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I Will Condemn Thy Body and Soul

The desire to communicate with spirits is older than history; it connects with ineradicable principles inhuman nature. The sources of occult wisdom, it proceeds, are, firstly, in God, second spiritual essences—that is to say, the Angelical Hierarch; thirdly, in corporal creatures, the reference being probably to the signatura rerum of Paracelsus; fourthly, in Nature—that is to say, in a knowledge of the secret virtues of interval things, as, for example, herbs and precious stones; fifthly, but after a long interval in the apostate spirits reserved to the last judgment; sixthly, in ministers of punishment in hell, which seems to connect with the classical conception of avenging infernal gods; seventhly, in the people of the element, that is, the Salamanders, Sylphus, Undines, and Pigmies. If we would call any evil Spirit to the circle, it first behoveth us to consider and to know his nature, to which of the planets it agreeth, and what offices are distributed to him from the planet. This being know, let there be sought out a place fit and proper for his invocation, according to the nature of the planet and the quality of the offices of the same Spirit, as near as the same may be done. For example, if his power be over the sea, rivers or floods, then let a place be chosen on the shore, and so of the rest. The Spirits of Mars have a tall body and a choleric, filthy countenance, brown, swarthy, or red in colour; they have horns like the hart, claws like a griffin, and they bellow like wild bulls. They have the motion of burning fire, and their sign is thunder and lightening about the circle. Their particular forms are an armed king riding on a wolf; and armed man; a woman holding a buckler on her thigh; a she-goat; a horse; a stage; a red garment; wool; a cheestip. Wool of a choleric disposition is perhaps a Geotic form of dun-cotton. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6

White Magic, as the intelligences concerned are said to be good and great, but their offices are mixed and confusing, including the discovery of treasures, the detection of secrets, fomenting war, opening locks and bolts, and procuring the love of women, inclining men to luxury and sowing hatred and evil thoughts. Obviously, White Magic of this kind is much blacker than it is painted. And I will tell you something else, too. Within the Winchester Mansion there lies the legendary wonder-World of Mysticism, Magic, and Sorcery, a World of fascination or terror. There, also, the dead live, and the hierarchies of extra-mundane intelligence are within easy communication, and become ministers or tormentors, guides or destroyers of man. The jewels, the stained-glass and led glass windows, the family’s fortune, it is all connected. Same with the Winchester name. The powers possessed by these Intelligence are very curiously set forth. They rule naturally over certain departments and operations of the material World, but outside these departments they perform the same operations magically. The mansion is filled with Pentacles and Sigils, instrument used in magical ceremonies. Along the long, winding and twisting hallways, it is difficult to say where the mansion actually beings, so it is uncertain where it ends. There are many curious secrets or transcendental good and transcendental evil. Many of the recent revelations lead us to concede, within certain limits, that there may have been some recrudescence of diabolism on the estate, as it is possible that there was formal communication with the Powers of Darkness. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6

Under the pretence of White Magic, usually includes the Rites for the invocation of Evil Spirits. Many people do roam the halls of the Winchester Mansion looking about one to see if any Spirit does appear. And if any Spirit shall appear, let the invocant turn toward him or her, receive him or her courteously, and earnestly entreating one, let one require one’s name. Let one ask whatsoever he or she will. There are generally Spirits of the Air, who are undoubtedly demons, and a set of angelical conjurations floating about. Beyond the fact that the evoked Spirits are Lucifer, Beelzebuth, Astaroth, and the inferiors, be forewarned that conjurer is expected to give oneself, body and soul, to the demon who serves one. One might be otherwise be appalled at the frightful figures of those rebellious angels who in sin were cast into the abyss, and become tormented by witch craft or possessed by the demon. Sarah L. Winchester had been in a near daze one night from exhaustion. The heavy, leaden sky, the wind roaring against the windows. Darkness was falling with a pure metallic monotony to it. Heavy footsteps, sounds produced by a number of booted feet, were crossing the landing. Several moved quickly and as one, as if marching to some ethereal command; others dragged behind as if they belonged to the wounded. They paused abruptly at the top of the stairs because they lead to the ceiling, which confused the ghosts, as they stood marching on the spot. Mrs. Winchester bit her lip in fright. The housemaid, Hedvig, laid a comforting hand on her arm. Mrs. Winchester glared at the and waited for the commotion to cease. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6

The phantom footsteps began descending the stairs, tramping out a slow, ordered rhythm. Their determined marching was like that of a platoon of battle-weary soldiers advancing in a final push. With each tread gained, the marching grew louder. The footsteps were drawing ever close to the Venetian Dining Room. Although Mrs. Winchester’s heart did, in a perpetual eagerness of attention, sit in her great house alone, day after day, month after month, deprived of company, this fate was more cruel than she deserved and more painful than she could bear. Mrs. Winchester let out a cry, “It is rather gashtly. All the millions and—imprisonment in my home by spirits. Think of it—day after day, winter after winter, year after year, howling, banging, ghost, devils, demons, angels, and alone I remain.” Mrs. Winchester seemed to be the only one showing fear. Hedvig seized her chance. She spoke out into the tense silence, in a voice that was loud and confident. “You have my complete sympathy, Mrs. Winchester,” she’d said, briefly explaining her own position. “I can heart it.” Hedvig’s hands began to tremble. However, she looked at Mrs. Winchester with a reassuring smile. Mrs. Winchester began to sob in terror. There came a frantic pounding, as if several heavy boots were trying to kick down the door. The door flew open. Mrs. Winchester and Hedvig turned in fear. Suddenly the door slammed shut again. Mrs. Winchester stood up. She was terrified. Hedvig had been arrested by the opening and closing of the door, and was gasping out something inarticulate. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6

Mrs. Winchester ran out of the dining room and went upstairs. She rushed down the passage and through a door which communicated, rather surprisingly, with a narrow walled-in stair case that was unfamiliar to her. At the top, she found herself on a small landing upon which two doors opened. Through the confusion of her mind Mrs. Winchester noticed that these rooms, with their special staircase leading down to what had always been called Mr. William Winchester’s suit. It was neat, glossy and extremely cold. The red-apple glaze had barely faded from her cheeks, and not a lock was disarranged in the unnatural luster of her false front; even her cap and ribbons hung symmetrically along either cheek. However, death had happened to her, and had made her into someone else. At first glance it was impossible to say if the unspeakable horror in Hedvig’s wide open eyes were only the reflection of that change, or of the agent by whom it had come. Mrs. Winchester paused a moment. “Her hand is warm still—but no pulse. How did she get up here? She’s dead,” Mrs. Winchester pronounced. “Oh, poor thing! But how–?” Mrs. Winchester drew near, and was kneeling down, taking the inanimate hand in hers. Mrs. Winchester bending over, distinctly saw a circle of red marks on Hedvig’s throat—the marks of recent bruises. She looked again into the awful eyes. “She’s been strangled, but by whom? Perhaps that is why I was led to this bedroom.” Mrs. Winchester, with a shiver of fear, drew down the housemaid’s eyelids. There seemed, in the air o the cold room, something that forbade wonderment and silenced conjecture. “You hadn’t ought to have meddled with Mr. Winchester’s suit, my lady. That is what he must have punished you for. When it came to his privacy, he would not ever listen to human reason…even in his death, he demands privacy.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 6

Someone in the grip of demonic control feels compelled to act, to do the most objectionable things to others in order to somehow save themselves. There is a hierarchy of evil spirits. The minor ones, the foot soldiers, do the dirty work, to prepare the way for the generals. We know so little about ourselves and how our minds work. And there are demons just waiting to fool us. Hedvig had stumbled on Mr. Winchester’s Verus Jesuitarum Libellus, or “True Magical Work of the Jesuits,” which contained most powerful conjurations for all evil spirits of whatever state, condition, and office they are, and a most powerful conjuration of the Spirit Uriel. It was an original copy from the 16th century. The Conjurations are excessively curious. The first is addressed to a spirit whose name is not indicated, but he is supposed to have been obedient to Abraham and Isaac, and is directed to bring the magician out of the depths of the sea so many millions—the number is not specified, and depends upon the cupidity of the operator—of the best Spanish gold; otherwise, says the Conjuration, I will condemn thy body (sic) and thy soul. In the second formula, the spirit is cited by the knowledge and exorcising power of Agrippa, which again puts a definite limit to the antiquity of the collection, were it otherwise necessary. The third Invocation is addressed to the spirit Zayariel, who is conjured by Agla Scheffert and the great Jehova Podashocheia. The remainder, to the number of seven in all, are nearly identical in character and quite in purpose, the demon being invariably required to bring that which is desired by the operator from the depths of the sea, or from the abyss of the waters, or from the spiritual abyss. The Discharge or Absolution which concludes the series is really an additional conjuration. Perhaps we are not really as advanced as we think and should heed warnings about occulta powers. I implore Thee, O Thou Grand and Powerful ADONAY, Master of all Spirits! I beseech Thee, O Eloim! I Implore Thee, O JEHOVAM! O Grand ADONAY, I give unto Thee my soul, my heart, my inward parts, my hands, my feet, my desires, my entire being! O Grand ADONAY, deign to be favourable unto me! So be it. Amen. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6


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That a highly organized monarchy of evil spirit-beings was in existence is not made known in the story of the garden. Only a “serpent” is there; but in the serpent is spoken to by God as an intelligent being, carrying out a deliberate purpose in the deception of the woman. The serpent-disguised of Satan is swept aside by God as He makes known the decision of the Triune God in view of catastrophe which had taken place: a “Seed” of the deceived woman would eventually bruise the head of the supernatural being who had used the form of the serpent to carry out his plan. Yet from that point on the name of “serpent” is attached to him throughout the ages, for it describes the climax action of his revolt against his Creator in beguiling and deceiving the women in Eden and blasting the human race. Satan triumphed, but God overruled. The victim is made the vehicle for the advent of a Victor, who would ultimately destroy the work of the devil and cleanse the Heavens and the Earth from every trace of his handiwork. The serpent is cursed, but, in effect, the beguiled victim is blessed, for through her will come the ”Seed” which will triumph over the devil and his seed; and through her will arise a new race through the promised Seed (Gen. 3.15), a race which will be antagonistic to the serpent to the end of time, through the enmity implanted by God. Henceforth the story of the ages consists of the record of a war between these two seeds: the Seed of the woman—Christ and His redeemed—and the seed of the devil (See John 8.44; 1 John 3.10), right on to the furthermost point of the final committal of Satan to the lake of fire. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

Henceforth it is also war by Satan upon the womanhood of the World, in malignant revenge for the verdict of the garden. Yes, war by the trampling down of women in all lands where the deceiver reigns. And war upon all women in Christian lands too, by the continuance of his Eden method of misinterpreting the Word of God: insinuating into men’s minds throughout all succeeding ages that God pronounced a “curse” upon the woman, when in truth she was pardoned and blessed; and instigating fallen men to personally carry out this supposed curse, though in truth it was a CURSE UPON THE DECEIVER and not upon the deceived one (Gen. 3.14). “I will put enmity between thee and the woman,” said God, a well as between “thy seed and her seed,” and this vindictive enmity of the hierarchy of evil toward women, and especially believers, had not lessened in its intensity from that day. Normative and behavioral aspects of a street gang collectively serve to shape and routinize the violent ways of its members. A gang is defined as an, “aggregated peer group that exhibits permanence, engages in criminal activity, and has symbolic representations of memberships.” For gangs, violence generally services critical, symbolic purpose withing the gang subculture. In many cases, violent themes permeate all aspect of gang life. Most gang members seek to develop and maintain a threatening physical presence. Violence tends to be incorporated into the entry rituals, social gatherings, and story-telling of the group. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

An overdeveloped sense of urgency and “threat” produces a contagion of violence, a hallmark of which is a never-ending cycle of preemptive and retaliatory violence among and between rival gangs. Gangs share many of the properties of mobs, crowds, and other collectives, and engage in many forms of collective behavior. Gangs have turf, symbols, organizational structure, permanence, criminality, and a sketchy sense of loyalty. One will notice a gang is always brought down when they trust an outsider. They fail to notice tale tale sighs that someone is working undercover. Many times, they also get too greed, to sloppy, think they are too big to fail, and talk too much, which leads to their down fall. Many gangs do not know when to give up and leave. It is like they are begging to be arrested and sent to prison. Their group membership, behavior, and values, however, make them interesting to criminologist who study gangs. Collective behavior explanations provide insights into gang processes, particularly the escalation of violence, the spread of gangs from one community to another, and increases in gang membership in specific communities. Violence, as we have mentioned, tends to be integral to the life in the gang, and gang members engage in more violence than other youths and senior citizens. Our analysis of gang violence focuses on the role of threat, actual or perceived, in explaining the functions and consequences of gang violence. We define threat as the potential for transgression against or physical harm to the gang, represented by the acts or presence of a rival group. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Threats of violence are important because they have consequences for future violence. Threat plays a role in the origin and growth of gangs, their daily activities, and their belief systems. In a sense, it help to define them to rival gangs, to the community, and to social institutions. Gangs are set apart from other groups by their ability to create “dread,” a direct consequence of involvement in and willingness to use violence. Dread elevates these individuals to street elites through the community members’ perceptions of gang members as violent. In many neighborhoods, groups form for protection against the threat of outside groups. Sometimes these groups are established along ethnic lines, though territorial concerns often guide their formation. There is a natural progression from a neighborhood group to a gang, particularly in the face of “adversarial relations” with outside groups. The emergence of many splinter gangs can be traced to the escalation of violence within larger gangs, and to the corresponding threat that the larger gang comes to represent to certain territorial or age-graded subgroups. Threat also may contribute to the growth of gangs. This mechanism works in two ways: through building cohesiveness and through contagion. Threats of physical violence increase the solidarity or cohesiveness of gangs within neighborhoods as well as across neighborhoods. The source of gang cohesion is primarily external—the results of intergang conflict. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Cohesion within the gang grows in proportion to the perceived threat represented by rival gangs. Threat maintains gang boundaries by strengthening the ties among gang members and increasing their commitment to each other, thus enabling them to overcome an initial reluctance about staying in the gang and ultimately engaging in violence. Thus the threat of a gang in a geographically proximate neighborhood increases the solidarity of the gang, motivates more young men to join their neighborhood gang, and enables them to engage in acts of violence that they might not have committed otherwise. The growth of gangs and gang violence contains elements of what is called “contagion.” In this context, contagion refers to subsequent acts of violence caused by an initial act; such act typically takes the form of retaliation. Violence—or its threat—is the mechanism that spreads gang from one neighborhood to another, as well as contributing to their growth. As the population of people of color grows in a community, many European Americas are prone to[RH1] move when the neighborhood diversifies. This is due to their fears of gang violence, and negative stereotypical beliefs about other racial and ethnic group. Some say White flight is due to increases in crimes, and conflicting political agendas. Many people wonder why there are so few European Americans in low income and middle-class neighborhoods. Well, it is because they tend to become victims of crime and are pushed out of their communities, which creates segregation. Many people do not realize it, but some African Americans are extremely racist. And speaking of segregation, by blockbusting, it is fascinating because many low income races of people do not like living around each other, due to the violence and crime and pests, but then they move to another community, threaten and harass the Europeans Americas until they move and create a ghetto. However, you will then find that these people do not like each other, they do not like living in the ghetto, and want to move out. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

Yet, the housing authority in many communities are not actually redeveloping. They are creating ghettos by violating fair housing laws and only renting to low income ethic groups, often from the same family, under the rouse of a lottery system. However, the exclude European America applicants, especially if they are young. The ability to manage the property because impossible because the management is in fear of the residence and neighbors in the surrounding houses live in fear and choose to move. As the community becomes undesirable, the property rates decrease because the area is what the insurance company deems high risk neighborhood (HRN), which makes the rates of any time of insurance in the neighborhood increase because more losses are sustained in that area. It also reduces the likelihood of investments in the neighborhood because it is unsafe. The threat of attack by a group of organized youth or senior citizens from another neighborhood is part of the gang “myth” or belief system, and helps to create the need for protection as well as to generate unity in a previously unorganized group of neighborhood youths and senior citizens. The origin and spread of such beliefs explain, among other things, the viability of the gang. Threat performs an additional function: it enhances the mythic nature of violence in the gang by increasing the talk about violence and preparedness for violent engagements. The threat of violence also “enables” gang member to engage in violent acts (especially retaliatory violence) that they might not have chosen under other circumstances. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

The need to respond effectively to rival gang violence escalates weaponry and increases the “tension” that often precedes violent encounters between gangs. Threat has an additional function, however. As gangs and gang members engage in acts of violence and create “dread,” they are viewed as threatening by other (gang and non-gang) groups and individuals. Also, over time, the threats that gang members face and pose isolate them from legitimate social institutions such as schools, families, and the labor market. This isolation, in turn, prevents them from engaging in the very activities and relationships that might reintegrate them into legitimate roles and reduce their criminal involvement. It weakens their ties to the socialization power and the controlling norms of such mainstream institutions, and frees them to commit acts of violence. When once we clearly recognize the existence of an unseen host of evil spirit-being, all actively engaged in deceiving and misleading humans, Old Testament of the Christian Holy Bible history will convey to us an open vision of their doings otherwise hidden from our knowledge. We can trace their operations in relation to the servants of God throughout all history and discern the work of Satan as deceiver penetrating everywhere. We shall see that David was deceived by Satan into numbering Israel because he failed to recognize that the suggestion to his mind was from a satanic source (1 Chron. 21.1). #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

That is why it is not only important for people to remain active members of the church, but to also take a class on Home Economics and also learn how to remain in compliance with the law and be good neighbors by keeping your home clean, inside and out, and not to make too much noise, nor to have too many people hanging out in front of your property. Since senior citizens and the youth have special license as regards involvement rulings, we might ask whether, in American society at least, the genders are differently defined in this regard. Some evidence suggests that women, in general, are more tightly defined than men. There is at least a popular belief that the female toilet takes longer than the male, and that therefore more is entailed in making a female presentable thana in making a male presentable. So, too, a man who appears on a public street with his hair tousled, his tie loosened, a cigarette dangling from his lips seems to be less of an affront to public decorum than is a woman similarly disarrayed. Drunkenness in a woman has a much higher visibility than that in a man, which can be traced to the symbolic qualities of drinking and drunkenness in women in the past, when drinking customarily symbolized the bawd and the harlot. The lack of a long experience with drinking on the part of women in America may explain the greater loss of control they show in their tippling. Another possibility to be counted is that women are more likely to be badly maladjusted when they first turn to excessive drinking, and as a result their overt behavior becomes more flagrantly disorganized. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

The high-pitched and overt behavior becomes more flagrantly disorganized. The high-pitched and shrill laughter of the drunken women often brands her behavior more quickly for what it is than in a man. Women are supposed to be neater, cleaner, fresher, and more fastidious about their dress than the opposite gender, so that disarray brought drunkenness also demarcates their condition more sharply. And yet, of course, women are sometimes defined as creatures who are not expected to be full-fledged participants in public meetings, and so can sometimes engage in somewhat taxing side involvements such as knitting, in recognition that they have not been deeply drawn into the occasioned main involvement. Similarly, there are coming to be more semipublic situations where a young woman may half-daringly slip her shoes off, while a man in the same setting cannot; but perhaps this is merely a sign that the female’s tightness of orientation is more than shoe-deep, and that a foot sheathed only in nylon is already almost presentable enough for safe public display. To speak of the general level of tightness or looseness built into a role is to imply a social rigidity: that is, the individual may be unable from the start to fit into certain social gatherings, finding that some are defined too loosely and others too tightly. Correspondingly, the individual will tend to exhibit alienation from those gatherings from which his role causes him to be unsuitably involved, and even be led to exhibit this kind of alienation at times when he does not want to. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

In this context it is worth considering the relation of work and clothing to the problem of fitting into gatherings. Some clothing, like that worn by deep-sea divers or firemen, is inextricably geared to the task at hand. These personal fronts can hardly serve in nonoccupational situations, nor can hardly serve in nonoccupational situations, nor can the possessor, unless he changes clothes. Even during the coffee-break he will be showing a certain kind of devotion to the job. In the case of white-collar task, however, work clothes transcend the work place and enable the worker to merge into gatherings occurring off the job. Correspondingly, when he is on the job, there will be parts of himself that he need not submerge into work, and this in fact provides him with one basis for self-possession and dignity. Those who must wear a uniform at work, and who cannot leave it in the locker room when they leave the premises, are likely to feel that they are under special constraint to give much of themselves to work and to carry this contribution to any nonwork situation in which they happen to find themselves. In the army, of course, this may be quite explicitly stressed by admonitions to respect one’s uniform. We find, then, that persons often feel unfairly restricted in uniform; they carp about not being able to melt easily into loose gatherings that happen to occur, and they feel their autonomy is threatened. Some individual may, of course, desire to maintain a pervasive alienation from their society at large, and seek membership in informed quasi-military groups partly in order to ensure that they will always be a little out of place. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

When you come into contact with the second and third lines of work, you necessarily come into contact with the will of others. “Is not stopping the expression of negative emotions more or less the same thing as giving up willfulness?” Why do you want to translate one thing into another? Willfulness may have many forms without a definite connection with negative emotions. “It seems to me that if you give up self-will you will get what you desire; that by giving up the desire, you get the desired results.” That is not self-will. Self-will does not include everything you want. If you are hungry and want to eat, that is not self-will. Self-will means preferring to act by yourself and, in our cause, not taking into consideration the work and the principles of the work. We speak of principles of the work and self-will. We can do things in our own way or not. If my self-will is to swear, for instance, and I give it up because it is against the principles of the work, where are the desired results you speak of? As I said earlier, self-will is always connected with self-opinions, a human always thinks one knows something. Then one comes to a school and realizes that one knows nothing. That is why preparation is necessary for school. One is usually full of self-opinions and self-will. Self-will is like a child saying, “I know it myself; I will do it myself.” Self-will has many features. One is told not to do something and at once one wants to do it; one is told that something is wrong, and at once one says, “No, I know better.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

A man who comes to teach school must be ready to accept the teaching and the discipline of the school; he must be free to accept it, or else he will get nothing. He cannot acquire will unless he gives up self-will; just as he cannot acquire knowledge unless he gives up self-opinions. “Must one break self-will oneself, or have it broken?” One must do it oneself, and one must have broken it sufficiently to be in a school. One must be sufficiently free from it to accept things without a fight. One cannot keep all the old views and opinions and acquire new ones. One must be sufficiently free to give up the old, at least for a time. One must be able to understand the necessity of discipline. Will cannot be created until one accepts a certain discipline. Strengthen your self-discipline and discover how it can help you succeed in all areas of your life. Most of life’s mistakes are easily overcome through simple, sincere repentance, a process common to nearly all religious people. In rare instances, we may commit serious transgressions that jeopardize our progress. Church discipline—restrictions and conditions of repentance that prompt a person to reevaluate their situation and return to full fellowship and activity—is a process designed to help us overcome sin in these instances. For all sins, large and small, it is the sacrifice and suffering, mercy and grace—or Atonement—of Jesus Christ that makes repentance possible. Church discipline is designed to help an individual more fully apply the Atonement of Jesus Christ, be cleansed of their sins and move forward in their eternal progression. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

Repentance brings peace when we place our lives in harmony with the teachings of Jesus Christ. Church discipline is a process that helps the individual feel that change of heart and change of behavior necessary to bring full forgiveness and peace. Someone who has fulfilled the requirements of Church discipline can be completely forgiven and return to full participation in the Church. Protect the innocent. When someone poses a physical threat to others or a spiritual threat to other members, Church discipline is conducted to provide protection to predatory practices, physical harm, abuse, fraud and apostasy. We all possess the God-given gift of moral agency—the right to make choice and the obligation to account for those choices. “That every human may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him or her, that every man or woman may be accountable for his or her own sins in the day of judgement,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 101.78. By “moral discipline,” I mean self-discipline based on moral standards. Moral discipline is the consistent exercise of agency to choose the right because it is right, even when it is hard. It rejects the self-absorbed life in favor of developing character worthy of respect and true greatness through Christlike service (see Mark 10.42-45). Jesus’s own moral discipline was rooted in His discipleship to the Father. To His disciples He explained, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work,” reports John 4.34. By this same pattern, our moral discipline is rooted in loyalty and devotion to the Father and the Son. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that provides the moral certainty upon which moral discipline rests. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

When the fraction using technology is constant over time, we are at an equilibrium of the game. Our preference for gasoline engines over steam and light-water nuclear reactors over gas-cooled is better explained by historical accidents than by the superiority of the adopted technologies. In 1890 there were three ways to power automobiles—steam, gasoline, and electricity—and of these one was patently inferior to the other two: gasoline. [A turning point for gasoline was] an 1895 horseless carriage competition sponsored by the Chicago Times Herald. This was won by a gasoline-powered Duryea—one of only two cars to finish out six starters—and has been cited as the possible inspiration for R.E. Olds to patent in 1896 a gasoline power source, which he subsequently mass-produced in the “Curved-Dash Olds.” Gasoline thus overcame its slow start. Steam continued viable as an automotive power source until 1914, when there was an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in North America. This led to the withdrawal of horse troughs—which is where steam cars could fill with water. It took the Stanley brothers about three years to develop a condenser and boiler system that did not need to be filled every thirty or forty miles. However, by then it was too late. The steam engine never recovered. While there is little doubt that today’s gasoline technology is better than steam, that is not the right comparison. How would steam have been if it had the benefit of seventy-five years of research and development? While we may never know, some engineers believe that steam was the better bet. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

In the United States of America, almost all nuclear power is generated by light-water reactors. Yet there are reasons to believe that the alternative technologies of heavy-water or gas-cooled reactors would have been superior, especially given the same amount of learning and experience. Canada’s experience with heavy-water reactors allows them to generate power for 25 percent less cost than light-water reactors can operate without the need to reprocess fuel. Perhaps most important is the safety comparison. Both heavy-water and gas-cooled reactors have a significantly lower risk of a meltdown—heavy water because the high pressure is distributed over many tubes rather than a single core vessel, and gas-cooled because of the much slower temperature rise in the event of a coolant loss. The question of how light-water reactors came to dominate has recently been studied by Robin Cowen, in a 1987, Stanford University Ph.D. thesis. The first consumer for nuclear power was the U.S.A. Navy. In 1949, then Captain Rickover made the pragmatic choice in favor of light-water reactors. He had two good reasons. It was then the most compact technology, an important consideration for submarines, and it was the furthest advanced, suggesting that it would have the quickest route to implementation. In 1954, the first nuclear-powered submarine, Nautilus, was launched. The results looked very optimistic. At the same time civilian nuclear power become a high priority. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

The Soviets had explored their first nuclear bomb in 1949. In response, Atomic Energy Commissioner T. Murray warned, “One we become fully conscious of the possibility that [energy-poor] nations will gravitate towards the USSR if it wins the nuclear power race, it will be quite clear that this race is no Everest-climbing, kudos-providing contest. General Electric and Westinghouse, with their experience producing light-water reactors for the nuclear-powered submarines, were the natural choice to develop civilian power stations. Considerations of proven reliability and speed of implementation took precedence over finding the most cost-effective and safest technology. Although light-water was first chosen as an interim technology, this gave it enough of a head start down the learning curve that the other options have never had the chance to catch up. The adoption of gasoline engines, and light-water reactors are but two demonstrations of how history matters in determining today’s technology choices. The important insight from game theory is to recognize early on the potential for future lock-in—once one option has enough of a head start, superior technological alternatives may never get the chance to develop. Thus there is a potentially great payoff in the early stages from spending more time figuring out not only what technology meets today’s constraints, but also what options will be the best for the future. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Although exploratory engineering research can show certain technological possibilities, gaining this knowledge can have a paradoxical effect on our feeling of knowledge, on our sense of how much we know about the future. It gives us more information, but it can reveal a range of possibilities so vast that we feel as if we know less than we did before. The prospect of nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing has this paradoxical effect. It makes certain scenarios—such as a mid-twenty first century World of poverty, or choking on pollution caused by massive accumulations of twentieth-century-style industry—seem very unlikely indeed. This is useful information in trying to understand our real situation and trying to make sensible plans for the future. And yet the range of new possibilities opened up is broader than we could have imagined before. On the negative side, one can imagine building engines of destruction capable of devasting the World as thoroughly as a nuclear war. On the beneficial side, one can imagine futures of stable peace with levels of health, wealth, and environmental quality beyond any historical precedent and beyond present expectations. But recall the energy crisis of the 1980s, when home owners and businesses could be fined $10,000 (2023 inflation adjusted $36,307.04) for turning on the heat, the thermostat, during the winter, was required to stay at 65-degrees Fahrenheit. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

