation, and the other function of theology is to respond to its needs. The “situation” does not refer to the psychological or sociological condition of individuals or even of groups, as for instance, a feeling of uncertainty that demands an uncomplicated unequivocal reassurance. Rather, it signifies the totality of man’s creative self-interpretation in a special period, that is the sum of the artistic, the scientific, philosophical, economic, political, and ethical forms in which men of a certain era express their understanding of life. If one stresses the unchangeable truth of the message (kerygma) over against the changing demands of the situation, the theology is kerygmatic. Such a theology preserves the Christian faith from the relativities of mundane exigencies. The drawback, however, is that kerygmatic theology hurls the message at the situation like a stone. It establishes no common ground with those in the situation, and so runs the risk of being irrelevant. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

If, on the other hand, one first listens attentively to the questions implied in the temporal situation and then responds with the power of the eternal message, that theology is “apologetic.” Apologetic theology is “answering theology.” It bears no semblance to the discredited relic that has borne the name in the past. Apologetic theology searches for the common ground between the message and the situation by listening to the questions that the situation poses before answering in terms of the message. The danger in such a procedure is that the word of the message may be distorted amid the clamor of the questions. However, apologetic theology is important for two reasons, one is because it is a fact, and because of the conviction. The fact is that for the last three hundred years the central problem of theology has been the adaption of the Christian faith to the modern mind. For instance, we no longer stone the unfaithful. We pray for them, send them to counseling or separate from them. With such an evolutionary synthesis, it is possible—and necessary—if Christianity is to avoid becoming a fossilized curiosity and if civilization is not to lose one of its most powerful stimulants. The Gospel records refer repeatedly to the workings of evil spirits. They show 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. 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). #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Why have socialist economic systems failed so miserably? The best laid Five Year Plan of Stalin and his successors “gang agley” because the workers and the managers lacked adequate incentives. Most importantly, the system offered no reward for doing a good job rather than a merely adequate one. People had no reason to show initiative or innovation, and every reason to  cut corners wherever they could—fulfilling quantity quotas and slacking on quality, for example. A market economy has a better natural incentive mechanism, namely the profit motive. A company that succeeds in cutting costs, or introducing a new product, makes a greater profit; one that lags behind stands to lose money. However, even this does not work perfectly. Each employee or manager in a company is not fully exposed to the chill wind of competition in the market, and the top management of the firm has to devise its own internal carrots and sticks to obtain the desired standards of performance from those below. When two firms join forces for a particular project, they have the added problems of designing a contract that will share the incentives between them in the right way. We bring out the important idea for the design of incentive schemes through a series of examples. Imagine yourself as the owner of a high-tech company in California trying to develop and market a new computer chess game, Wizard 1.0. If you succeed, you will make a profit of $200,000 from the sales. If you fail, you make nothing. Success or failure hinges on what your expert player-programmer does. One can either put one’s heart and soul into the work, or just give it a routine shot. With high-quality, effort, the chances of success are 80 percent, but for routine effort, the figure drops to 60 percent.  #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Chess programmers can be fired for $50,000, but they like to daydream, and will give only their routine effort for this sum. For high-quality effort, you have to pay $70,000. What should you do? Low-Quality Effort: Chance of success is 60 percent, average revenue is $120,000, salary payments are $50,000, and average profit = revenue – salary which is $70,000. High-Quality Effort: Chance of success is 80 percent, average revenue is $160,000, salary payments are $70,000 and average profit = revenue – salary, which is $90,000. A routine effort will get you $200,000 with a 60 percent chance, which comes out to $120,000 on average. Subtracting the $50,000 salary leaves an average profit of $70,000. The corresponding calculation if you hire a high-effort expert is 80 percent of $200,000 minus $70,000, that is, $90,000. Clearly you do better to hire a high-effort expert at the higher salary. However, there is a problem. You cannot tell by looking at the expert’s working day whether one is making routine effort or quality effort. The creative process is mysterious. The drawings on your programmer’s pad may be the key to a great graphics display that will ensure the success of Wizard 1.0, or just doodles of pawns and bishops to accompany one’s day dreaming. Knowing that you cannot tell the difference between routine effort and quality effort, what is to prevent the expert from accepting the salary of $70,000 appropriate for high effort, but making routine effort just the same? Even f the project fails, that can always be blamed on chance. After all, even with genuine quality effort, the project can fail 20 percent of the time; this was just that kind of bad luck. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

When you cannot observe the quality of effort, you have to base your reward scheme on something you can observe. In the present instance that can be only the ultimate outcome, namely success or failure of the programming effort. This does have a link to effort, albeit an imperfect one—higher quality of effort means a greater chance of success. This link can be exploited to generate an incentive scheme. What you do is offer the expert a remuneration that depends on the outcome: a larger sum upon success and a smaller sum in the event of failure. The difference, or the bonus for success, should be just enough to make it in the employee’s own interest to provide high-quality effort. In this case, the bonus must be big enough so that the expert expects a higher effort will raise one’s earnings by $20,000, from $50,000 to $70,000. Hence the bonus for success had to be at least $100,000: a 20 percent increase in the chance of getting a $100,000 bonus provides the necessary $20,000 expected payment for motivating high-quality effort. It remains to find the separate sums to be paid in the event of success or failure. That needs a little calculation. The answer is that you should pay the employee $90,000 for success, and one should pay you a find of $10,000 in the event of failure. With this incentive scheme, the programmer’s incremental reward for success is $100,000, the minimum necessary for inducing quality effort. The average payment to one is $70,000 (an 80 percent chance of $90,000 and a 20 percent chance minus $10,000). This leaves you, the owner, an average profit of $90,000 (an 80 percent chance of $200,000 minus the average salary of $70,000). If you could observe quality of effort by direct supervision, this is exactly what you could have gotten. The incentive scheme has done a perfect job; the unobservability of effort has not made any difference. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

In essence, this incentive scheme sells 50 percent of the firm to the programmer in exchange for one’s effort. One’s net payments are then either $90,000 or -$10,000, and with so much riding on the outcome of the project it becomes in one’s interest to supply high-quality effort in order to increase the chance of success (and one’s profit shares of $100,000). The only difference between this contract and the fine/bonus scheme is in the name. While the name may matter, we see there is more than one way to achieve the same effect. However, these solutions may not be possible, either because assessing a fine on an employee may not be legal or because the worker does not have sufficient capital to pay the $10,000 for one’s 50 percent stake. What do you do then? The answers is to go as close to the fine solution or equity-sharing as you can. Since the minimum effective bonus is $100,000, the worker gets $100,000 in the event of success and nothing upon failure. Now the employee’s average receipt is $80,000, and your profit falls to $80,000. With equity-sharing, the worker has only one’s labor and no capital to invest in the project. However, one still has to be given a 50 percent share to motivate one to supply high-quality effort. So the best you can do is sell one 50 percent of the company for one’s labor alone. The inability to enforce fines or get workers to invest their own capital means that the outcome is less good from your point of view—in this case, by $10,000. Now the unobservability of effort makes a difference. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

Another difficulty with the fine/bonus scheme or equity-sharing is the problem of risk. The worker’s incentives arise from one taking a $100,000 gamble. However, this large risk may not be evaluated by the statistical average of the outcomes. In this case, the worker has to be compensated both for supplying high-quality effort and for bearing risk. The bigger the risk, the bigger the compensation. This extra compensation is another cost of a firm’s inability to monitor its workers’ efforts. Often the best solution is a compromise; risk is reduced by giving the worker less than ideal incentives and consequently this motivates less than an ideal amount of effort. In other instances you may have other indicators of the quality of effort, and you can and should use them when designing your incentive scheme. Perhaps the most interesting and common situation is one in which there are several such projects. If there are more observations, even though success is only an inexact statistical indicator of the quality of effort, it can be made more precise. There are two ways in which this can be done. If the same expert works for you on many projects, then you can keep a record of one’s string of successes and failures. You can be more confident in attributing repeated failure to poor effort quality rather than the working of chance. The greater accuracy of your inference allows you to design a better incentive scheme. The second possibility is that you have several experts working on related projects, and there is some correlation in the success or failure of the projects. If one expert fails while others around one are succeeding, then you can be more confident that one is a shirker and not just unlucky. Therefore rewards based on relative performance—in other words, prizes—will generate suitable incentives. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

When an employer designs incentives to motivate a worker, the problems are only one-sided. More complicated and more interesting are the problems of joint ventures in which each side has to provide the right incentives to motivate the other. Ubiquitination is the systematic spread of the new media system around the World and down through every economic layer of society. A potential nightmare facing high-tech governments derives from the split-up of populations into the info-rich and the info-poor. Any government that fails to take concrete actions to avoid this division courts political upheaval in the future. Yet this dangerous polarization is hardly inevitable. In fact, one can imagine considerable equality of access in the emerging society, not because of compassion or political good sense on the part of the affluent elites, but because of the workings of what might be called the Law of Uniquity. This law holds that strong commercial, as well as political, incentives will arise for making the new electronic infrastructure inclusive, rather than exclusive. In its infancy the telephone was regarded as a luxury. The idea that everyone would someday have a phone was simply mystifying. Why on Earth would everybody want one? The fact that almost everyone in the high-tech nations now has a phone, rich and poor alike, did not stem from altruism but from the fact that the more people plugged into a system, the more valuable it became for all users and especially for commercial purposes. The same proved true, as we have seen, in the early development of postal services. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

The industrial economy needed a way to send bills to, or advertise to, or sell newspapers and magazines to everyone, not just the rich. And today, once more, as fax machines and email have replaced the industrial-era post office, similar pressures are accelerating the spread of the new technology. There were 2.5 million fax machines in the United States of America in 1989, churning out billions of pages of faxed documents per year. There are no 43 million fax machines in operation. The more faxes out there, the greater the value of the system to all concerned. It is, therefore, in the distinct self-interest of the affluent to find ways of extending the new systems to include, rather exclude, the less affluent. DVDs and Blu-ray discs and players are being replaced by streaming services. Video streaming services are used by nearly 2 billion people Worldwide, while music streaming platforms have 524 million users. Their combined numbers of users total to more than 2.3 billion. Such a level is more than half of the total number of internet users globally which currently stands at 5.03 billion. Cable television is also being left in the past. As of September 2002, 65 percent of adult pay for cable and 82 percent of USA adults claim that streaming shows provide more entertaining shows than cable does. Streaming services now provide a wider variety of entertainment compare to cable, cater batter to the busy schedules of today’s younger populations and are also producing better quality television due to higher budgets. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

