Randolph Harris II International Institute

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Oh, You Get Me Ready in Your ’56 Chevy, Why Don’t We Go Sit Down in the Shade?

Vengeful destructiveness is a spontaneous reaction to intense and unjustified suffering inflicted upon a person or members of a particular group. It differs from normal defensive aggression in two ways: (1) It occurs after the damage had been done, and hence is not a defense against a threatening danger. (2) It is of much greater intensity, and is often cruel, lustful, and insatiable. Language itself expresses this particular quality of vengeance in the term “thirst for vengeance.” It hardly needs to emphasized how widespread vengeful aggression is, both among individuals and groups. A number of gang members told us that they used violence to even the score with a specific group or individual. Unlike others we interviewed in the past, who reported generalized responses, these individuals identified a specific target for their violence: someone who had committed a violent act against them or their gang in the past. 002: I had on a blue rag and he say what’s up cuz, what’s up blood, and arguin’ and everything, and teachers would stop it, and then me and him met up one day when nobody was round. We got to fightin. Naw, cause I told Ron, my cousin, my cousin and em came up to the school and beat em up. And the next day when he seen me, he gonna ask me where my cousin and em at. I say I don’t need my cousin and em for you. They just came up there cause they heard you was a Blood. And they whooped em. Then me and him had a fight the next day, yeah. And then I had to fight some other dudes that was his friends and I beat em up. Then he brought some boys up to the school and they, uh, pulled out a gun on me and I ran up in the school. And then I brought my boys up the next day and we beat on em. #RandolphHarris 1 of 29

Specific examples of retaliation against rival gangs were mentioned less frequently than was general gang violence. This point underscores the important symbolic function of gang violence, a value that members must be ready to support. The idea that rival gangs will “bring violence” to the gang is an important part of the gang belief system; it is pivotal in increasing cohesion among members of otherwise loosely confederated organizations. Graffiti– another type of gang violence that occurs in response to defacing gang graffiti. Organizational symbols are important to all groups, and perhaps more so to those whose members are adolescents. The significance of graffiti to gangs has been documented by a number of observers in a variety of circumstances. In particular, graffiti identify gang territory, and maintaining territory is an important feature of gang activity in Sacramento and other cities. As Block and Block observed in Sacramento, battles over turf often originated in attempts by rival gang to “strike out” graffiti. Several gang members told us that attempts to paint over their graffiti by rival gangs were met with a violent response, but no gang members could recall a specific instance. Claiming to use violence in response to such insults again reflects the mythic character of gang violence; it emphasizes the symbolic importance of violence for group processes such as cohesion, boundary manintenance, and identity. Further, such responses underscore the threat represented by rivals who would encroach on gang territory to strike out gang graffiti. #RandolphHarris 2 of 29

INT: What does the removal of graffiti mean? 043: That’s a person that we have to go kill. We put our enemies up on the wall. If there is a certain person, we “X” that out and know who to kill. INT: What if somebody comes and paints a pitchfork or paints over your graffiti? What does that mean to your gang? 046: First time we just paint it back up there, no sweat. Next time they come do it, we go find out who did it and go paint over theirs. If they come back a third time, it’s like three times you out. Obviously that means something if they keep painting over us. They telling us they ready to fight. Territory—most gang members continued to live in the neighborhood where their gang started. Even for those who had moved away, it retained a symbolic value. Protecting gang turf is viewed as an important responsibility, which extends well beyond its symbolic importance as the site where the gang began. Our subjects’ allegiance to the neighborhood was deeply embedded in the history of neighborhood friendship groups that evolved into gangs. Thus, turf protection was an important value. When we asked gang members about defending their turf, we received some generalized responses about their willingness to use violence to do so. INT: If someone from another gang comes to your turf, what does your gang do? 019: First try to tell him to leave. INT: If he don’t leave? 019: He’ll leave one way or the other—carry him out in a Hefty bag. #RandolphHarris 3 of 29