Within this spectrum of possibilities (and off to its sides) is a range of futures we cannot even imagine. Our actions, day by day, are taking us into one of those futures. Not to some future of our present plans or dreams or nightmares, but to a real future, one that will grow from the intended and unintended consequences of our actions, one that we and our descendants will actually have to live in. Scenarios are useful tools for thinking about the future. They do not represent predictions of what will happen, but instead they present pictures of Worlds that one can imagine happening. By looking at these pictures and seeing how they fit together, we can try to get some idea of which events are more likely and which are less likely, and to get some idea of how the choices we make today may affect the shape of the things to come. We are about to see a fusion of government and private business intelligence on a scale never before known in the capitalist economies. Governments and companies have long had truck with one another. Some giant firms have long provided “cover” for government agents. For example, the Bechtel Corporation, the San Francisco-based construction firm that had hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of contracts in the Middle East, gave nominal jobs to CIA operatives. In return, Bechtel received commercially valuable intelligence from the CIA. At one time U.S. businesses provided cover for some two hundred intelligence agents posted abroad who pretended to be executives. The companies were reimbursed for their costs. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

On the other hand, while may countries simply “expect” their business people to cooperate with intelligence and may apply pressure if they refuse, the United State of America does not. America business executives, including those who have had contacts with high-level foreign politicians, are seldom debriefed. The line between public and private espionage will continue to blur. As multinational corporations proliferate, many grown their own private intelligence networks—“para-CIA,” as it were. This is as true for European oil companies or banks and for Japanese trading houses as it is for American construction firms. Contact between some of these para-CIAs and the intelligence units of their own or their host countries must be assumed. Paralleling “para-intelligence” operations abroad is the recent spread of so-called “competitive intelligence” units in domestic industry. While designed to operate within the law, these apply, at least on a rudimentary level, many of the same methods and skills used by government intelligence operations. The possibilities for informal links with government increase as these business firms hire former spies and analysts from the ranks of government. Such incestuous relationships will multiply as a consequence of the restructuring of World business now taking place, which is leading to complex-cross-national business alliances. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

The company entering into a “strategic alliance” with another firm may never know that some of its partner’s operations are actually espionage activities run for the benefit of the government. Or it may want to know—and demand that its own government’s spies find out. Inevitably, such changes will drag many formerly “private” business activities into the public purview, politicizing them, and firing off a succession of charges, countercharges, upheavals, and explosive scandals. Another change that parallels recent developments in business will be a shift of emphasis from mass production to customization of intelligence. Government policy-makers are demanding more and more targeted, particularized, and precise information. This requires either customized collection of information or, at a minimum, customized analysis. To meet this demand—especially in the fields of economics, technology, and environment—requires pinpointed tactical information about so vast a variety of matters that not even the largest intelligence producers, like the CIA, will be able to recruit, maintain, and pay for all the necessary specialists. Intelligence agencies will therefore do what companies are doing: They will contract more work out, breaking up the vertical integration characteristic of mass-production operations. Espionage agencies have always done some contracting out. The CIA and French intelligence have both hired gangster and Mafiosi to carry out unpleasant tasks for them. Intelligence agencies have often set up pseudo-businesses—like the famous “Foreign Excellent Trench Coat Company,” used as a cover by the Red Orchestra spy network during its work against the Nazis in World War II, or the CIA’s “proprietary” airlines used during the Vietnam War. However, spies will soon be forced to rely on independent outside suppliers and consultants to a great extent than ever. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

The basis for this “out-sourcing” is already being laid by the proliferation of private research boutiques specializing in everything from political risk analysis to technical information searches. Business Environment Risk Information, a Long Beach, California, firm, has made whopping mistakes on occasion, but it is also credited with having told its business subscribers in December of 1980 that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would be assassinated. He was, ten months later. It also correctly forecast Iraq’s invasion of Iran nine months ahead of time. As long ago as 1985, even before the boom in such shops, there were scores of these info-boutiques. Many employ former senior officials or intelligence agents. The most prominent is Kissinger Associates, which at one time or another has employed Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President Bush; Lawrence Eagleburger, the number two man in the American State Department; William Simon, a former Secretary of the Treasury; and, of course, Henry Kissinger himself, a former national security adviser and once Secretary of state. Officials with intelligence connections move in and out of such firms—among them William F. Colby, former director of the CIA, who set up his own shop in Washington after leaving the agency. Said Colby: “The assessment business is a lot like the intelligence business.” Private intelligence enterprises can provide “deniability” to the governments that hire them; they can attract the best professionals at free-market, rather than civil service, wages; they can also perform the niche tasks for which large, bureaucratic sup shops are inherently ill-fitted. What we may well see, therefore, is a far closer fusion or interpenetration of business and government intelligence-seeking. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

I will continue to hold my banner aloft. I find myself born—aye, born—into a people and a religion. The preservation of my people must be for a purpose, for God does nothing without a purpose. His reasons are unfathomable to me, but on my own reason I place little dependence; test it where I will, it fails me. The simple, the ultimate in every direction is sealed to me. It is as difficult to understand matter as mind. The courses of the planets are no harder to explain the growth of a blade of grass. Therefore am I willing to remain a link in the great chain. What has been preserved for four thousand years was not saved that I should overthrow it. My people have survived the prehistoric paganism, the Babylonian polytheism; and it will survive the modern dilettantism and the current materialism, holding aloft the traditional Christian ideals inflexibly until the World shall become capable of recognizing their worth. I am a Christian because the faith of America demands no abdication of my mind. I am a Christian because the faith of America asks every possible sacrifice of my soul. I am a Christian because in all places where there are tears and suffering the Christian weeps. I am a Christian because every age when the cry of despair is heard the Christian hopes. I am a Christian because the message of America is the most ancient and the most modern. I am a Christian because America’s promise is a universal promise. I am a Christian because for American the World is not finished; men will complete it. I am a Christian because for America man is not yet fully created; men are creating him. I am a Christian because America places man and his unity above nations and above America itself. I am a Christian because above man, image of the divine unity, American placed the unity which is divine. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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Where is My John Wayne? Where is My Prairie Song? Where is My Happy Ending?

Enthusiasm is undoubtedly a disorder of the mind; and such disorder as greatly hinders the exercise of reason. Nay, sometimes it wholly sets it aside: it not only dims but shuts the eyes of the understanding. It may, therefore, well be accounted a species of madness; of madness rather than folly: seeing a fool is properly one who draws wrong conclusions from right premises; whereas a madman draws right conclusions, but from wrong premises. And so does an enthusiast. Suppose his or her premises are true, and his or her conclusions would necessarily follow. However, here lies one’s mistake: one’s premises are false. One imagines oneself to be what one is not, and therefore, setting out wrong, the farther one goes out, the more one wanders out of the way. Very earlier in the history of the Christian Church the subtle temptation to a kind of inverted humility, which is really the worst and most dangerous form of spiritual pride, disclosed itself in portentous scandals. The Adventists of Thessalonica, who refused their normal obligations in the interest of a complete self-preparation for the Lord’s coming, have had their representatives in many strange sects in Europe and America, who have been carried into amazing tracks allows an individual to define and redefine one’s experience by the strategic placement of information. Sometimes, the individual receives outside help. For example, when Milgram in 1963 placed a barrier between people, administering electric shocks, and the bogus “subjects” who were supposedly receiving the shocks, he made it easier for the shockers to “disattend” signs of human distress from their hapless victims. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

In other cases help can come from guides who direct the novice on what to experience and what to block out. Beginning marijuana smokers are cautioned to ignore feelings of nausea. On the other hand, novice hit men like Pete are reluctant to share their “experience” with any one else. It would be a sign of weakness. In still other cases, however, it is possible that the subject can do the reframing on his or her own. And this is what appears to have happened to Pete. “And then the second one [the second hit] came up, [Pete] was still thinking about the first one. Yeah, when he got ready to go, he was to the moment that he killed the second guy, he waited, you know. Going through his mind was the first guy he killed. He still seeing him still see the expression on his face. Soon, the second guy walked up; I mean, it was like just his mind just blanked out for a minute, everything just blanked out. Next thing he knew, he had killed the second guy. He knew what he was doing, but what I mean, he just didn’t have nothing on his mind. Everything was wiped out,” reports Pete. When the second victim approached, Pete says that he noticed the victim’s approach, he was aware of the man’s presence. However, he noticed none of the victim’s personal features. He did not see the victim’s face or its expression. Thus, as if Pete had negatively conditioned himself to avoid certain cues. Since he shot the victim in the head, it is probable that Pete saw him in one sense; this is not the same kind of experience as a dissociative reactions, which has been linked to sleep-walking. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Pete says, that “he knew what he was doing.” However, he either did not pay attention to his victim’s personal features at the time of the killing, or he blocked them out immediately afterward, so that now the only aspect of his victim he recalls is the victim’s approach (if we are to believe him). While demons do not possess a material body, they can act upon the human body, as well as the human soul and spirit. They are capable of entering in and assuming control of a human body, speaking and acting through it from time to time and even possessing it, as if it were their own property. That demons are individuals is attested by their intelligent and voluntary action. They think, they speak, they act through a spiritistic medium or through a person over whom they have acquired control. After his second murder, Pete says that killing became routine. He learned to view his victims as “targets,” rather than as people. Thus, he believes that the second experience is the crucial one, and that the disattendance of the victim’s persona features made it so. Because demons are spirit personalities, they can act upon and influence a man or woman’s body and mind. Support from other account of hit men is scant, due to a lack of data. Furthermore, not everyone in Pete’s account supports the “reframing” hypothesis. In talking about later killings, it is clear that he not only attends to his victims’ personal features, on occasion, but he also derives a certain grim pleasure in doing so. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

“The victim was a nice looking woman. She started weeping, and [she cried], ‘I ain’t did this, I ain’t did that.’ And [Pete] said that he shot her. Like it wasn’t nothing…he didn’t feel nothing. It was just money,” reports Pete. It may be the this evidence contradicts what I said about reframing, but perhaps another interpretation is possible. Reframing may play a more crucial role in the original redefinition of an experience than in the continued maintenance of that redefinition. Once Pete has accustomed himself to viewing his victims as merely targets, as “just money,” then it may be less threatening to look upon them as persons, once again. Once the “main story line” has been established, discordant information can be presented in the “overly track,” without doing too much damage. Foe what I have been referring to as “disattendance” Pete used the term “heart,” which he defined as a “coldness.” When asked what he would look for in an aspiring hit man, Pete replied, “ See if he’s got a whole lot of heart…you got to be cold…you got to build a coldness in yourself. It’s not something that comes automatically. Cause, see, I don’t care who he is, first, you’ve got feelings,” reports Pete. However, the “made rather than born” thesis does explain one perplexing feature of hit men and other “evil” men whose banality has sometimes seemed discordant. In other aspects of their lives they all seem perfectly capable of feeling ordinary human emotions. Their inhumanity, their coldness, seems narrowly restricted to their jobs. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Pete, for example, talked about his “love” for little children. Examples of human warmth indicate that the cold heart of the hit man may be less a characteristic of the killer’s individual personality, than a feature of the professional framework of experience which the hit man or woman has learned to adapt oneself to, when one is on the job. As we have been studying ways of deviance neutralization, it is clear that the freelance hit man or woman is an example of an individual who, relatively alone, must deal with a profound and unambiguous stigma in order to enter one’s career. “Heart” seems to be a dedicating factor in becoming a professional. The inhibitions against murder-for-money are real. “Heart” or the ability to adapt to rationalized framework for killing—has been portrayed as the outcome of an initial process of reframing, in addition to other neturalization techniques established during the further stages of professionalizations. People often enter into deviant acts first, then develop rationales for their behaviour later on. This was also the case with Pete, who began his career by first, being willing, encountering a frame-break, undergoing negative experience, being willing to try again (also known as “getting back on the horse”), reframing the experience, and having future, routine experiences wherein his professionalization increasingly enabled him to “deny the victim,” “deny injury,” and “deny responsibility.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Through the process of reframing, the experience of victim-as-target emerged as the “main storyline,” and the experience of victim-as-person was downgraded from the main track to the disattended track to the overlay track. Ironically, the intensity of the negative experience seemed to make the process all the more successful. Thus, it may be possible for a person with “ordinary human feelings” to pass through the novice stage, and to continue with “normal relations” thereafter. This suggests that hit men and women may not be psychopaths, but it is possible that they are possessed. The reframing hypothesis has implications for other people who knowingly perform stigmatized behaviors. It may be particularly useful in explaining personal conversion experience that occurs despite the relative absence of deviant peer group, deviant norms, extenuating circumstances, and neutralization rationales. If all that the Christian Holy Bible and Book of Mormon contains on the subject of the supernatural power of evil could be exhaustively dealt with, we would find that more knowledge is given of the workings of Satan, and his principalities and powers, than many have realized. From Genesis to Revelation the work of Satan as deceiver of the whole inhabited Earth can be traced until the climax is reached, and the full results of the deception in the Garden of Eden are unveiled in the Apocalypse. In Genesis we have the simple story of the garden, with the guileless pair unaware of danger from evil beings in the unseen World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

We find recorded there Satan’s first work as deceiver, and the subtle form of his method of deception. We see him working upon an innocent creature’s highest and purest desires, and cloaking his own purpose of ruin under the guise of seeking to lead a human being nearer to God. We see him using the God-ward desires of Eve to bring about captivity and bondage to himself. We see him using “good” to bring about evil; suggesting evil to bring about supposed good. Caught with the bait of being “wise,” and “like God,” Eve is blinded to the principle involved in obedience to God and DECEIEVED (1 Tim. 2.14). Goodness is, therefore, no guarantee of protection from deception. The keenest way in which the devil deceived the World, and the Church, is when he comes in the guise of somebody, or something, which apparently causes them to go God-ward and good-ward. He said to Even, “Ye shall be as gods,” but he did not say, “and ye shall be like demons.” Angeles and men only knew evil when they fell into a state of evil. Satan did not tell Eve this when he added “knowing good and evil.” His true objective in deceiving Eve was to get her to disobey God, but his wile was, “Ye shall be like God.” Had she reasoned, she would have seen that the deceiver’s suggestion exposed itself, for it crudely receiver’s suggestion exposed itself, for it crudely resolved itself into “disobey God” to be more like God! The lawless tyrant, who denies to know their God, or message to regard, must be compelled by signs and judgments dire; to blood unshed rivers must be turned, frogs, lice and flies must all his palace fill with loathed intrusion, and fill all the land. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

However, when buffers are shaken, conscience awakes. “How can one discover what one’s own buffers are?,” asked someone else. Sometimes it is possible. If one has the right idea of buffers, one may find one’s own. There is a great difference between excuses and buffers. Excuses may be different every time, but if the excuse is always the same, then it becomes a buffer. Buffers are connected with conscience. Conscience is a word we use generally in a conventional sense, to mean a sort of educated emotional habit. Really, conscience is a special capacity which everybody possesses but which nobody can use in the state of sleep. Even if we feel conscience for a moment accidentally, it will be a very painful experience, so painful that immediately we shall want to get rid of it. People who have occasional glimpses of conscience invent all kinds of methods to get rid of this feeling. It is the capacity to feel at the same time all that we ordinarily feel at different times. Try to understand that all our different “I”s have different feelings. One “I” feels that one like something, while another hates it, and a third “I” is indifferent. However, we never feel these things at the same time because between them are buffers. Because of these buffers we cannot use conscience, cannot feel at the same two contradictory things which we feel at different times. If a man or woman does happen to feel them one suffers. So, in our present state, buffers are even necessary things without which a man or woman would go mad. However, if one understands about them and prepares oneself, then after some time, one may start to destroy the contradictions and break the buffers down. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The breaking of a mechanical habit, whether good or bad, may be uncomfortable, because we have mechanical habits such as rules of conduct and moral rules which we get from our education. In most cases, therefore, we do not experience conscience; we have too many buffers. As I have said, they are partitions between our emotional attitudes, and experience of conscience means seeing a hundred things at the same time. Partitions disappear and all inner contradictions are seen at the same time. This is very unpleasant, and as the general principle of life is to avoid unpleasant sensations and realizations we run away from seeing them. In this way we create inner buffers. Contradictions seen one after the other do not appear contradictory; they have to be seen at the same time. We are machines and we must see where we can change something, because in ever machine of every kind there is always a point where it is possible to begin. Sometimes people ask if there is anything permanent in us. There are two things, buffers and weaknesses. The weaknesses are sometimes called features, but they are really just weaknesses. Everyone has one, two or three particular weaknesses, and everybody has certain buffers belonging to one. One consists of buffers, but some are particularly important because they enter into all one’s decisions and all one’s understandings. These features and buffers are all that can be called permanent in us, and it is lucky for us that there is nothing more permanent, because these things can be changed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

“Does giving up one’s will mean not to act without understanding?” You see, this is another of your mistakes. You think that giving up will means doing something. This happens very seldom. In most cases you are told not to do something. There is a great difference in this. For instance, you want to explain to someone what you think of him or her, and you must not do it. It is a question of training. Will can be grown if one works on oneself and makes one’s will obey the principles of the work. Things that do not concern the work cannot be connected with it, but the more you enter into the work, the more things begin to touch upon the work. However, this needs time. When their chance comes and people are told to do something, or not to do something, they go against it for what seems to them the very bests of reasons. So they miss their opportunity. Time passes, and later they may see that they have missed their opportunity, but it can no longer be replaced by anything. This is the penalty of self-will. About this idea of giving up one’s will: it must be repeated that men nos 1, 2, and 3 have no will, but only self-will and willfulness. Try to understand what that means. Being willful means that one wants to do or actually does something forbidden, simply because it is forbidden. And an instance of self-will is when someone sees that you are trying to do something that you do not know how to do and wants to help you, but you say, “No, I will do it myself.” These are the two types of will we have. They are based on opposition. Rel will must depend on consciousness, knowledge and Permanent “I.” Such as we are, we have not got it. All that we have is self-will and willfulness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Our will is a resultant of desires. Desires may be very well hidden. For instance, a man may want to criticize someone and one calls it sincerity. However, the desire to criticize may be so strong that one would have to make a really big effort to stop it, and a man cannot make real efforts by oneself. In order to create will, a man must try to co-ordinate one’s every action with ideas of the work; one must in every action ask oneself: How will it look from the point of view of the work? Is it useful or harmful to me, or to the work? If one does not know, one can ask. If a person has been long in the work, there is practically not a single action that does not touch upon the work; there are not independent actions. In that way one is not free, in the sense that one cannot act foolishly without discrimination. One must think before one acts. If one is not sure, one can ask. This is the only method by which will can be created, and for this method school organization is necessary. Without school one can do nothing. The ward system, which forms a central aspect of the social structure in mental hospitals, can also be delineated in terms of involvement rules—the “bad” wards being ones where tight situational orientation is little demanded; the “good” or convalescent wards being ones where many more exhibitions of respect for the gathering are required. Conversely, the “good” wards are ones where other kinds of privileges are available, and the “bad” ones are places where these are not. When staff use these labels they often mean to refer to differences in situational propriety; patients, on the other hand, tend to have in mind the merely-situated component of privileges on the ward. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

The same term, then, will designate the same ward but will tend to connote different things to the two status levels. It may be added that, in general, mental hospitals seem to operate on the basis of a privilege quota: the patient who requires situational license must sacrifice the merely-situated component of privilege, and to the degree that one desires the latter, one must be ready to “behave oneself.” The communal institutions of Central Hospital were themselves differently defined as regards tightness. In the large 300-man refectory, which fed the men on 900-patient chronic men’s service, eating with one’s hat on was not forbidden; the place had something of the atmosphere of a train depot. However, at the Red Cross House (containing a large sitting room-dancehall), the staff felt that patients should have some “respect” for the place, and act in it as they would in their homes. Posted signs, collective bawlings-out, and other injunctions established that no hats, no spitting, no refuse on the floor, and no “horsing around” were to be permitted. When we see that some of these controlling factors inhere in the behavior setting, we can more readily understand why some mental patients may improve greatly merely by being brought down to a “better” ward; but we cannot as easily determine how much new human material a setting can incorporate without losing it customary involvement structure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Just as there are differences between situations in regard to the tightness of conduct occurring therein, so, of course, there are differences between different roles, each of these differences being maintained across several different situations. At one extreme we have the mental patient on a chronic ward who has not yet decided to try to get out by good behavior. One may feel that one has earned and paid for the right to act loosely and that one might as well exercise it. One this plays the role of an “involvement freak,” and, as already suggested, shares with children, senior citizens, the homeless, and bohemians the special license and expectation of being frequently remiss in situational obligations. At the other extreme are high ecclesiastical and miliary officers who carry their solemnity in their uniform, and prefer gatherings that are tight enough to be saluted. Here, incidentally, one finds a very pervasive difference between middle- and lower-class males in American society. Those who work without a tie, in clothes they do not have to worry about keeping clean, are persons who can afford to touch and be touched by the physical environment around them. The “informality” of their dress is one part of a complex, the whole of which is the understanding that these persons need not maintain a tight orientation in public situations. While waiting for a bus, the lightrail, or talking to a friend on the street, they can slouch, lean against a building, or squat on any substitute for a seat, and thus express a looseness of orientation to the gathering as such, which is consistent with the role that has been accorded them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

That their clothing allows this is as much effect as cause of their situational orientation. (A limiting case is the person such as a chimney sweep or miner, who can soil the environment around one and will therefore have a special basis for circumspection.) Middle-class people in public places, on the other hand, have more obligation to keep relatively erect and stiff, relatively ready to respond interactively. And, again, the fact that their clothing and cleanliness patterns are incompatible with too great a familiarity with the physical environment of the street would seem to be as much effect as cause of their level or orientational discipline. Persons tightly attired can, of course, express meager concern for the gathering, but they are perhaps more likely than those informally dressed to do this by means of relatively subtle cues. Now when it comes time to commuting to work, traffic patterns are a concern. There are two main ways to commute from Berkeley to San Francisco. One is driving over the Bay Bridge, and the other is taking public transportation, the Bay Area Rapid Transit train called BART. Crossing the bridge is the shortest route, and with no traffic, a car can make the trip in 20 minutes. However, this is rarely the case. The bridge had only four lanes and is easily congested. (Sometimes, after earthquakes, it is closed altogether.) We suppose that each additional 2,000 cars the travel time rises to 30 minutes; at 4,000 cars, to 40 minutes. The BART train makes a number of stops, and one has to work to the station and wait for the train. It is fair to say that the trip takes closer to 40 minutes along this route, but the train never fights traffic. When train usage rises, they put no more cars, and the commuting time stays roughly constant. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

If, during the rush hour, 10,000 commuters want to go from Berkeley to San Francisco, how will the commuters be distributed over the two routes? Each commuter will act selfishly, choosing the route that minimizes one’s own transportation time. Left to their own devices, 40 percent will drive and 60 percent will take the train. The commuting time will be 40 minutes for everyone. This outcome is the equilibrium of a game. We can see this result by asking what would happen if the split were different. Supposed only 2,000 drivers took the Bay Bridge. With less congestion, the trip would take less time (30 minutes) along this route. Then some of the 8,000 BART commuters would find out that they could save time by switching, and would do so. Conversely, if there were, say, 8,000 drivers using the Bay Bridge, each spending 60 minutes, some of them would switch to the train for the faster trip it provides. However, when there are 4,000 drivers on the Bay Bridge and 6,000 on the train, no one can gain by switching: the commuters have reached an equilibrium. Is this equilibrium good for the commuters as a whole? Not really. It is easy to find a better pattern. Suppose only 2,000 take the Bay Bridge. Each of them saves 10 minutes. The 2,000 who switch to the train are still spending the same time as they did before, namely 40 minutes. So are the 6,000 who continue to take the train. We have just saved 20,000 person-minutes (or almost two weeks) from the total travel time. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Why is this saving possible? On in other words, why were the drivers left to themselves not guided by an invisible hand to the best mix of routes? The answer lies in the cost that each user of the Bay Bridge inflicts on the others. When an extra driver takes this road, the travel time of all the other users goes up by a little bit. However, the newcomer is not required to pay a price that reflects this cost. One takes into account only one’s own travel time. What traffic pattern is best for the group of drivers as a whole? In fact, the one we constructed, with 2,000 cars on the Bay Bridge and a total time saving of 20,000 minutes, is best. To see this, try a could of others. If there are 3,000 cars on the Bay Bridge, the travel time is 35 minutes in all. With only 1,000 cars, the travel time is 25 minutes, and each saves 15 minutes, but the total saving is again only 15,000 minutes. The intermediate point with 2,000 drivers, each saving 10 minutes, is best. How can the best pattern be achieved? Devotees of central planning will think of issuing 2,000 licenses to use the Bay Bridge. If they are worried about the inequity of allowing those with licenses to travel in 30 minutes while the other 8,000 must take the train and spend 40 minutes, they will devise an ingenious system of rotating the licenses among the population. A market-based solution charges people for the harm they cause others. Supposed each person values an hour of time at $25, that is, each would be willing to pay $12 to save an hour. Then charge a toll for driving on the Bay Bridge; set the $2 above the BART fare. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

By our supposition, people regard an extra $2 cost as equivalent to 10 minutes of time. Now the equilibrium commuting pattern will have 2,000 cars on the Bay Bridge and 8,000 riders on BART. Each user of the Bay Bridge spends 30 minutes plus an extra $2 in commuting costs; each BART rider spends 40 minutes. The total effective costs are the same, and no one wants to switch to the other route. In the process we have collected $4,000 of toll revenue (plus an additional 2,000 BART fares), which can then go into the county’s budget, thus benefiting everyone because taxes can be lower than they would otherwise be. A solution even closet to the spirit of free enterprise would be to allow private ownership of the Bay Bridge. The owner realized that people are willing to pay for the advantage of a faster trip on a less congested road. One charges a price, therefore, for the privilege. How can one maximize one’s revenue? By maximizing the total value of the time saved, of course. The invisible hand guides people to an optimal commuting pattern only when the good “commuting time” is priced. With the profit-maximizing toll on the bridge, time really is money. Those commuters who ride BART are selling time to those who use the bridge, Finally, we recognize that the cost of collecting the toll sometimes exceeds the resulting benefit of saving people’s time. Creating a marketplace is not a free lunch. The toll booths may be a primary cause of the congestion. If so, it may be best to tolerate the initial inefficient route choices. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

The coming eco-wars—another growth business for tomorrow’s spies is the environment. Environmental problems increasingly cross national boundaries, so that pollution from the Rhine affect Holland as well as Germany, acid rain ignores frontiers, and the deforestation of the Amazon has global concerns. Increasing environmental knowledge can help reduce such problems, but it also opens the way to sophisticated manipulation of one country’s environment by another’s political policy-makers. A crude example was the 1989 announcement by Turkey that it would shut off the flow of Euphrates River water to Iraq and Syria for a month. The shutdown threatened Iraqi agriculture and Syrian electrical supplies. Its purpose, according to the Turks, was to do repair work on the Ataturk Dam. However, skeptics insisted there was more to the story. Across Turkey’s southern border in Iraq and Syria are the remote bases of Kurdish separatists belonging to the Marxist Kurdish Workers Party. KPW guerrillas have been slipping across into Turkey. In turn, Turkey has been demanding that Iraq and Syria guard the border and prevent such penetrations. This incursion did not stop, and were followed by the Turkish announcement of a dam shutdown. This, in turn, was followed four days later by a guerrilla raid that left twenty-eight dead in a Turkish village on the Iraqi line. The Turkish press clamored for a reprisal against the guerrilla bases in Syrian-controlled territory. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Whether the water cutoff was or was not intended to prod the Iraqi and Syrian governments into military action against the guerrillas, it was an event with significant ecological implications, an opening shot, one might say, in the eco-warfare that will become more common and far more sophisticated in the decades ahead. Someday nations may unleash genetically altered insects against an adversary, or attempt to modify weather. When that day comes, intelligence will provide ammunition for the eco-wars. On a more optimistic note, however, because of their satellite remote sensing systems, intelligence agencies may be well placed to take on the task of verifying compliance with environmental treaties, as they now verify arms control agreements. Eco-intelligence will be integrated more closely with political and military planning as both eco-war and eco-treaties become part of the new global system. The spread of new system of wealth creation thus begins to transform one of the universal functions of the nation-state—the collection of foreign intelligence. What we have glimpsed so far, however, are only the most superficial changes. Far deeper ones lie in store. For instance, nanoparticles can get into the body through the skin, lungs and digestive system. This may create “free radicals,” which can cause cell damage and damage to the DNA. There is also concern that once nanoparticals are in the bloodstream they will be able to cross the blood-brain barrier. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

For all practical purposes, nanotechnology seems inevitable. With work, it can be made beneficial, but only if we exercise ordinary care in avoiding accidents and extraordinary care in preventing abuse. It is hard to get people to take future technologies seriously. Present-day problems dominate discussions, and ideas about future possibilities take effort to judge. Because of this inertia, broad international regulations of nanotechnology will not be possible until nanotechnology already exists, until people begin to see its results. And then, for regulation to be most effective, researchers and governments in many countries will need to cooperate and be on speaking terms with the technology’s critic. What, then, is the socially responsible course of action, the approach most likely to avoid serious abuse of nanotechnology and most likely to deliver some of its potential benefits? It is, we believe, to point out potential dangers and abuses and how they can be avoided, but also to emphasize the civilian applications in medicine, the environment, and the economy. It is these benefits that provide grounds for advocating open civilian development programs, and for international cooperation that can provide a basis for effective international guidance. To guide nanotechnology will not be simple. We will be confronted with a range of choices greater than we have faced before in history. It is only by grappling with those choices that we will be able to affect them for the better. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

O Lord, our hope in every generation, we rejoice in the wondrous deliverance Thou didst bring to pass for our fathers. When Haman rose to crush us, Thou wast at our side. Thou didst bring to naught his base designs, delivering us from destruction. In our day, too, O Lord our God, we trust in Thy saving power. We know it is Thy will that evil be subdued and righteousness prevail. Keep us ever steadfast and just, that no weapon formed against us may prosper. Inspire us like Mordecai of old, to be unswering in our devotion to Thee. Like Esther, may we ever be eager to serve our people, even at the peril of our lives. Cause us to know as Mordecai knew, that whether we be born to high or low estate, we share alike our people’s lot. That though we dwell in safety, blessed with abundance, our brother’s hurt is our hurt, in their sorrow, ours. Hasten the day when all oppression shall cease, and tyranny shall forever be crushed; when strife shall no longer set off man from man, but all shall unite in true brotherhood to serve each other, and thus, O Lord, serve Thee. We, who were young and loved each other blindly, now come to know each other in love, married by what we have done, as much as by what we intend. Our hair turns white with our ripening as though to fly away in some coming wind, bearing the deed of what we know. It was bitter to learn that we come to death as we come to love, bitter to face the just and solving welcome that Heaven prepares. It is better to pray than worry, for we will have the sweetness of ripening. How sweet to the Lord by the signs of the World. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21


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Out for Murder: Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?