The widest diffusion of communication capabilities is an inseparable part of the new system of wealth creation. The direction is almost inevitably toward what the old Bell phone company called “universal service”—id est, ubiquity—combined with interactivity, mobility, convertibility, and connectibility. Finally, the new infrastructure is global in scope. As capital flows electronically across national borders, zipping back and fourth from Zurich to Hong Kong, Hong King to Norway, Norway to Tokyo, Tokyo to Wall Street in milliseconds, information traces equally complex pathways. A change in U.S.A. T-bill rates or the yen-deutsche mark ratio is instantly known around the World, and the morning after the big event in Los Angeles, youngsters in Ho Chi Minh City discuss the latest Grammy winners. The mental borders of the state become as permeable as its financial frontiers. The combination of these six principles produces a revolutionary nervous system for the planet, capable of handling vastly enlarged quantities of data, information, and knowledge at much faster transmission and processing rates. It is a far more adaptable, intelligence, and complex nervous system for the human race than ever before imagined. However, what is amazing, is technology is so advanced, but public WiFi is still hard to find in most cities. Traffic is still a major problem. And a lot of old technology is still being used. For instance, there are touch screen elevators and voice command elevators, but many new construction projects are still going with the traditional push button. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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There Were Omens from the Beginning

That voice. His voice. How could it be? On the fourth floor, the air plays such tricks, distorts and changes perspective, but I was certain it was William I had heard. “It was you,” I said in disbelief, yet knowing I was right. “It was you I heard.” However, I turned my face away, and took the elevator down stairs. There was Mr. Hansen going on construction plans. “Mr. Hansen?” I said urgently. “Was it you on the fourth floor a few moments ago? Was it? Did you see me? Mr. Hansen, please.” Still he did not answer, and I would have pressed him further, except I was suddenly aware the atmosphere in my mansion had changed. The air was suddenly charged with anticipation, with tension. I took my eyes away from Mr. Hansen for a moment. While we had been talking, everything else had receded, my sight, my hearing, my smell. Now, like the lights coming up in the Grand Ball Room at the end of a concert, the World came back into focus. The white sofa was pristine, but there were empty coffee cups, splashes of spilled coffee and crumbs of cookies, prunes and butter. The noise level had dropped. Like the low growl of the sea, the rumbling of voices was constant but muted. Everyone seemed to be speaking in hushed voices. Hooded and watchful eyes, no laughter now. For the first time since sitting down on the sofa, I felt uncomfortable. Mr. Hansen took the leather chair opposite. But he said nothing. Nothing would come out of his mouth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

The carpet in the room had been woven for the room, an immense sea of dark flowers, banded in gold along the walls and the high polished baseboards. Mr. Hansen has never seen a rug made for a room quite like this one. “Why do you not stop clutching that gun and talk to me?” “I can do everything you’ve asked,” said Mr. Hansen. “I’m eager to do it.” Mr. Hansen was powerfully excited to add an apartment of new rooms to the mansion. But he did not let on. The music in his head would not stop. I knew how excited he was as I watched him. I could see it in his breathing and in the warmth in his eyes, which perhaps he did not notice. “What is it you want for all this, besides money? I asked him. Now Mr. Hansen was startled. And there was a dramatic change in his face. Mr. Hansen noticed it, the blood in his cheeks, and the flash in his eyes. “More work,” said Mr. Hansen. “Lot of it. And the finest tools you can buy.” I shook my head. Then I heard, quite distinctly, the stomp of horses’ hooves outside in the street and the rattle of a harness. I figured it must have been another load of construction materials for the drawing room. However, as the far end of the west wing, an altercation broke out. Voices raised, shouting, the sound of a chair being overturned. At first, I assumed it was some kind of childish play. I turned toward the entrance, and at that precise moment the heavy wooden doors were flung open. Two men strode into the hall. “What in God’s name…” Their faces were concealed beneath square iron helmets and the sunlight shined on their unsheathed swords, sending flashed of silver shining around them like sparks. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

For a moment, nobody spoke. And, just for a moment, I wondered if this was some kind of entertainment. Then a woman screamed and I knew it was not. Panic took hold. I fell against a wall. “Mr. Hansen,” I whispered. A small group of farmers were attempting to drive the intruders from the hall. Some brandished hunting daggers, drawn from their sheaths on their belts. Others grabbed at whatever at rifles. Bullets flew, blades jabbed and sliced through the air, though never connecting. It was an unequal fight for my men were armed. The cry went up to barricade the door. And despite the exhaustions of the long day, despite the fact that it was now evening, I felt suddenly alive. The renovations of the mansion continued. When Mr. Hansen was done with this portion of the expansions, twenty-two rooms with fireplaces had been added. I fulfilled my request and built tunnels in the basement that ran all the way to the fruit orchards so that we could hall the fruit to the basement for storage. A young boy made a home for himself in the tunnels. He was nine years old at the time, when the men were carrying fruit from the orchard to the basement one of them saw a soldier, in a somewhat outdated uniform, standing in the darkened tunnel. “Who’s that man?” asked one of the farmers, surprised and a bit apprehensive to see a stranger in the tunnels. “Oh, he’s all right,” replied the boy who had seen him many times before. Poltergeist most often find their energy center in the psyche of an adolescent, who performs the ghostly effects, both consciously and unconsciously. The adolescent is gifted for the time being with something mysterious. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

The particular direction of this power is always toward the secret or concealed weakness of the spirit. Something is released from the recesses of the soul. The mysteries of puberty, that trance or dozing of the psyche before it wakes into adult life, is a favorite playground for the poltergeist. Ghosts haunt houses, and poltergeist hunts people. The poltergeist is very often not really a ghost but a cacophony of projected repressions. One sultry summer morning the farmers came to complain to the boy for coming in the basement in the middle of the night and eating a huge portion of the harvest. Of course the boy would never steal anything, and so, when he explained this, the farmers were at a loss to determine just who ate the fruit. Some of the farmers who were working to harvest fruit that summer mentioned to the boy that, in the tunnels some places were unusually cold. As well, they complained to the noy about being awakened in the middle of the night by horses pawing the ground and snorting outside. When they went to the window to see who in the World was out riding after midnight, through the fields, they saw no horses or riders. The boy also counted at least eight times that the farmers had queried him about the Confederate soldier they had seen in the tunnels, in the basement, or standing in the one doorway. The boy said that many sightings and noises went on during the harvest season, but at other times when the tunnels were not in use it was a peaceful place to rest. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

That evening, I shut myself away in the drawing room. I could hear Helga and Judit, two caretakers, talking behind the closed door. I pressed my ear against the polished room, praying that they would know I was there and they would come in and comfort me. However, they did not. I sat up straight, my heart pounding as my eyes darted around the room.  Despite the darkness, I could see there was a woman wearing a long cloak wandering the hallway. She was easy to see because she glowed softly as she walked along. The woman was crying faintly as she searched for something. Fear throbbed in my veins. As she glided up the stairs, she then hanged herself, but the body and the noose disappeared shortly after. “Where are they coming from?” I wondered aloud. A sick feeling began to brew in my stomach.” “Is anyone there?” I cried. “Did you hear that?” Helga asked. “Hear what?” Judit replied. They were still oblivious to my presence. Blood slammed through my veins. I looked down, trying to shake away the horrible vision I had just scene. Just then a porcelain figurine was lifted from the coffee table and began to float through the air and traveled more than twelve feet before in smashed into the wall.  After this demonstration of prowess on the part of the spirits, I decided to retire for the evening. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

But upon entering my bedroom, I found that a heavy bureau has tipped face down on the floor, and a phonograph began orbit around the room. I felt curiously like an intruder in my own home. I paced the corridors, entered many of the other bedchambers and for the most part the doors were closed, and I shut those doors that stood open before making my way to the basement. It had been divided into two sections. On this occasion, I saw a woman at the fireplace in the old section tending food. Quickly I walked to the second basement, which was built in an L shape. It was very dark. I could hear a little girl singing near the tunnel entrance. And there were figures shifting in the dark shadows, as if hiding. Since the caretakers could not hear me, and I was having such a hard time locating them, I figured it would be best to learn to embrace and enjoy the spirits. Feeling unsettled, I walked through the plush gardens. There, under a large tree about a hundred feet away, was a gray, misty figure, seated, resting against the tree. So indistinct were his features that he could not possibly have been real. At a hundred feet or less, anyone with average vision can easily recognize another human being. However, there was something definitely non-human about this human form. I stood there watching him for ten minutes or so, but I was unwilling to examine this apparition more closely to see if it was a fellow traveller in this World, or true ectoplasm. I made my way back to my home with a ticklish feeling on the back of my neck. When I looked behind me, the apparition had vanished. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

ASTRACHIOS, ASACH, ASARCA, ABEDUMABAL, SLLAT, ANABOTAS, JESUBILIN, SCIOIN, DOMOL, Lord God, who dwellest above the Heavens, whose glance searchest the abyss; please grant us, we pray Thee, the power to conceive in our minds and to execute that which we desire to do, the end of which we will attain by Thy help, O God Almighty, who livest and reignest for ever and ever. I conjure thee,  LUCIFER, OUYAR, CHAMERON, ALISEON, MANDOUSIN, PREMY, ORIET, NAYDRUS, ESMONY, EPARINESONT, ESTIOT, DUMOSSONT, DANOCHAR, CASMIEL, HAYRAS, FABELLERONTHON, SODIRNO, PEATHAM, by the great living God, the Sovereign Creator of all things, to appear under a comely human form, without noise and without terror. Emperor Lucifer, please respond in a clear and intelligible voice, point by point, to all that we shall ask thee, falling which, thou shall ask thee, thou shalt be most surely compelled to obedience by the power of the divine ADONAY, ELOIM, ARIEL, JEHOVAM, TAGLA, MATHON, and by the whole hierarch of superior intelligences. I command and I adjure thee, Emperor Lucifer, as the representative of the mighty living God, and by the power of Emanuel, His only Son, who is they master and mine, and by the virtue of His precious blood, which He shed to redeem mankind from thy chains, I command thee to quit thine abode, wheresoever it may be, swearing that I will give three one quarter of an hour alone, if thou dost not straightway come hither and communicate with me in an audible and intelligible voice or, if thy personal presence be impossible, please dispatch me thy Messenger Astarot in a human form.   COME, LUCIFER. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7

The Winchester Mystery House

Many researchers have noted that, in addition to the sadistic attacks directed upon authoritarian figures (parents, older siblings, police officers, clergymen), the individual who serves as the poltergeist’s energy center—the psychic “eye of the storm”—may receive wounds that appear to be the effects of stigmata. The individual may also experience painful swelling of the body, and vile and obscene writing may appear on walls or various personal objects. If we only knew more about the nature of energy, perhaps we would understand its relationship to time. Why do we bind, in our reasoning minds, energy within the boundaries of time? There is no law that says energy must start and stop within the certain bounds of time. That is exists in time should be enough.