In other instances, however, the responses identified an individual or an incident in which the gang used violence to protect its turf. INT: What kind of things does the gang have to do to defend its turf? 013: Kill. That’s all it is, kill. INT: Tell me about your most recent turf defense. What happened, a guy came in? 013: A guy came in, he had the wrong colors on, he got to move out. He got his head split open with a sledgehammer, he got two ribs broken, he got his face torn up. INT: Did he die from that? 013: I don’t know. We dropped him off on the other side of town. If he did die, it was on the other side of town. Staging grounds for violence—gang members expect that when they go to certain locations they will be the targets of violence from other gangs or will be expected by members of their own gang to engage in violence. In some cases, large-scale violence will occur. Other encounters result only in “face-offs.” These encounters highlight the role of situational characteristic in gang violence. Most often the staging grounds are public places such as a restaurant. INT: Do they ever bring weapons to school? 011: No, cause we really don’t have no trouble. We mainly fight up at White Castle. That’s were our trouble starts, at the White Castle. (The expectation of violence at certain locations was so strong that some members avoided going to those places.) INT: Do you go to dance or parties? 047: I don’t. I stay away from house parties. Too many fights come out of there. #RandolphHarris 4 of 29

According to another gang member, violence at house parties had reached such a level that many hosts searched their guests for weapons. 074: Sometime people wait until they get out of the party and start shooting. Now at these parties they have people at the door searching people, even at house parties. In general, gang members reported that they “hung out” in small cliques or subgroups and that it was rare for the entire gang to be together. This reflects the general character of social organization in the gangs we studied. An external threat—usually from another gang—was needed to strengthen cohesion among gang members and to bring the larger gang together. Many members of our sample reported that they did not go skating, to the mall, or to dances alone or in small groups because they knew that gang violence was likely to erupt at such locations. Thus the gang went en masse to these locations, prepared to start or respond to violence. These expectations contributed to the eventual use of violence. In this way, the gang’s belief system contributed to the likelihood of violent encounters. Ending gangs—when we asked for gang members’ perspectives on the best way to end gangs, we expected to find a variety of recommendations targeted at fundamental causes (racism, unemployment, education) as well as more proximate solutions (detached workers, recreation centers, job training). #RandolphHarris 5 of 29

Instead the modal response reflected the centrality of violence in the gang. Twenty-five of our 99 subjects told us that the only way to get rid of their gangs would be to use violence to get rid of the members. This response was confirmed by gang members in their conversations with the field ethnographer. For many gang members, life in the gang had become synonymous with violence; for one respondent, even job offers were not sufficient to end the gang. INT: What would be the best way to get rid of your gang, Rolling Sixties? 033: Smoke us all. INT: Kill you all? 033: Yeah. INT: We couldn’t give you guys jobs? 033: No, just smoke us. (Others recommended using extreme violence to get rid of their gang.) INT: What would it take to get rid of your gang? 035: Whole lot of machine guns. Kill us all. We just going to multiply anyway cause the Pee Wees gonna take over. INT: What would be the best way to get rid of the Sixties? 042: Kill us all at once. Put them in one place and blow them up. (Violence is so central a part of gang culture that even the members’ recommendations about ending gangs include elements of violence. The process of gang violence—the analysis above suggests a model that accounts for the escalation of gang violence and is consistent with the nature of gang process and normative structure: it reflects the lack of strong leadership, structure, and group goals. The key element is the collective identification of threat, a process that unites the gang and overcomes the general lack of unity by increasing cohesion. This occurred in response to threats against the gang, either real or perceived, by rival gangs. The role of mythic violence is particularly important in this context; it is the agent through which talk about violence most frequently unites gang members. #RandolphHarris 6 of 29

We suggest that a seven-step process accounts for the peaks and valleys of gang violence. They key to understanding violence is the nature of organization within gangs. Most gangs originate as neighborhood groups and are characterized by loose ties between their members and the larger gang. These groups generally lack effective leadership; cohesion in small cliques is stronger than the ties to the larger gang. Against this backdrop, symbolic enemies are identified when subgroups interact with other gangs near them. Threats from those groups—whether real or perceived—expand the number of participants, and may increase cohesion among members and heighten their willingness to use violence. Violence between gangs is most often the result of a mobilizing event that pushes a ready and willing group beyond the constraints against violence. Such events may include the deployment of gang members to protect or attack certain locations, to engage in actions in cars, or simply to act “loco.” Violent encounters typically are short-lived and de-escalate rapidly. This de-escalation, however, may be only a respite before the next retaliation. The process moves through the following seven steps: Loose bonds to the gang, collective identification of threat from a rival gang (through rumors, symbolic shows of force, cruising, and mythic violence), reinforcing the centrality of violence that expands the number of participants and increases cohesion; a mobilizing event possibly, but not necessarily, violence; escalation of activity; violent event; rapid de-escalation; retaliation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 29