The dreams of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, who united the Thirteen Colonies in the 18th century, may have died or have at least become shaded in the 21st century. Nothing nettles America more than the hordes of diverse people whom she cannot exclude from her land. The new multitudes are jamming into the cities, making these centers the most fearful jungles of “manyness” and are threatening the Anglo-Saxon empire. The cities are becoming the storm center as well as the nerve center because they are where the serious menaces to America is lurking. They have not only become the home of roughs, gamblers, thieves, robbers, lawless and desperate men and women, rioters, skeptics, and the irreligious, but they are also the lair of wealthy and luxurious people who do not care for the Kingdom. This has allowed people to adopt a sense of pride in their deviant work, as they are gradually able to reconceptualize their killings and other crimes as an acceptable and rewarding business profession. Murder, the unlawful killing of a person, is considered a serious criminal offense in the United States of America, and it is punished by extreme penalties. In addition, most Americans do not feel that the penalties are extreme enough. In overcoming the intense stigma associated with murder, the hit man or hit woman lacks the supports available to more ordinary types of killers. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25

Some cultures allow special circumstances or sanction special organizations wherein people who kill are insulated from the taint of murder. Soldiers at war, or police in the line of duty, or citizens protecting their property operate under what are considered justifiable or excusable conditions. Individuals acting on their own, who kill in a spontaneous, “irrational” outburst of violence, can also mitigate the stigma of their behaviour. I mean, people will go ape for one minute and shoot, but there are very few people who are capable of thinking about, palling, and then doing it. Individuals who kill in a hot-blooded burst of passion can retrospectively draw comfort from the law which provides a lighter ban against killings performed without premeditation or malice or intent. At one extreme, the spontaneous killing may seem the result of a mental disease or dissociative reaction, and excused entirely as insanity. However, when an individual who generally shares society’s ban against murder, is fully aware that his or her act of homicide is (1) unlawful, (2) self-serving, and (3) intentional, one does not have the usual defenses to fall back on. How does such an individual manage to overcome his or her inhibitions and avoid serious damage to his or her self-image (assuming that he or she does share society’s ban)? This is the special dilemma of the professional hit man or woman who hires himself or herself out for murder. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25

There are two types of professional murders: the organized and the independent. The killer who belongs to an organized syndicate does not usually get paid on a contact basis, and performs his or her job out of loyalty and obedience to the organization. The independent professional killer is a freelance agent who hires himself or herself out for a fee. It is the career organization of the second type of killer that will be discussed. The organized killer can mitigate his or her behavior through an “appeal to higher loyalties.” He or she can also view his or her victim as an enemy of the group and then choose from a variety of techniques available for neutralizing the offense against the enemy. However, the independent professional murderer lacks most of these defenses. Nevertheless, built into one’s role are certain structural features that help one avoid deviance ascription. These features include: Contract. A contract is an unwritten agreement to provide a sum of money to a second party who agrees, in return, to commit a designated murder. It is most often arranged over the phone, between people who have never had personal contact. And the victim, or “hit,” is usually unknown to the killer. This arrangement is meant to protect both parties from the law. However, it also helps the killer deny the victim, or hit, is usually unknow to the killer by keeping the individual relatively anonymous. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25

In arranging the contract, the hired killer will try to find out the difficulty of the hit and how much the customer wants the killing done. These considerations determine the price. He or she does not ask about motive for the killing, treating it as none of his or her concern. Not knowing the motive may hamper the killer from morally justifying his or her behavior, but it also enables one to further deny the victim by maintaining one’s distance and reserve. Finally, the contract is backed up by a further understanding. If the killer fails to live up to one’s part of the bargain, the penalties could be extreme. This has the ironic effect that after the contract is arranged, the killer can somewhat deny responsibility. Reputation and Money. Reputation is especially important in an area where killers are unknown to their customers, and where the less written, the better. Reputation, in turn, reflects how much money the hit man had commanded in the past. Pete, who could not recall the exact number of people he had killed, did, like other hit men, keep an accounting of his highest fees. To him big money meant not only a way to earn a living, but also a way to maintain his professional reputation. People who accept lower fees can also find work as hired killers. Heroin addicts are the usual example. However, as Pete says, they often receive a bullet for their pains. It is believed that people who would kill for so little would also require littler persuasion to make the talk to the police. This further reinforces the single-minded emphasis on making big money. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25

As a result, killing is conceptualized as a business or as just a job. Framing the hit in a normal busineslike context enables the hit man or woman to deny wrongfulness or deny injury. In addition to the economic motive, Pete, and hit men and women discussed how the job was exciting, fun, game-playing, power, and impressive to their romantic partners as incentives for murder. However, none of these motives are mentioned by all sources. None are as necessary to the career as money. And, after a while, these other motives diminish and killing becomes only “just a job.” The primacy of the economic motive has been aptly expressed in the case of another deviant profession. Women who enjoy pleasures of the flesh with their customers do not make good women of the evening, according to those who are acquainted with this institution first hand. Instead of thinking about the most effective way of making money at the job, they would be doing things for their own pleasure and enjoyment. Skill. Most of the hit man and woman’s training focuses on acquiring skill in the use of weapons. “Then, he met these two guys, these two white guys…them two them two was the best. And but they stayed around over there and they got together, and Pete told [them] that he really wanted to be good. He said, if [I] got to do something, I wanted to be good at it. So, they go together, showed him, show him how to shoot…And gradually, he became good…Like he told me, like when he shoots somebody, he always goes for the head; he said, that’s about the best shot. I mean, if you want him dead then and there…And these two guys showed him, and to him, I mean, hey, I mean, he don’t believe nobody could really outshoot these two guys, you know what I mean. They know everything you want to know about guns, knives, and stuff like that.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 25

The hit man or woman’s reputation, and the amount of money he or she makes depend on his or her skill, his or her effective ability to serve as a means to someone else’s ends. “The result is a focus on technique. Like in anything you do, when you do it, you want to do it just right. On your target and you hit it, how you feel: I hit it! I hit it!” reports Pete. This focus on technique, on means, helps the hit man to “deny responsibility” and intent. In frame-analytic terms, the hit man or woman separates one’s morally responsible, or “principal” self from the rest of himself or herself, and performs the killing mainly as a “strategist.” In other words, one sees oneself as a “hired gun.” The saying, “If I didn’t do it, they’d find someone else who would,” reflects this narrowly technical orientation. Therefore, the contract, based on the hit man or woman with opportunities for denying the victim, denying the injury, and denying responsibility. However, this is not enough. To point out the defenses of the professional hit man or woman is one thing, but it is unlikely that the novice is at a point where he or she both lacks the conventional defense against the stigma of murder, and he or she has not yet fully acquired the exceptional defenses of the professional. How, then, does he or she cope? Negative experience is a feeling of disorientation. Expecting to take up a position in a well-framed realm, one finds that no particular frame is immediately applicable, or the frame that one thought was applicable no longer seems to be, or one cannot bind oneself within the frame that apparently apply. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25

One loses command over the formulation of viable response. One flounders. Experience, the meld of what the current scene brings to one and what one brings to it—meant to settle into a form even while it is beginning, finds no form and is therefore no experience. Reality automatically flutters. One has a “negative experience”—negative in the sense that it takes it character from what it is not, and what it is not is an organized and organizational affirmed response. Negative experience can occur when a person finds oneself lapsing into an old understanding of a situation, only to suddenly awaken to the fact that it no longer applies. In this regard, we should expect negative experience to be a special problem for the novice. For example, the first time he killed a man for money, Pete supposedly became violently ill: “When he [Pete], you know, hit the guy, when he shot the guy, the guy said ‘You killed me.’…something like that, cause he struck him all up here. And what he said, it was just, I mean, the look right in the guy’s eye, you know. I mean he looked like: Why me? Yeah? And then he said that at night-time he’ll start thinking about the guy: like he should not have looked at him like that…I mean actually [Pete] was sick…He couldn’t keep his food down, I mean, or nothing like that….[It lasted] I’d say about two months…” #RandolphHarris 7 of 25

Pete’s account conforms to the definition of negative experience. He had never killed anyone for money before. It started when a member of the Detroit drug World had spotted Pete in a knife fight outside an inner city bar, was apparently impressed with the young man’s style, and offered him fifty dollars to do a “job.” Pete accepted. He wanted the money. However, when the first hit came about, Pete of course know that he was doing it for money, but yet his orientation was: revenge. Thus, he stared his victim in the face, a characteristic gesture of people who kill enemies for revenge. Expecting to see defiance turn into a look of defeat, they attempt to gain “face” at the loser’s expense. However, when Pete stared his victim in the face, he saw not an enemy, but an innocent man. He saw a look of: “Why me?” And this discordant image is what remained in his mind during the weeks and months to follow and made him sick. As Pete says, “He shouldn’t have looked at him like that.” The victim’s look of innocence brought about a “frame break.” Given that the frame applied to an activity is expected to enable us to come to terms with all events in that activity (informing and regulating many of them), it is understandable that the unmanageable might occur, an occurrence which cannot be effectively ignored and to which the frame cannot be applied, with resulting bewilderment and chagrin on the part of the participants. In brief, a break can occur in the applicability of the frame, a break in its governance. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25

When such a frame break occurs, it produces negative experience. Pete’s extremely uncomfortable disorientation may reflect the extreme dissonance between the revenge frame, that he expected to apply, and the unexpected look of innocence that he encountered and continued to recall. The quotes above are from Pete, who is a hit man. Pete speaks of himself in the third person to explore the behavioral side of contract killing, or because his disassociates with himself when it comes time to hit a person. However, it is possible that is become possessed when he has a contract and enforces it. Demon possession is a condition in which one or more evil spirits or demons inhabit the body of a human being and can take complete control of their victim at will. By temporarily blotting out his consciousness, they can speak and act through him as their complete slave and tool. The inhibiting demon (or demons) comes and goes much like the proprietor of a house who may or may not be “at home.” When the demon is “at home,” he may precipitate an attack. In these attacks the victim passes from his normal state, in which he acts like other people, to the abnormal state of possession. Causes of demonic attacks vary. In many case, the targets do not deliberately call on evil spirits so these would latch onto them. Rather, they engage in “spiritual openings” that the spirits consider an invitation, which eventually leads to an attack. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25

There are aspects of life where a particular kind of situational respect is required. In daily speech, the terms “formality” and “informality” are sometimes used to refer to this central axis of situational regulation. And these terms might be tend to stress unduly the kind of clothing that is worn, the degree to which the sequence of acts in a social occasion is codified in advance and heavily enjoined, and the range of activities that is permitted. The terms “tight” and “loose” might be more descriptive and give more equal weight to each of the several ways in which devotion to a social occasion may be exhibited. For example, certain social settings in different communities are differently defined as regards tightness. Thus, public streets in Paris seem to be more loosely defined than those in Britain or America. On many Parisian streets one can eat a loaf of bread while walking to or from work, become heatedly involved in peripatetic conversations, engage in a full-course meal at an open café table, expect not to show surprise at oddly costumed persons, and so forth. In Anglo-American society one would have to look to summer resorts to find a similar degree of looseness. (In any case, Americans tend to find France and summer resorts relaxing for the same reason: many public gatherings seem to demand less attachment and respect, allowing one an easier depth of either private or interpersonal concerns.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 25

Similarly, in many Anglo-American communities a teacher will be expected to remain thoroughly oriented in to the situation during school hours, while in a rural community in Southern Italy we learn that: It is not uncommon for a teacher to come late to class and to spend the morning smoking a cigarette and looking idly out the window. In many geographical regions in America, a continuum can be traced regarding the formality of dree required of men who patronize public eateries. There are still establishments that require dinner jackets. Those next in line insist at least on ties and jackets, and may keep a supply of ties handy to accommodate would-be customers who turn up informally attired. At summer resorts in the same geographical regions, one can find establishments whose posted house-rules demand that T-shirts be worn in addition to swimming trunks, these establishments thereby distinguishing themselves from those final seats of beach informality in our society where eating, drinking, and dancing are allowed even barefoot men in swimming trunks. Incidentally, it might be noted here that societies seem to have their own limits regarding tightness and looseness and that these limits seem to change over time. In spite of some recent efforts to bring pomp back into American life, the most formal of evening clothes are becoming more and more rarely sed, and decorations such as jewelled tiaras can properly be worn these days at almost no occasion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25

Any social establishment is itself likely to provide instructive variation in tightness or formality requirements, according to place and time. In Central Hospital, for example, attendants claimed that they need wear their ties and “look smart,” that is, situationally oriented, only when on that half of the campus that contained the administration building. On the night-shift, when doctors and nurses were absent, attendants would administer medication without bothering to take their cigarettes from their mouths, and tended to slouch more while sitting or standing. Therefore, one can draw from this example that there are ways one leaves oneself more open to demon possession. Are you doing things that are conducive of the Lord? Are you engaging in slander, gossip, fights, drugs, drinking, terrorism, premarital pleasures of the flesh, and not going to church? Well, these are ways to open yourself up to becoming possessed by demons. God’s regulations for good Christian behavior is very tight. “Why did you say we must remember ourselves when it is most difficult?” Our own exposure to life is both a threat and an opportunity. You know you must not do something. One part of you wants to do it. Then your remember yourself and stop it. Self-remembering has an element of will in it. If it were just dreaming, “I am, I am, I am,” it would not be anything. You must give a certain time simply to studying what remembering means, and what not remembering means, and what effect these have. Then you can invent many different ways to remember yourselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25

However, actually, self-remembering is not an intellectual or abstract thing; it is moments of will. It is not thought; it is action. It means having increased control; otherwise of what use would it be? You can only control yourself in moments of self-remembering. The mechanical control which is acquired by training and education—when one is taught how to behave in certain circumstances—is not real control. “Are we to understand that self-remembering means awareness?” Not only awareness. It means also a certain capacity to act in a certain way, to do what you want. You see, in our logical way of thinking, according to logical knowledge, we divide consciousness from will. However, consciousness means will. In the Russian language, for instance, “will” is the same word as “freedom.” The word “consciousness” means a combination of all knowledge; as if you had all your knowledge before you at the same time. However, consciousness also means will, and will means freedom. “What does giving up will mean?” Giving up childishness, inefficiency and lying. “Does giving up self-will involve giving up your own judgment?” It depends in what. What does giving will mean? How can it be achieved? You have mistaken ideas about this. First you think of it as a final actions: that you give up will and have no more will. This is an illusion because we have no such will to give up. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25

Our will last for about three minutes. Will is measured by time. If once we give up three minutes of will, tomorrow, another three minutes will grow. Giving up will is a continuous process, not one action. A single action means nothing. A second mistake is not remembering certain principles to which you give up will, such as rules. For example, there is a rule that you should not talk about this system. The natural desire is to talk, but if you stop yourself, it means that you give up your will; that you obey this rule. There are many other principles to which you must give up your will in order to follow them. In the 1950s the Ivy League colleges were faced with a problem. Each school wanted to produce a willing football team. The colleges found themselves overemphasizing athletics and compromising their academic standards in order to build a championship team. Yet, no matter how often they practiced or how much money they spent, at the end of the season the standings were much as they had been before. The average win/loss record was still 50/50. The inescapable mathematical fact is tht for every winner there had to be a loser. All the extra work canceled itself out. The excitement of college sports depends as much on the closeness and intensity of the competition as on the level of skill. Many fans prefer college basketball and football to the professional versions; while the level of skill is lower, there is often more excitement and intensity to the competition. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25

With the excitement and intensity in mind, the colleges got smart. They joined together and agreed to limit spring training to one day. Although there were more fumbles, the games were no less exciting. Athletes had more time to concentrate on their studies. Everyone was better off, except some alumni who wanted their alma maters to excel at football and forget about academic work. Many students would like to have a similar agreement with their fellow students before examinations. When grades are based on a traditional “bell curve,” one’s relative standing in the class matters more than the absolute level of one’s knowledge. It matters not how much you know, only that others know less than you. The way to gain an advantage over the other students is to study more. If they all do so, they all have more knowledge, but relative standings and therefore the bottom line—the grades—are largely unchanged. If only everyone in the class could agree to limit spring studying to one (preferably rainy) day, they would get the same grades with less effort. The feature common to these situations is that success is determined by relative rather than absolute performance. When one participant improves his or her own ranking, one necessarily worsens everyone else’s ranking. However, the fact that one’s victory requires someone else’s defeat does not make the game zero-sum. In a zero-sum game it is not possible to make everyone better off. Here it is. The scope for gain comes from reducing inputs. While there might always be the same number of winners and losers, it can be less costly for everyone to play the game. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25

The source of the problem of why (some) students study too much is that they do not have to pay a price or compensation to others. (Of course, the dumb thing to do is believe you are stupid and not study at all!) Each student’s studying is akin to a factory’s polluting: it makes it more difficult for all the other students to breathe. Because there is no market in buying and selling studying time, the result is a “rat race”: each participant strives too hard, with too little to show for one’s efforts. However, no one team or student is willing to be the only one, or the leader, in reducing the effort. This is just like a prisoner’s dilemma with more than two prisoners. Escape from the horns of this dilemma requires an enforceable collective agreement. As we saw with OPEC and the Ivy League, the trick is to form a cartel to limit competition. The problem for high-school students is that the cartel cannot easily detect cheating. For the collectivity of students, a cheater is one who studies more to sneak an advantage over the others. It is very hard to tell if some are secretly studying until after they have “aced” the test. BY then it is too late. In some small towns, high-school students do have a way to enforce “no-studying” cartels. Everyone gets together and cruises Main Street at night. The absence of those home studying is noticed. Punishment can be social ostracism or worse. To arrange a self-enforcing cartel is difficult. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25

It is all the better if an outside enforces the collective agreement limiting competition. This is just what happened for cigarette advertising, although not intentionally. In the old says, cigarette companies used to spend money to convince consumers to “walk a mile” for their product or to “fight rather than switch.” The different campaigns made advertising agencies rich, but their main purpose was defensive—each company advertised because the others did, too. Then, in 1968, cigarette advertisements were banned from TV by law. The companies thought this restriction would hurt them and fought against it. However, when the some cleared, they saw that the ban helped them avoid mutually damaging and costly advertising campaigns and thus improved their profits. As with advertisers, scientists are trying to stop means of losing control. The simplest imaginable approach to “guiding” nanotechnology would be to stop it. The easiest trip to plan is the trip that goes nowhere. This would have a certain appeal, if it were possible. Because of its enormous potential for abuse, nanotechnology has the potential of doing great harm. If we believe that human beings and human institutions are too incompetent to deal with nanotechnology—that they are too likely to turn it to aggressive military use, or too likely to make it freely available to madmen and women—then the option of stopping the development of nanotechnology may seem attractive indeed. However, the ethical question that must guide human actions is not “Would it be better to stop?,” but “Would attempts to stop make things better?” #RandolphHarris 17 of 25

One option is to push forward, emphasizing the need for caution but also the potential for good applications. The promise of medical, economic, and environmental applications, joined with the threat posed by a new arms race, provides a powerful motive for international cooperation. With positive goals and an inclusive stance, international cooperation is a promising strategy; it could provide a basis for guiding the development and application of nanotechnology. Another option would be to emphasize the downside, to focus debate on potential abuses in support of a campaign to halt development. In following this strategy, an activist group would want to downplay the civilization applications of nanotechnology and emphasize its military applications. Horror stories of potential abuse (including abuses that regulation could easily prevent) would help to make the technology seem strange and dangerous. This strategy might succeed in suppressing civilian research in many countries, though probably not all. Unfortunately, it would also guarantee funding for classified military research programs in laboratories around the World, even in the most morally honest countries, because of their then-inevitable fear of consequences if someone else developed nanotechnology first. In a hostile public atmosphere, research would be pushed into secret programs, and in secrecy the prospects for broad international cooperation would disappear. Attempts to stop nanotechnology for fear of a new, unstable arms race become self-fulfilling prophecies. Afterwards, the advocates of this view could then say, “We warned you!” as the World slid toward a war they themselves had helped to prepare. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25

Attempting to stop technological development is a simple but dangerous idea. The greater its success, the greater the polarization it would cause between technology advocates and technology critics. A moderate success would push research out of the public universities and into corporate and military research labs. A greater success would push research out of the corporate laboratories and into heavily classified programs. A truly amazing success would end most of these, leaving the only remaining military programs in the hands of those states with thoroughly repressive governments or alien ideologies. This, presumably, is not how one would prefer nanotechnology to be developed. The only genuine success would be a total success, and this would mean banning research not only in the United States of America, and Germany, and France, and the rest of Western Europe, and Japan, and the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan, but in Korea, South Africa, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Vietnam, and the part of Colombia controlled by the Medellin Cartel. Later, as computers improve, as chemistry advances, as more and more proximal-probe microscopes are built by high school students, total success would require banning kids from tinkering in suburban garages in Pittsburgh. Competitive pressures are pushing technology toward thorough control of matter, and we have seen that this goal can be reached by many different paths. Preventing one area of research would not prevent the advance, nor would stopping work in one country. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25

When the United States of America delays drug development through regulations by the FDA, drug companies simply switch research overseas, or non-U.S.A. companies pull ahead. Orbital-launch capability and nuclear-weapons capabilities are other examples. Very seldom has one country given these abilities to another, yet at least eight nations are able to launch satellites to orbit independently, at least seven have detonated nuclear devices, and another two are suspected to be within reach of nuclear capabilities. India and Israel have built bombs and launched satellites, though neither is considered a great power or a leading force in World technology. Where nanotechnology is concerned, many countries are capable of doing the required research, and more will be in the future. South Korea has both the needed educational levels and the ambition; visitors from the People’s Republic of China ask about nanotechnology. A decision at the top directing the resources of a nation could get results almost anywhere. The United States of America is only gradually being shaken from its illusion that it rules the World of technology. However, whoever rules the World of technology is generally the World leader. Like military force, economic clout is increasingly based on knowledge. High technology is congealed knowledge. As the super-symbolic economy spreads, the value of leading-edge technology soars. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25

In January of 1985 nearly 200,000 tons of Romanian 96-inch carbon steel arrived in North America and went on sale for 40 percent less than comparable Canadian steel. The story of that shipment began thirteen years earlier, when the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu placed his country’s nuclear development program under the aegis of the DIE, his foreign intelligence organization. According to Ion Pacepa, the former head of the DIE, who later defected to the West, teams of intelligence-trained engineers were provided with false papers and sent abroad to find jobs in the nuclear industry. According to Pacepa, these techno-spies actually landed positions in General Electric, Combustion Engineering, their Canadian counterparts of affiliates, as well as in Siemens, Kraftwerke Union, and AEG in West Germany and Ansaldo Nucleari Impiante itn Italy. Soon technical intelligence began barreling into Bucharest. Knowing that the Canadians were having difficult selling their CANDU reactor, Ceausescu, through the DIE, hinted that he might buy as many as twenty CANDUS. In fact, on October 27, 1977, the Romanians signed an agreement with the Canadians, the remainder with Romanian help. Canada thereupon laid down the welcome mat for Romanian nuclear engineers, many of them DIE agents. The result, according to Pacepa, was that “the DIE soon obtained intelligence covering approximately 75 percent of CANDU-600 technology, a modern security system for nuclear plants, technology and equipment for producing heavy water, and architectural and construction plans for nuclear plants built in Canada, West Germany, and France.” #RandolphHarris 21 of 25

Better yet, Romania was able to sweet-talk Canada into putting up a $1 billion loan, supposedly to be partly used as payments to Canadian firms involved in the project, the remaining Romanian costs to be paid to Canada in the form of countertrade or barter. By March 1982, the entire commercial deal melted down, as its were. However, Romania had already pocketed an advance tranche amounting to $320 million. Moreover, Romania also already had most of the technology it needed. All it needed to do now was send Canada goods under terms of the barter deal. Which is why Romanian steel entered Canada and began to undersell the domestic product. The Romanian scam, combining technological espionage with an economic rip-off, is less unusual than it might appear in a World in which research cost are skyrocketing and the cost of stolen technology is extremely inexpensive by comparison. In fact, according to Count de Marenches, former chief of French intelligence: “In any intelligence service worthy of the name you would easily come cross cases where the whole year’s budget has been paid for in fully by a single operation. Naturally, intelligence does not receive actual payment, but the country’s industry profits.” This—not just military considerations—explains why spies swarm around any center of new technology, why the Soviets and others have focused on Silicon Valley, why the Russians even tried to buy Valley companies. It is why Japan, too, is a major target today. (According to a former KGB officer stationed there, “Even the special audio equipment used by the KGB residency to monitor radio communications between Japanese National Police surveillance teams was stolen from Japan.”) #RandolphHarris 22 of 25