That it exists throughout time, in one form or another, sometimes recognizable, sometimes not, could explain why some places seem to have an abundance of psychic energy long after the people associated with that energy have gone. There is one law of physics that might apply—that of thermodynamics—which states that energy is a constant in the Universe, that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but merely changes form. In a liberal interpretation, it could explain a lot. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

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I Guess it’s Hard to Understand Life When it Hits You in the Face with a Backhand

One of the ways memory of helplessness is stored is as muscle tension or feelings of disintegration in the affected body areas: head, back, and limbs in accident victims, the private parts and rectum in victims of sexual abuse. The lives of many trauma survivors come to revolve around bracing against and neutralizing unwanted sensory experiences, and most people I see in my practice have become experts in such self-numbing. They may become serially obese or anorexic or addicted to exercise or work. At least half of all traumatized people try to dull their intolerable inner World with drugs or alcohol. The flipside of numbing is sensation seeking. Many people cut themselves to make the numbing go away, while others try bungee jumping or high-risk activities like prostitution and gambling. Any of these methods can give them a false and paradoxical feeling of control. When people are chronically angry or scared, constant muscle tension ultimately leads to spasms, back pain, migraine headaches, fibromyalgia and other forms of chronic pain. They may visit multiple specialists, undergo extensive diagnostic tests, and be prescribed multiple medications some of which provide temporary relief but all of which fail to address the underlying issues. Their diagnosis will come to define their reality without ever being identified as a symptom of their attempt to cope with trauma. My interviews with wife rape survivors revealed that women not only developed strategies for coping during the sexual assaults, but they also developed strategies for emotional survival after each incident of sexual abuse. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Emotional survival is defined as the extent to which women are able to reconstruct their lives so that the experience of sexual violence does not have an overwhelming and continuing negative impact on their lives. Following their experiences of wife rape, the women in this sample, like other sexual assault survivors, worked not only to exist but also to put back together the pieces of their lives. Six women in this study began to do this by terminating their relationships with their partners immediately following their first experience of wife rape. Thus, as I indicated earlier, they did not take steps to manage the violence. They emotionally survived the assault by distancing themselves from their partners, seeking the help of service providers and turning to friends. Gwen was raped once by her partner after she returned home from having major surgery. Following the rape, she remembered getting dressed and leaving the house in a daze: “I wound up at the police department, and then I found out husbands can rape their wives, so they sent me to a doctor for a rape test [kit] and then…I signed a criminal complaint and called [a rape crisis center] the next day.” However, the majority of women in this sample were raped multiple times by their partners. These women developed strategies to cope after each assault. Kayla typifies the reaction of many women in this sample. She recalled what happened one time after she was raped: “He fell asleep and I got up and cleaned myself up and then I pretended that nothing happened. I thought about the kids coming over, and I just didn’t deal with it [the rape]. I thought to myself, it wasn’t that bad.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Kayla’s recollection reveals the complex process of coping after sexual abuse and indicates several of the strategies women I interviewed used to put their lives back together again—cleaning themselves up, forgetting about the incident, justifying the assault, and minimizing the effects of the violence. Like other survivors of sexual assault, most of the women I interviewed felt the need to “be clean” following their experiences of rape. For example, Sally told me, “I went into the shower and I washed myself and scrubbed myself. I did everything a rape victim would do. Everything. It was like you knew what had been done to you and that this was something all rape victims do. And you knew you had to heal yourself because if you didn’t heal yourself, nobody else would.” After each sexual assault, Sara said she would “take shower after shower because I felt so dirty and I couldn’t get clean.” Two other strategies women used were to rationalize the violence and minimize the severity of the assault. It Is important for women who decide to stay in the relationship, either because they do not want to leave or are unable to leave the marriage, to discount the trauma of the rape. Similarly, minimizing the effects of sexual violence allows women to define the violence in a way in which they do not have to immediately act, possibly because they see no other available options or because they fear the consequences of their actions. Thus, for most women to be able to remain in the marriage, they must “work” on their emotions, transforming the social reality of their situation, so that they do not see themselves as victims or their husbands as rapists. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Many abused wives reconstruct their experiences by holding themselves, rather than their husbands, responsible. Although self-blame is a characteristic more commonly associated with wives who are battered than with those who are raped, a significant number of raped wives (estimates range from 6 percent to 20 percent) engage in self-blame. The length of time a women remains in the violent relationship and the extent to which she holds traditional ideals about the family are directly related to self-blame. In this sample, one third of the women initially blamed themselves to some extent for their husband’s actions. Many of these women felt they had failed in their roles as wives so they were able to rationalize that it was their own fault that the forced sex occurred. For example, both Sonya and Cory were incest survivors who were generally not interested in having sexual intercourse with their partners. They felt their unresponsiveness was the cause of the sexual abuse. Sonya said, “I wouldn’t let him touch me for the first 2 months after we got married because of what I went through with my father….and I was afraid he was going to go and get an annulment, and I felt like part of the problem of our marriage is because I can’t. It’s like I want to have sex with him, but I keep having flashbacks about what happened to me, and I just can’t handle it. And I knew he’s my husband.” Some people who have been raped may feel unsure about sex and may not want to enjoy it after a rape or are mentally and physically unable to because their feelings are distorted, and/or their body is injured. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

These women viewed sex as their marital obligation and felt their husbands were being neglected because they were unable to fulfill their duties. Thus, they did not, at last initially, blame their husbands for raping them. Three other women I interviewed did not blame their husbands for assaulting them but instead blamed drug or alcohol use for triggering the attacks. Crack cocaine was one substance that several of the women blamed for changing their partners from loving individuals into sexually and physically abusive men. These examples indicate that rather than viewing their husbands as assailants, these women perceived them as the victims in some way. By constructing the violence in this way, their husbands were free from blame, and they were able to remain in their relationships and cope with the sexual abuse. It was not uncommon for victims of rape to minimize or limit the impact of incidents that they defined as abusive to some degree. Many of the women in this sample also minimized the extent of the sexual violence they had suffered. For example, after each rape, Debbie would tell herself, “That wasn’t that bad. I got through that one so I’ll get through another.” Similarly, Becky thought, “I love him and I know he really loves me, so it [the abuse] wasn’t so bad.” These women were hesitant to acknowledge the severity of their experiences because for a variety of reasons, including emotional and economic ties, they were not in a position to leave. Thus, rather than leave the relationships, they redefined their experiences in ways that were acceptable to them and developed elaborate coping strategies allowing them to survive from day to day. However, eventually all of these women reached a point where they were unable to cope with the violence any longer and ended their relationships. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

A high value can be placed on loneliness or from empathy for others undergoing such experiences. Looking back on childhood, for many people it was very lonely—at least all the requirements were there—and yet one may not have been aware of it as such; one may not think of calling it by that name. As a child, when an individual is hospitalized, they may have no real understanding of the situation. Being given shots every four hours, having several blood transfusions per day, and learning that one may not live is shocking. However, sometimes people want time away from their parents and their parents’ friends so they can be a lone and experience a real life without being manipulated. By being close to oneself, confronting oneself, and learning who you are and what about you is artificial is a crucial part of development. When a person is alone, two things may change: one is one’s decision to undergo psychoanalysis, and the other is their intimate relationship with their girlfriend. Both of these are acute and unavoidable confrontations of oneself with oneself. Both are quite painful, particularly the relationship with the girl, for one may feel like she never really accepted one as one was (perhaps this may be mutual), and yet neither party wants to break it off either. And at the same time one never has experienced such violence of emotion—love or hate—except for as a preteen. Feelings which one never suspected of having inside well up to overwhelm the individual, often feelings of lust or hate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

It is impossible for one to really feel again those feelings a one is stagnant. One knows they happened, some as recently as two or three months ago, and yet to recall them is exceedingly difficult. Partly because they are part of a whole complex which one would probably prefer submerged out of the picture. At the same time, one knows when one reads poetry now one responds with more feeling and understanding then before all of this happened. Now is that not strange? It is just like music. When you fall in and out of love the songs have more feeling, or when you know you are an outcast or doing your best, you can really connect with how the artist may be feeling. I had completely forgotten an experience that happened to me this summer. I went down on foot into the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It is hard for me to really believe that I could have been totally unaware of what I was getting in for, and yet I acted that way. I took with me a camera, a few biscuits, and a small canteen of water; I ended up walking, with occasional rest periods, for 14 or 15 hour, with next to no food or water. Why did I do it? I have no understanding of it, and yet connections are forming in my mind. If you will, it was senseless, stupid, and yet I had been guided by sense I would have avoided with this experience. I have rarely wanted (or perhaps I have had the want beaten out of me) to communicate my inmost thoughts to others, because I know that they will not understand. I have very rarely withheld my sympathy from anyone, but I just now wonder if that is not some kind of compensation for the fact that I do withhold other things. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

For a while now, I do not know how long exactly, I have felt prepared to die. By that I do not mean at all that I want to (though I have felt that too), but rather that I was alive enough to die. I went through a long period when I was very anxious about death. However, this past week I looked at the parade of planets, and somehow realized that I could accept my death as mine because when you die, your mind releases a chemical and every living essence goes into another realm. And maybe that is where we experience true freedom. Heaven and Hell may be a myth. There is some kind of pleasure in knowing that my death is waiting for me somewhere. Distinctions between the various workings of prince Satan and his demonic agents should be definitely noted, so to understand their devious methods at the present day. For to many, the Adversary is merely a tempter, while they little dream of his power as a deceiver (Rev. 12.9), hinderer (1 Thess. 2.18), murderer (John 8.44), liar (John 8.44), accuser (Rev. 12.10), and a false angel of light; and still less do the imagine the hosts of spirits under his command, constantly besetting their path, bent upon deceiving, hindering, and prompting to sin. A vast host is wholly given up to wickedness (Matt. 12.43-45), delighting to do evil, to slay (Mark 5.2-5), to deceive, to destroy (Mark 9.20)—and has access to men of every grade, prompting them to all kinds of wickedness, being satisfied only when success accompanies their wicked plans to ruin the children of men (Matt. 27.3-5). #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