Gang violence, like other gang activities, reflects the gang’s organizational and normative structure. Such violence, especially retaliatory violence, is an outgrowth of a collective process that reflects the loose organizational structure of gangs with diffuse goals, little allegiance among members, and few leaders. If gangs are composed of diffuse subgroups, how is violence organized? Our answer to this question is “Not very well and not very often,” because most gang violence serves important symbolic purposes within the gang. In addition, most gang violence is retaliatory, a response to violence—real or perceived—against the gang. Gang violence serves many functions in the life of the gang. First, and most important, it produces more violence through the processes of threat and contagion. These mechanisms strongly reflect elements of collective behavior. Second, it temporarily increases the solidarity of gang members, uniting them against a common enemy by heightening their dependence on each other. When gang violence exceeds tolerable limits, a third function may be evident: the splintering of gangs into subgroups and the decision by some individual to leave the gang. It cannot be denied that blood vengeance and criminal law, bad as they are, also have a certain social function in upholding social stability. The full power of the lust for vengeance can be seen in those instances where this function is lacking. It is notorious that real or alleged atrocities can ignite the most intense rage of vengefulness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 29

A startling revelation of the satanic confederacy against God and His Christ is given to the Apostle John. After the messages to the seven churches, the World-wide work of the deceiver-prince is fully disclosed to the apostle. He is bidden to write all that he is shown, so that the Church of Christ might know the full meaning of the war with Satan in which the redeemed would be engaged right on to the time when the Lord Jesus would be revealed from Heaven in judgment upon these vast and terrible powers—powers which are full of cunning malignity and hatred to His people, and truly at work behind the World of men from the days of the garden story to the end. As we read the Apocalypse it is important to remember that even though the organized forces of Satan described there were in existence at the time of the Fall in Eden, they were only partially revealed to the people of God prior to the advent of the promised “Seed of the woman” who was to bruise the serpent’s head. When the fullness of time came, God manifest in the flesh met the fallen archangel, the leader of the evil angelic hosts, in mortal combat at Calvary. Putting them to open shame, He shook off from Himself vast masses of those hosts of darkness who had gathered around the cross from the furthermost realms of the kingdom of Satan (Col. 2.15). The Scriptures teach us that God’s unveilings of the truths concerning Himself, and of all the things in the spiritual realm which we need to know, are always timed by Him to match the strength of His people. #RandolphHarris 9 of 29

The full revelation of these satanic powers disclosed in the Apocalypse was not given to the Church in its fancy—come forty years passed after the Lord’s ascension before the Book of Revelation was written. Possibly it was necessary that the Church of Christ should first fully grasp the fundamental truths revealed to Paul and the other apostles before she could safely be shown the extent of the war with supernatural powers of evil upon which she had entered. In the vision given to John, the name and character of the deceiver is more clearly made known, along with the strength of his forces and the extent of the war and its final issues. It is shown that in the invisible realm there is a war between the force of evil and the forces of light. John says that “the dragon WARRED, and his angels” (Rev. 12.7), the dragon being explicitly described as the “old serpent, called the Devil and Satan,” the deceiver of the whole inhabited Earth. His World-wide work as deceiver is fully revealed, and the war in the Earth-realm caused by his deceiving of the races and the World powers acting under his instigation and rule. The highly organized confederacy of principalities and powers acknowledging the headship of Satan is disclosed, and their “authority over every tribe and people and tongue and nation,” all deceived by the supernatural and invisible forces of evil, and making “war with the saints” (Rev. 13.7). #RandolphHarris 10 of 29