The entire Romanian system was modeled after the much bigger technology espionage apparatus constructed by the Soviet Union and centered in the so-called Line X of the KGB, its Directorate T, the scientific and technological section. A 1987 U.S.A. State Department report based on CIA data charged that one third of all the officials of the Soviet Chamber of Commerce and Industry are, in fact, known or suspected KGB or GRU officers. “Hosting over 200 trade exhibitions and about 100 Western business delegations annually, and inspecting thousands of goods each year give its employees extraordinary access to imported equipment…” The Soviets pay special attention to robots, deep-sea marine technology, and industrial chemicals. As the lack of hard currency makes it difficult for many in it, they are irresistibly drawn to illegal acquisitions. This suggests a coming step-up in technological espionage by the less affluent countries of Africa, Asia, and South America. If they themselves cannot use the knowledge their engineers or students steal, they can at least sell it. Indeed, one of the frequently ignored aspects of technological espionage is what might be termed the “resale” market. Furthermore, as knowledge become ever more central to economic, military, and political power, techno-espionage causes increasing friction among former allies. Note the recent changes that French intelligence has intercepted IMB transatlantic communications, passed them to Groupe Bull, and also planted agents in American computer firms. Witness, too, CoCom. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25

CoCom is the Paris-based Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls set up by sixteen nations to prevent the seepage of Western high technology to what was then the Soviet bloc. CoCom, the scene of escalating dissension among its members, now face possible disintegration. Members increasingly resent its restrictions on trade, and accuse one another of using it to gain commercial advantage. At the initiative of the Europeans and Japanese, moves are under way to shorten the list of restricted technologies and embargoed countries. However, in 1983, when the United States of America, the main force behind CoCom, proposed that Chia be struck from the list, a howl arose. Wester European nations fearing that the U.S.A. would take over the Chinese market vehemently opposed this proposal and kept it from ever seeing the light of day. Japan had recently been embarrassed by the Toshiba affair. This centered on a Toshiba subsidiary’s illegal sale to the Soviets of highly sophisticated equipment for grinding submarine propellers blades. Under heavy U.S.A. pressure, Japan tightened its own domestic export controls to precent a recurrence. One result, however, was to cut itself off from part of its Chinese market. Thus, Japanese machine tool exports to China plummeted by 66 percent in the single years 1987. Japan was furious, therefore, when a Cincinnati Milacron machining center turned up in Shanghai. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25

This kind of commercial war now threaten to explode CoCom altogether. Moreover, European economic integration means that the exports controls of individual European nations are weakened, since goods can flow freely among the twelve EC nations. The rise of the super-symbolic global economy also brings with it, as we saw, the creation of transnational or multinational business groups, along with multiple, boundary-crossing commercial alliances and joint ventures. These increase the cross-flows of knowledge, and make it far harder to police. For all these reasons, technology will join economies as a top-priority target for the World’s spies. The spy of the future is less likely to resemble James Bond, whose chief assets were his fists and Ultimate Driving Machine, than the Line X engineer who lives quietly down the block and never does anything more violent than turn a page of a manual or flick on his microcomputer. O Lord, our hope in every generation, we rejoice in the wonderous deliverance Thou didst bring to pass for our fathers. When Haman rose to crush us, Thou wast at our side. Thou didst bring to naught his base designs, delivering us from destruction. In our day, too, O Lord our God, we trust in Thy saving power. We know it is Thy will that evil be subdued and righteousness prevail. Keep us ever steadfast the no weapon formed against us may prosper. Inspire us like Mordecai of old, to be unswerving in our devotion to Thee. Like Esther, may we ever be eager to serve our people, even at the peril of our lives. Cause us to know as Mordecai knew, that whether we be born to high or low estate, we share alike our people’s lot. That though we dwell in safety, blessed with abundance, our brother’s hurt is our hurt, their sorrow, ours. Hasten the day when all oppression shall cease, and tyranny shall forever be crushed: when strife shall no longer set off man from man, but all shall unite in true brotherhood to serve each other, and thus, O Lord, serve Thee. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25


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I Will Wash the Dishes, You Pay All the Bills

The sadomasochistic splitting of power has the characteristics of all symptomatic behavior: it is literally destructive, and it involves a polarization in which one side of the split is apparent, while the other is hidden. People who turn to violence are visibly controlling; what is less obvious are their weakness and feelings of powerlessness. On the other hand, those who habitually play the victim may be quite unaware of their own more subtle methods of control. This is why issues of power are so difficult to deal with: things are not as they appear to be. Weaklings puff themselves up and try to act strong; tough people hide their vulnerabilities; the rest of us fail to look past the surface. We assume that the fabrication of power all around us are genuine, and we fall victim to them. Heinrich Himmler is an excellent example of a vicious, sadistic character who illustrates what has been said about the connection between sadism and the extreme forms of the anal-hoarding, bureaucratic, authoritarian character. The “bloodhound of Europe,” as he was called by many, Mr. Himmler was, together with Mr. Hitler, responsible for the slaughter of between fifteen and twenty million unarmed and powerless Russians, Poles, and Jewish. Whenever one person victimizes another, real power has been lost and replaced by a literalistic drama that is dangerous for both parties. Stage V On forgoing a working agreement, the offender and, in many cases, victim appeared committed to battle. They contributed to and invested in the development of a fateful transaction, one which was problematic and consequential to their face and wider reputation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Both the offender and the victim placed their character on the line, and alternative methods for assessing character focused on a working agreement that violence was appropriate. Because opponents appeared to fear displaying weakness in character and consequent loss of face, and because resolution of the content was situationally bound, demanding an immediacy of response, they appeared committed to following through with expressed or implied intentions. Commitment to battle was additionally enhanced by the availability of weapons to support verbal threats and challenges. Prior to victory, the offender often sought out and secured weapons capable of overcoming the victim. In about thirty-six percent of the cases, offenders carried hand guns or knives into the setting. In only thirteen percent of these cases did offenders bring hand guns or knives into the situation on the assumption that they might be needed if the victims were confronted. In the remainder of these cases such weapons were brought in as a matter of everyday routine. In either event, to inflict the fatal blow required the mere mobilization of the weapon for action. In sixty-four percent of the cases, the offender either left the situation temporarily to secure a hand gun, rifle, or knife, or transformed the status of some existing situational prop, such as a pillow, telephone cord, kitchen knife, beer mug, or baseball bat, into a lethal weapon. The possession of weapons makes battle possible, and, in situations defined as calling for violence, probable. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The particular dynamics of the physical interchange are quite varied. In many cases, the battle was brief and precise. In approximately fifty-four percent of the cases, the offender secured the weapon and dropped the victim in a single shot, stab, or rally of blows. In the remaining cases, the battle was two-sided. One or both secured a weapon and exchanges a series of blows, with one falling in defeat. Stage VI Once the victim had fallen, the offender made one of three moves which marked the termination of the transaction. In over fifty-eight percent of the cases, the offender fled the scene. In about thirty-two percent of the cases, the offender voluntarily remained on the scene for the police. In the remaining cases, the offender was involuntarily held for the police by members of the audience. These alternatives seemed prompted by two lines of influence: the relationship of the offender and victim and the position of the audience vis-à-vis the offense. When there is no audience, the offender and victim were intimately related, the offender typically remained on the scene and notified the police. Sometimes these offenders waited for minutes or hours before reporting the event, stating they needed time to think, check the victim’s condition, and make arrangements on financial matters, the children, and work before arret. In contrast, when victims were acquaintances or enemies, offenders typically fled the scene. Moreover, these offenders often attempted to dispose of their victims and incriminating evidence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Seventy percent of the cases, however, occurred before an audience, and offenders’ moves seemed related to audience reactions to the offense. Bystanders seemed to replace the victim as the primary interactant, serving the offender as the pivotal reference for his existing orientations. The audience assumed one of three roles: hostile, neutral, or supportive. In the hostile role, accounting for nearly thirty-five percent of the case, bystanders moved to apprehend the offender, assist the victim, and immediately notify police. Such audiences were generally comprised of persons who either supported the victim or were neutral during the pre-battle escalation. In several of these cases, bystanders suggested, without use of force, that the offender assist the victim, call the police, and so forth. These audiences were comprised of the offender’s intimates, and he or she followed their advice without question. In either case, hostile bystanders forced or suggested the offender’s compliance in remaining at the scene for police. In almost seventeen percent of the cases, the audience was neutral. These people appeared as shocked bystanders. Having witnessed the killing, they stood numb as the offender escaped and the victim expired. In the remainder of the cases, the audience was supportive of the offender. These audiences were usually comprised of persons who encouraged the offender during the pre-battle stages. Supportive bystanders rendered assistance to the offender in his or her escape, destroyed evidence, and maintained ignorance of the event when questioned by the police, breaking down only in later stages of interrogation. Thus, while a hostile audience directs the offender to remain at the scene, the supportive audience permits or directs one’s flight. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

On the basis of this research, criminal homicide does not appear as a one-sided event with an unwitting victim assuming a passive, non-contributory role. Rather, murder is the outcome of a dynamic interchange between an offender, victim, and, in many cases, bystanders. The offender and victim develop lines of action shaped in part by the actions of the other and focused toward saving or maintaining face and reputation and demonstrating character. Participants develop a working agreement, sometimes implicit, often explicit, that violence is a useful tool for resolving questions of face and character. In some settings, where very small children are murdered, the extent of their participation cannot be great. However, generally these patterns characterized all cases irrespective of such variables as age, gender, race, time and place, use of alcohol, and proffered motive. We know that in the evolution of vertebrates, the bond of personal love and friendship was the epoch-making invention created by the great constructors when it became necessary for two or more individuals of an aggressive species to live peacefully together and to work for a common end. We know that human society is built on the foundation of this bond, but we have to recognize the fact that the bond has become too limited to encompass all that it should; it prevents aggression only between those who know each other and are friends, while obviously it is all active hostility between al men of all nations or ideologies that must be stopped. Obviously, love and friendship should embrace all humanity; we should love all our human brothers indiscriminately. This commandment is not new. Our reason is quire able to understand its necessity as our feeling is able to appreciate its beauty, but nevertheless, made as we are, we are unable to obey it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Indeed, one might be inclined to summarize the whole matter by saying that the individual is obliged to demonstrate involvement in a situation through the modulation of one’s involvements within the situation. However, this would be a loose way of talking. First, that which the individual owes is conveyed through appropriate modulation of situated involvements. What is thereby conveyed, however, is not “involvement,” but rather a kind of respect and regard for that to which attachment and belongingness are owed. At the heart of it is a kind of concern that shows one to be a part of the thing for which one is concerned. Second, a situation, as defined in this study, is merely an environment of communication possibilities, and not the sort of thing to which one can become attached. The little society involved is that of the gathering in the situation, and the little social system found therein is made up from conduct performed in accordance with the norms of situational propriety. Finally, what is owned the gathering is owed the social occasion in which it occurs, the joint social life sustained by the gathering being an embodiment of the occasion itself. Situational proprieties, then, give body to the joint social life sustained by a gathering, and transform the gathering itself from a mere aggregate of persons present into something akin to a little social group, a social reality in its own right. Behind this social function we can see still further ones. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

When a situation comes into being, mutual accessibility of body signs is not the only contingency faced by those who are present. As already suggested, each person becomes a potential victim or aggressor in the potential occurrence of violent interpersonal actions, such as physical or sexual assault, blocking of the way, and so forth. Further, each person present is in a position to accost or be accosted by the others for the purpose of initiating a state of talk—a joint conversational engagement. And this, too, has its own dangers, for when persons are joined in this way they can command and plead with each other, insult or compliment each other, inform and misinform each other, or be seen (by others) as being on close terms, and the like. Further, when an engagement is sustained in the presence of bystanders, the participants open themselves up to being listened in on and interfered with, just as the bystanders become vulnerable to undesired distractions. Although these various dangers of being in the presence of others are perhaps not frequently realized, especially in middle-class society, the possibility of their occurrence is always there. And it is through body signs that persons present signify to each other that they can be trusted not to exploit these threatening possibilities. Only when these signs are received may the individual feel secure enough to forget about defending oneself, secure enough to give oneself up to the merely-situated aspects of one’s involvements. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Aside, then, from the disrespect an individual shows to a gathering by conducting oneself improperly, such improprieties can also cause the others present to fear for their physical and social inviolability, whether rightly or not. And here, incidentally, is one reason for arguing that social situations and the gatherings occurring therein are worth studying, even apart from the social occasion that incorporates them. Ordinarily, situations are thought to be so closely enmeshed in a particular on-going institutional setting, and these settings to be so very different one from another, that excision of situations and their gatherings for separate study might seem questionable. However, it is only in situations that individuals can be physically assaulted, accosted by requests for talk, or drawn away from conversations and other involvements by the antics of bystanders. It is in situations that these accessibilities will have to be faced and dealt with. And in facing these accessibilities and dealing with them, a common and distinctive character is given to the social life sustained in situations, regardless of the uniqueness of the larger span of social life in which each gathering is embedded and of which each is an expression. King James vowed to make deviants conform or he would “harry them out of the land or else do worse.” If from the beginning one did not state making serious efforts to develop will, it is possible to understand and not be able to do anything about a situation. If will remains undeveloped, then the development of understanding cannot help much. One can understand very much, but at the same time not be able to do anything about it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Much like in Elizabethan England, the exiles knew they were supposed to assimilate. Yet they found it difficult to find a way to flee from the profane multitude that harassed them in their gatherings at the manor house of William Brewster at Scrooby. These educated and sometimes prosperous people, knowing they had much to lose, prepared to lose it by booking a ship onto which they sneaked one night in 1607. Someone betrayed them before they could leave for Holland and religious freedom: Officers searched the men’s shirts for money, “yea even the women further than become modesty.” They tried to escape again a few months later, but only some of the husbands and fathers eluded authorities. The families of these pesky believers were then permitted to join them. “Is the will part of being?” Yes, the same as consciousness or understanding. Only if you work too much on understanding and disregard will, then instead of growing stronger, you will will become weaker, or will remain the same as it was. With our will—the will of men nos 1, 2, and 3—we can only control one center, using all the concentration possible for us. We can never control two or three centers, and yet centers are dependent on one another. Suppose that we decide to control one center and, meanwhile, other centers go on by themselves, then they will immediately corrupt the center that we want to control and bring it again to mechanical reaction. “How can one attain this kind of will?” That was explained in relation to “stop” exercise. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

Those who heard that lecture about “stop” exercise may remember it. To control more than one center is the basis of “stop” exercise. This can only be done if you put yourself under some other will because your own will is insufficient. Sometimes it may be necessary to control four centers, and the maximum of your energy of will can only control one center. So another will is necessary. This is why schools of discipline is necessary and school exercises. “How can we work against self-will? It is possible for us, as we are, to recognize the moments when we have real will?” Not real will; we cannot have that. All we have is self-will and willfulness, or small wills that change all the time. Real will is very far off; it is based on Permanent “I,” consciousness and individuality. We have not got it. About how we can work against self-will: you can study the system. There are certain demands in the system; things you must not do or must do. For instance, you must not talk, because if you do, you will only tell lies. You cannot speak about the system before you know and understand it. In this way, from the very beginning, you meet with ideas of the work opposed to self-will. If you forget about the work, you re not working against self-will. The only way to struggle against self-will is to remember the work. It may be that at one moment the work does not enter at all, but at another moment it does enter, and in that moment you can understand what giving up self-will means. Ask yourself: Is it right from the point of view of the work or not? This is struggle against-self-will. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

First it is necessary to understand what will is. We have no will; we only have self-will and willfulness. Self-will is self-assertion. Willfulness is going against something, against rules, and so on. Both include a kind of opposition to something and in that form they exist. Man has no original will which can exist without opposition, and which is permanent. That is why it is necessary to subjugate it. This subjugation trains it so that afterwards it can follow a definite line. When it becomes strong enough, it is no longer necessary to limit it. So will cannot be left as it is. Now it runs in all directions. It has to be trained, and in order to train will one has to do many unpleasant things. In an ordinary man will follows a zigzag line or goes in a circle. Will shows the direction of efforts. Effort is our money. We must pay with effort and the time of effort—in the sense of whether it is the right time for the effort or not—we obtain results. Effort needs knowledge, knowledge of moments when effort is useful. The efforts we can make are efforts of self-observation and self-remembering. When people hear about effort, they think about an effort of “doing.” That would be lost effort or wrong effort, but effort of self-observation and self-remembering is right effort because it can give right results. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. [Every individual] intends only his own security, only one’s own gain. And he is in this lead by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest, one frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when one intends to promote it.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Adam Smith wrote this in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations. Ever since, these word have been music to the ears of free-market advocates. The efficiency of the economic marketplace is then interpreted to suggest that a government should not interfere with individuals’ selfish attempts to maximize their interests. Some free-marketers are inclined to take this idea beyond the economic realm and like Dr. Pangloss in Candide claim that “everything is for the best in this, the best of all possible Worlds.” The sad reality is that Adam Smith’s invisible hand has a relatively small span. There is no general presumption that when every person pursues one’s own interest, the outcome will be the best of all possible Worlds. Even in the narrower sphere of economic affairs, there are important caveats and exceptions to the rule of the invisible hand. Game theory provides a natural way to think about social interactions of individuals. Every person has one’s own aims and strategies; we being them together and examine the equilibrium of the game in which these strategies interact. Remember that there is no presumption that an equilibrium must be good; we have to find out in each situation whether the outcome is a war of each against all, or the best of all possible Worlds, or something between these extremes. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Why did Adam Smith think the invisible hand would produce good economic results for society? Well, his argument went as follows. When I buy a loaf of bread, I am using up some socially valuable resources—the wheat, the fuel, the services of the oven, the labor, and so on—that go into marking the loaf. What stops me from over-using these resources is the price of the loaf. (Much like is someone keeps hitting your car, the insurance company charges them a lot of money to repair it, to prevent future accidents. However, if drivers know they can cause an at fault accident and win the lottery, word gets around they got a good one to move into.) I will buy the load only if its value to me exceeds the price I have to pay. In a well-functioning market the price equals the cost of all these resources—the baker will not sell me the loaf unless the price covers all his costs, and competition will preclude his charging me a higher price. Thus I will buy the loaf only if its value to me exceeds the cost of the resources to the rest of society. The market mechanism, therefore, controls my desire to by more bread to just the right extent. It is as if the price were a “fine” I had to pay to compensate the rest of society for using up its resources. On the other side of the picture, the baker, representing the rest of society, is compensated for his costs in supplying the bread that I value, and therefore has just the right incentive to produce it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

The simplicity, the clarity, we daresay the beauty of this argument explain its appeal. In fact the clarity carries with it an equally clear message about its limitations. The invisible hand at best applies only to situations in which everything has a price. In many instances outside of economics, and even in many within, people are not charged a fine for doing harm to the rest of society, nor given a reward for doing good to someone else. For example, manufacturers are rarely charged an adequate price for using up clean air, nor compensated for training a worker who might then quit and find other employment. Here pollution is an unpriced good (actually a bad), and the problem is that there is no economic incentive to temper the firm’s selfish interest in supplying a large amount of pollution. When a firm trains a worker, this good is not traded on market, so there is no price to guide the firm’s action; the firm must equate its own costs with benefits and cannot capture the willingness of others to pay for this service. In the prisoners’ dilemma, when one prisoner confesses, he harms his colleague but is not fined. Because many unpriced or non-marketed activities matter, it is no wonder that individuals acting selfishly often do too much hard to others, and too little good. Within this broad theme, the failures of the invisible hand can occur in many ways. Everyone might do the individually best thing, but this ends up worst from their collective viewpoint, as in the prisoners’ dilemma. Too many people might do the wrong thing, or everyone might do too much of the wrong thing. Some of these problems are amenable to social policies; others, less so. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

In 1975 a Palestinian consultant to the Iraqi government was given a blunt message. Iraq, in the process of switching its political orientation from the Soviet Union to the West, was in the market for sixty military aircraft, then worth about $300 million. The consultant, Said K. Aburish, tried to negotiate the purchase with a British firm, but the government would not guarantee that spare parts would be available. The Iraqis thus turned to the French, who agreed to sell them F-1 Mirages and to guarantee spare parts. However, the Iraqis sense the French were overcharging them. According to Mr. Aburish, he was then called in by the Iraqis and told: “Drop whatever you are doing, and find out what the bastards charged other countries. You have unlimited expenses—use them to bribe, buy or bully anyone.” Ironically, as he tells the story, he ultimately found the information he needed in the files of the Peace Institute in Stockholm, not exactly a friend of warplane merchant. When France’s then-Prime Minister Jacques Chirac visited Baghdad shortly thereafter, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi strongman, shoved a paper in front of him with the prices charged other countries. According to Mr. Aburish, Mr. Chirac “volunteered, on the sport, a reduction of $1,750,000 in the price of each plane.” The planes went on to fly during Iran-Iraq war that ended in 1988. This was traditional commercial intelligence activity carried out on behalf of a government. The size of the return—id et, $1.75 million times 60 plane, or a bit over $100 million—against the modest bribe Aburish claims he paid indicates the immense profit possibilities inherent in economic intelligence gathering. It is frequently a low-risk, high-return operation. However, the Aburish case is small potatoes. It is an example of what might be termed “micro-intelligence.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Compare the potential rewards of “macro-intelligence.” When Britain negotiated its entry into the Common Market in 1973, its negotiators were armed with information from the intercepted messages of the other European countries. It is impossible to measure the bargaining edge thus gained, but it would make Iraq’s $100 million look like petty cash. That was macro-intelligence. Today the National Security Agency and the British GCHQ both maintain so-called “watch lists” of companies or organizations they monitor with more than routine interests. These include banks, petroleum companies, and commodity traders whose activities might swing the World price of, day, oil or gain. The Soviets, too, pay a lot of attention to economic data. Says, Raymond Tate, a former official of the National Security Agency, “The Soviet Union has for many years manipulated a lot of commercial markers in the World” by using its intelligence capabilities. However, it is the Japanese, according to Lionel Olmer, a former Under Secretary of Commerce in the United States of America, who “have the most refined and organized system of economics intelligence in the World through a network of ‘operatives’—a word I do not use disparagingly—in their export trade offices. JETRO [the Japanese External Trade Organization] s the main collector. However, Japanese trading companies live and die on information, and they are active everywhere, from Africa to Eastern Europe. We do not know how much of the information they collect is shared with governments, but we assume almost all of it is.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

When Olmer was at Commerce, he says, “We spent a year once trying to prove that the Japanese were secretly manipulating the value of the yen—in the period around 1983. We could find no hard evidence to demonstrate that the government was orchestrating up and down moves in the value of the currency. However, we certainly would have like to know.” That is macro-intelligence. In 1988-89 a major commercial tug-of-war broke out between Japan and the United States of America over terms for the joint production of the FSX fighter plane. In those negotiations, says Olmer, “It would have been very helpful if our government were better informed as to the Japanese government’s true intentions. Was it looking to the FSX project as a springboard to help Japan develop a commercial passenger jet business in competition with out own? All we got were a lot of inconsistences.” Here, too, what was at stake was not the sale of a few planes, but the fate of whole industries. These are only the opening skirmishes, however, of an economic intelligence war that will grow more systematic, more central to government policy and corporate strategies alike in the decisive decades ahead. The World’s leading intelligence producers are being driven deeper into economic espionage by several converging factors. First, with the breakup of the Cold War, all the major agencies are searching for new missions to justify their budgets. Second, as the new wealth-creation system forces more industries to globalize, more and more companies have overseas interests to nurture or protect. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

These firms step up the pressure on governments for political backup and economic intelligence that may be beyond the reach of an individual firm. Whether or not public intelligence should be sued for private gain, these pressures can only mount as globalization proceeds. Beyond this, however, is a startling, largely overlooked fact. As companies, in order to operate in the new super-symbolic economy, become ever more dependent on electronics, building extensive, Earth-spanning networks, transmitting data across borders, exchanging data directly between their computers and those of other companies, the entire business system becomes more vulnerable to electronic penetration by outfits like the NSA or GCHQ, Chobetsu, and their Soviet counterparts. Immense flows of fine-grained business data, once less accessible, will present a vast, irresistible target for intelligence agencies. Finally, as the stake rise in global trade rivalries, intelligence rivalries will heat up in parallel, leading to the intelligence equivalent of the arms race. A breakthrough by one country’s spy service will immediately set all the others racing to outdo it, raising the stakes at each move. Spying, to greater extent than at any time in the past century, will be pressed into service in support not only of government objectives but of corporate strategy as well, on the assumption that corporate power will necessarily contribute to national power. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

That is why we must expect more refined monitoring crops and mining activities in target nations, more eavesdropping on crucial trade negotiations, more stealing of engineering software, more purloined bidding data, and so on. The entire armamentarium of electronic surveillance may be pressed into commercial service, along with armies of trained human operatives determined to answer precisely the kind of questions Mr. Olmer found unanswerable during his years in the U.S.A. Commerce Department. All of this will led to a boom in cryptography or coding and code-breaking, as companies and individuals seek to protect their secrets from prying eyes and ears. It will also open the door to corruption—the back-door sale of government-acquired data to private parties by agents or former agents. In the absence of enforceable international law, it will also spark bitter international conflicts. That is why it is very important to pay close attention to technology. Potential accidents with nanotechnology richly deserve the attention they will get, and we have confidence that this attention will suffice to make nanotechnology a force for improved human and environmental safety. Abuse is the greater danger, and harder to deal with. When considering a proposed policy, the first question should be, “How will this affect the long-term likelihood of serious abuse?” Guiding technology means making many choices, and being able to deal with the consequences. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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Never Take Anyone’s Word as Bond!