There is, however, a distinction between Satan, the prince of the demons (Matt. 9.34), and his legion of wicked spirits—a difference in rank which is clearly recognized by Christ and may be noted in many parts of the Gospels (Matt. 25.41). We find Satan in person challenging the Lord in the wilderness temptation, and Christ answering him as a person, word for word, and thought for thought, until he retires, foiled by the keen recognition f his tactics by the Son of God (Luke 4.1-13). We read of the Lord describing him as the “prince of the World” (John 14.30); recognizing him as ruling over a kingdom (Matt. 12.26); using imperative language to him as a person, saying, “Get thee hence”; while to the Jewish people He describes his character as “sinning from the beginning,” and being a “murderer” and a “liar.” He is the “father of lies” who “abode not in the truth” (John 8.44) having departed from the position which he once held as a great archangel of God. Moreover, he is called “that wicked one” (1 John 3.12), the “Adversary,” and that “old serpent” (Rev. 12.9). In respect of the devil’s method of working, the Lord speaks of hum as “sowing tares,” which are “sons of the evil one,” among the wheat, the sons of God’s kingdom (Matt. 13.38-39)—thus revealing the Adversary as possessing the skill of a mastermind, who directs, with executive ability, his work as “prince of the World” throughout the whole inhabited Earth, having power to place the men who are called his “sons” wherever he wills. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

We read, also, of Satan watching to snatch away the seed of the Word of God from all who hear it—once again indicating his executive power in the World-wide direction of his agents, whom the Lord describes as “fowls of the air.” In His own interpretation of the parable (Matt. 13-3-4, 13, 19; Mark 4.3-4, 14-15; Luke 8.5, 11-12) Jesus said tht by these “fowls” (plural) He meant the “evil one” (Matt. 13.19), “Satan” (Satanas, Mark 4.15), or the “devil” (diabolos, Luke 8.12). We must remember, however, from the general teaching of other parts of the Scripture that the devil is but one person, and does much of his work through the wicked spirits he has at his command. For although Satan is able to transport himself with lighting velocity to any part of his World-wide dominions, he is not omnipresent. But what shall be the spiritual center of this new World? Already religion has been largely replaced by political and social movements with their new myths of nation and social justice. Yet they have not proved to equal to the task, and so, today, at the center of the World there is a vacuum which demonic forces struggle to fill. The vacuum is an absence of meaning: The spiritual disintegration of our day consists in the loss of an ultimate meaning of life by the people of the Western civilization. Through the racial and gender wars started around the World by the sinful state of California, they have left behind pessimism and cynicism. “The World is going crazy.” Well, many people around the World believes the craziness is seeping from California, to the rest of America and then globally. Whatever the explanation one attaches the philosophy of California, one thing is unmistakably clear. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The scholars of this generation differ from the generations of their teachers in that the former have been thrust into history, forced to face up to it realistically, and to interpret it theologically. The renowned theological faculties of Berlin, Tubingen, and Halle there existed a consensus that identified the last four centuries of theology with the history of Germany theology. Consequently, it is our feeling that only in Germany is the problem of how to unite Christianity and the modern mind taken seriously. All this was a mixture of limitation, arrogance, and some elements of truth. It has been felt that Germany, after 1800, succeeded to ancient Greece as the center of philosophy. One trait in particular is supped to account for the superiority: the attempt to reunite, in a great synthesis, Christianity with the modern mind. It is in its heart philosophy of religion, it is Weltanschauung, a vision of the World as a whole. And we despised every philosophy which was less than this. Two events have broken the gip of this intellectual provincialism: the fact that the supposedly superior Germany culture could produce Mr. Hitler; and secondly, his emigration to the quite different intellectual climate of the United States of America. Many people, like the Mayor of Sacramento, California USA; Daryl Steinberg, blame America from the creation of Mr. Hitler and if you ask many citizens is not much better than Mr. Hitler. In fact, he does not even try to help the residence of his city, he leaves them sleeping in masses on the street to die, but spends hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on sports entertainment, instead of housing. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

American intellectual life is characterized by its imitation relating of theory to practice and by its wide-open horizons. Protestant theology in American cannot rest content with theorizing, but draws out practical conclusions; hence its special contribution in the field of social ethics. Mention has already been made of how its theological horizons have been kept broad, but there is a certain typically American unity of theological discussion, competition, and teamwork. In general, the American bent for practicality permits a widespread concrete realization of religious truth, while the European drive for ultimate insures it profundity. The European danger is a lack of horizontal actualization; the American danger is a lack of vertical depth. There should be a chief concern between the relationship of the infinite and the finite. Our discussions should center around God’s relation to the World and to man. The absolute objectifies itself in nature and becomes conscious of itself through the reflection of man, nature is unconscious but on the way to consciousness, and reaches it with the birth of man. (Also, keep in mind, some people believe Satan is God.) Human consciousness is that which realized God; consequently, all history is the history of religion, and that is true when you look at the crusades and the establishment of America and the wars in other countries. Many of them start over religion. It is in history that man comes to a consciousness of God; thus, even the cultural process is religious in its roots and can be considered from the viewpoint of the history of religion. All men and women have a religious experience. The polarity of mysticism and sense of guilt (Mystik und Schuldbewusstsein) is brought about by man’s union with and separation from God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Mysticism means the feeling of union with the absolute; it implies the principle of identity of absolute and individual spirit. Guilt means the consciousness of opposition to God; it implies the experience of conflict between the holy Lord and the sinful creature. I began my philosophical school in German idealism and can never unlearn what I there acquired. By idealism, one usually means the identity of thought and being as the principle of truth. Between the human spirit and reality there exists a correspondence which is best expressed in the concept of meaning (Sinn). The system is an expression of a specific but limited encounter with reality. Man lives in existence and not in essence, as the idealists would have him do. The depths of psychology is related to existentialism as part to whole. Their common root is the protest against the philosophy of essence or consciousness which has dominated modern industrial society and endangered freedom, individuality, and creativity. Dr. Freud’s discovery of the irrational, unconscious level of man heled enormously to combat this philosophy. Depth psychology and existentialism are both basically concerned with man’s existential predicament—temporal, spatial, finite and estranged—as opposed to man’s essential nature. There are certain unmistakably existential themes in theology: the original goodness of being and of man, the universal fall, and salvation as healing or making whole a disrupted World. Transposed into philosophical language, these themes are: essential goodness, existential estrangement, and the teleological nature of man which points to a unity beyond the essence and existent. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

However, while theology contributes its insights to the existentialist movement, existentialism returns the favor. It opens up a whole new psychological dimension in the immense religious literature of the past. It rediscovers sin as a state of separation instead of a series or moral acts. It lays bare the demonic structures that shape conscious decision. It reinforces the meaning of grace as acceptance of the unacceptable—recall the manner in which an analyst handles one’s patient. And, finally, it raises the question of human existence which systematic theology must answer by the reinterpretation of religious symbols. Every individual can relate to skirmishes with friends or family members in which they wrestled the television remote control of the last Eggo waffle away from one’s wanton adversary. If you are coming up short on material, embark on an afternoon visit to your local playground or daycare center and you are sure to find dozens of examples of children using force to gain exclusive rights to their favorite today. These are mundane and seemingly harmless instances of people using force to get what they want. The most extreme manifestations of forcible taking, thefts that often involve weapons and produce serious bodily harm are becoming more common in some communities. The Model Penal Code says an individual is guilty of robbery when he or she inflicts or threatens to inflict serious bodily injury upon another while in the course of committing a theft. The legal notion of what constitutes “in the course of committing a theft” includes those behaviors associated with the individual’s attempt to take the item as well as the flight (escape) efforts that follow. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

In addition, most jurisdictions specify that the assailant need not be armed with a weapon. Any aggressive action on top of the minimal effort required to extract and carry the targeted item away is generally enough to satisfy the force requirement of the robbery statue. Robbery poses a quandary for scholars who prefer to classify crimes as either violent, property, or public order offenses. A robbery is not a simple theft, nor is it a simple act of interpersonal violence. Instead, a robber combines elements of property theft and violence into a single criminal transaction. This prompts some to treat robbery as a unique conceptual entity—an aggravated property crime. On a more practical level, the unpredictable and multifaceted nature of the crime means that the given offense may allow for criminal justice authorities to purse multiple charges against a single perpetrator—it is not uncommon for perpetrators to have charges of theft, fraud, assault, possession of stolen property, burglary, and/or weapons possession stacked on top of a robbery rape. Robbery is treated as a form of violent crime. An estimated 650,795 attempted or complete robberies occurred in the United States of America in 2022. This figure represents 11 percent of the total number of violent offenses that year (second to assault). This translates into a victimization rate of 2.8 robberies per 1,000 persons or households. Police are never made away of a considerable portion of the robberies that occur each year. Roughly 40 percent of robbery victims choose not to notify law enforcement authorities. Generally, 250,000 robberies are withheld from being reported to law enforcement. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Considerable physical, emotional and financial losses stem from robberies.  Nearly one-third of the robberies (almost 350,000 annually) were shown to produce some form of injury. Of these injuries, 81 percent were describe as minor (id est, bruises, cuts, scratches) while 19 percent were deemed severe (id est, flesh wound, broken bones, loss of consciousness, internal bleeding). More than one-half (53 percent) of the injuries required medical treatment and one in four resulted in a emergency room visit. Surveys of our nation’s hospitals reveal that emergency room personnel administer care to well over 20,000 robbery victims annually. The financial costs of robbery are also sizeable. The FBI states that $532 million in property losses were produced by the more than 400,000 robberies that were investigated by police. This translates to an average dollar loss per incident of $1,258. Given the large numbers of robberies that go unreported to police, one can reasonably assume that somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion in property is lost to robbery offenders each year. Most notably, robbery victimization rates reached an all-time high of 7.4 per 1,000 persons or households. Robbery victimization rates are traditionally higher in the western and southern regions of the United State of America. Victimization rates in the Midwest and Northeast (2.1 and 2.7, respectively) were noticeably lower than in the West and South (3.1 and 3.0 per 1,000 respectively). The District of Columbia, Maryland, New York, California are most burdened by robbery calls. Conversely, Vermont, North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota weigh in at the bottom of the state-level rankings. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