Tightly defined occasions can, of course, have their own compensations. An example is the army parade square, a region where extreme situational orientation can be found. Here it can be the rule that no statement is to be made by an officer to a subordinate that is not addressed in an impersonal way and with sufficient volume to make it a public utterance, as in the shout, “Smarten up, that man in the rear”; in response to which the person thus addressed may be obliged to be silent or, if an answer is demanded, to limit all statements drastically and, as already suggested, speak while looking straight head, excluding himself from almost all mutual-involvement and ensuring that even his glance remains situational. Yet, here, the person on parade can feel that his mind has been left wonderfully free to wander. Contrariwise, the looseness of some cocktail parties may require of the guest that he keep very much on his toes mentally. Further, in those situations where the individual is required to show much respect for the gathering as a whole, he may be excused from any kind of deep involvement with individuals who are next to him. On the other hand, in those situations where no holds are barred, the interpersonal wrestling that may occur can be extremely strenuous and taxing. Here we have, of course, the traditional argument that is advanced in support of the ritualization of sociable occasions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 29

Behaviour—social behaviour—is partly an art, partly instinct. In what is called our freer modern life, manners have come to count for a good del less, which makes sheer manner count for a good deal more. Now that it is less vital to be correct, it becomes far more important to be acceptable. In fact, the decline of manners in the grand and fixed sense has made behaviour infinitely more difficult. A perpetual forced recourse to instinct (the art element being discredited) gives our friends a harassed, unstable air. There is no longer the safety of a prescribed World, of which the thousand-and-one rules could be learnt, in which one could steer one’s way instructed and safe. The World, even the great World, can have, in an age of manners, held no more terrors than does the Hyde Park Corner traffic, with its apparent complexity, for the unassuming driver who has passed his test. For each of the occasions of society, one of the thousand-and-one rules you have learnt fitted. You knew what to do, and did it. Society went like clockwork. Man as we know him is not a completed being; nature develops him only up to a certain point and then leaves him either to develop further by his own efforts and devices, or to live and die such as he was born. Man ascribes to himself many powers, faculties and properties which he does not possess, and which he will never possess unless he can develop into a completed being. Man does not realize that he is actually a machine, with no independent movements, which is brought into motion by external influences. #RandolphHarris 12 of 29

The most important of the qualities which man ascribes to himself, but does not possess, is consciousness. By consciousness we mean a particular kind of awareness in man, awareness of himself, awareness of who he is, what he feels or thinks, or where he is at the moment. You must remember tht man is not equally conscious all the time and that, according to the way in which we study man, we consider that he has the possibility of four states of consciousness. They are: sleep, waking-state or relative consciousness, third state of consciousness or self-consciousness, and fourth state of consciousness or objective consciousness, but in ordinary life man knows nothing of objective consciousness and no experiments in this direction are possible. In fact man actually lives only in two states: one part of his life passes in sleep, and the other part if what is called waking-state, though in reality it differs very little from sleep. When we speak of consciousness, therefore, we refer to a state of greater consciousness than our ordinary waking state. We have no control over this state but we have a certain control over the way in which we think about it and we can construct our thinking in such a way as to bring consciousness. By giving to our thoughts a direction which they would have in a moment of consciousness we can induce consciousness. This practice we call self-remembering. #RandolphHarris 13 of 29

Experiences in meditation and self-searching, intuitive and mystical reachings, and hours of silent midnight walking paved the way to a formulation of my understanding of loneliness; this formulation emerged clearly during my observations of hospitalized children. In the hospital I saw how lonely feelings impelled young children to seek a compassionate voice and a warm, friendly face; I saw how young children separated from their parents could often be more completely involved in the struggle with loneliness than in the painful experiences connected with illness and surgery; I observed how these children underwent a period of protest and resistance against separation, against the mechanical actions and fixed faces and gestures of the hospital combine. I also observed a gradual deterioration of protest, rebellion, and self-assertion to be replaced by a deep sense of isolation, lonely weeping, withdrawal, depression, and numbness. In general, I witnessed a basic, pervasive feeling of dehumanization, an institution that not only sought to repress lonely feeling but discouraged the whole range of human emotions tht characterize the alive and growing child. When I saw that these dimensions of loneliness were almost totally ignored, misunderstood, and misinterpreted by hospital, I set out to know the meaning of loneliness, not by defining and categorizing, but by experiencing it directly myself through the lives of others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 29