Spirituality does not arrive fully formed without effort. If our spirituality is like plastic esophagus, then we are starving ourselves, not fasting in a sense. Depictions of violence often glamorize vicious behavior. They offend the Spirit and make you less able to respond to others in a sensitive, caring way. They contradict the Savior’s message of love for one another. Our bodies are temples, and when we abuse our bodies by consuming harmful substances, the Spirit of the Lord is restrained in our lives. The Spirit will not inhabit a polluted temple. Similarly, the Spirit is offended when we pollute our minds with harmful, violent material, whether or not such materials causes us to commit violent acts. Consuming violent media makes it more difficult to keep ourselves unspotted from the World. A diet of violence or pornography dulls the senses, and future exposures need to be rougher and more extreme. Soon the person is desensitized and is unable to react in a sensitive, caring, responsible manner, especially to those in one’s home and family. Good people have become infested with this material and it can have terrifying, destructive consequences. When it comes to our daily lives, sometimes we find ourselves in situations where we may think it is logical to respond violently. However, in retaliating by verbal and physically nonlethal means, offenders appear to suggest to the victim a definition of the situation as one in which violence is suitable in settling questions of face and reputation. When in fact, violence should never be the answer to our problems. However, programs in the media may make some people believe that violence is a way to resolve problems. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

Stage IV Except for cases in which the victim has been eliminated, the offender’s preceding move places the victim in a problematic and consequential position: either stand up to the challenge and demonstrate strength of character, or apologize, discontinue the inappropriate conduct, or flee the situation and thus withdraw questions of the offender’s face while placing one’s own in jeopardy. Just as the offender could have dismissed the impropriety, fled the scene, or avoided further contact with the victim, so too did the victim have similar alternatives. Rather than break the escalation in a manner demonstrating weakness, sometimes victims come into a “working” agreement with the proffered definition of the situation as one suited for violence. In the majority of cases, the victim’s move appears as an agreement that violence is suitable to the transaction. In some cases, though, the offender interpreted, sometimes incorrectly, the victim’s move as implicit agreement to violence. A working agreement is struck in several ways. The most prominent response, found in forty-one percent of cases, in our study, involves noncompliance with the offender’s challenge or command, and the continued performance of activities deemed offensive: Case 54 The victim continued ridiculing the offender before friends. The offender finally shouted, “I said shut up. If you don’t shut up and stop it, I’m going to kill you and I mean it.” The victim continued his abusive line of conduct. The offender proceeded to the kitchen, secured a knife, and returned to the living room. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

She repeated her warning. The victim rose from his chair, swore at the offender’s stupidity, and continued laughing at her. She thrusted the knife deep into his chest. Similarly, a spouse or lover’s refusal, under threat of violence, to conciliate a failing marriage or relationship served as tacit acceptance that violence was suitable to the present transaction. Whether the victims noncompliance was intentional or not, the offender interpreted the move as intentional. Take, for example, the killing of children at the hands of parents. In an earlier illustration, the first move found the parent demanding obedience and backed by a hostile, combative stance. In several of these cases, the child was too young to understand what the parent demanded and the specific consequences for noncompliance. Nevertheless, the child’s failure to eat dinner or stop screaming was interpreted by the parent as a voluntary protest, an intentional challenge to authority. Consequently, the unwitting activities of victims may contribute to what offenders define as very real character contest demanding very real lines of opposition. A second response, occurring in thirty five percent of the cases, found victims physically retaliating against their offenders by hitting, kicking, and pushing—responses short of mortal injury. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

Case 42 The offender and a friend were passing by a local tavern and noticed the victim, a co-worker at a food-processing plant, sitting at the bar. The offender entered the tavern and asked the victim to repay a loan. The victim was angered by the request and refused to pay. The offender then pushed the victim from his stool. Before the victim could react, the bartender asked them to take their fight outside. The victim followed the offender out the door and, from behind, hit the offender with a brick he grabbed from a trash can immediately outside the door. The offender turned and warned the victim that he would beat the victim if he would not pay up and continued his aggression. The victim then struck the offender in the mouth, knocking out his tooth. In the remaining case, victims issued counter-challenges, moves made when offender’s previous moved involved threats and challenges. In some cases, this move came in the form of calling the offender’s bluff. In other cases, the counter came in the form of a direct challenge or threat to the offender, a move no different from the ultimatum given victims by offenders. Unlike simple noncompliance, physical retaliation against offenders and issuance of counter-challenges signify an explicit acceptance of violence as a suitable means for demonstrating character and maintaining or salvaging face. Just as the victim contributed to the escalation toward violence, so too did the audience. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

In these cases, interested members of the audience intervened in the transaction, and actively encouraged the use of violence by means of indicating to opponents that initial improprieties, cheering them toward violent action, blocking the encounter from outside interference, or providing lethal weapons: Case 23 The offender’s wife moved toward the victim, and hit him in the back of the head with an empty beer bottle stating, “That’ll teach you to [molest] my boy. I ought to cut your balls off, your motherf*cker.” She went over to the bar to get another bottle. The victim pushed himself from the table and rose. He then reached into his pocket to secure something which some bystanders thought was a weapon. One of the bystanders gave the offender an axe handle and suggested that he stop the victim before the victim attacked his wife. The offender moved toward the victim. In remembering cases, onlookers were neutral. They were neither encouraging nor discouraging. While neutrality may have been due to fear, civil inattention, or whatever reason, the point is that inaction within a strategic interchange can be interpreted by the opponents as a move favoring the use of violence. Consider the statement of the offender in the following case: Case 48 Police officer: Don’t you think it was wrong to beat [your daughter] when her hands were tied behind her back? [Her hands and feet were bound to keep her from scratching.] Offender: Well, I guess so. But I really didn’t think so then, or [my wife] would have said something to stop me. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

Whenever another being is not experienced as human, the act of destructiveness and cruelty assumes a different quality. Perhaps this is why so many offenders become violent. They may see the victim as a culmination of all the abuse they have experienced in their lives, the victim then become several people rolled into one. As the victim goes on to represent an architype of offense and abuse, the offender no longer sees that individual as a human being, but more of a target that must be made to pay for its sins. The victim becomes more of a personal devil for the offender, and therefore must be taken out by any means necessary. As Church members, we are seeking to become like Christ and to cultivate loving relationships with our families and those around us. Consequently, the effects of media violence on our interactions with others should be of particular concern. Let us choose carefully the material we allow to enter our hearts and minds and how we respond to others. We must recognize for ourselves the effects of media violence, both temporal and spiritual, and take responsibility for our choices. In our society, there are a vast array of people who are mentally ill and because they are of a certain race, gender, social class, or profession, they have not been held responsible for their actions, and they see life as a game and think they can abuse anyone they want to. Conversely, others have been deemed victims because of race, age, disability, religion, social class, physical appearance, sexuality, gender and so forth. For certain victims, it is hard to seek justice when one has been labeled a victim. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

Law enforcement is far from perfect, and some law enforcement officials can be criminals. When a person has become a target and politicians, families members, the media and others are trying to make a news story out of a victim, and turn them into an offender, getting help can seem almost impossible. One will be surprised at how people will go out of their way to help corrupt officials. It is truly unbelievable. Sometimes victim’s can get trapped in situations where no one will help them and they cannot escape, and no matter how many years one pleads for help, it never seem to come, even though people in the community make know one is being terrorized. Americans seem so willing to help others, when there is a crisis in another nation, but it is amazing how fast they are willing to condemn their own. People may have the resources and ability to help a target, but they will not. Trying to survive and remain in compliance with the law can be very difficult, but it is possible. When you have no one to turn to and have tried everything possible to save your own life, it is best to turn your problems over to God. Even though you have done this in the past and things may not have gotten better, you have no other option. Sometimes situations can become a battle for your soul. When you have no other options and you have repeatedly reported to authority figures that you are being attacked and they seem to do nothing, keep in mind God is the highest authority figure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

Often times, victims may victims may turn to a family member and talk about things people are doing to them, and the person will respond, “Don’t judge that person.” However, one must keep in mind, just like these people are targeting you, not helping you, and participating in the terrorism, God will judge them. Never feel like your life is meaningless. You are of great value to God. Just endure as long as you can, even if it takes over a quarter of a century. We cannot control all that happens to us, but we have absolute control over how we respond to the changes in our lives. There will be times in our lives when we find ourselves on an unexpected path, facing circumstances much more severe than a disrupted vacation. However, no amount of change, trial, or opposition can alter the eternal course. The changes, and resulting challenges, that we encounter in mortality come in a variety of shapes and sizes and impact each of us in unique ways. Although each change may be unique to our individual circumstances, there is a common element in the resulting trail or challenge—hope and peace are always available through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And, maybe others are right, do not judge these people. Just keep in mind that God will. Just like when you needed help and no one was there for you, perhaps God will not be there for them on judgment day. Many people think they are saved, but through their actions and thoughts, they can lose their salvation. Perhaps God is using you to separate the wicked from the good and because the way they are treating you, they are damning themselves to hell. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

Abuse and discrimination tactics are not always subtle, sometimes they are a combination being overt and covert. However, unliked friends and loved ones, the Savior not only sympathizes with us, but He can empathize perfectly because He has been where we are. In addition to paying the price and suffering for our sins, Jesus Christ also walked every path, dealt with every challenge, faced every hurt—physical, emotional, or spiritual—that we will ever encounter in mortality. Remember, this life is all some people will ever have, many people on this planet will not make it to Heaven, but perhaps your will and your reward will be much greater than you ever imagined. Man wants to remove God from public life and our consciousness so we forget that He exists and focus on this life and think this is all there is, but there is much more to come in Heaven. The mercy and grace of Jesus Christ are not limited to those who commit sins, but they encompass the promise of everlasting peace to all who will accept and follow Him. His mercy is the mighty healer, even to the wounded innocent. In this mortal experience, we cannot control all that happens to us, but we have absolute control over how we respond to the changes in our lives. This does not imply that the challenges and trials we face are of no consequences and easily handled or dealt with. It does not imply that we will be free from pain or heartache. However, it does mean that there is cause for hope and that due to the Atonement of Jesus Christ, we can move forward and find better days—even days full of joy, light, and happiness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

Discovering the Mormon Church is a great way to understand what our Savior has planned for our lives. Their strict doctrines and codes for socialization are the path to salvation. I encourage you to turn your life over to God and find a religion that works for you. And rather than blame God for your problems, pour out your heart to Him. The Lord wants you to be of good comfort, and He promises to ease the burdens which are put upon your shoulders, that you will not feel them upon your back. And the Lord will strengthen you that you will be able to bear up your burdens with ease, and this will allow you to submit cheerfully and with patience to all the will of the Lord. Although you mat not immediately delivered from bondage, by turning to the Lord, you will be blessed according to your needs and according to the Lord’ wisdom. Healing blessings come in many ways, each suited to our individual needs, as known to Him who loves us best. Sometimes a “healing” cures our illness or lifts our burden. However, sometimes we are “healed” by being given strength or understanding or patience to bear the burdens placed upon us. In these latter days, the Lord has provided us with numerous resources, our “brazen serpents,” all of which are designed to help us look to Christ and place our trust in Him. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

A similar picture presents itself when we look at some of the traffic regulations regarding accessible engagements, especially engagements during social occasions such as parties. Prohibitions against improper involvement with others are prohibitions against taking joint leave of the gathering and the encompassing social occasion. Often prohibitions about intruding upon bystanders—persons presumably maintaining an appropriate regard for the social occasion. Rules obliging one to gibe oneself up to occasioned mutual-engagements, and rules against excluding deferential newcomers, are rules assuring that the occasion as a whole will provide the basis of involvement. By maintaining accessibility to all those present, one shows that the gathering is significant enough in itself to ensure that any participant, merely by virtue of one’s participation, has a right to obtain attention and an obligation to give attention to any other participant. Loyalty, damping, spacing, drift—these are all issues basic to the organization of both accessible engagements and the setting of bystanders in which they occur. These issues are difficult even to describe unless reference is made to their function as supports for the gathering as a whole and, behind this, the social occasion. The constraints that apply to objects of involvement, to modes of managing one’s involvements, and (through these) to the management of accessible engagements, seem together to provide evidence of the weight and reality of the “situation.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

The determination and definition of aim is a very important moment in the work. It usually happens that one defines one’s aim quite rightly, in quite the right direction, only one takes an aim that is very far off. Then, with this aim in view, one begins to learn and to accumulate material. The next time one tries to define aim, one defines it a little differently, finding an aim that is a littler nearer. The next time again a little nearer, and so on, until one finds an aim that is quite close—tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. This is really the right way in relation to aims, if we speak about them without definite words. However, besides them, we can find many that have been mentioned definitely. “To be one.” Quite right; very good aim. “To be free.” How? Only when one acquires control of the machine. One may say, “I want to be conscious.” Quite right. Another may say, ‘I want to have will.” Very good. “I want to be awake.” Also very good. These are all aims on the same line, only at different distances. “I have come to the conclusion that most of my aims are too remote and I want to work more on the practical side.” Yes, because before you can reach remote aims, there are many things you have to do here and now, and that is where this system differs from almost all other systems. Nearly all other systems begin at least ten thousand miles ahead and have no practical meaning; but this system begins in this room. That is the difference and that is what must be understood first of all. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

Again and again we must return to this question of what we want from the work. Do not use the terminology of the system but find what you yourself want. If you say you want to be conscious, that is all very good, but why? What do you want to get by being conscious? You must not think that you can answer this question immediately. It is very difficult. However, you must keep coming back to it. And you must understand that before the time comes when you will be able to get what you want, you must know what it is. This is a very definite condition. You can never get anything until you know it and can say, “I want this.” Then perhaps you may get it or perhaps you may not; but you can never get it unless you know what it is. Also, you must want things in the right order. “What does this mean?” One must study and understand the right order of possibility. This is a very interesting subject. “Do you mean in the system?” With the help of the system. However, you can formulate it in your own way. You must be sincere with yourself. You must know exactly what you want, and then you will ask yourself: “Will the system be able to help me to get it?” and so on. However, it is necessary to know what we want. We are never the same for two days in succession. On some days we shall be more successful, on others less. All we can do is to control what we can. We never control more difficult things if we do not control the easy things. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

Every day and hour there are things that we could control an do not; so we cannot have new things to control. We are surrounded by neglected things. Chiefly, we do not control our thinking. We think in a vague way about what we want, but if we do not formulate what we want, then nothing will happen. This is the first condition, but there are many obstacles. Think about this question, revise what you have already thought about aim, and think how you would define your aim now after the study of these ideas. It is useless to define an aim that cannot be attained. However, if you define an aim that you can hope to attain, then your work will be conscious, serious. What a man can get, what can be promised to him on the condition that he works, is after some time of work he will see himself. Other things he may get, such as consciousness, unity, connection with higher centers, all come after this—and we do not know in what order they come. However, we must remember one thing; until we get this—until we see ourselves—we cannot get anything else. Until we begin to work with this aim in view we cannot say that we have begun work. So, after some time we must be able to formulate our immediate aim as being to see oneself. Not even to know oneself (this comes later), but to see oneself. Even knowledge and understanding cannot help if one does not work on being. If will does not grow at the same time, one can understand and yet not be able to do anything. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

Brinkmanship in the Atlantic—“At the outbreak of war, the Navy would move aggressively into the Norwegian Sea, first with submarines and then with several aircraft carriers. They would roll back the Soviet fleet, and attack its home base stations, striking ports and any bastions within reach of the carriers’ attack planes.” –John Leman, U.S.A. Navy Secretary (1981-87). “To threaten Soviet nuclear missile submarines is to wage nuclear war. It is very escalatory.” –Barry Posen, Professors of Political Science, MIT. Posen argues that the U.S.A. Navy is following a very dangerous and escalatory policy in the Atlantic. In the event of any conventional conflict with the U.S.S.R., the U.S. Navy will attempt to sink all Soviet subs in the Atlantic. The problem with this strategy is that, at present, the United States of America cannot distinguish nuclear from nonnuclear armed submarines. Hence there is the risk that the United States of America will cross the nuclear threshold unknowingly by inadvertently sinking a Soviet submarined with nuclear weapon. At that point the Soviets will feel justified in attacking American nuclear weapons, and we will be one step too close to an all-out exchange. Secretary of the Navy John Lehman defends the policy just as vigorously as Posen attacks it. He recognized the increased chance that a conventional war would escalate into a nuclear conflict. However, he reasons that the Soviets should recognize this too! The increased chance of escalation was justified because it would decrease the chance of a conventional conflict in the first place. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

On which side of the fence does brinkmanship lie? Our understanding of brinkmanship is unlikely to please either side. When the goal is to prevent a nuclear way, the policy should not have any effect. The increased chance of a conventional conflict escalating should be exactly offset by a decrease in the probability of initiating a conventional conflict. An analogy might prove helpful. Suppose we try to make dueling safer by reducing the accuracy of the pistols. The likely outcome is that the adversaries will come close to one another before firing. Suppose that the adversaries are equally good shots, and that killing the other person earns the reward of 1, and that being killed incurs the penalty of -1. Then the optimal strategy is for the two to keep on approaching each other, and fire the moment the probability of hitting reaches 1/2. The probability of a fatal hit is the same (3/4) irrespective of the accuracy of the pistols. A change in the rules need not affect the outcome; all players can adjust their strategies to offset it. To deter the Soviets from initiating a conventional attack, the United States of America must expose them to some risk that the conflict will escalate to a nuclear exchange. If the risk along one route grows larger, then the Soviets will advance down that route more slowly. And the Americans will be more likely (as will the Soviets) to offer a concession, knowing that both countries face this bigger risk. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

Both the Americans and the Soviets should evaluate their strategies by their consequences, not the actions per se. For another helpful way to think about this, imagine that the two parties are engaged in an auction. Instead of bidding dollars or rubles, they are bidding probabilities of disaster. At some point the bidding gets too rich. One side decides to back down rather than escalate to a twenty-three percent chance of mutual loss. However, it may have waited too long, and the probability of a loss could already have turned into the bad outcome. In a conflict between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, the bids are the probability that the conflict will escalate. How the two sides communicate their bids depends on the rules of the game. However, changing the rules alone cannot make brinkmanship a safer game to play. If the United States of America were to change its policy in the Atlantic, the Soviets could simply adjust their bidding strategy to restore the same pressure on the United States of America. In a safer World, the countries can take more escalatory steps. When the threat is a probability, the Soviets can always adjust their actions so as to keep the probability the same. This does not mean that you should give up and be resigned to the risk of nuclear way. To reduce the risks, you have to attack the problem at a more fundamental level—the game must be changed. Were French and German aristocrats to have used less accurate dueling pistols, that would not have helped them to live longer. Rather, they would have to have changed the honor code that initiated a duel at the drop of a glove. As the United States of America and the Soviet Union begin to share the same objectives, that changes the game, not just the rules. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

As the World of intelligence adapts to the emerging super-symbolic economy, this ravenous information market will demand new products, and new giants will arise to dominate it. Looming in the not-too-distant future is the breakup or terminal enfeeblement of the UKUSA-NATO espionage alliance. As the Soviet Union’s former satellites in Eastern Europe rush off, each to make its own separate deal with Western spy agencies, the World “intelligence balance” is further tilted. In addition, as Japan and Germany take on much larger diplomatic and political (and perhaps military) riles, consonant with their enormous economic strength, they can be expected to beef up their intelligence activities, which in turn will stimulate intelligence and counter-intelligence among their neighbors, trading partners, allies, and adversaries. (We must assume, for example, that German reunification has delivered to Bonn at least some spy networks and “assets” previously run by the East Germans in the United States of America, France, Britain, or other nations.) The Japanese and the Germans may themselves form the nuclei of new consortia, to which lesser powers will attach themselves. In any event, it would be surprising if both the Bundesnachrichtendienst and the Chobetsu were not enjoying substantial budget increases (no doubt disguised or hidden in the budgets of other agencies). #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

These power-shifting changes in the hidden World of intelligence reflect the new “correlation of forces” (to use a favorite Soviet phrase). As the new system of wealth creation intensifies competition among the high-tech nations, it will also shift the priorities of the main spy services. Three specific topics will command top-level attention from spies in the future: economics, technology, and ecology. Technology is a crucial topic in our World today, as many new technologies are being developed. Abuse of nanotechnology can be delayed, perhaps for a long time, by proper regulation. The goal here is not to make regulations so tight that people will have to violate them to get anything done. This would encourage holdouts, underground work, and disrespect for the law. Instead, the goal is to draw boundaries loosely enough to cause little difficulty for legitimate work, while making dangerous activities very difficult indeed. This is a delicate balance to stroke: those fearful of risk naturally try to loosen an avoid regulation entirely. Nonetheless, the problem must be solved, and this seems the best direction to explore. In one approach, nanomachines could be divided into two classes: experimental devices and approved products. Approved products could be made widely available through special-purpose molecular manufacturing systems. Thus, once an experimental device had passed regulatory inspection, it could become inexpensive and abundant. In this way, popular demands for a product could be satisfied without anyone needing to break safety rules. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

Approved products could include devices like (but superior to) the full range of modern consumer products, ranging from personal supercomputers with 3-D displays, through smart construction materials, to running shoes with truly amazing features. The main cost of such goods might be the royalty to the designer. In Engines of Creation (the first book to examine this topic), this strategy for producing and distributing approved products is called a “limited assembler system.” Note that both approved products and the limited assemblers that build them would lack the ability to make copies of themselves, to self-replicate. Ralph Merkel sees this ability as the one to keep an eye on: “Self-replicating systems can and should be appropriately regulated. There seems no need, however, to have any more than normal concerns for devices which cannot replicate. While we might, as with any device, need law to ensure their appropriate use, they pose no extraordinary problems.” For must products, normal medical, commercial, and environmental standards would apply; the regulatory bureaucracies are already in place. There are great advantages to permitting nearly free experimentation in new technology, allowing creative people to try ideas without seeking prior approval from a cumbersome committee. Surprisingly, this, too, seems compatible with safety. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

There are great advantages to permitting nearly free experimentation in a new technology, allowing creative people to try ideas without seeking prior approval from a cumbersome committee. Surprisingly, this, too, seems compatible with safety. In the World of nanotechnology, one cubic micron is a large space, with room enough for millions of components. For many purposes, a few cubic microns would amount to a large laboratory space. To a device on a micron scale, a centimeter is an enormous distance. Surrounding a micron-scale device with a centimeter-thick wall would be like surrounding a human being with a wall kilometers thick, and just as hard to penetrate. Further, a micron-scale device can be incinerate in an instant by something as small as a spark of static electricity. Based on observations like these, Engines of Creation outlined the idea of a sealed assembler lab, in which a researcher could build anything, even something deliberately designed to be dangerous, and yet be unable to get anything out of the microscopic sealed laboratory except for information. With a good communications network, a researcher or product developer in Texas could equally easily perform experiments in a remote Maine laboratory run with the security and secrecy of a Swiss bank. A lab would have a responsibility to its customers to keep proprietary work confidential, and a responsibility to regulatory authorities to ensure that nothing but information leaves the laboratory. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

Researchers could then perform any small-scale experiments they wish. Only approved products, of course, would be built outside the sealed laboratories. While this may not be the best pattern of regulation possible, it does show one way in which freedom of experimentation could be combined with strict regulation of use. By providing a clear separation between legitimate and illegitimate activity, it would help with the difficult problem of identifying and preventing research aimed at damaging ends. A sensible policy will have to balance the risk of private abuse of technology against the risk of government abuse of technology and regulation. Low-cost manufacturing can make surveillance equipment less expensive. Increased surveillance can reduce some risks in society, but the watchers themselves often are not very well watched. Placing bounds on surveillance is a challenge for today’s citizens as well as tomorrow’s, and lessons learned in the past can be applied in the future. In the long run, it seems wise to assume that someone, somewhere, somehow, will escape the bound of regulation and arms control and apply molecular-manufacturing capabilities to making novel weapons. If by then we have had several decades of peaceful, responsible, creative development of nanotechnology (or perhaps a few years of help from smart machines), then we may have developed both ecosystem protectors and sophisticated immune machines for medicine. There is a good reason to think that distributed technologies of this sort could be adapted and extended to deal with the problem of protecting against novel nanoweaponry. Failure to do so could mean disaster. Nonetheless, building protective systems of this sort will be by far the greatest challenge of any we have discussed. The chief purpose of regulator tactics like those we have descried must be to buy time for those peaceful developments, to maximize the chances that this challenge can be met before time runs out. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

Violence has a great deal to do with shadow, in particular the shadow of power. Take the example Judas. Judas led them into battle, and fought like a lion and behold, the hosts of the enemy were vanquished and they fled. And Israel had a great deliverance. And they sang sons of thanksgiving, and praised the Lord of Heaven for His goodness, because His mercy endureth forever. And on the five and twentieth day of Kislev, the same day when three years before the altar of God had been profaned by the heathen, the sanctuary of God was dedicated anew with songs and music, and the people praised the God of Heaven who had given them great victory, and they celebrated the Dedication of the Altar for eight days, and there was great rejoicing among the people. Moreover, Judas and his brethren with the whole congregation of Israel ordained that the days of the Dedication of the Altar should be celebrated from year to year for eight days in gladness and thanksgiving. O Lord, Thou has ever been our fortress and our strength; from days of old hast Thou upheld our fathers. When me rose up against them in the days of Mattathias, to desecrate Thine altar and destroy their faith in Thee, forcing the brave Judeans to forsake Thy covenant, compelling them to follow pagan ways—then didst Thou, O Lord our God, reveal Thy saving power; Thy spirit moved the Maccabees to rise against the foe that ruled by force and might. Right was thus triumphant, faith victorious; the mighty hosts didst Thou deliver to the weak. Thou didst bring low the wicked hordes who sought to crush the faithful few devoted to Thy Law. When the battle was over, and arrogance subdued, Thy children all rejoiced and praised Thee in Thy courts. They purified Thine altar and kindled there the lamp that sheds its rays on all mankind, spreading Thy light afar. As witness-bearers to the triumph of Thy right, we kindle lights in gratitude, and praise Thy holy name. Through that resplendent victory, Israel was preserved, to share Thy truths with all mankind, and by these truths to live. O may we consecrate our lives as did the Maccabees, and dedicate anew our hearts and souls to Thee. The glowing lights of Heaven, today as in the past, proclaim that man must live, not by might nor by power, but by Thy Spirit, O Lord of hosts. #RandolphHarris #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

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This Was Like a Hot Iron in My Gut

The soul apparently needs amorous sadness. It is a form of consciousness that brings its own unique wisdom. Criminal homicide is the culmination of an intense interchange between an offender and victim. Transactions resulting in murder involved the joint contribution of the offender and victim to the escalation of a “character contest,” a confrontation in which at least one, but usually both, attempt to establish or save face at the other’s expense by standing steady in the face of adversity. Such transactions additionally involved a consensus among participants that violence was a suitable if not required means for settling the contest. These are the occasions in which situated transactions resulted in violent death. However, examination of the development of these situated interchanges is not to argue that such transactions have no historical roots. In almost half of the cases there had preciously occurred what might be termed rehearsals between the offender and victim. These involved transactions which included the escalations of hostilities, and sometimes, physical violence. In twenty-six percent of these cases, the offender and, sometimes, victim entered the present occasion on the assumption that another hostile confrontation would transpire. Whether or not murderous episodes had such rehearsals, an examination of all cases bring to light a conception of the transaction resembling a “face game.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

The offender and victim, at times with the assistance of bystanders, make “moves” on the basis of the other’s moves and the position of their audience. While these moves are not always of the same precise content or degree, it was possible to derive as set of time-ordered stages of which each share certain basic properties. Stage I The opening move in the transactions was an event performed by the victim and subsequently defined by the offender as an offense to “face,” that image of self a person claims during a particular occasion or social contact. What constitutes the real or actual beginning of this or any other type of transaction is often quite problematic for the researcher. The victim’s activity, however, appeared as a pivotal event which separated the pervious occasioned activity of the offender and victim from their subsequent violent confrontation. Such a disparaging and interactionally disrupting event constitutes the initial move. While the form and content of the victim’s move varied, three basic types of events cover all cases. In the first, found in over forty-one percent of the cases, the victim made some direct, verbal expression which the offender subsequently interpreted as offensive. This class of events was obviously quite broad. Included were everything from insults levied at some particular attribute of the offender’s self, family, or friends to verbal tirades which disparaged the overall character of the offender. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

Case 34 The offender, victim, and two friend were driving toward the country where they could consume their wine. En route, the victim turned to the offender, both of whom were located in the back seat, and stated: “You know, you really got some good parents. You know, you’re really a son-of-a-b*tch. You’re a leech. The whole time you were out of a job, you were living with them, and weren’t even paying. The car you have should be your father’s. He’s the one who made the payments. Any time your dad goes to the store, you’re the first in line to sponge off him. Why don’t you grow up and stop being a leech?” The offender swore at him, and told him to shup up. But the victim continued, “Someone ought to come along and really F*ck you up.” A second type, found in thirty-four percent of the cases, involved the victim’s refusal to cooperate or comply with the requests of the offender. The offender subsequently interpreted the victim’s action as a denial of his ability or right to command obedience. This was illustrated in transactions where parent murdered their children. When the parent’s request that the child eat dinner, stop screaming, or take a bath went unheeded, the parent subsequently interpreted the child’s activity as a challenge to rightful authority. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

The third type of event, found in twenty-five percent of the cases, involved some physical or nonverbal gesture which the offender subsequently defined as personally offensive. Often this gesture entailed an insult to the offender’s prowess involving pleasures of the flesh, and took the form of affairs or flirtation: Case 10 When the victim finally came home, the offender told her to sit down; they had to talk. He asked her is she was “fooling around” with other men. She stated that she had, and her boyfriends pleased her more than the offender. The offender later stated that “this was like a hot iron in my gut.” He ripped her clothes off and examined her body, finding scars and bruises. She said that her boyfriends liked to beat her. His anger magnified. Although the content and the initial production of these two events varied, each served to disrupt the social order of the occasion. Each marked the opening of serious yet tranquil order came to be transactions involving an argumentative “character contest.” Stage II In all cases ending in murder the offender interpreted the victim’s previous move a personally offensive. In some cases the victim was intentionally offensive. However, it is plausible that in other cases the victim was unwitting. In Case forty-three, for instance, the victim, a five-week old boy, started crying early in the morning. The offender, the boy’s father, ordered the victim to stop crying. The victim’s crying, however, only heightened in intensity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