As is the case with all forms of violent crime, increased population density yields significantly higher robbery victimization rates. City dwellers experienced a robbery victimization rate of 4.9 per 1,000 persons or households. This compares to reported rates of 2.2 in suburban areas and 1.4 in rural locales. Of our major cities, the FBI lists Atlanta, Newark, and Miami as having the highest robbery rates. At the other end of the spectrum, San Jose, Mesa, and El Paso are major cities with low robbery rates. U.S. robbery rates tend to exceed those experienced in other developed nations. Our robbery rate is 165.4 per 100,000 persons This was surpassed only by Spain which posted a rate of 168.9. Significantly lower robbery rates were experienced in France, England, and Wales, Australia, Canada, Germany, Israel, and Japan. Robbery is a classic example of an unskilled crime where the offender enlists fear and intimidation tactics to achieve his or her goals. Weaponry and robbery often go hand in hand—roughly half of all robbery victims recently claimed that their assailant was armed: 29.9 percent of attackers were said to carry a gun, 13.6 a knife or sharp object, and 4.6 percent relied on a blunt object (id est, club, pipe, baseball bat). At the same time, almost four in every ten attacks took the form of “strong arm robberies” in which the offender relied only on the threat or use of brute force. Alternative sources of data suggest that the numbers of gun-toting robbers may be significantly higher. A full 42 percent of the robberies that police investigated were found to involve some sort of firearm. Luckily, less than 10 percent of the inmate sample reported firing shots. The FBI estimated a robbery-by-firearm rate of 59.5 per 100,000. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Gun control advocates often attribute our high robbery rates to this country’s fascination with firearms. Reports estimate 223 million firearms were circulating throughout the United States of America. Add to that roughly 4 million new firearms that are purchased each year and another 300,000 or so that get reported stolen, and it becomes abundantly clear that there are plenty of guns to go around. Some have argued that rigorous gun control measures would significantly reduce our robbery rates. However, an in-dept study found that injuries occurred far less frequently in robberies involving a gun than did when a knife, club, or no weapon present. S the perceived lethality of the situation decreased (id est, knives were less threatening than guns), robbery victims exhibited a greater willingness to resist or challenge their attackers. Both good news and bad news flow from these findings. Resisting seems to increase the chances that the victim will remain in control of his or her valuables. However, this course of action increases the likelihood that the attacker will turn to a weapon of choice as an equalizer. In the case of a gun, this generally results in dire consequences for the victim. Look forward and reason backward. It is better to give than to receive when you are the victim of a robbery. Most material items can be replaced and it is best to walk away with your life. Time is money. And sometimes giving away money is certainly worth your time. A robbery is like a negotiation, but you have no power. A lot of people think the United States of America is frequently robbed, but is the World’s Super Power.  The fact that the greater share in bargaining agreements goes to the more patient side also very unfortunate for the United States of America. Our system of government, and its coverage in the media, fosters impatience. When negotiations with other nations on military and economic matters are making slow progress, interested lobbyists seek support from congressmen, senators, and the media, who pressure the administration for quicker results. Our rival nations in the negotiations know this very well, and are able to secure greater concession from us. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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Disturbing the Dead is Never a Good Idea

So time passed and did not move at all. Ten years of voices in my head, of memories that were more real, more vivid, than the World outside my window. Ten years of constant construction. All this might suggest that I was very far adrift from reality, that I was incapable of distinguishing true from false. Were there hideous dream coming in the night? Visitations, or more of glowing, late-night specters suddenly visible just outside my bedroom window? Had I really seen blood ooze from behind the walls?  It had got quite dark, as if a sudden storm was sweeping up over the sky. Others were near me, but I could not see them. We were standing by the palm trees at the turn of the drive, and as Mr. Hansen came to me, I passed behind the palm trees and, in the darkness, I hurried back to the house. And a queer thing was that as I reached the door the black cloud vanished, and there was the transparent twilight again. In the house everything seemed as usual, and the caretakers were busy about their work; but I could not get it out of my head that a shadow of a cloud had concealed the sun. I paused for breath, and began again. In the hall I stopped at the annunciator to call for help, but unknown forces seemed to answer my call. A mass fog started hovering at the end of the hall, and out of it came a tall thin man with a pocket watch in his vest and black garters on his arms. He was carrying a lantern down the hall toward me. He was extremely pale as if suffering from a high fever. When the phantasm’s eyes met my own, his features appeared quite tranquil and not at all disagreeable, but I could not help being filled with some sort of nameless dread. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

Suddenly, there came a fierce bombardment of stones against the roof and doors. Fearing an attack by bandits, I ran to grab my revolver, and shouted an alarm. Cautiously looking out into moonlit fields, I saw nothing. No one. Then, as I blinked my unbelieving eyes, the front gate was wrenched from its hinges by an invisible force and tossed high into the air. Venturing out to investigate, my revolver clenched firmly in my hand. A volley of stones was suddenly hurled at me, and I feld back into the mansion. As I slammed and barred the front door behind me, the caretakers shuttered the windows. However, shutters made no difference to the stones. In they came, through glass, through shutters, rolling down the chimney, smashing against the door. Objects in the room began to hurl themselves at me. Candles were blown out. The bars on the doors began to bend under the solid blows of an invisible hammer. A tea cup smashed itself against a wall. Somehow, I managed to survive this night of horror. However, much to my dismay, the stone-throwing spirit had not vanished with the coming dawn and the rooster’s crowing. That day, haystacks in the fields were broken up and the hay tossed into the high branches of trees. As the farmers attempted to go about their farmwork, stones pursued them. This could not be the work of naughty little boys. One of the boys who had been helping put up the hay was struck so hard on the back that he began to cry. This spirit never developed a voice, but was quite proficient at snorting and whistling. It smashed pottery and slammed furniture about the room. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

One night I was standing on the stairs, talking to a stonemason who told me his tools were being knocked out of his hand while he was working by an invisible demon and others went missing. As we were talking, we both caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure floating down towards us carrying the tools. The farmers has also had sickle blades broken by stones, and several rows of corn had been uprooted. If passion, fear, anger or other emotions must be expended to create a haunting, then it should be no surprise that my mansion was host to its share of ghost. Staff often reported hearing what sounded like heated arguments coming from the Blue Séance Room, and the sweet smell of smoking tobacco, despite no one ever smoked in my home. On December 24, 1896, two men using a key opened the safe in the Grand Ball Room and stole over $1,000,000 in money and bonds were removed from the vault, but the bonds were thrown away and they took what gold and silver they could carry without attracting attention. The sheriff was dumbfounded. However, they soon leaned that two locksmiths, Robert and David Bowles had recently changed the locks, so they were arrested. The two of them lived in the attic of my home. There was not enough evidence to hold the men, so the men were set free. They both contracted yellow fever while in jail, and died a week later. Soon after their deaths, reports began to surface that the staff of the Winchester mansion were being haunted by Robert and David. Loud banging or dragging noises came from the attic and the hallway just outside it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

Since the late 1880s, there has been a persistent sight of a young woman, dressed all in white. We believe her name to be Astrid, she was one of my caretakers who fell in love with one of the farmers Baldur. It seems that they used to meet in the greenhouse, and that his family disapproved of her. However, he was certain their love would prevail, and promised he would be with her forever in marriage, eventually. Their meetings continued, her love growing deeper and deeper for him. But even the strength of love has its limits. He finally told her that it would not work out, the problems that they faced were insurmountable, and that he would have to break his promise that they would be together in marriage. They met in the greenhouse one last time. She committed suicide and died in his arms. Now, whenever a promise is broken, there, among the deep green plants, a pale phantasm hovers in the greenhouse. Forever, mourning a broken pledge, forever haunts the Woman in White. Frequently on Easter Sundays, clocks would move about on the mantelpiece in the Hall of Fires and the room would be lit up by a vibrating glow. I had been naturally a fearless child; now I live in a state of chronic fear. Fear of what? I cannot say—and even at the time, I was never able to formulate my terror. It was like some dark undefinable menace, forever stalking my steps, lurking, and threatening; I was conscious of it wherever I went by day, and at night it made sleep impossible, unless a light and caretaker were in the room. However, whatever it was, it was most formidable and pressing when I was returning from my daily walk. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

During the last few years, and while I waited on the door-step, I could feel it behind me, upon me; and there was any delay in opening of the door I was seized by a choking agony of terror. It did not matter who was with me, for no one could protect me. This species of hauntings lasted seven or eight years, and I was a young lady with long skirts and my hair up before my heart ceased to beat with fear if I stood a minute on the door-step! Then one day, at the very front door, I looked up and saw an officer, dressed in Union blue, tall, gaunt, and apparently a modern re-enactor moving rapidly down the wide open lawn, toward my home. He seemed in a hurry to reach the front doors. I looked away to make sure they were opened, and as I looked back at him, he had completely vanished. I immediately had the front doors sealed so that his soul would rest in my estate. From the day on, the Devil had appeared to me on a number of occasions, the first time offering me a purse of silver. I was lost. Bewilderingly, heart and soul, lost. There was a promise that there was an entire life to be lived if I could only take the chance. I can still recall the sense of possibility that came over me then, a kind of lightness. Every sinew, every muscle, every vein in my body seemed suddenly to vibrate, to be alive. If I could find the courage to speak, people would listen. I took a deep breath and then slowly, steadily exhaled. Finally, I began to talk.  I noticed that I could speak in languages that I had never learned. I remember everything about that day. Every tiny detail. The smell and the texture of it, every second before and after the Devil appeared. The purple leaves on the copper beech turning and there was condensation on the inside of the window in the early morning. The fire had been lit for the first time since the previous winter and there was a pleasant smell of pine in the room. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