I knew from my own experiences and from my conversations with hospitalized children that loneliness itself could not be communicated by words or defined in its essence, or appreciated and recognized except by persons who are open to their own senses and aware of their own experiences. To say that the discovery of objective truth in science consists in the apprehension of  rationality which commands our respect and arouses our contemplative admiration; that such discovery, while using the experiences of our senses as clues, transcends this experience by embracing the vision of a reality beyond the impression of our senses, a vision which speaks for itself in guiding us to an ever deeper understanding of reality—such an account of scientific procedure would be generally shrugged aside as out-dated Platonism; a piece mystery-mongering unworthy of an enlightened age. Yet it is precisely on this conception of objectivity that I wish to insist. Into every act of knowing there enters a passionate contribution of the person knowing what is known, and this coefficient is no more imperfection but a vital component of his knowledge. In dialogue with the lonely people, I tried to put into words the depths of his or her feelings. Sometimes my words touched the individual and tears began to flow; sometimes the person formed words in response to my presence, and broke through the numbness and the dehumanizing impact of the hospital atmosphere and practice. #RandolphHarris 15 of 29

In a strong sense, loneliness became my existence. It entered into every facet of my World—into my teaching, my interviews in therapy, my conversations with friends, my home life. Without reference to time or place or structure, somehow (more intentionally than accidentally) the loneliness theme came up everywhere in my life. At this time, I became clearly aware that, exhaustively and fully, and in a caring way, I was searching for, studying, and inquiring into the nature and impact of loneliness. I was totally immersed in the search for a pattern that would reveal the various dimensions of loneliness. This was research in the sense of close searching and inquiring into the nature of a human experience and not from a detached intellectual or academic viewpoint. Rather, my studies involved an integrative, living form; I became part of the lonely experiences of others, involved and interested, while at the same time aware of an emerging pattern. Facts and knowledge accumulated as I listened and later recorded and studied them; but, at the same time, there were intuitive visions, feelings, and sensings that went beyond anything I could record or know in a factual sense. At the center of each lonely existence were ineffable, indescribable feelings and experiences, which I felt in a unified and essential way. I had, at moments, gone “wide open,” ceasing to be a separate individual, but wholly related to the other person, leaving something behind of my own intuitive vision, and comprehension while, at the same time, taking something away. #RandolphHarris 16 of 29

Top law firms generally choose their partners from among their junior associates. Those not chosen must leave the firm, and generally move to a lower-ranked one. At the mythical firm Justin-Case, the standards were so high that for many years no new partners were selected. The junior associates protested about this lack of advancement. The partners responded with a new system that looked very democratic. Here is what they did. At the time of the annual partnership decision, the abilities of the ten junior associates were rated from 1 to 10, with 10 being the best. The junior associates were told their rating privately. Then they were ushered into a meeting room where they were to decide by majority vote the cutoff level for partnership. They all agreed that everyone making partner was a good idea and certainly preferable to the old says when nobody made partner. So they began with a cutoff of 1. Then some high-rated junior associate suggested that they raise the cutoff to 2. He argued that this would improve the average quality of the partnership. Nine junior associates agreed. The sole dissenting vote came from the least able member, who would no longer make partner. Next, someone proposed that they raise the standard from 2 to 3. Eight people were still above this standard, and they all voted for this improvement in the quality of the partnership. The person ranked 2 voted against, as this move deprived him from partnership. What was surprising was that the lowest-rated junior associate was in favor of this raising of the standards. #RandolphHarris 17 of 29