The victim was too young to understand the offender’s verbal order, and persistent crying may have been oriented not toward challenging his father’s authority, but toward acquiring food or a change of diapers. Whatever the motive for crying, the child’s father defined it as purposive and offensive. What the victim intends may be inconsequential. What the offender interprets as intentional, however, may have consequences for the organization of subsequent activity. In sixty percent of the cases, the offender learned the meaning of the victim’s move from inquiries made of victim or audience. In reply, the offender received statements suggesting the victim’s action was insulting and intentional. In thirty-nine percent of the cases, the offender ascertained the meaning of the impropriety directly from the victim: Case 28 As the offender entered the back door of the house his wife said to her lover, the victim, “There’s____.” The victim jumped to his feet and started dressing hurriedly. The offender, having called to his wife without avail, enter the bedroom. He found his wife nude and the victim clad in underwear. The startled offender asked the victim, “Why?” The victim replied, “Haven’t you ever been in love?” We love each other.” The offender later stated, “If they were drunk or something, I could see it. I mean, I’ve done it myself. But when he said they loved each other, well that did it.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

In another twenty-one percent of the cases, however, the offender made his assessment from statements of interested bystanders: Case 20 The offender and his friend were sitting in a booth at a tavern drinking beer. The offender’s friend told him that the offender’s girlfriend was “playing” with another man (victim) at the other end of the bar. The offender looked at them and asked his friend if he thought something was going on. The friend responses, “I wouldn’t let that guy fool around with [her] if she was mine.” The offender agreed, and suggested to his friend that his girlfriend and the victim be shot for their actions. His friend said that only the victim should be shot, not the girlfriend. In the remaining forty percent of the cases the offender imputed meaning to the event on the basis of rehearsals in which the victim had engaged a similar role. The incessant screaming of the infant, the unremitting aggression of a drunken spouse, and the never-ending flirtation by the lover or spouse were activities which offenders had previously encountered and assessed as pointed and deliberate aspersions. Such previous activities and their consequences served the offender as an interpretive scheme for immediately making sense of the present event. Stage III The apparent affront could have evoked different responses. The offender could have excused the violation because the victim was judged to be drunk, crazy, or joking. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

He could have fled the scene and avoided further interaction with the victim by moving into interaction with other occasioned participants or dealt with the impropriety through a retaliatory move aimed at restoring face and demonstrating strong character. The latter move was utilized in all cases. In countering the impropriety, the offender attempted to retore the occasioned order and reaffirm face by standing his or her ground. To have used another alternative was to confirm questions of face and self raised by the victim. The offender’s plight, then, was “problematic” and “consequential.” He could have chosen from several options, each of which had important consequences both to the face he situationally claimed and to his general reputation. Thus, the offender was faced with a dilemma: either deal with the impropriety by demonstrating strength of character, or verify question of face by demonstrating weakness. In retaliating, the offender issues an expression of anger and contempt which signified his opinion of the victim as an unworthy person. Two basic patterns of retaliation were found. In eighty-six percent of the cases, the offender issued a verbal or physical challenge to the victim. In the remaining cases, the offender physically retaliated, killing the victim. For the latter pattern, this third move marked the battle ending the victim’s life: Case 12 The offender, victim, and group of bystanders were observing a fight between a barroom bouncer and a drunk patron on the street outside the tavern. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

The offender was cheering for the bouncer, and the victim was cheering for the patron, who was losing the battle. The victim, angered by the offender’s disposition toward the fight, turned to the offender and said, “You’d really like to see the little guy have the sh*t kicked out of him, wouldn’t you big man?” The offender turned toward the victim and asked, “What did you say? You want the same thing, punk?” The victim moved toward the offender and reared back. The offender responded, “OK buddy.” He struck the victim with a single right cross. The victim crashed to the pavement, and died a week later. Such cases seem to suggest that the event is a one-sided affair, with the unwitting victim engaging a passive, non-contributory role. However, in these cases the third state was preceded by the victim’s impropriety, the offender’s inquiry of the victim or audience, and a response affirming the victim’s intent to be censorious. On assessing the event as one of insult and challenge, the offender elicited a statement indicating to participants, including himself, his intended line of action, secured a weapon, positioned it, and dropped the victim in a single motion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

While ten cases witness the victim’s demise during this stage, the typical case consists of various verbal and physically nonlethal moves. The most common type of retaliation was a verbal challenge, occurring in forty-three present of the cases. These took the form of an ultimatum: either apologize, flee the situation, or discontinue the inappropriate conduct, or face physical harm or death. In about twenty-two percent, retaliation came by way of countering the victim’s impropriety with similar insults or degrading gestures. This response entailed a name-calling, action-matching set of expressions resembling that which would be found between boys in the midst of a playground argument or “playing the dozens.” The remaining cases, some eleven percent of the sample, were evenly divided. On the one hand, offenders issues specific commands, tinged with hostility and backed with an aggressive posture, calling for their victims to back down. On the other hand, offenders “called out” or invited their victims to fight physically. This third stage is the offender’s opening move in salvaging face and honor. In retaliating by verbal and physically nonlethal means, the offender appeared to suggest to the victim a definition of the situation as one in which violence was suitable in settling questions of face and reputation. Another point to take away, is people often think they are being attacked when someone says something offensive to them and that it is okay to respond with physical violence. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

However, the person who first responds with physical violence becomes the offender. So it is often best to walk away. If someone is stalking and harassing you, it is best to contact the police and do not engage in violence because they are baiting you to become the offender and them the victim. If you contact the police and they refuse to take actions and you are feeling threatened, perhaps the next best move would be to contact a lawyer and/or another division of law enforcement to investigate. Just remember, once you physically lay a hand on a person, no matter what they did, you become the offender. And, if someone assaults you, and the responding officer refuse to take action, get the officers name and badge number and contact Internal Affairs. However, keep in mind, it is always best to walk away from an altercation before it becomes physical and never physically attack anyone, nor try to bait them into attacking you. I have suggested that the behavior of an individua while in a situation is guided by social values or norms concerning involvement. These rulings apply to the intensity of one’s involvements, their distribution among possible main and side activities, and, importantly, their tendency to bring one into an engagement with all, some, or none present. There will be then a patterned distribution or allocation of the individual’s involvement. By taking the point of view of the situation as a whole, we can link the involvement allocation of each participant to that maintained by each of the other participants, piecing together in this way a pattern than can be described as the structure of involvement in the situation. (And just as we speak of actual allocations and structures of involvement, so we can consider matter from the normative point of view and speak of prescribed allocations and structures of involvement.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

Since the shape and distribution of involvement nicely enfolds an aspect of everything that goes on within a situation, we can perhaps speak here of the structure of the situation. In any case, if we want to describe conduct on a back ward, or in a street market, a bridge game, an investiture, or a revivalistic church service, it would seem reasonable to employ the structure of involvement in these situations a one frame of reference. Now let us briefly review the kinds of situational proprieties that have been described and the social functions that appear to be performed by them. Rules about access to a bounded region, and the regard that is to be shown its boundaries, are patently rules of respect for the gathering itself. Regulations against unoccasioned main involvements or overtaxing side involvements (especially when either of these represents an auto-involvement) seem to ensure that the individual will not become embroiled divisively in matters that incorporate only oneself; regulations against intense mutual-involvement provide the same assurances about the conduct of a subset of those present. In short, interests that are larger or smaller than the ones sustainable by everyone in the gathering as a whole are curtailed; limits are put of those kinds of emigration of the self which can occur without leaving one’s physical position. Being thus constrained to limit his involvements outside the situation as well as divisive ones within the situation, the individual perforce demonstrates that something of oneself has been reserved for what remains, namely, the little system or regulated social life that is jointly and exclusively maintained by all those in the situation as a whole—the situation being that entity neatly matched the area within which the individual’s regulation of involvement is perceptible. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

However, we know that the gathering and the joint life it currently sustains are merely an expression, a visible phase, of the social occasion within which the situation occurs. To engage in situational impropriety, then, is to draw improperly on what one owes the social occasion. Similar implications emerge when we turn from those constraints that play upon choice of object of involvement to those that pertain to the way in which the individual handles oneself. By sustaining a publicly oriented composition of one’s face and a suitable organization of more material aspects of one’s personal appearance, the individual shows oneself a person ready for social interaction in the situation. By inhibiting creature releases and keeping a check upon intense involvement, one ensures that one will be ready for any event that occurs within the situation, and that one is respectful of these possibilities. By keeping oneself from going too far into a situated task, one is able to remain in readiness near the surface of the situation. Through all of these means, the individual shows that one is “in play” in the situation, alive to the gathering it contains, oriented in it, and ready and open for whatever interaction it may bring. What does it mean to work practically? It means to work not only on intellect but also on emotion and on will. Work on intellect means to think in a new way, creating new points of view, destroying illusions. Work on emotions means not expressing negative emotions, not identifying, not considering, and later on, also work on emotions themselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

Work on will: what does it mean? What is will in men nos 1, 2, and 3? It is the resultant of desires. Will is the line of combined desires, and as our desires constantly change, we have no permanent line. So, ordinary will depends on desires, and desires can be very different; desire to do something and desire not to do something. Man has no will but only self-will and willfulness. We have to ask ourselves on what the will of man no. 7 could be based. It must be based on full consciousness, and this implies knowing and understanding connected with objective consciousness and a Permanent “I.” So three things are necessary: knowledge, consciousness, and Permanent “I.” Only those people who have these three things can have real will; that means, a will that is independent of all else and only based on consciousness, knowledge and a Permanent “I.” Now ask yourselves on what self-will and willfulness is based. It is always based on opposition. Self-will is when, for instance, someone sees that a man does not know how to do a thing and says he will explain, and the man says, “No, I will do it myself. “Self-will springs from opposition. Willfulness is much the same only more general. Willfulness can be a kind of habit. In order to study how to begin work on will, how to transform will, one has to give up one’s will. This is a very dangerous expression if it is misunderstood. It is important to understand rightly what “to give up one’s will” means. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

The question is how to give up one’s will. First, one must try to connect and to co-ordinate thoughts which change the whole thing. If we want to be in the work, we must verify all our thoughts, words, and actions from the point of view of work. Some of them can harm the work. So, if you want to work, you are not free any more; you must lose the illusion of freedom. The questions is: Have we freedom? Have we something to lose? The only freedom we have is to do harm to the work and to people. By learning not to harm the work we learn not to harm ourselves; not to perform irresponsible, unconnected actions. So we do not give up anything real. Now, let us look at how the United States of America has used nuclear brinkmanship as an effective deterrent. Now that the cold war is over and the arms race is winding down, we can examine nuclear brinkmanship in a cool analytical way that was hard to achieve earlier. Many argue that there is a paradox in nuclear weapons because they pose too big a threat ever to use. If their use cannot be rational, then the threat cannot be rational either. This is just the Gutman-Spade exchange write large. Without the threat value, nuclear weapons are impotent in deterring minor conflicts. This is why the Europeans feared that NATO’s nuclear umbrella might prove a poor shield against the rain of superior Soviet conventional forces. Even if the United States of America is resolved to defend Europe, the argument went, the threat of nuclear response is not credible against small Soviet transgressions. The Soviets can exploit this using “salami tactics,” a slice at a time. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

Imagine that there are riots in West Berlin and some fires. East German fire brigades come to help. Does the U.S.A. president press the nuclear button? Of course not. East German police arrive in support. The button? No. They stay, and a few days later are replaced by East German troops. At each point, the incremental aggression is too small to merit a drastic response. NATO keeps on redrawing the line of its tolerance. Eventually, the Soviets could be at Trafalgar Square, and NATO headquarters in exile would be wondering just when it was that they missed their chance. This conclusion was mistaken. The threat of a U.S.A. nuclear response to conventional Soviet aggression in Europe was one of brinkmanship. There are two ways for getting around the problem of redrawing the line. Brinkmanship uses both. First, you arrange to take the control for punishment out of your hands so as to deny yourself the opportunity to redraw the line. Second, you transform the precipice into a slipper slope. With each step further down the slope there is the risk of losing control and falling into the abyss. In this way, an opponent who tries to avoid your threat through salami tactics finds oneself constantly exposed to a small chance of disaster. Each slice he takes, no matter how small, may be the proverbial last straw. The essential ingredient in making this type of threat credible is that neither you nor your rival knows just where the breaking point lies. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

A small risk of disaster can have the same threat value as the certainty of a smaller punishment. The United States of America has used the nuclear threat by creating a risk that the missiles will fly even though at that time the government will be trying as hard as it can to prevent the attack. The United States of America’s threat would be carried out only in spite of itself. The threat of nuclear weaponry is that it will be used inadvertently. Nuclear deterrence becomes credible when there exists the possibility for any conventional conflict to escalate out of control. The threat is not a certainty but rather a probability of mutual destruction. As a conflict escalates, the probability of a chain of events leading to a nuclear confrontation increases. Eventually the probability of war will be sufficiently high that one side will want to back down However, the wheel of war set in motion have a momentum all their own, and the concessions may come too late. Unanticipated, inadvertent, perhaps accidental or irrational actions beyond the leaders’ control will provide the path of escalation to nuclear weapons. M.I.T. political science professor Barry Posen put this well: “Escalation has generally been conceived of as either a rational policy choice, in which the leadership decides to preempt or to escalate in the face of a conventional defeat, or as an accident, the result of a mechanical failure, unauthorized, use, or insanity. But escalation arising out of the normal conduct of intense conventional conflict falls between these two categories: it is neither a purposeful act of policy nor an accident. What might be called “inadvertent escalation” is rather the unintended consequence of a decision to fight a conventional war. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

Nuclear deterrence involves a fundamental trade-off. There is a value in being able to make the threat of mutual destruction. The nuclear age has enjoyed seventy years without a World war. However, there is a cost in leaving our fate to chance. Nuclear deterrence requires accepting some risk of mutual destruction. Much of the debate about nuclear deterrence centers on this risk. What can we do to lower the probability of nuclear war without losing the value of deterrence? The trick, as usual, is to keep such generalized risk within the bounds of effectiveness and acceptability. Successful brinkmanship remains something of an art and an adventure. When it comes to swapping secrets, all “companies” are part of a massive information marketplace. Part of any industrial economy consists of sales of goods or services, not to “end consumers” but from one business to another. In the same way, spies have long traded with one another. Edward Gleichen, a British spy at the turn of the 20th century, surveyed Moroccan fortifications, sometime with the good-natured help of local populations who, he reported, “assisted me in ‘shooting’ angels and slopes.” This intelligence was later handed over to the French, who were busy “pacifying the natives.” What the British received in exchange is not recorded, but this kind of truck and barter, as Adam Smith might have termed it, is not only rampant behind the scenes, but growing. RandolphHarris 17 of 23

Much like today’s global corporations, spy agencies are linked in consortia and alliance. Ever since 1947, a secret pact known as the UKUSA Security Agreement has linked the NSA, the British GCHQ, and their Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand counterparts. Later, the NATO organization joined the pact. (Since 1986, however, New Zealand has been excluded from the intelligence-sharing arrangement because it prohibited nuclear-armed American vessels from entering its ports.) Members of such consortia maintain uneasy links, sharing information and misinformation, accusing one another of leaking secrets or having been penetrated by an adversary, or of holding out some secrets. The modern World’s second great intelligence consortium, from the end of World War II until the 1990s, was, of course, controlled from Moscow and included most of the East European nations plus Cuba and North Vietnam. One case that illustrates their relationships involved James D. Harper, a retired electrical engineer in California whose wife worked for Systems Control, a U.S.A. defense contractor. For $250,000, Harper sold a large number of Systems Control documents to Zdzislaw Przychodzien, supposedly an employee of the polish Ministry of Machine Industry, but actually an agent of the Polish SB, the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa. The papers, dealing with U.S.A. ballistic missile defenses, were quickly shipped to Warsaw, sorted, copied, and then picked up by case officers of the Soviet KGB. The KGB is said to have routinely “tasked” the satellite services with specific assignments. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

The Harper story was repeated many times with the agencies of East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania when Eastern Europe was under Soviet domination. While all these countries also pursued their own perceived self-interests, they were so organically linked to the Soviets, they even continued collaborating with the Soviets for a time after the overthrow of their communists governments. However, not everyone was a member of the two big intelligence camps. Nor did trade only with one another. Many other buyer-seller relationships exist. In many nations when a new regime or different party tasks over the government, one of its most important decisions (never discussed publicly) is the choice of an “intelligence vendor” or “wholesaler.” A good example was the case of President Raul Alfonsin, who headed the first democratic government of Argentina after the military junta fell. In 1985 insiders in his civilian government were debating the problem. The main suppliers that Argentina could hook up with were the CIA, the French, the British, or the Israeli Mossad. Under the deal, Argentina’s spies would feed its supplier with information about certain countries, in return for a steam of information about countries that Argentinian intelligence could not afford to cover or could not penetrate. The British were out, because of the then still-fresh Falklands/Malvinas war, which pitted them against the Argentinians. The CIA? It had has relations with the previous regime in Buenos Aires, and anyway it might be best to avoid both the superpowers. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

The French were a possibility, but while strong in Africa, they were weak on the ground in South America, where, after all, Argentina’s min interests lie. “Alas,” said one Argentine official, “the problem is that in intelligence matters, one never knows with whom one is dealing.” Similar questions are, no doubt, being debated in all the Eastern European nations that have loosened their ties with Moscow and are even now searching for new spy-partnerships in Western Europe and elsewhere. Even in the United States of America, intelligence-sharing practices change with the arrival of a new administration. South Africa, lacking satellites of its own, has received intelligence about neighboring black nations from both the United States of America and the British. This included information about the African National Congress, the main black opposition movement in South Africa. President Jimmy Carter banned any exchange of U.S.A. intelligence were every opened, all sorts of odd cross-linkages would turn up. The Australians working in Chile under CIA direction to overthrow the Allende government. The French working with the Portuguese and the Moroccans, for example, or the Romanians with the PLO. The Soviets have collected information about Israeli air and sea operations and have passed it on to Libya. This Israelis supply information to the United States of America. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Perhaps the most astonishing cross-linkage of all is implied in the 1989 visit of two former top KGB officials—Deputy Director Fiodor Sherbak and Valentin Zvezdenkov, chief of KGB antiterrorist operations—to the United States of America, where they met with former CIA Director William Colby and current officials to work out an information-sharing agreement with respect to narcotics and terrorism. Such secret criss-cross arrangements make it possible for one nation to hide behind another and to do things that its own laws might declare illegal or questionable. The GCHQ, for example, maintains a list of Americans whose phone calls interest the NSA. The international swapping of secrets subverts all domestic restrictions on intelligence gather. When speaking of cooperative controls, molecular manufacturing will lead to more powerful technologies, but our current, crude technology already has World-smashing potential. We have lived with that potential for decades now. In the coming years, we will need to strengthen institutions for maintaining peaceful security. If most of the political power in the World, and with it most of the police and military power, sees that the course of self-interest lies in peace and stability, then solutions seem possible. (The prospect of an arms race in nanotechnology is terrifying and to be avoided at almost any cost. As of this writing, the end of the Cold War offers a better hope of avoiding this nightmare.) #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

James C. Bennett, a high-tech entrepreneur and public-policy commentator affiliated with the Center for Constitutional Issues in Technology, explains the goal: “Advanced technologies, particularly as far-ranging a capability as nanotechnology, will create a strong demand for their regulation. The challenge will be to create sufficient controls to prevent the power-hungry from abusing the technologies, without either smothering development or creating an overbearing international regime.” In the coming decades, preventing major abuse of nanotechnology will take the form of regulation, arms control, and antiterrorist activities. In the field of arms control, nanotechnology should present strong motivation for international cooperation and for intimate mutual inspection in the form of joint-research programs. The sheer productive capabilities of molecular manufacturing will make it possible to move from working prototype to mass production in a matter of days. In a more exotic vein, dangerous nanomachines could be developed, including programmable “germs” (replicating or nonreplicating) for germ warfare. Either development could bring war. With peace looking so profitable and an arms race looking so dangerous, arms control through cooperative development should look attractive. This does not make it easy, or likely. Terrorism is not an immediate concern. We have lived with nuclear weapons and nerve gas for decades now, and nerve gas, at least, is not difficult to make. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

As of this writing, no city has been obliterated by terrorists using these means, and no terrorist has ever made a credible threat of this sort. The citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like the Kurds in Iraq, fell victim to nuclear and chemical weapons wielded by governments, not small groups. So long as nanotechnology is technically more challenging than the simple chemistry of nerve gas, nanoterrorism should not be a primary concern. To keep dangerous nanotechologies unavailable, however, will require regulation. If anyone were free to build anything using molecular manufacturing, then someday as the technology base improves and designs become available for more and more nanodevices, someone, somewhere—if only out of sheer spite—would figure out how to combine those nanodevices to make a dangerous replicator and turn it loose. There will almost surely be warning signs, however: In the natural course of events, causes attract protesters before stone-throwers, and produce letter bombs before car bombs. Abuse of nanotechnology is likely to be visible long before it is devastating, and this at least gives some time to try to respond. We should still keep a reasonable hope that our moral responsibility may gain control over the primeval drive, but our only hope of its ever doing so rests on the humble recognition of the fact that militant enthusiasm is an instinctive response with a phylogenetically determined releasing mechanism and the only point at which intelligent and responsible supervision can get control in the conditioning of the scrutiny of the categorical question. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

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It’s So Hot—Would You Like a Drink?

There is a near universal agreement that violent messages permeate nearly every aspect of social life in this country, as we live in a society that implicitly and/or explicitly exposes individuals to heavy doses of violent imagery and ideals. Our movies, TV news, and television programs are mostly hyperviolent. Our sporting events and other leisure activities tend to revolve around violent themes. Even our children’s cartoons and video game are inundated with violence. Although no direct, causal relationship exist, social commentators tend to agree that this pervasive subculture of violence serves to reinforce individual-level thoughts and behaviors. The actual assaultive or homicidal transactions generally do not hinge upon recent or heightened levels of exposure to these violent stimuli; however, this type of social climate does make physical problem solving appear to be a more acceptable and realistic course of action. Murderers have been known to interact or network with other known killers, taking on everything from a collegial to a formal organizational format. However, when it comes to the issue of organizational alignment, most murderers fit the description of what Best and Luckenbill (1994) call loners. Namely, they choose to work alone and go to great lengths to keep their offending a secret. While some perpetrators of criminal assaultive operate as loners (abusive parents or domestic partners), the average assaulter (the male combatant who is prone to street or barroom fights) operates within a colleague or peerlike existence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

In extreme cases, such as gang violence, offenders are known to interact as part of a team or formal organization. Here, the violence takes on a collective form with fellow combatants passing along normative and behavioral guidance to one another. Sometimes, we even see active recruitment and apprenticeships within these collectives. The average offender learns violent ways by mutating or exaggerating existing socialization scripts. They tend to be persons with a history and proficiency in physical problem solving. Faced with emotionally charged situations, these individuals allow the situation to get out of hand to such a degree that a would-be assault becomes an assault or murder. Society’s formal social control agents clearly take a hardline orientation toward the crimes of homicide and assault. Law enforcement hits the ground running when these crimes occur. In 2021, 65 percent of all known homicides and 60 percent of all aggravated assaults were cleared by arrest. No other form of violent or property crime enjoys a clearance rate that approaches this level. Statutory provisions allow for the serious charges to be levied against these arrested individuals. For example, The Model Penal Code assigns a felony status to all three grades of criminal homicides. Murder is treated as a first degree felony which means that, in more jurisdictions, it I punishable by a 1- to 20 year prison term. Where aggravating circumstances are present, someone convicted of murder may be sentenced to life in prison or even death. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

The Mode Penal Code defines manslaughter to be a second degree felony. If convicted on this charge, the defendant can be sentenced to 1 to 10 years in prison. Finally, the Model Penal Code classifies negligent homicide as a third degree felony. A person convicted on this charge must contend with a 1- to 5-year prison sentence. The Model Penal Code classifies aggravated assaults (those committed with a deadly weapon or against a peace officer) as a felony in the second degree. Such an offense is punishable by 1 to 10 years of prison. Simple assault is assigned a graded offense designation. Most simple assaults receive a generic misdemeanor or a designation, punishable by a fine and/or jail term of less than 1 year. When evidence of mutual consent (id est, a fight) is present, the offense may be downgraded to a petty misdemeanor. This grade of offense is punishable by a fine and/or jail term of up to 6 months. Murder and assault cases receive close scrutiny from the court system. Nearly two thirds of all homicide defendants and one third of the assault defendants remain in jail while they await trial. The average bail amount for murder is $500,000. For involuntary manslaughter, the average amount is $50,000. The average bail amount for assault with a weapon is $100,000. And the average bail amount for assault without a weapon is $15,000. Researchers found that 70 percent of the homicide defendants and 60 percent of the assault defendants in their study were eventually convicted. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Once convicted, the vast majority of homicide and assault defendants were subject to extreme sanctions. Over 90 percent of the murderers were sentenced to incarceration with a median prison sentence of 30 years. Only 10 percent of the murderer were sentenced to less than 10 years in prison and nearly 25 percent of all murder cases typically result in a life sentence. Nearly 75 percent of all assault defendants are sentenced to prison with the average sentence set at 69 months. Nationwide, there are approximately 2,500 murderers awaiting death sentences. This means that there was one individual on death row in the United States of America for every nine homicides that were committed in 2021. Surprisingly, informal reactions to homicide and assault offenders and offenses vary across different situations. The presence of third parties can alter the process of a homicide transaction in a number of ways. They can avoid involvement, negotiate further escalation, intervene in the dispute, or simply tolerate the violence as an impartial observer. Staged experiments show that citizens are wary to intervene in physical disputes that they witness This holds true even when the attackers is a man and the victim is a woman. Onlookers are particularly hesitant about intervening in disputes when they do not have social ties (id est, friendships, family ties, group affiliation) to the combatants. Conversely, when third parties know one or more of the combatants, these allegiances are more likely to inspire them to join the fight. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Unfortunately, this involvement usually serves to exacerbate, not defuse, the level of violence. The complex and unpredictable nature of third-party responses lead scholars to conclude that their presence rarely takes on a noticeable social control function. By definition, criminal homicide is a collective transaction. An offender, victim, and possibly an audience engage in an interchange which leaves the victim dead. Furthermore, these transactions are typically situated, for participants interact in a common physical territory. As with other situated transactions, it is expected that the participants develop particular roles, each shaped by the others and instrumental in some way to the fatal outcome. However, research, with a few exceptions, has failed critically to examine the situated transaction eventuating in murder. At most, studies have shown that many victims either directly precipitate their destruction, by throwing the first punch or firing the first shot, or contribute to the escalation of some conflict which concludes in their demise. However, how transactions of murder are organized and how they develop remain puzzles. What are the typical roles developed by the offender, victim, and possible bystanders? In what ways do these roles intersect to produce the fatal outcome? Are there certain regularities of interaction which characterize all transactions of murder, or do patterns of interaction vary among transactions in a haphazard fashion? These are important questions that we will soon cover. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