I did not hear the knock at the door, but I remember being aware of footsteps on the floors in the hall. Even then, I think I knew. There was something in the quality of the silence that shouted out that this caller was unwelcome. I stopped what I was doing and listened, listened to the silence. Then I heard a voice in the hall. I ran. Sending the door flying back against the wall, I ran down the stairs. From the hall below, a sound that tore through me like a butcher’s knife. Not screaming exactly, more a howling, a wailing, the same word repeated over and over, “Mine, mine, mine.” I was struck on the head by a falling hammer. Laying on the floor unconscious, I awoke, and it was the Devil, he told me that I must live and continue to build my estate and that every coin of silver in his purse represented the years I had to live. If I wanted to see my husband and my darling daughter again, it was an offer I could not refuse. When I awoke, my most valued pieces of furniture were rudely destroyed by the violent and unbidden guest, but there were nearly one hundred silver coins in a purse. I had no visible injuries, nor suffered any terrible mental or emotional pain. But there was a piercing scream, followed by a raucous cacophony of voices filling the room. That night as I lay in bed, I thought about seeing my husband and daughter again. I thought about how I would devote this mansion, not only to the spirits, but also to the spirits of my family. My face was stained with tears. I thought about the pact I had made. I got up, put on my clothes, keeping my revolver in my pocket, and went down the steps of my home, past the two caretakers playing cards in the living room.  One of the me got up. “Mrs. Winchester, you want something, a cup of tea maybe?” “I need to walk,” I said. No one stopped me. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

I went outside and walked around the gardens. I noticed the lay the leaves looked in the trees that were nearest the lamppost. I noticed how the branches of the evergreen trees were gleaming with dew. I studied the tall steep shingled roofs of the house. I looked at the glint of light in the diamond-paned windows. I listened to the sound of grass under my feet, and came to the cupid fountain that was running in spite of the cold, and watched the water erupt from the jet and fall down in an airy white shower into the basin that boiled under the dim light. The air smelled of pine needles and of burning wood. There was a freshness and a cleanness I had not experienced. There was a deliberate beauty. I made my way back to the house slowly. I could not sleep. Then a strange thing occurred, as I drew near the mansion. From within the house, I heard a subtle stirring music. Surely a window was open to the cold for me to hear something of such tenderness, and subtle beauty. I knew it to be a harp. There was the window up ahead, tall and made of leaded glass and opened to the cold. From there the music was coming: a long swelling note, and then a cautious melody. Finally, the music stopped. I glanced up and saw a black shadow jump out the window toward me. I found myself shaken, frightened without reason by the sound of voices crying out in pain and the echoes of sobbing. Looking over to the nine-story observation tower, there was a ghostly guard walking his eternal watch. My home seems to be a place haunted by shadows and furtive ghosts. It seems to have been taken over by spirits. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7

The Winchester Mystery House

The Winchester Mansion is one of the World’s most haunted places. For more information on the site and the haunted house events, please visit: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

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Have I Been Wrong, Have I Been Wise to Shut My Eyes and Play Along?

Violence seems to beget violence, from generation to generation. In violence, we do not just consider injuring others but also give the green light to doing so, often with a forceful as unrestrained as it is self-justified. Vengeance, bloodlust, severe dehumanization, rape, torture, acting with extreme prejudice—whatever its form, violence is aggression with no restraints, further fueled by a mindset that adds an emphatic, not-to-be debated stamp of approval. There are plenty of views about what constitutes and causes violence, but any deep understanding of violence has to include our capacity for extreme aggression and the dehumanizing of others, especially toward those who offend us. How do women cope with their experiences of wife rape? Women implement a variety of coping strategies to deal with the violence in their lives and protect themselves from harm. Women who are abused by their husbands must manage the violence and this involves the attachment of meaning to the violence and development of strategies to cope with it. The meanings the woman attaches to the violence and the resources she believes she has shape strategies for living with, or ending the violence. Women coping with sexual violence is defined as the actions take to avoid or control distress. Women’s coping responses are active, constructive adoptions to the experiences of abuse. The responses of any particular woman will depend on how she defines her experience, the context within which it occurs, and the resources which are available to her at the time and subsequently. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Just as battered women and other survivors of repeated acts of violence learn to manage the violence, my research indicates that wide rape survivors too develop strategies to cope with their experiences of sexual abuse, beginning with the first incident. For the majority of women in this study, the first forced sexual experience was merely one in a long line of abuses to come. Indeed, only seven women were able to escape the relationship after having been raped only once. Six of these women terminated their relationships immediately after the first incident of rape. Those women were either separated or seriously considering separation from their partners at the time of the rape, and several had the economic resources to survive on their own. For example, Rhonda and her husband were separated at the time of the incident but maintained an amicable relationship. On the night of the rape, he entered her house, which was not unusual, and then, she says, “It was like something just snaped in him. He grabbed me and said, ‘We gonna have sex, I need to f*ck.’” Rhonda was raped for 7 hours before her husband finally left. At the time of the rape, Rhonda owned her own home, had a job, and was already separated from her assailant, so the decision to remove herself from any further contact with her husband was easy to make. Whereas Rhonda’s circumstances allowed her to immediately end all contact with her husband, most of the women in this study were not in a position to do this. For example, although Karen also identified her first experience as rape, it took her 2 month to save money and finalize her plans to leave. She was raped 11 more times during this period. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

The vast majority of women in this sample did not leave the relationship after the first incident but instead tried to manage the violence. After the first incident, all of the women reported feeling a similar sense of shock that the assault was happening to them and a general feeling of disbelief that someone they loved was responsible for their pain. Debbie is typical in her response to the first rape: “The first time, I though, ‘I don’t believe this is happening, I just don’t believe it.’ I was in shock—totally numb—and I don’t know how I ever got over being that numb. It just blew me out, and I thought this can’t be happening to me.” Most of the women reported that they though the first assault was an aberrant incident that would never happen again. Shock, confusion, anxiety, fear, helplessness, and a belief that this will only happen once are common psychological responses to victimization. Indeed, for most victims of haphazard crimes, this coping mechanism of treating the incident as a single occurrence may suffice. However, many survivors of wife rape (more than 80 percent of women in this sample) learn that the first incident is not aberrant but an ongoing problem. Thus, after the initial shock has ceased, survivors of wife rape are forced either to develop strategies to manage the violence or end the relationship. Two fundamental goals in managing violence are protecting oneself from injury and justifying the continuation of the relationship. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

During the course of the relationship, a woman’s coping strategies often change as it becomes clear to her that she will or will not be able to avoid an assault. My interviews revealed that a variety of strategies were employed by women to protect themselves, including minimizing the risk of violence, diminishing injuries once the violence had begun, and emotionally surviving the violence. A primary way women in this sample tried to cope with being raped by their partners was to minimize the risk that violence would occur. As Sally told me, “You know what’s gonna happen, and you’re trying to think in your brain, how can I stop this without getting hurt? And you don’t know how to stop it without angering him because you know you’re going to get killed, and it’s like looking a murderer straight in the eye, and they have this cold-blooded look, and you know you’re dead unless you can do something.” There were several strategies implemented by women to minimize the risk that they would be sexually assaulted. Active resistance—most women in this sample attempted, on at least one occasion, to minimize the risk of violence by physically resisting their partners. One quarter of the women in this sample were successful at least once in resisting their husbands’ attempt to rape them. For example, Erica physically resisted to the point where her husband grew tired and gave up. On one occasion, Samantha was able to kick her husband in the groin and escape. Several other women used weapons, such as guns or knives, to deter their partners; Teri stabbed her partner in the arm with a kitchen knife. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Clearly, these women were courageous and creative in their attempts to resist their partners’ attacks. However, most of the women in this sample said they learn not to resist but merely to “give in.” Debbie recalled how she quickly learned not to resist her husband: “I love in an apartment where you go up the steps to get in, and do you know how many times I’ve been dragged up the stairs? Get away? It just doesn’t happen. So I learned quick, and then I never fought back or anything because it would just prolong the agony. It’s over quicker if I just give in.” Avoidance—most of the women in this sample found that a more successful strategy than active resistance was simple avoidance. Indeed, several women tried a tactic similar to Natalie’s: “He would come home from work angry over something and take it out on me. So I would try to stay out of his way.” Danielle knew that she was particularly at risk for being sexually assaulted after her husband watched pornographic movies, so she made extra efforts to avoid him at these times. Many women avoided the bedroom, feigned sleep, or went to bed only after they were certain their partners were asleep. Other women in this sample used more direct tactics to avoid their husbands. For example, Debbie particularly feared her husband when he had been drinking. When he came home drunk, she regularly took advantage of his ulcer by putting tabasco sauce into his food. The result was that he became very thirsty and continued to drink more beer, not realize why he was so thirsty. Debbie says that, “if I was lucky; he would pass out and leave me alone.” Otherwise, Debbie was forced to have sexual intercourse until he passed out from sheer exhaustion. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Placating their husbands—the most popular tactic for minimizing the risk of assault was for women to placate their husbands. Placation took many forms, including not seeing close friends of whom their husbands did not approve, quitting their jobs, distancing themselves from their families, maintaining a clean home, having dinner ready at specific times, and keeping the children quiet at all times. These were all components of what these women perceived as their roles as “good wives,” and they tried actively to meet their husbands’ expectations in order to avoid violent episodes. The majority of women told stories similar to this account by Annabel, who remained with her husband for 29 years: “I felt if I could just be what he wanted—a good wife—and stay at home, then he would stop.” Cory remembered thinking, “OK, I can play housewife, I can do that.” Like many battered women, most of the women in this sample understood that if they could fulfill their partners’ expectations about being a good wife and mother, they would reduce their risk of experiencing violence. However, it should be emphasized that these women were not merely passive in their acceptance of their husbands’ demands and gender role expectations; placating their partners was an active coping strategy used to minimize their risk of being abused. Although most of the women went to great lengths to please their husbands, they all learned that they could not manipulate every situation and avoid being sexually assaulted. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Thus, they tried to minimize their injuries as a way of maintaining some form of control over the violence. Stacey said, “I would try to manipulate him during the sex, not for my own needs or orgasms, but to control his anger and try to reduce it so I wouldn’t het really hurt.” Many of the women tried to appease their husbands sexually in order to minimize their risk of harm. For example, Annabel knew that she had to “service him [her husband] to keep the peace.” Natalie told me, “I would fake it (orgasm)—I was the best damn actress—I could have won an award. I even did things to him when there were tears in my eyes.” One quarter of the women in this sample said they sometimes performed oral sex on their husbands, although they despised this act, so that the abuse would end quickly. This was particularly difficult for several of the women, who were incest survivors and recall being forced to engage in fellatio with their assailants when they were children. Other women in this sample recalled engaging in what they referred to as “perverse” activities, such as anal intercourse and bondage, to reduce their risk of injury. Although she despised having anal intercourse, Lorraine remembered that she allowed her husband to do this so that he would not severely batter her in front of the children. When rape appeared inevitable, these women had little choice but to focus their energy on limited their injury and emotionally surviving the attack. All of the women who experienced more than one assault described mechanisms that allowed them to survive the actual rape. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