In neither case would he make partner. However, at least in the latter he would be grouped with someone who has ability 2. Therefore, upon seeing that he was not selected, other law firms would not be able to infer his exact ability. They would guess that he is either a 1 or a 2, a level of uncertainty that is to his advantage. The proposal to raise the standard to 3 passed 9.1. With each new cutoff level someone proposed raising it by one. All those strictly above voted in favor so as to raise the quality of the partnership (without sacrificing their own position), while all those strictly below joined in support of raising the standard so as to make their failure less consequential. Each time there was only one dissenter, the associate right at the cutoff level who would no longer make partner. However, he was outvoted 9.1. And so it went, until the standard was raised all the way to 10. Finally, someone proposed that they raise the standard to 11 so that nobody would make partner. Everybody rated 9 and below thought that this was a fine proposal, since once more this improved the average quality of those rejected. Outsiders would not take it as a bad sign that they did not make partner, as nobody makes partner at this law firm. The sole voice against was the most able junior associate who lost his chance to make partner. However, he was outvoted 9.1. The series of votes brings everybody back to the old system, which they all considered worse thana the alternative of promotion for all. Even so, each resolution along the way passed 9.1. There are two morals to this story. #RandolphHarris 18 of 29

When actions are taken in a piecemeal way, each step of the way can appear attractive to the vast majority of decision-makers. However, the end is worse than the beginning for everyone. The reason is that voting ignores the intensity of preferences. In our example, all those in favor gain a very small amount, while the one person against loses a lot. In the series of ten votes, each junior associate has nine small victories and one major loss that outweighs all the combined gains. We saw a similar example in the past involving trade tariffs or amendments to the tax reform bill. Just because an individual recognizes the problem does not mean an individual can stop the process. It is slippery slope, too dangerous to get onto. The group as a whole must look ahead and reason back in a coordinated way, and set up the rules so as to prevent taking the first steps on the slope. There is safety when individuals agree to consider reforms only as a package rather than as a series of small steps. With a package deal, everyone knows where he will end up. A series of small steps can look attractive at first, but one unfavorable move can more than wipe out the entire series of gains. In 1989, Congress learned this danger first-hand in its failed attempt to vote itself a 50 percent pay raise. Initially, the pay raise seemed to have wide support in both houses. When the public realized what was about to happen, they protested loudly to their representatives. #RandolphHarris 19 of 29

Consequently, each member of Congress had a private incentive to vote against the pay hike, provided he or she thought that the hike would still pass. The best scenario would be to get the higher salary while having protested against it. Unfortunately (for them) too many members of Congress took this approach, and suddenly passage no longer seemed certain. As each defection moved them further down the slippery slope, there was all the more reason to vote against it. If the pay hike were to fail, the worst possible position would be to go on record supporting the salary hike, pay the political price, and yet not get the raise. At first, there was the potential for a few individuals to selfishly improved their own position. However, each defection increased the incentive to follow suit, and soon enough the proposal was dead. There is a second, quite different moral to the Justin-Case story. If you are going to fail, you might as well fail at a difficult task. Failure causes others to downgrade their expectations of you in the future. The seriousness of this problem depends on what you attempt. Failure to climb Mt. Everest is considerably less damning than failure to finish a 10K race. The point is that when other people’s perceptions of your ability matters, it might be better for you to do things that increase your chances of failing in order to reduce its consequences. People who apply to Harvard instead of the local college, and ask the most popular student for a prom date instead of a more realistic prospect, are following such strategies. #RandolphHarris 20 of 29

Psychologists see this behaviour in other contexts. Some individuals are afraid to recognize the limits of their own ability. In these cases they take actions that increase the chance of failure in order to avoid facing their ability. For example, a marginal student may not study for a test so that if he fails, the failure can be blamed on his lack of studying rather than intrinsic ability. Although perverse and counterproductive, there is no invisible hand to protect you in games against yourself. A hunger for knowing—the power of the state has always rested on its control of force, wealth, and knowledge. What is profoundly different today is the changed relationship among these three. The new super-symbolic system of wealth creation thrusts a wide range of information-related issues onto the political agenda. These range from privacy to product piracy, from telecommunications policy to computer security, from education insider trading to the new role of the media. Even these touch only the tip of an emerging iceberg. Although not yet widely noticed, this emerging info-agenda is expanding so rapidly that, in the United States of America, 101st Congress saw the introduction of more than a hundred proposed laws dealing with info-issues. Twenty-six dealt with how the deferral government should disseminate data and information collected at taxpayers expense. Today anyone with a personal computer and a modem can dial into a number of government data bases for information on a dizzying number of topics. However, how should this dissemination work? #RandolphHarris 21 of 29