I have suggested that an individual can betray one’s encounter either by entering collusive byplays against it or by taking leave in a precipitous fashion. There is another possibility, however—one that is especially important for the kind of leave-taking that also terminates the engagement. Leave-taking, as already suggested, is a physical act well designed to express rejection of those taken leave of. In the case of two-person engagements, the person left is not only the person available as the target for this implication, but also finds oneself perforce unengaged—and this state, during some social occasions, may be a threat not only to the unengaged individual but to those managing the occasion as well. Perhaps the most familiar instance of this issue is found in the leave-taking considerateness associated with “getting stuck” at social parties. A girl at a party who is left without a dance or talk partner is left exposed as an undesired person (and, incidentally, exposes the party itself as an entity that cannot incorporate its members). Hence, there are often rules against a male dropping his partner, no matter how long he has been stuck with her, if this means she will be exposed to the gathering unengaged. In theory, in “society” the male must wait for the officially sanctioned means of release: delivery of the female to a desirable unit of participation, especially another male openly seeking her company. At public dances for the lower-middle and lower class, a male’s obligation to his current partner may extend only to walking her back to the female side of the hall; sauntering back with her, however, is more protective of the female than is walking with a rapid pace. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Even then, however, the social task of the person released may not be at an end: If you are talking to a lady with the ordinary indifference of a common acquaintance, and are only waiting till some one else comes up, for an opportunity to leave her, you should not move the instant another arrives, for that would look as if your previous tarrying had been compulsory; but you should remain a few moments and then turn away. In the face of this difficult obligation, the withdrawer may devise strategies to reduce the potential offensiveness of his withdrawal. Currently, at informal parties, a person locked in an encounter may seize on a desire for a fresh drink as a reason for tactful leave-taking. A more general tack is to rely on the tacit cooperation of the person who is being left; she must look for cues and hints and take them. While a guy must be willing to dance a little longer than he might want, or even until officially released by another male, the female herself ought to come to his rescue after a while: The beginning of wisdom is to accept the fact that one has danced long enough with one partner and that he might like to change. A woman who clings for hours, pathetic though she may be, will not soon dance with that partner again. Failing that perfect refuge, a table and a group of friends, she should suggest leaving the floor quite quickly, as soon as getting stuck seems likely. The classic phrase for this is, “It’s so hot—would you like a drink?” or, Let’s sit down for a bit.” Once away from the floor, she and her partner should join in a group of friends—better a group than a couple—unless a man comes up to speak to her, at which point her partner may slip away. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The tactful work of the leave-taker and the left is sometimes facilitated by the person responsible for order in the occasion; this officer may provide diplomatic means of effecting other persons’ tactful departures. Thus, the fact that a guest may use the punch bowl as a means of switching encounters can lead a wise hostess to arrange to have drinks and food out, but at a far table. However, of course, the hostess’s action may be even more direct: she may herself arrange to break into those conversational clusters in which she feels persons have been stuck. Some of the tete-a-tetes will break up by themselves, if the guests have sense and experience enough to move around and handle themselves. However, very often the intervention of the hostess will be themselves. In fact, unless a tete-a-tere seems to be particularly animated and gay the hostess is sure that both guests are enjoying themselves thoroughly, she should change the combinations from time to time. So, too, with partners who have been too long stuck with each other dancing. Here the hostess may ensure that there will be men present, often relatives of the house, who are willing to engage in “duty” dances and other emergency operations. The traditional role of the usher is a formalization of this function, giving to men whose sign of office is white boutonniere the right and obligation to keep partners “circulating.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

When it comes to personal achievement, attitude may be right and understanding may be right, but you still find that things happen in a certain way. Any ordinary things. It is very useful to try to remember instances where one tried to do something differently and to see how one always came back to the same thing even if one made a slight deviation—enormous forces driving one back to the old ways. “When you said that we cannot help the same things happening, did you mean until our being is changes?” I did not speak about work. I said it was necessary to understand that by ourselves we cannot “do.” When this is sufficiently understood, you can think what it is possible to do: what conditions, what knowledge and what help are needed. However, first it is necessary to realize that, in ordinary life, if you try to do something different, you will find that you cannot. When this is emotionally understood, only then is it possible to go further. “If we are machines, how can we change our being?” You cannot wait until you change. There is one very important principle in the work—you never have to work in accordance with your forces, but always beyond your forces. This is a permanent principle. In the work you always have to do more than you can. Only then can you change. If you do only what is possible, you will remain where you are. One has to do the impossible. You must not take the word “impossible” on a big scale, but even a little means much. You have to do more than you can, or you will never change. This is different from life—in life you only do what is possible. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

“I want to find the way to make a decision to work from which I cannot draw back.” This is one of our greatest illusions, that we can make decisions. It is necessary to be in order to make decisions because, as we are, one little “I” makes decisions and another “I” which does not know about it, is expected to carry them out. This is one of the first points we have to realize, that, as we are, we cannot make decisions even in small things—things just happen. However, when you understand this rightly, when you begin to look for the causes, and when you find these causes, then you will be able to work and perhaps you will be able to make decisions, but for a long time only in relation to work, not to anything else. The first thing you have to decide is to do your own work and to do it regularly, to remind yourself about it, not to let it slip away. We forget things too easily. We decide to make efforts—certain kinds of effort and certain kinds of observations—and then just ordinary things, ordinary octaves, interrupt it all and we quite forget. Again we remember and again we forget, and so on. It is necessary to keep certain realizations, certain things that you have already realized and understood, always with you. You must try not to forget them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The chief difficulty is what to do and how to make yourself do it. To make yourself think regularly, work regularly—this is the thing. Only then will you begin to see yourself, that is, to see what is more important and what is less important, where to put your attention and so on. Otherwise what happens? You decide to work, to do something, to change things—and then you remain just what you were. Try to think about your work, what you are trying to do, why you are trying to do it, what helps you to do it and what hinder you, both from outside and inside. It can also be useful to think about external events because they show you how much depends on the fact that people are asleep, that they are incapable of thinking rightly, incapable of understanding. When you have seen the outside, you can apply it to yourself. You will see the same confusion in yourself on all sorts of different subjects. It is difficult to think, difficult to see where to begin to think: once you realize this, you start to think in the right way. If you find your way to think rightly about one thing, that will immediately help you to think rightly about other things. The difficult is that people do not think rightly about anything. For instance, one should think not only about the consequences of committing a crime and the consequence of self-defense, but also look at the economic factors such as the cost of bail, time lost from work, and if your vehicle happens to be in the area because what will happen if you are not there to move it? Although the macho response to a threat may seem like the best course of action in the moment, walking away may be more rightly. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

There is so much trouble in the World today that we really should limit the people we are around if they are constantly unhappy and upset or generally not in a good disposition. Movies and TV often depict violence, and most of the time the character gets out of trouble super quick because they have to in order to keep the show of the film flowing. People only see the glamourous side of violence, but the real consequences so they do not stop to really consider if acting out is a viable option. When individual character deviates from the social character, the social group tends to reinforce all those character elements that correspond to it, while the opposite elements become dormant. If, for instance, a sadistic person lives within a group where the majority are nonsadistic and where sadistic behavior is considered undesirable and unpleasant, the sadistic individual will not necessarily change one’s character, but one will not act upon it; one’s sadism will not disappear, but will “dry up,” as it were, for lack of being fed. Life in the kibbutzim and other intentional communities offers many examples of this, although there are also instances where the new atmosphere produces a real change of character. A person whose character is sadistic will be essentially harmless in an antisadistic society; one will be considered to be suffering from an illness. One will never be popular and will have little, if any, access to positions in which one can have social influence. If it is asked what makes the sadism of a person so intense, one must not think of only constitutional, biological, but of psychic atmosphere that is largely responsible not only for the generation of social sadism but also for the vicissitudes of individually generated, idiosyncratic sadism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

With any exercise of brinkmanship, there is always the danger of falling off the brink. While strategists look back at the Cuban missile crisis as a successful use of brinkmanship, our evaluation would be very different if the risk of a superpower war had turned into a reality. The survivors would have cursed Kennedy for recklessly and unnecessarily flaming a crisis into a conflagration. Yet in an exercise of brinkmanship, the risk of falling off the brink will sometimes turn into a reality. The riots in America in 2020 are a sad example. The people were on a collision course with law enforcement. One side would have to lose; either the hard-liners would cede power to more reform-minded leaders or the people would compromise on their demands. During the confrontation, there was a continual risk that the hardliners would overact and use force to squelch the democracy movement. When two sides are playing a game of brinkmanship and neither side is backing down, there is a chance that the situation will get out of control, with tragic consequences. In the aftermath of the democracy movement, government leaders became more aware of the dangers in brinkmanship—for both sides. Faced with similar democracy protests in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, the communist leaders decided to give in to popular demands. In Romania, the government tried to hold firm against a reform movement, using violent repression to maintain power. The violence escalated almost to the level of a civil war, and in the end President Nicolae Ceausescu was executed from crimes against the people. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

It helps to think of spying as a gigantic business. In fact, it is not inappropriate that U.S.A. Central Intelligence Agency is nicknamed The Company. As in any industry, there are a few giant firms and many smaller ones. In the global espionage industry, U.S.A. producers are dominant. These include, apart from the CIA, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency and, above all, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, which together are responsible for most of the “techint” data collection. In addition there are specialized military intelligence units attached to various military commands. Less known are the small intelligence units, frequently staffed by CIA people on loan, in the State Department, the Energy Department, the Treasury, the Commerce Department, and sprinkled throughout the government. Together they for the U.S.A. “intelligence community.” The Soviets, on their side, rely on part of the KGB (the other part has domestic security functions) to collect foreign intelligence, and on the GRU, which specializes in military and technological espionage. The Soviets, too, possess a vast system of satellites, ground stations, giant radar, reconnaissance aircraft, and other means to monitor international communications and nuclear activities around the World. The British—famed for excellent analytic skills and for the number of Soviet moles who succeeded in worming their way into their intelligence agencies—depend on their Secret intelligence Service, known as M16, and their own NSA counterpart, called Government Communications, Headquarters, or GCHQ. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

The French CIA is the DGSE, also known as La Piscine or “the swimming pool,” and is supplemented by the GCR, or Groupement de Controles Radioelectrique. Frequently on the outs with other Wester services, it is rising in prestige, despite its Keystone Kops performance in the so-called Greenpeace incident, which led to the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, a ship belonging to anti-nuke protestors. The highly rated Israeli Mossad, often called “The Institute,” and the West Germany Bundesnachrichtendienst are also important producers, as are the three main Japanese services. The first of these is the Naicho, or Cabinet Research Office, a small organization that reports directly to the Japanese Prime Minister. The private organizations and news media like Kyodo News service and Jiji Press; and from the Chosa Besshitsu, or “Chobetsu,” which handles electronic and aerial reconnaissance, focusing mainly on North Korea, China, and the U.S.S.R. (In 1986, eighty-four years after Giichi Tanaka’s firsthand look-see at the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the Soviets discovered an odd Japanese container on the railroad. Techint had supplanted Humint.) In short, virtually every nation has some semblance of an agency for the collection of foreign intelligence. Additionally, certain nongovernmental institutions, from giant oil companies to the Vatican, conduct extensive intelligence operations. In aggregate, these organizations form one of the World’s greatest “service” industries. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

The chief danger of nanotechnology is not accidents, but abuse. The safety benefits of nanotechnology, when used with normal care, will free some of our attention to grapple with this far more difficult problem. Nanotechnologies have such great power that they could be used for evil or environmentally destructive purposes as easily as they could be used for good and environmentally nourishing purposes. This great danger will require a level of political control far beyond that which most nations know how to exercise. We have a prodigious social learning task that we must face. Thus far, we have focused on how increased abilities can serve constructive ends. Not surprisingly, the potential consequences—with the huge exception of social and economic disruption—are overwhelmingly positive. Inherently, clean, well-controlled, inexpensive, superior technologies, when applied with care, can yield far better results than inherently dirty, messy, costly, inferior technologies. This should come as no surprise, but it is only half the story. The other half is the application of those same superior technologies to destructive ends. Readers feeling that all this may be too good to be true can breathe a sigh of relief. This problem looks tough. Molecular manufacturing will lead to more powerful technologies, but our current, crude technology already has World-smashing potential. We have lived with that potential for decades now. In the coming years, we will need to strengthen institutions for maintaining peaceful security. Remember, Americans, be proud of who you are, display your superiority and buy American cars, produce, meat and other products to keep America the World’s Superpower. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16


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Creativity finds its soul when it embraces its shadow. The artist’s block, for instance, is a well-know part of the creative process: inspiration stops and the writer is faced with an intractable empty page. Many souls today must have evaporated, leaving emptiness to take over. If we could see how our blank spots have eroded our souls, we might quickly humble our lives. Given our society’s propensity for physical problem solving, it should come as no surprise that murder and assault offenders generally develop pronounced criminal careers. These individuals tends to possess a proverbial short fuse and are not shy about resorting to physical means to resolve life’s problems. For example, one third of all individuals who face a felony assault charge and 58 percent of all murder defendants are typically found to have at least one prior felony arrest. More than one in five murder defendants have a rap sheet that includes five or more prior felony arrests, while one in five defendants have at least ten prior felony arrest. In a recidivism study which tracked more than 272,000 inmates released from state prison, the data showed that 41 percent of all released murderers and 65.1 percent of all assault releases were charged with another criminal offense within three years of leaving prison. Most of these arrests resulted in a second conviction and follow-up term of incarceration. There is some evidence of escalation and specialization in the career trajectories of homicide and assault offenders. For instance, 22 percent of those who served time for assault were picked up for yet another assault charge withing three years of there release. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

In addition, 12 percent will graduate to murder by the end of that three-year window of time. There plausible explanation for these high levels of recidivism is due to the fact that the average murderer is a confrontational male with a long history of violent rehearsals. Repeated involvement in physical violence tends to produce increasing intensity and severity in one’s actions. While most murderers do not involve themselves exclusively in homicide, an analysis of criminal history data reveals that they have a tendency to concentrate their offending in the area of violent crime. Furthermore, 20 percent of murderer and 35 percent of the assault releases face new violent felony arrests within 3 years. Considering not everyone who goes to jail is actually guilty, and some people may have been acting in self-defense, it seems the goal would be to keep people who have been released from jail away from people and situations that may lead them into recidivism for at least 4 to 5 years. There exists a great deal of conjecture and assumption about what goes on inside the mind of the violent offender. Media outlets are more than willing to produce fictional and nonfictional accounts of the thought processes of homicide or assault offenders. As entertaining as the depictions may be, the public is provided little accurate information about the mindset of the average murderer. For starters, most scholars agree that there is nothing innate or inborn about human violence. Man needs a social system in which he has his place and in which his relations to others are relatively stable and supported by generally accepted values and ideas. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

What has happened in modern industrial society is that traditions, and common values, and genuine social personal ties with others have largely disappeared. The modern mass man is isolated and lonely, even though he is part of a crowd; he has no convictions which he could share with others, only slogans and ideologies he gets from the communications media. He has become an a-tom (the Greek equivalent of “in-dividual” = indivisible), held together only by common, though often simultaneously antagonistic interests, and by the cash nexus. This phenomenon is called anomie, and is the main cause of death by suicide which had been increasing with the growth of industrialization. Anomie is the destruction of all traditional social bonds, due to the fact that all truly collective organization has become secondary to the state and all genuine social life had been annihilated. People living in the modern political state are a disorganized dust of individuals. In modern society, much of the tradition American community in which all genuine social bonds are made have become illegal or disappeared and it is having an impact on the World. Ceasing pledging allegiance to flag of the United States of America in public schools seems to be a problem. Also, removing God and Christ as symbols of America has influenced people to become unpatriotic, have a loss of fear for God, and indulge in sin. Now people are starting to lose respect for the National Anthem and all of this division is ripping America apart from its core. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Others are seeing the nonsense that is going on in California, where they are teaching children to deny their gender, not to follow gender roles, and to have a total disregard for humanity and authority figures, and it is setting a dangerous precedent in countries like China, Japan, and India where people who were once loyal to their government, now riot and protest. It is not population density that is the main cause of the problems, but a lack of social structure, genuine common bonds, and interest in life that is causing human aggression. Long standing U.S.A. violence is also due to our propensity for misunderstanding. Parents allow or even encourage aggressive behavior in children, especially boys; all individuals are exposed to gratuitous levels of violence in the print and television media; and we are exposed to displays of aggression on a daily basis in our work and social lives. These three factors come together to produce a culturally based acceptance of violence. While no one of the above sources actually causes violence in a given individual, they can come together to produce a broad-based tolerance for violent problem solving, especially in pockets of society where frustration and violence is more pervasive. The antecedents of violent crimes that are reported by offenders themselves have always impressed me as extraordinarily petty. Unfortunately, some individuals chose to bestow offensive or threatening meanings to the seemingly innocuous comments, gestures, or actions of another. Too frequently, this flawed assessment is followed by a mental exercise to overcome one’s inhibitions against conflict (id est, a mental stamp of approval) and then an intense physical response. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

The volatility of these situations is exacerbated by the fact that most violent combatants commit their crimes while under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol. Therefore, bragging about being drunk and/or high is not a badge of honor. Surveys of incarcerated persons reveal that more than 50 percent of all murders and assaults occur while the offender is under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol—roughly 40 percent report being impaired by alcohol and roughly 30 percent report being impaired by some other form of illegal drug or controlled substance. It is worth noting that burglary, theft, and robbery are the only index crimes that exhibit higher levels of drug and/or alcohol usage at the time of the offense. These substances can significantly numb an individual’s reasoning and motor skills. In interviews conducted with 268 convicted murderers, drug and/or alcohol impairment was often the determining factor that turned a simple argument or fist fight into a homicide. So, one approach to stopping violence of any kind would be to teach people not to drink and/or use drugs. Murderous and/or assaultive behavior can be supported by both expressive and instrumental motives. Expressive motivation is associated with emotional states in which the individual strikes out spontaneously in a crime of passion. Instrumental motivation is used to describe a more calculated mental state in which the offender is driven by the will to achieve a predetermined goal. Scholars have long belabored the issue of violent motivation. Most stress the emotional and seemingly nonsensical nature of violence. It is particularly popular to interpret gang or “ghetto” violence in this manner. Violence occupies a more central role in the normative culture of inner-city America. All violence is bound to the situation or surroundings within which it occurs and one simply must understand the underlying cultural text of the environment if one wishes to unravel the meanings and intentions behind a given act. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

In the case of “ghetto” violence, street thugs use overt acts of force as a means of enhancing their social status on the streets (somewhat equivalent to accumulating monetary wealth in middle- and upper-class American culture). However, the leads to a somewhat muddled explanation of assaultive and murderous motives. On one hand, the physical outburst represents a situationally bound overflowing of expressive motions. At the same time, this eruption of emotional energy is not mindless, but takes on an instrumental quality as it is generally guided toward solving some tangible problem. In short, the emotions serve as the means of accomplishing what the individual sees as a rational end. We must distinguish between predatory and moralistic murder. The public is most familiar with and intrigued by the predatory variety—those cases that involve a serial or habitually murderous offender stalking victims in a methodical, blood-thirsty manner. This brand of killers is like modern-day gang members. These predatory offenders stalk their impersonal prey and commit what we see as cold, calculated acts of violence. Most murderers do not fit this stereotypical image. Instead, they are moralistic offenders. This brand of killer commits crimes in a loosely structured, sometimes disorientated state of rage. A small minority of murderers chronically commit predatory homicides with instrumental motives, most killers are novices of the moralistic variety who possess expressive motives that are bound to the uncertainty of the movement. We often refer to the moralistic homicides as crimes of passion. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

If follows that noticeable levels of criminal planning tend to be observable among predatory murderers, whereas moralistic murders take on a more haphazard quality. Habitual murderers are likely to develop set patterns, rituals, and methods to their madness, whereas the spontaneous and emotional nature of moralistic homicide usually precludes the likelihood of structured planning on the part of the offender. Conversely, planning generally occupies a notoriously small role in a moralistic or assaultive transaction. The spontaneous and emotional nature of these acts leaves little time for conscious aforethought. Although these individuals may plan the dynamics of an aggressive response, their heightened emotional state rules out the possibility for them to ponder or preconceive the volatility of the transaction. Normative neutralizations play an important part in the cognitive dimension of murder and assault. Despite all the cultural messages that supply reinforce violence as an alternative means of problem solving, would-be offenders must still redefine the situation. Individuals quickly overcome existing inhibitions against violence by convincing themselves that violence is an acceptable or appropriate course of action. In the case of a mundane assault, this usually involves a preoccupation with the severity of the victim’s actions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

In other cases, the offender will draw mental parallels to past experiences in which violence served a viable alternative. Homicide offenders are also known to develop and refine stable normative neutralizations. In fact, even the most vicious murderer (id est, mafia hitman)often becomes adept at recasting one’s actions in a positive, self-righteous light. Manhattan Island was one of the most densely populated places in the World fifty years ago, but it was not then, as it is today, characterized by excessive violence. Anyone who has lived in a big apartment building where several hundred families live together knows that there are few places where a person has as much privacy and is as little intruded upon by the presence of next-door neighbors as in a densely populated building. By comparison there is much less privacy in a small village where the houses are much more dispersed and population density is much smaller. Here the people are more aware of each other, watch and gossip about each other’s private lives, and are constantly in each other’s field of vision; the same holds true, although to a much lesser degree, for suburban society. This example tends to show that it is not crowding as such, but the social, psychological, cultural, and economic conditions under which it occurs that are responsible for aggression. It is obvious that overpopulation, id est, population density under conditions of poverty, causes stress and aggression, which can be another reason murders are committed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The big cities of India, as well as the slums in American cities, are an example of why overpopulation can cause problems. Overpopulation and the resulting population density are malignant, when, due to the lack of decent housing, people lack the most elementary conditions for protection from immediate and constant intrusion by others. Overpopulation means that the number of people in a given society surpasses the economic basis for providing them with adequate food, housing, and meaningful leisure. There is no doubt that overpopulation has evil consequences and that numbers must be reduced to a level which is commensurate with the economic basis. However, in a society which has the economic basis to support a dense population, the density itself does not deprive the citizen of his privacy, and it does not expose him to constant intrusion of others. An adequate standard of living, however, takes care only of the lack of privacy and constant exposure to others. It does not solve the problem of anomie, of the lack of Gemeinschaft, of the individual’s need to live in a World that has human proportions, whose members know each other as persons. The anomie of industrial society can only be removed if the whole social and spiritual structure can only be removed if the whole social and spiritual structure is changed radically: if the individual is not only adequately fed and housed, but the interests of society become identical with the interests of each individual; when the relationship to one’s fellowman and the expression of one’s powers, rather than the consumption of things and antagonism to one’s fellowman, become the principles which govern social and individual life. This is possible under the condition of high population density, but it requires radical rethinking of all our premises and radical social change. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

Fantastic technical advances have filled the sky with eyes and ears automating the collection of mass data. Satellites, advanced optics, and other imaging equipment constantly monitor the Earth. Acoustical sensors blanket strategic sea lanes. Listening stations, giant radars, and other electronic devices dot the planet from Australia to Norway. Technological intelligence, or “Techint,” now includes: Signals Intelligence, or “Sigint” (which, in turn, embraces communications, electronics, and telemetry); “Radint” (which sweeps up signals sent by or to radars); and “Imaging intelligence” (which includes photography, infrared, and other detection tools). All use the biggest and most advanced computers on Earth. So vast, costly, and powerful are these systems that they have shoved intelligence gathered by humans, or “Humint,” into a second-class position. William E. Burrows, author of a study of space espionage, has summed up these high-tech systems in the following terms: “The remote sensing systems with which each side monitors the other and most of the rest of the World are so many, so redundant, and so diffuse that no preparation for an all-out attack could take place without triggering multiple alarms…Orders for armies to march, planes to fly, and civilians to hide must be communicated relatively quickly over vast areas, and what is communicated can be intercepted; everything necessary to wage the war must be moved, and what is moved can be photographed.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

The big eavesdroppers in the sky can monitor all military, diplomatic, and commercial messages sent by phone, telex, radio, teletype, or other means via satellites or microwave systems. They have even been able to listen in on Kremlin bigwigs in their limousines and Chinese scientists at the Lop Nor nuclear weapons site. (The Chinese subsequently quit using over-the-air communications and installed secure below-ground lines.) There are serious limits on all this. Despite its vaunted “spy-in-the-sky” capabilities, the United States of America was red-faced to discover that the Soviets, who were supposed to have destroyed 239 SS-23 missiles, had secretly transferred 24 of them to East Germany. There are other failings too. An increasing number of codes can no longer be cracked because of computer advances in coding. Weather still interferes with some photoreconnaissance. Adversaries can use their own electronic countermeasures to blind or deceive the collection systems. Nevertheless, factory-style mass collection of data has been spectacularly achieved. Naturally, not all intelligence involves either high technology or trench-coated snoops. A vast amount is derived from “open sources”—careful reading of the press, monitoring of foreign broadcasts, study of officially released statistics, attendance at scientific and commercial conferences—all of which, when added to the secret materials, becomes raw material for the intelligence mill. To handle all these data, from both human and technical sources, a dizzying bureaucracy has grown up which applies the factory principle of the division of labor, breaking production into a sequence of steps. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The process begins with the identification of client needs, the collection of raw material from both open and secret sources, translation, decoding, and other preparation, followed by analysis and its packaging into reports which are then disseminated to clients. Many corporations today are learning that this form of sequential production is inadequate. As we saw, in the new economy steps are eliminated or made simultaneous. Bureaucratic organization is too slow and cumbersome. Markets change rapidly. Mass production itself is giving way to “flexible production” of more and more customized products. The result for many industries has been a profound crisis. Not surprisingly, intelligence, too, finds itself at a crisis point. The new collection technologies have been so effective, they now vacuum up so much computerized imagery and listen in on so many phone calls, they deluge intelligence agencies with so much information it can no longer be processed adequately. They now increasingly cause “analysis paralysis.” Finding the right piece of information, analyzing it correctly, and getting it to the right customer in time are turning out to be bigger problems than collecting it in the first place. Today, therefore, as the World moves toward a new system of producing wealth, superseding the smokestack system, intelligence operations face a crisis of restructure paralleling that which has overtaken the economy itself. There is a final aspect of control that is essential for effective brinkmanship. The threatened party must be able to reduce the risk sufficiently, often all the way to zero, by agreeing to the brinkman’s terms. Spade must have the assurance that Gutman’s temper will cool down sufficiently quickly once he knows the secret, and Khrushchev must be sure that the United States of America’s forces will withdraw as soon as he complies. Otherwise you are damned if you do and damned if you do not, and there is no incentive to comply. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

The conduct of America’s trade policy illustrates brinkmanship without the control mechanism. The United States of America trade administration tries to compel the Japanese and the Koreans to open their markets to American exports (and also to export less to the United States of America) by pointing out the risk of more serious protectionist actions by the Congress. “If we can’t reach a moderate agreement, the Congress will enact restrictions that will be a lot worse for you.” The so-called voluntary export restraints on automobiles agreed to by Japan in 1981 were the result of just such a process. The problem with the regular use of such tactics in trade negotiations is that they can create risk, but cannot control it within the requisite range. When other issues are occupying the legislations’ attention, the risk of protectionist action by Congress is too low to be an effective threat. On the other hand, when the Congress is exercised about trade deficits, the risk is either too high to be acceptable to our own administration, or simply unresponsive to a modest foreign restraint and therefore an ineffective threat. In other words, the American system of checks and balances can create risk, but cannot control it effectively. With our present technology, which is simpler to build—a car that runs on gasoline, or one that forages for fuel in the forest? A foraging car would be very hard to design, cost more to manufacture, and have more parts to break down. The situation is similar with nanotechnology. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Ralph Merkle of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center discussed this issue at the First Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology. He explains, “It’s both uneconomical and more difficult to design a self-replicating system that manufactures every part it needs from naturally occurring compounds. Bacteria do this, but in the process they have to synthesize all twenty amino acids and many other compounds, using elaborate enzyme systems tailored specifically for the purpose. For bacteria facing a hostile World, the ability to adapt and respond to a changing environment is worth almost any cost, for lacking this ability they would be wiped out. “But in a factory setting, where adequate supplies of all the needed parts are provided, the ability to synthesize parts from scratch is not only unneeded, it consumes extra time and energy, and produces excess waste. Even if we could design artificial self-replicating systems as flexible as existing natural ones, an inflexible and rigid system is better adapted to the controlled factor setting in which it will find itself than a more complex, more adaptable, less efficient design.” What is more, the Desert Rose Industries scenario showed how an expandable factory setup could operate with no self-replicating machines at all: molecular manufacturing does not require them. If they are used for some purpose, they will most likely resemble automobiles in their finicky requirements. A self-replicating molecular machine built for industrial purpose (and made as simple as possible) would float in a container of specially selected chemicals not commonly found in nature, and it would be easy to make that a design rule: Never make a replicator that can use an abundant natural compound as fuel. If we follow this rule, the idea of a replicator “escaping” and replicating in the wild will be as absurd as the notion of an automobile going feral and refueling itself from tree sap. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Whether for replicators or cars, to design a machine that could operate in the wild would not be a matter of a flick of the draftsman’s pen, but an intense, sustained research-and-development effort focused on that objective. Crashes and explosions occur in machinery by accident, but complex new capabilities do not. A simple psychological error frequently occurs when someone first hears about nanotechnology, and hears mention of “molecular machines,” and “replicators,” and “nanocomputers,” and “nanomachines that operate in nature.” The error is this: The person makes a single new mental pigeonhole for “nanotechnology,” throws everything into it, and stirs. After some mental fermentation, the result is the mythical nanomachine that does everything: it is a replicator, it is a supercomputer, it is a BMW X7, it slices, it dices, it makes Julian carrots—and on reflection, this imaginary nanomachine sounds uncontrolled and dangerous. With enough effort, a do-it-all nanomachine could perhaps be built, but it sounds difficult and there is no good reason to try. There are advantages to making systems of molecular machinery that can use inexpensive, abundant chemicals, and devices that can operate in nature, but these machines need not be replicators. A facility like Desert Rose might be designed to use little but electric power from solar panels and molecules from the air, but a setup like this is not going to slip away. Nanomachines built for cleaning up pollutants and other outdoor tasks could be manufactured infacilities run like Desert Rose and then spread or installed where they are needed. Extraordinary accidents deserve attention, but with a little care they can be completely avoided. The incentive to build anything resembling a Star Trek-scenario replicator is negligible, even from a military perspective. Any effort toward building such a thing should be seen not as a use of nanotechnology, but as an abuse. Other abuses seem more likely, however, and are quite bad enough. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