When it comes to incest survivors, many victims of sexual assault resort to psychological measures to minimize the trauma. Some women find their time perception and sensory perception altered as they disassociate themselves from the experience or treat it as if it is happening to somebody else. This process is defined as “cutting off” as not just a coping strategy but also an act of resistance. In doing this, a woman refuses to let her partner control her mind and feelings. One of the most prevalent survival strategies was best described by Debbie as “orbing out.” She recalled, “He would be all over me, and then I just went out in my mind—I just wasn’t there anymore. I took myself somewhere else, and I fond out later that I had done that a lot. Even growing up and all, if anything hurts me, I orb out—I get total numb. Although this strategy was consistently employed, particularly by the one quarter of the women in this study who were survivors of incest, some women reported out-of-body experiences only during certain episodes. For example, Karen described having “out-of-body experiences—like I was watching from a corner of the room because I couldn’t feel anything”—only during the sexual assaults but not during the physical assaults. Several other women said they coped with the actual rape by focusing their thoughts ironically on the happy days of their marriages or on other aspects of their lives. For example, Kayla recalled, “I would lay there and pretend it’s not happening to me. I would think of shopping or the kids or whatever else I had to do.” Others, such as Rebecca and Wanda, repeated the same phrase continually in their minds in order to distract themselves from what was happening and help them to cope with the assaults. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

All of these mechanisms enabled he survivors to cope during the actual time of crisis and to minimize emotional trauma. These offenders cannot be taken lightly. Please try to understand their philosophy of life and society. They have no fear of man-made laws or the laws of God…to them crimes as serious as murder comes easy…these people will stop at nothing. They are like a secretive society, bonded together by a common need and desire to mete out havoc on society. There are plenty of views about what constitutes and causes violence, but any deep understanding of violence had to include our own capacity for extreme aggression and the dehumanizing of other, especially toward those who offend us. The more intimate we are with our own violent urges and their roots, the less likely we are to be irresponsible with such urges, and the deeper our understanding will be of others’ violence. This does not necessarily mean that we will then be more likely to excuse or marginalize it or look the other way, but we will be able to more skillfully related to it and its origins, getting a deeper sense of how to best approach and work with it. As uncomfortable as it may be to bring our own violence or capacity for violence out of the shadows, we owe it to ourselves—and everyone else—to do so. People who are the victims of violence may feel a loneliness, accompanied with the terrors of manic-depression and suicide. It is not just the loneliness, not the shock, not the fear, not the sense of failure, but the sense of a dying, of a relationship dying, and no one can stop it, not really—not yourself, your work, your money, your efforts, your hopes, your dreams; not your realities, not your friends, not anybody. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

And then the victim comes to realize that there will be more grief to come, more hard realities to face, certainly more hurt and abuse; and they pray, and pray that in the breakdown of their home, their family, their relationship with their husband, that in some way their children ma find enough strength to endure and grow because that is where the real guilt and sense of failure lies. You know you can never repair what has been broke; it is to the children, not anybody else that you have a responsibility. It is them you need to feel for not mama or daddy, not really; it is to them that the dawn must speak and comfort and help grow; it is to them that hopefully out of the mess, their goodness might survive. Man as we know him is regarded not as a completed being but as a being in a certain definite phase of one’s possible transformation. This transformation is considered to be possible in one lifetime, that is, it is considered that a man born in one phase can, during one lifetime, pass into another. If we take the example of a butterfly then a man born in one phase can, during one lifetime, pass into another. If we take the example of a butterfly, then man is approximately a caterpillar. And the vast majority of people die as “caterpillars.” However, out of the masses of caterpillars a small percentage of transforming beings is constantly emerging. These evolving beings are, for us, people of higher mind. We can know of their existence by traces of their activity in history, chiefly in rt and in religions. Possessing a more perfect mind than ordinary people they possess greater knowledge. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

We have schools that have as their aim to bring ordinary people, who have felt or realized the necessity of escaping from their present state, near to the ideas coming from people of higher mind, because these ideas alone can assist their transformation, that is, their transition to a new level of being. The solution of the thinker must be capable of exciting a sympathetic vibration in the personality of the man. Or more exactly, the thinker instinctively shies away from certain solutions and gravitates toward others simply because they strike or fail to strike a resonance in one’s temperament and background. The process of life can no longer be adequately described by the metaphor “level,” and the metaphor “dimension” must replace it. The multiplicity of beings demands a principle of organization which in the past was the hierarchical principle with the concomitant image of levels. Besides social and political levels, there are other processes described in terms of the body-soul level, the organic-inorganic level, the levels of religion and culture, and the levels of nature and supernature. Levels, however, are static, with no implications between them, and the only interaction is by interference, that is, control of one level by another, or revolt of one against the other. Since the Renaissance and the Reformation, however, these levels have been gradually broken down so that a new insight into the unity and compenetration of life demands a new metaphor. “Dimension” is a geometric image which expresses unity within diversity. Dimensions have their property that they meet in a point but do not interfere with each other. They do not life next to one another, nor above one another, nor below one another. They lie in one another, and are untied in the point where they meet. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Though all dimensions are present at any given point one of the will predominate in the process of life. This dominant dimension is called a “realm” (Bereich), as for example, the inorganic and organic realms and the historical and spiritual realms. The simultaneous presence of all dimensions is explained by the distinction between the potential and the actual. Both are realities, for the potential has a power for being that has not yet been activated. Potential dimensions exist within actual ones. Since the actualization of potencies is a gradual, evolutionary process that extends in its totality over millions of years, some dimensions will prevail over others. However, these successive realms do not constitute a pyramid of levels, for the lie within, not atop one another. One can say, therefore, that in the atom is present the spiritual power that created Shakespeare’s Hamlet, just as the movements of the atoms in Shakespeare’s body participated in the spiritual acts that produced Hamlet. Evidently, tensions and ambiguities exist in every life process, but these are not conflicts between levels. They are conflict between forces that operate in every dimension. The four dimensions are the social, historical, intellectual, and personal. No specifically religious dimension is constructed because religion cannot be confined to a special realm; it permeates all dimensions, giving them depth. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

The hour of need always brings a corresponding measure of power from God to meet that need. The Church of Christ must lay hold of the equipment of the apostolic period for dealing with the ongoing influx of evil spirits hosts among her members. Believers today may receive the equipment of the Holy Spirit whereby the authority of Christ over the demon hosts of Satan is manifested, for this is proved not only by the instance of Philip the deacon in the Acts of the Apostles, but also by the writings of the “Fathers” in the early centuries of the Christian era. These writings show that the Christians of that time recognize the existence of evil spirits, knew that they influenced, deceived, and possessed men, and believed that Christ gave His followers authority over them through His name. And this authority through the name of Christ, is available for the servants of God even at this present time. The Spirit of God is making this known in many and diverse ways. God gave a recent object lesson through a Chinese Christian, Pastor His, who acted upon the Word of God in simple faith without the questioning caused by the mental difficulties of Western Christendom. And He has awakened a portion of the Church in the West through the last Revival in Wales—by an outpouring of the Spirit of God which has not only manifested the power of the Holy Spirit at work in the twentieth century as in the days of Pentecost, but has also unveiled the reality of satanic powers in active opposition to God and His people, spotlighting the need among the Spirit-filled children of God for equipment for dealing with them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Incidentally, too, the Revival in Wales has thrown light upon the Scripture records, showing that the highest point of God’s manifested power among men are invariably the occasion for concurrent manifestations of the working of Satan. For it was like that when the Son of God came forth from the wilderness conflict with the prince of darkness and found the hidden demons in many lives aroused to malignant activity, so that from all parts of Palestine crowds of victims came to the Man before whom the possessing spirits trembled in impotent rage. The awakened part of the Church of today has now no doubt of the real existence of spirit-beings of evil, and that there is an organized monarchy of supernatural powers set up in opposition to Christ and His kingdom who are bent upon the eternal ruin of every member of the human race. And these believers know that God is calling them to seek the fullest equipment obtainable for withstanding and resisting these enemies of Christ and His Church. In order to understand the methodology of this deceiver-prince of the power of the air, and become acute to discern his program and his tactics in deceiving men, we should search the Scriptures thoroughly to obtain a knowledge both of his character and how hi evil underlines are able to possess and use the bodies of men. The World is in process of becoming a Kosmos, a unified, structured, historical whole in which all the parts interact with one another. However, the forms of thought and action are still chaotically individualistic, and so the World as a historical reality is being born in labor pains of two wars. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

At almost the precise midpoint of the 20th century, George Orwell published 1984, hi scorching indictment of totalitarianism. The book pictured a government in total control of the mass media. Mr. Orwell’s brilliant neologisms, like newspeak and doublethink, entered the language. The book became a powerful assault weapon in the fight against censorship and mind-manipulation, which is why it was banned for decades in the Soviet Union. While it helped rally forces opposed to dictatorship of the mind, however, the book’s projection of the future turned out to be highly questionable. Mr. Orwell correctly envisioned such technologies as two-way television screens that could be used to deliver the state’s propaganda to viewers while simultaneously spying on them, and his warnings about potential invasions of privacy are, if anything, understated. However, he did not foresee—nor did anyone else at the time—the most important revolution of our era: the shift from an economy based on muscle to one dependent on mind. He did not, therefore, anticipate today’s astonishing proliferation of new communication tools. The number and variety of these technologies is now so great, and changing so swiftly, that even experts are bewildered. To confront the army of technical abbreviations, from HDTV and ISDN to VAN, ESS, PABX, CPE, OCC, and CD-I, is to sink into alphabetical asphalt. Even to scan the advertisements for consumer electronics is to come away dazed. Rise above this clutter, however, and the basic outlines of tomorrow’s Third Wave media become strikingly clear. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