It should be plain that failure of the participants in an engagement to contain their activity can not only lead to a betrayal of one or more of their numbers, but also cause the content and feeling generated in the engagement to flow over into the situation at large. At such times bystanders may become dislodged from their own involvements, making it very difficult for them to continue to extend civil inattention to the uncontained encounter. An instance of this doubly offensive disloyalty is found during what are sometimes called “scenes.” Here, an individua who is supposed to be enclosed in an engagement may make a deeply engrossing appeal to others outside it, even though the appeal bears on a specific issue generated within the original engagement. Thus, one pair of patients I studied would (according to nursing notes) travel on a bus under the guidance of a nurse, start an argument with each other, and soon “open up the encounter” to all the passengers, dragging them in on both sides of the altercation. A woman in a lower-class street who is struck by her male companion may similarly make a direct appeal to others for help, thereby forcibly embroiling them. The disturbed feelings created by such bursting of the bounds of the engagement give us a clear picture of exactly what the rules of public conduct operate to prevent. In the extreme, a scene can break down all conventional closure separating the various engagements and unengaged individuals in the situation, providing an instance of an exhaustive engagement where none had been expected or desired. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

The fact that bystanders may desire or feel obliged to remain out of an accessible encounter allows for a special kind of half-scene, where persons in an encounter talk in a sufficiently loud and pointed fashion to be heard by an outsider, yet modulate their talk enough to give him a slight opportunity to distend. Here the terms “grumbling” or “muttering,” and “stage whisper,” are sometimes used. Thus, two middle-aged ladies sitting at a drugstore counter waiting for their lunch sandwiches may, upon receiving them and finding the filling thin, ostentatiously life up a piece of the bread and complain to each other in a tone of voice that the countergirl is half-meant to hear. (The countermeasure for this, as suggested, is for the person who is grumbled at to attempt directly to ratify the half-spoken comment as a message formally addressed to him, employing some such phrase as “Did you say something?”) In addition to “selling out” an encounter while he is yet a member of it, a participant can also leave it in such a ways as to expose the feelings within the encounter to the situation at large. Those remaining in the encounter may not be given a chance to compose themselves during the leave-taking, and the leave-taker may decline to damp and muffle the particular affect generated in him as a participant of the engagement. Ordinarily, of course, a brief leave-taking ceremony functions to allow leave-taking without exposure. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

One’s expectations that a leave-taker will “cut back” to the tone and temper prevailing in the gathering at large becomes evident when an individual fails to discipline his leave-taking in this way. A special kind of momentary scene can be observed among children, opera stars, mental patients, and others who have the privilege of temperament, when they precipitously take leave of an engagement, stalking or flouncing out of it and often out of the situation, leaving a wave of affect marked materially by slammed doors and overturned chairs. Yet it must also be said that the leave-taker is expected to show in the situation at large at least some marks of his recent participation, some lingering, albeit fading, signs of the animation the encounter inspired in him; should he not do so, he exposes the encounter a one that has failed to move him. It should be apparent that affective disorganization is particularly likely when the leave-taker leaves what was in the first place only a two-person engagement. In such cases the remaining person, having no others to whom to deflect his readied response, and left deeply involved in an encounter that no longer exists, finds himself in a poor position to cut back his own affect to that prevailing in the situation as a whole. This possibility can, of course, be exploited. For example, one patient I studied, who seemed to know exactly how to attack social arrangements at their joints, as it were, would—according to nursing notes—leave with a package from a store after paying the clerk all but one or two cents of the requested amount, thereby leaving him in a position neither to terminate his involvement in the encounter nor to sustain a role in it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Unless people make sufficient efforts from the beginning the system will be useless to them. Efforts must be organized. What does this mean? Unless you understand our work, we shall not be able to help you. You can be helped only if you enter into our work. One must work on three lines. Before one can understand what this means in relation to the work, one must understand three different lines of work in oneself: intellectual work (acquisition of knowledge), emotional work (work on emotions), and work on will (work on one’s action). One has no big will such as man no. 7 has but one has will at certain moments. Will is the resultant of desires. Will can be seen at moments when there is a strong desire to do or not to do something. Only those moments are important. The system can help only those who realize that they cannot control their will. Then the system will either help them to control their will, or they will have to do as they are told. “Is there no such thing as forcing a situation?” It may look like that but really it happened. If it could not happen in that way, then it could not happen. When things happen in a certain way, we are carried by the current but we think that we control the current. “If one feels for a moment that one is able to ‘do,’ say, to put through a particular job in ordinary work what is the explanation of that?” If one is trained to do something one learns to follow a certain kind of happenings, or if you like, to start a certain kind of happenings, and then these develop, and one runs behind although one thinks one is leading. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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I Do Not Know What You Mean by Knowing Fate

In the cybernetic age, the individual becomes increasingly subject to manipulation. His work, his consumption, and his leisure are manipulated by advertising, by ideologies, by what Dr. Skinner calls “positive reinforcements.” The individual loses his active, responsible role in the social process; he becomes completely “adjusted” and learns that the behavior, act, thought, or feeling which does not fit into the general scheme puts him at a severe disadvantage; in fact he is what he is supposed to be. If he insists on being himself, he risks, in police states, his freedom or even his life; in some democracies, he risks not being promoted, or more rarely, he risks even his job, and perhaps most importantly, he risks feeling isolated, without communication with anybody. As we have discussed, criminal events take on a transactional (give-and-take) nature. It was argued that the “form” and “content” of these exchanges can vary across different types of crime. Homicide and assault transactions generally take on the form of a one-on-one, heated interaction between acquaintances. The vast majority of homicide incidents that were reported to the police in 2022 were known to involve a long assailant and a lone victim. Only 20 percent were known to involve more than two offenders and 6 percent involved multiple victims. Similarly, victimization report indicate that multiple offenders were present in only 25 percent of the assault cases occurring in 2022. Turning to the nature of relationship, about one half of all murder and/or assault victims are known to be related or acquainted with their attacker. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Moreover, roughly one in ten of these incidents are categorized as cases of intimate violence wherein the combatants are either intimates or are linked via a blood or marital relationship. An analysis of the circumstances surrounding murder reveal that nearly one third of all homicides begin as a simple argument, while less than one in give are committed in conjunction with another felony offense. Homicides and assaults occur disproportionately in loose social settings. Most often, violent exchanges take place at night and on weekends in locations where acquaintances are accustomed to interacting with one another. These types of familiar settings are governed by relaxed social norms that allow individuals to more freely express their emotion. For example, researchers discovered that 55 percent of all homicide cases occur in residences, while 9 percent occur in or near bars. Only 18 percent were found to occur in the more impersonal setting of a street or public park. Most violent predators commit their crimes in close proximity to their residence. The majority of homicide and assault transactions involve individuals of the same age, race, and gender groups. In 2020, the average homicide offender was 28.5 years of age and the average victim was 32.2 years of age. That same year, individuals between the ages of 18 and 24 committed murder at a rate of 28 per 100,000. This figure was more than five times larger than the homicide rate of the 35- to 49-yer-old age group and nearly twenty times higher than for persons over the age of 50. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The same type of trend is observable in the victimization rates. Take for example the crime of assault. In 2020, the reported assault victimization rate for individuals between the ages of 12 and 24 years exceeded forty per 1,000 persons or households. This is almost double the rate in the overall population and more than twenty times the rate reported among persons over the age of 65. A similar trend can be observed with regard to the age of the offender. Most victims of assaultive behavior estimate that at least one of their attackers was under the age of 30—this was the case in 60 percent of the single offender assaults and 95 percent of the multiple offender assaults. Murder is no different. In fact, the CDC ranked homicide as the No. 2 cause of death among 18- to 25-year-olds. Only unintentional injuries accounted for more deaths among members of this age group. It is clear that murder and assault take on an intra-aged transactional form, meaning that offenders and victims come from similar age groups. In the case of assault, nearly three fourths of all victims between the ages of 12 and 20 estimate that their attacker comes from this same age group. Similar patterns are observed in the 30 and above age bracket. Race is another telling indicator in homicide and assault transactions. Assault rates among African Americans (28 per 1,000) were slightly higher than those among European American (22) and Hispanics (25). #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Race is another telling indicator in homicide and assault transactions. The assault rate among African Americans (27 per 1,000) were somewhat higher than those observed among European Americas (23) and Hispanics (25.6). This trend is further reflected in the arrest data—despite comprising only 12 percent of the overall population, African Americans typically account for 30 percent of the aggravated assault arrests each year. The picture becomes even more grim when we focus solely on murder. An African American person faces a one in forty-four chance of becoming a homicide victim at some point in his or her life. Think about that. If you are in a room with 44 African Americans, it is likely one will be a murder victim. That is compared to a one in 253 chance among European Americans. Makes you want to take stalking and death threats more seriously is one has such a high chance of becoming a murder victim, huh? African Americans represent 52 percent of the known homicide offenders and 48 percent of the known homicide victims. Homicide and assault take form as a markedly intraracial crime (occurring within the same racial group). For example, typically 86 percent of European American victims are killed by European American perpetrators and 94 percent of African Americans were killed by other African Americans. A close examination reveals that most interracial (across races) murder involve younger perpetrators victimizing strangers. Shifting to the crimes of assault, 80 percent of European American assault victims claim that their attackers were of the same race and 83 percent of the African American assault victims claim that they were attacked by a fellow African American. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

It appears that even offenders behave in an intraracial capacity—only one in ten assault victims who was attacked by more than one offender claims that the attackers were of mixed races. Homicide events traditionally involve male participants. For example, generally, 90 percent of the known homicide offenders and 80 percent of the homicide victims. In fact, men are 10 times more likely than females to be a murder offender and more than three times more likely to be a victim. Most homicide events take shape as intragendered (male on male or female on female) transactions, and nearly 70 percent of the known homicides involve all male participants. A slightly different portrait emerges for assault. Here again, males account for the majority of the offender and victim pools. In fact, 80 percent of the individuals who are arrested for aggravated assault, and 58 percent of the pool of the assault victims are men. The fact that men account for only a slight majority of the victim population but a considerably larger majority of the offender pool suggests that many of these assaults manifest themselves as male-on-female or intergendered transactions. In most cases, this male-on-female violence takes its form as intimate partner violence (id est, domestic violence or spousal abuse). A recent survey of representative samples of 8,000 men and women found that 23 percent of women versus 9 percent of the men had been the victim of domestic assault at least once in their lives. It is estimated that a total of 24,546, 840 women who are alive today will at some point be physically assaulted by an intimate partner—at a rate of 1,400,000 per year. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Murder and assault rates become particularly problematic when the age, gender, and race variables are included in the same equation. The overall reported U.S.A. homicide offending rate is 6.1 and the victimization rate is 5.5 per 100,000 population. For African American males between the ages of 18 and 24 those rates ballooned to 206 and 102, respectively. Conversely, the homicide offending and victimization rates among European American females 25 years or older is 1 and 2.3, respectively. African American males between the ages 18 and 24 make up 1.5 percent of the U.S.A. population but account for a staggering 30 percent of all known homicide offenders and 15 percent of all homicide victims. The process of the homicide and/or assault transaction is typically marked by brevity and intensity. Most murders and/or assaults last only a few seconds. In the case of murder, the short amount of time required of the act can be attributed to the fact that firearms are present in nearly two thirds of all homicide cases. This is well evidenced by the fact that 30 percent of aggravated assault victims claimed their attacker carried a gun, compared to 7 percent of the overall pool of assault victimizations. When asked why they carried guns, one fourth of violent felons claimed that the gun was originally intended as a scare tactic. Murders and assaults take on an undeniably interactive and escalating flavor. Most homicides are disputes and/or potential assaults that have gone terribly wrong. They are situations in which factors such as ego, reputation, and irreversible moments of misinterpretation regrettably come together to produce lethal consequences. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Spies have been busily at work at least since the Egyptian Book of the Dead termed espionage a soul-endangering sin. However, from the Pharaohs to the end of World War II the technologies available for espionage remained primitive, and early spies, like early scientists, were largely untrained amateurs. In the first years of the 20th century, Robert Baden-Powell, later the founder of the Boy Scouts movement, masqueraded as a dotty butterfly collector when he hiked through the Balkans, sketching fortification and hiding their outline in drawings of complicated butterfly wing. (Baden-Powell insisted that enthusiastic amateurs, who regarded spying as sport, would do the best work.) Another self-taught spy was the Japanese Captain Giichi Tanaka. After serving on the staff of the Japanese military attache in Moscow, learning to speak Russian and claiming adherence to the Russian Orthodox church, Tanaka took a leisurely two-month trip back to Tokyo so he could reconnoiter the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern railroads, brining back with him intelligence used by Tokyo in planning for the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. Much spy literature today still focuses on the derring-do of intrepid individuals pursuing military secrets. The industrial revolution, however, transformed war. The conscripted mass army, the mechanization of transport, the machine gun, mass-produced tanks and airplanes, and the concept of total war were all product of the Second Wave or smokestack era. The potential for mass destruction grew, right along with the rise of mass production, reaching its final point of no return in the U.S.A.-Soviet nuclear stalemate. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

The industrialization of intelligence followed that of war. In the early 20th century, spying became more systematic and bureaucratic, with the Tsar’s fearsome Okhrana, forerunner of the KGB, leading the way. Espionage schools were set up. Spies began to be trained as professionals. However, a handful of even well-trained spies could no longer satisfy the growing market for intelligence. Thus, just as individual craft took a back seat to assembly-line production in the factory, attempts were made to mass-manufacture intelligence. By early in the 20th century, the Japanese were no longer relying exclusively on a handful of full-timers like Tanaka but on thousands of foot-soldiers spies, as it were—emigrants settled in China or Siberia, cooks, servants, and factory workers who reported on their host countries. Japanese intelligence, following the factory production model, used unskilled “espionage workers” to mass-produce information, then built a growing bureaucracy to process the “take.” After the 1917 revolution in Russia, Lenin promoted the idea of “rabcors” or “people’s journalists”—thousands of ordinary workers were encouraged to write to the newspaper denouncing supposedly antirevolutionary saboteurs and traitors. The idea of masses of amateur correspondents was applied to foreign intelligence, too, and by 1929 there were three thousand so-called “rabcors” in France, including workers in state arsenals and the defense industries who were told to write to the Communists press to expose their poor working conditions. These contributions, however, provided useful insights into war production, and the most revealing letters were not published, but sent on to Moscow. It was another attempt at mass collection of low-level intelligence by amateurs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

High-level espionage, however, was entrusted to carefully trained professionals. Richard Sorge, born in Baku and raised in Berlin, became one of the most brilliant soviet agents in history. Because of his German boyhood, Sorge was able to penetrate the Nazi Party and get himself sent to Japan posing as the enthusiastically pro-Hitler correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung—a cover that won him access to top German and Japanese officials and diplomats in Tokyo. The Soviets were terrified of a Japanese surprise attack on Siberia. Sorge correctly told them it would never happen, but that the Soviet Union would be attacked by Germany instead. In 1941, Sorge actually sent Moscow advance news of the coming Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R., warning that 150 German divisions were concentrating in preparation. He even pinpointed the date—22 June 1941. However, his information was ignored by Stalin. Sorge was about to tip off Moscow about the coming Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—once again naming the exact date—when he was captured and later executed by the Japanese. Sorge was subsequently described by General Douglas MacArthur as “a devastating example of a brilliant success of espionage.” Sorge’s career surely underscored the continuing value of the courageous and resourceful individual spy and spymaster. However, World War II also saw remarkable breakthroughs in everything from coding and deciphering equipment to reconnaissance aircraft, radio, and radar—technologies that laid the basis for true mass production of intelligence, some of its high-level stuff indeed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

If you are trying to extract some exclusive information from someone, your threat to kill him unless he reveals the secret will not be credible. He knows that when the time comes, you will realize that the secret dies with him, and will have no incentive to carry out the threat. Hollywood films provide two excellent illustrations of this problem, and how to deal with it. Schelling uses a scene from the film High Wind in Jamacia. “The pirate captain Chavez wants his captive to tell where the money is hidden, and puts his knife to the man’s throat to make him talk. After a moment or two, during which the man keeps his mouth shut, the mate laughs. ‘If you cut his throat he can’t tell you. He knows it. And he knows you know it.’ Chavez puts his knife away and tries something else.” Chavez might have kept the knife out and tried brinkmanship, if only he had seen The Maltese Falcon. There Spade (Humphrey Bogart) has hidden the valuable bird, and Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) is trying to find out where it is. Spade smiled at the Levantine and answered him evenly: “You want the bird. I’ve got it…If you kill me how are you going to get the bird? If I know that you can’t afford to kill me till you have it, how are you going to scare me into giving it to you?” In response, Gutman explains how he intends to make his threat credible. “I see what you mean.” Gutman chuckled. “That is an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides, because as you know, sir, men are likely to forget in the heat of action where their best interest lies and let their emotions carry them away.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Gutman concedes that he cannot threaten Spade with certain death. Instead, he can expose Spade to a risk, a probability that things might get out of control in the heat of the moment. The outcome is left to chance. It is not that Gutman would actually want to kill Spade, but accidents do occur. And death is irreversible. Gutman cannot commit to killing Spade for sure if Spade refused to talk. However, he can threaten to put Spade in a position in which Gutman cannot guarantee that he will be able to prevent Spade from getting killed. This ability to expose someone to a probability of punishment can be enough to make the threat effective if the punishment is bad enough. The greater the risk of Spade getting killed in this way, the more effective the threat. However, at the same time, the risk becomes less credible. Gutman’s brinkmanship will work if, and only if, there is an intermediate range of probabilities where the risk is large enough to compel Spade to reveal the bird’s location, and yet small enough to be acceptable to Gutman. Such a range exists only if Spade values his own life more than Gutman values the bird, in the sense that the probability of death will frighten Spade into talking is smaller than the risk of losing his information that gives Gutman pause. Brinkmanship is not just the creation of risk, but a careful control of the degree of that risk. Now we have a problem. Many of the mechanisms that generate risk also prevent a sufficiently accurate control of the degree of that risk. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

We saw how Kennedy could use internal politics and standard operating procedures to ensure that the situation would get somewhat outside his control, and therefore not affected by Kennedy’s temptation to back down. However, those very things make it difficult for him to ensure that the risk does not climb to a degree that is intolerable to the Untied States of America. Kennedy’s own estimate of the risk—between one out of three and even—is a wide range of risk, to the point where one worries if the risk is being controlled at all. We have no perfect or generally valid answer to this dilemma. Brinkmanship is often an effective device, but equally often it remains something of an adventure. Now, when it comes to nanotechnology, it is important that we know how to prepare for a big mistake. The so-called Star Trek scenario (named after an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that featured runaway “nanites”) is perhaps the most commonly imagined problem. In this scenario, someone first invests considerable engineering effort in designing and building devices that are bacterial-sized, omnivorous, able to survive in a wide range of natural environment, able to build copies of themselves, and made with just a few built-in safeguards—perhaps a clock that shuts them off after a time, perhaps something else. Then, accidentally, the clock fails, or one of these dangerous replicators builds a copy with a defective clock, and away we go with an unprecedented ecological disaster. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

This would be an extraordinary accident indeed. Note well, though, that this accident scenario starts with someone building a highly capable device that is almost disastrously dangerous, but held in check by a few safeguards. This would be like wiring your house with dynamite and relying on a safety-catch to protect the trigger: a subsequent explosion could be called an accident, but the problem is not with the safety mechanism, it is with the dynamite installation. Do we need to build nanotechnological dynamite? It is worth considering just how little practical incentive there is for anything even resembling the dangerous replicator just as described. (Note that our topic here is accidents; deliberate acts of aggression are another matter.) When looking at open collusion, there are some illustrations we need to consider. A few attendants tease a patient in order to laugh at their bizarre reactions—such as a nip on the ear or a slap on the head to bring about a temper tantrum. This teasing sometimes becomes cruel, and does not seem to be restricted to trouble-makers among patients. This may be done to break the monotony, or may be due to psychological quirks in the few attendants who do it. Miss Kurt asked the attendant for a cigarette. The attendant replied, “say pretty please.” Miss Kurt, on saying pretty please, was answered, “now say, ‘hello, Miss Crandall’ twice,” pointing to the other attendant. Miss Kurt did not answer. The attendant held a cigarette aloft and said again, “If you say ‘hello Miss Crandall’ twice you will get his cigarette.” Miss Kurt did as requested. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Similar interactions can be cited from Central Hospital. For example, an attendant would occasionally take a “pet” patient and dance with him or her while winking broadly to the rest of the ward staff. The wink is a classic device for establishing byplay in our society, but at the same time an item in our involvement idiom that seems to be passing into disuse. The fun reached its climax at the point where the patient was released and the attendant turned back to participation with the rest of the now laughing staff. Similarly, a few patients would sometimes encircle a mute fellow patient who had taken the tack of obeying all commands. They would then address the mute patient, ordering one to do a series of increasingly self-profaning acts, until the circle was excited into laughter. The same sort of treatment is often accorded young children in our society: the child is teased or prodded into responding to a question focusing on the child as an unwitting source of amusement or pride for the adults. Some extreme forms of engagement disloyalty are managed without the butt necessarily becoming aware of what is being done to him. The very obligation to the individual in a two-person encounter to tactfully support his fellow-participant in maintaining the illusion that both desire to be engaged together can itself lead to disaffection which I carefully concealed from the other, but sometimes from him alone. Thus, when one participant fees it is beneath one in some way to be publicly joined to the other in a special relationship of any kind, the disgruntled participant may secretly tease the other participant before the assembled company or communicate in other ways to them that the encounter is not one that should be taken seriously. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

At Beijing, China dances I occasionally saw a young lady maintain the right of any man to dance by accepting a request from a someone from the southern region, or an international seaman, but once his arms convey by collusive gestures to the circle of people behind his back that the dance-engagement was a lark and that she was not to be judged by it. Cautionary tales in our own society tell of college or high school dances where a male, who may wish to be unburdened of the girl whom he finds himself dancing, holds up a twenty-dollar bill behind her back as they pass the stag-line, a mute but raucous bribe for someone to “cut in.” Of course, the possibility of this kind of sellout is one factor in social control, leading the individual to forego engagements in which his fellow-participants might not be loyal to him. “I do not understand why one should excuse oneself.” One does not want to give up the idea that one can “do,” so that even if one realizes that things just happen, one finds excuses, such as, “This is an accident but tomorrow it will be different.” That is why we cannot realize this idea. All our lives we see how things happen but we explain them as accidents, as exceptions to the rile that we can “do.” Either we forget, or do not see, or do not pay enough attention. We always think that at every moment we can begin to “do.” This is our ordinary way of thinking about it. If you see in your life a time when you tried to do something and failed, that will be an example, because you will find that you explained your failure as an accident, an exception. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

If things repeat themselves, again you think you will be able to “do,” and if you see this again, again you will explain your failure as just an accident. It is very useful to go though your life from this point of view. You intended one thing and something different happened. If you are really sincere, then you will see; but if not, you will persuade yourself that what happened was exactly what you wanted! You must start with some concrete idea. Try to find what really prevents you from being active in work. It is necessary to be active in work; once can get nothing by being passive. Now we forget the beginning, where and why we started, and most of the time we never even think about aim, but only about small details. No details are of any use without aim. Self-remembering is of no use without remembering the aims of the work and the original fundamental aim. If these ais are not remembered emotionally, years may pass and one will remain in the same state. It is not enough to educate the mind; it is necessary to educate the will. You must understand what our will is. From time to time we have will. Will is the resultant of desires. The moment we have a strong desire, there is will. In that moment we must study our will and see what can be done. We have no will but self-will and willfulness. If one understands that, one must be brave enough to give up one’s will, to pay attention to what was said. You must look for those moments and you must not miss them. I do not mean create them artificially, although in a house [organized according to work principles] special possibilities to give up one’s will are made, so that if you give up your will, later you may have your own will. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

However, even people who are not in the house, if they watch themselves and are careful, can catch themselves at such moments, and ask themselves what they are to do. Everybody must find what is one’s own situation. “How should we think about our inability to ‘do’ in relation to responsibilities?” You are given certain definite tasks, things to do. When you learn to remember yourself, even a little, you will find you are in a better position in relation to all other things. “Does the system put forward any thesis about will-power other than by using it as it grows, and by disuse it fades away?” The system explains that you have many “I”s and that each has its own will. If instead of being many, you become one, then you will have one will. Will, in normal 1, 2, and 3 men, is only the resultant of desires. Certain conflicting desires, or combinations of desires, make you act in a certain way. That is all. “Is the observing ‘I’ the embryo of Permanent ‘I’? Observing “I” is the embryo of Permanent “I,” but it has no real will. Its will is not opposed to self-will. What can be opposed to self-will? There are only two things opposed to one another: work and self-will. Self-will wants to talk, for instance, and there is a rule against talking. A struggle ensues, and the result is according to which of the two conquers. “The making of effort is what you call struggle, but suppose one is not aware of a struggle?” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

That means it happened. Things can happen to us in for ways—by accident, through cause and effect, by fate, and by will. Struggle must be by will, intention. And you must be aware of your intention. You cannot make effort and not be aware of it. Will would be if you wanted something, and decided and acted and achieved what you wanted. That is what is important. “I thought I heard is said that if a man studies groups of “I”s, he will understand how groups of “I”s help each other.” What is important in this case is will-action. At first we were told about three things only—will, fate, and accident. Then we came to the conclusion that there must be a fourth class corresponding to Karma. However, as this word had gained many wrong associations from theosophy, we used the words “case and effect,” meaning by them something that happens in this life and refers to oneself only, because from another point of view the whole World is based on cause and effect. “In those four categories, will is not often used, is it?” Will has to be used. We are never ready for work but we must work all the same. If we are ready, then we are given other work for which we are not ready. “Knowing one’s fate, how can one act along a line to avoid accident?” I do not know what you mean by “knowing fate.” It has nothing to do with avoiding accident. One avoids accidents (in our special sense) by creating causes and increasing effects. This is coming to will. It is not will but it is coming to it. Only a certain number of things can happen in an hour or a day, so if one creates more causes, there is less room for accidents to happen. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

We can take fate only in relation to our physical state, to health and so on. Fate has nothing to do with attainment. Cause and effect begins it. However, cause and effect is when the result depends on one’s own action, but unpremeditated action. In work, one must try to use will—as much as we have of it. If one has one inch of will and uses it, then one will have two inches, then three, and so on. “How can I learn to act differently in life so as to avoid the same limited and recurrent emotions which I now feel?” This is our aim; this is the aim of the whole work. This is why work is organized, why we have to study different theories, to remember different rules, and so on. What you speak of is the far aim. We have to work in the system first. By learning how to act in connection with the system and the organization, we learn how to act in life; but we cannot learn to act in life without first going through the system. “If we are all weakness and no strength, from what source do we draw such strength as is needed even to begin work on ourselves?” We must have certain strength. If we are only weakness, then we can do nothing. However, if we had no strength at all, we should not have become interested in that work. If we realize our situation, we already have a certain strength, and new knowledge increases this strength. So we have quite enough to begin. Later, more strength some from new knowledge and new efforts. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19


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