The electronic infrastructure of the advanced economies will have six distinct features, some of which have already been foreshadowed. These half-dozen keys to the future are: interactivity, mobility, convertibility, connectivity, ubiquity, and globalization. When combined, these six principles point to a total transformation, not merely in the way we send messages to one another, but in the way we think, how we see ourselves in the World, and, therefore, where we stand in relationship to our various governments. Put together, they will make it impossible for governments—or their revolutionary opponents—to manage ideas, imagery, data, information, or knowledge as they once did. Our account of bargaining has so far focused on just one dimension, namely the total sum of money and its split between the two sides. In fact there are many dimensions to bargaining: the union and management care not just about wages but health benefits, pension plans, conditions of work, and so on. The United States of America and its NATO allies care not just about total defense expenditures, but how they are allocated. In principle, many of these are reducible to equivalent sums of money, but with an important difference—each side may value the items different. Such differences open up new possibilities for mutually acceptable bargains. Suppose the company is able to secure group health coverage on better terms than the individual workers would obtain on their own—say, $1,000 per year instead of $2,000 per year for a family of four. Now the workers would rather have health coverage than an extra $1,500 a year in wages, and the company would rather offer health coverage than an extra $1,5000 in wages, too. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

It would seem that the negotiators should throw all the issues of mutual interest into a common bargaining pot, and exploit the differences in their relative valuations to achieve outcomes that are better for everyone. This works in some instances; for example, broad negotiations toward trade liberalization in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) have had better success than ones narrowly focused on particular sectors or commodities. However, joining issues together opens up the possibility of using one bargaining game to generate threats in another. For example, the United States of America may have had more success in extracting concessions in negotiations to pen up the Japanese market to its exports if it threatened a breakdown of the military relationship, thereby exposing Japan to a risk of Soviet or Chinese aggression. The United States of America had no interest in actually having this happen; it would be merely a threat that would induce Japan to make the economic concession. Therefore, Japan would insist that the economic and military issues be negotiated separately. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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Haunting Phenomena and Unsolved Winchester Mysteries

As we made our way through the hall, the cold outdoor light flooded the drawing room. The shutters had not been closed, nor the curtains drawn. I looked about me. The room was empty and every chair was in its usual place. My armchair was pushed up by the chimney, and the cold hearth was piled with the ashes of the fire at which I had warmed myself. My home was filled with ancient artifacts and historic pieces. It also housed several spirits. One night, as I sat in my armchair, my fear seemed to take on a new quality. It was like an icy liquid running through every vein, and lying in a pool about my heart. I discovered that there was something wrong with the chair when I felt someone grab my arm in a painful grip while I was resting in. Whatever it was left fingerprint bruises on my arm. I was convinced that a vengeful spirit had grabbed me. It absorbed me so completely that I was not aware how long I rained there. But suddenly a new impulse pushed me forward, and I walk on toward the scullery. I went there first because there was a service slide in the wall, through which I might peep into the kitchen without being seen; and some indefinable instinct told me that this particular kitchen held the clue to the mystery. I still felt strongly that whatever had happened in parlor must have its source and center in this kitchen. In the scullery, as I have expected, everything was clean and tidy. However, a voice was speaking in the kitchen—a man’s voice, low but empathic, and which I had never heard before. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

I stood there, cold with fear. But this fear was again a different one. As I turned to retreat across the smooth slippery floor, halfway through I crashed down on the tiles. The noise seemed to echo on and on through the emptiness, and I stood still, aghast. Now that I had betrayed my presence, flight was useless. Whoever was beyond the kitchen door would be upon me in a second. But to my astonishment the voice went on speaking. It was as though neither the speaker nor his listener had heard me. The invisible stranger spoke so ow that I could not make out what he was saying, but the tone was passionately earnest, almost threatening. The next moment I realized that he was speaking in a foreign language, a language unknown to me. Once more my terror was surmounted by the urgent desire to know what was going on, so close to me yet unseen. I crept to the slide, peered cautiously through into the kitchen, and saw tht it was as orderly empty as the other rooms. I froze when I saw a blue mist coming down their stairs. The mist dispersed before reaching me. I must have fainted them, I supposed; at any rate I felt so weak and dizzy that my memory of what happened remained indistinct. But in the course of time, I walked through the deserted ground floor, up the stairs, and down the corridor to my room. There, apparently, I feel across the threshold, again unconscious. When I came to, I saw a specter wandering the halls and hurrying along through the bookshelves. He literally knocked me out of his way. He plowed over me as he hurried toward the bookshelves. I was a bit flustered by his ungentlemanly behavior. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

I got up and crept silently down the stairs, walked through the hallways. It was a beautiful night, and a full moon was riding high in the sky. I felt quite exhilarated and not at all afraid. All the caretakers on the estate were fast asleep, so there was little chance of meeting anyone on my stroll through my mansion. Enjoying the solitude of my walk, I did not notice how far I had gone. It must have been two or three miles. As I realized that, I start my way back. Looking out the windows, I noticed that sky became overcast, covering the moon and making the night darker and darker. My mood changed to an eerie sort of fear and I kept walking faster and faster. Soon it was so dark that my fear almost became panic, for I could hardly in front of me anymore. At last, I could a candle and lit it. Suddenly I turned my head and looked over my shoulder. There, just a few yards behind me, floating about three feet above the ground, was a boy with blonde hair, following me at the same pace I was walking. He was glowing dully, but shed no light around him or on the ground. Almost as soon as I had seen him, he veered towards the wall, roe a bit, then sailed into the wall and disappeared. This strange boy behaved as if he were intelligent, for he had been following me in a straight line. But as soon as he was discovered, he swerved aside an went into the wall, as if hiding. And had not there been something unnatural about the sudden darkness? #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

Deep within the 600 rooms of my home, the imagination can be filled with bright colors of love and joy and the somber hues of tragic death and heartbreak. Then it came, the next morning while the famers were plowing and planting and caring for the young crops, the estate exploded in a scarlet haze. It was very odd. The sleep field and fruit orchards were littered with pieces of human flesh and cadavers of men and horses. In a few days, the famers found themselves planting quite a different crop around the estate and through the fertile fields. I had never seen anything worse than this vast sea of anguish. The spirits must have been upset. Although I had inherited $20,000,000 and $1,000 a day, I paid for this with my heart’s blood. Later that evening, my home was pelted by a shower of limestone and other debris as I sat reading in the front parlor on the first floor. Believing my mansion was crumbling, I jumped to my feet. Glancing warily toward the ceiling, there were no cracks in the ceiling. How could lime and debris fall on me from the ceiling if there was no hole from which they might drop? I stood up on a chair so that I might better inspect the ceiling. I was unable to detect one single sign of damage, but as I searched the area above me, lime once again began to rain down. I picked up a number of pieces from the fresh fall and they felt very cold to the touch, as if they had come from an outside wall. I continued studying the ceiling for some kind of opening through which the lime might have dropped. When I awakened the next morning, I was greatly disturbed to find the room carpeted by the mysterious lime, but there seemed to be no gaping cracks in the walls or ceiling that would have caused so much lime to fall. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

The following night, I was awakened by the sounds of what sounded like feet slipping across the floor. Then I clear heard a man say, “pardon me.” I lit got out of bed, lit a candle, proceeded down the hallway, and heard what sounded like voices in deep conversation, but no one was insight. I got the feeling of not being alone. As if someone invisible was with me. Walking down to the front parlor, I notice the picture William’s mother had given to us for a wedding present was no longer hanging over the fireplace, but learning against the fireplace screen. Moment later in levitated and hung itself back over the fireplace. The candles in the dining rooms appeared to be lighting themselves. The lights seemed to have a mind of their own. Walking through the house to inspect more rooms, I caught a glimpse of a man coming down toward me. Instinctively, I stepped back at the landing so the man could pass. No one came by and when I turned, I saw that I was alone. Who had been following me down the stairs? This was only one of many encounters with a man on their stairs or in the parlor. Before I removed the mansion, guests would have to go up to the second floor to use the rest room. Several guests were quite startled to see the face of a skeleton looking at them in the mirror rather than their own reflections. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

By the next evening, I had conducted an exhaustive search of all the possible “natural causes” for the disturbances. As the activity began to intensify, it became very apparent that the spirits were angry. Candlesticks flew from one corner of the room to another. When the I sat down to dinner, knives, forks, plates, and food became animated and airborne. Anything movable seemed to be possessed and have the ability to levitate about the room. Later that evening, I retired to the Daisy Bedroom and managed to start a fire in my grate, and after warming myself, got back into bed. The evening passed in a haze of pain, out of which there emerged now and then a dim shape of fear—the fear that I might lie here alone and untended still I died of cold, and of the terror of my solitude. For I was sure by the time that the house was empty—completely empty, from garret to cellar. I knew it was so, I could not tell why; but again I felt that it must be because of the peculiar quality of the silence—the silence which had followed my steps wherever I sent, and was now folded down on me like a pall. I was sure that the nearness of any other human being, however queer and secret, would have made a faint crack in the texture of that silence, flawed it as a sheet of glass is flawed by a pebble through against it. The lovely decorated walls of my gentle home was splattered with crimson residue; the wooden, oiled floors smeared umber from the writhings of the wounded. Innumerable bloated forms and traumatic horrors appeared. Putrefying human gore, and light hovered over the Grand Ball Room from perturbed spirits. And ectoplasm ascended upon the windows. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

O thou great and powerful King AMAYMON, who rulest by the power of the Supreme God, El, over all Spirits, superior and inferior, but especially over the Infernal Order in the Dominion of the East, I invoke and command three by the particular and true Name of God, and by the God whom thou dost worship, by the Seal of thy creation, by the most mighty and powerful name of God, JEHOVAH, TETRAGRAMMATON, who cast thee out of Heaven with the rest of the Infernal Spirits, by all the other potent and great names of God, Creator of Heaven, Earth and Hell, of all contained therein, by their powers and virtues, and by the Name PRIMEMATUM, which commands the whole host of Heaven. Do thou force and compel the Spirit Sarah L. Winchester here before this mansion, in a fair and comely shape, without injury to myself or to any other creature, that she may give us true and faithful  answers, so that we may accomplish our desired end, whatsoever it be, provided that it is proper to her office, by the power of God, EL, who hath created and doth dispose of all things, celestial, aerial, terrestrial, and infernal. Welcome, Spirits, welcome art thou unto us; we have called three through Him who created Heaven, Earth, and Hell, with all contained therein, and thou hast obeyed also by the like power. We bind three to remain affably and visibly before this mansion, within the mansion, so long as we need thee, and to depart not without or license, till thou hast truly and faithfully fulfilled all that we shall require. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7

The Winchester Mystery House

While there may be many instances in which the outbreak of poltergeist phenomena might be associated with the dramatic changes that adolescence brings to a child’s psyche, many of the classic cases of noisy ghosts throwing objects and severely disrupting the normal flow of things occurred where no adolescent was present. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

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