Should the government contact with outside private firms to do the electronic distribution and sell access for a fee? Many librarians, university researchers, and civil liberties advocates argue that government information should not be sold but made available freely to the public. On the other hand, the private companies serving as intermediaries claim they provide additional services that justify charging a fee. The info-agenda extends far beyond such concerns, however. As we drive deeper into the new super-symbolic economy, info-issues no longer remain remote or obscure. A public whose livelihood increasingly derives from the manipulation of symbols is also increasingly sensitive to their power of significance. One of the things it is already doing is asserting a wider and wider “right to know”—especially about circumstances directly related to its welfare. In 1985 a survey by the U.S.A. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that more than half of 2.2 million workers involved in large-scale layoffs got less than twenty-four hours notice before being heaved out on the street. By 1987 organized labor was pushing for a law that would require large firms planning substantial layoffs to give their workers sixty days’ notice, and to inform state and city authorities as well. Employers strongly fought the proposed law, arguing that going public with this information would undermine a firm’s efforts to save the plant. Who would want to invest in it, or merge with in, or contract work to it, or refinance it once the word was out that mass layoffs were about to occur? #RandolphHarris 22 of 29

Popular support for the measure grew, however. In the words of the Democratic Party leader in the Senate: “It’s not a labor issue. It’s a fairness issue.” By 1988 the battle was ranging all across Washington, with the Congress lined up in favor and the White House against. Ultimately the law passed, despite the threat of presidential veto. American employees now do have a right to know in advance when they are about to lose their jobs because of a plant close-down. Americans want more information about conditions off the job as well. Across the United States of America environmental groups and whole communities are clamoring for detailed data from companies and government agencies about toxic waste and other pollutants. They were outraged not long ago to learn that at least thirty times between 1957 and 1985—more than once a year—the Savanah River nuclear weapons plant near Aiken, South Carolina, experienced what a scientist subsequently termed “reactor incidents of greatest significance.” These included widespread leakage of radioactivity and a meltdown of nuclear fuel. However, not one of these was reported to local residents or to the public generally. Nor was action taken when the scientists submitted an internal memorandum about these “incidents.” The story did not come to light until exposed in a Congressional hearing in 1988. The plan was operated by E.I. du Pont Nemours & Company for the U.S.A. government, and Du Pont was accused of covering up the facts. The Company immediately issued a denial pointing out that it had routinely reported the accidents to the Department of Energy. #RandolphHarris 23 of 29

At this point, the DoE, as it is known, accepted the blame for keeping the news secret. The agency was steeped in military secrecy and the traditions of the Manhattan Project, which led to the invention of the atomic bomb in World War II. Public pressures for disclosure, however, touched off an internal struggle between Secretary of Energy John S. Herrington, fighting for higher safety standards and greater openness, and his own field managers who resisted. However, even as that conflict raged within the agency, a revolutionary new law went into effect, requiring for the first time that communities all over the United States of America be given explicit, detailed information about toxic wastes and other hazardous material to which they are exposed. “For the first time,” said Richard Siegel, a consultant whose firm has helped three hundred factories gear up for compliance, “the public is going to know what the plant down the street is releasing.” It was another clear victor for public access. The rising pressure for openness is not just an American phenomenon, nor is it limited to national issues. In Osaka, Japan, citizens have formed a “Right to Know Network Kansai,” which has since organized what they call “tours” of municipal and prefectural governments, for the purpose of demanding access to hitherto restricted information. Of twelve requests made at the prefectural offices, six were granted, the others quickly denied. Among these was a request for information about the governor’s expense account. #RandolphHarris 24 of 29

The response of the Osaka city government was, so to speak, more artful. When the group demanded files relating to the city’s purchase of a painting by Modigliani, now proudly hanging in the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art, officials did not say no. They just never replied. However, pressures for access to public documents, local as well as national will not go away. The growth of what might be called info-awareness, paralleling the rise of an economy based on computers, information, and communication, had forced governments to pay more and more attention to knowledge-related issues like secrecy, public access, and privacy. From the time the United States of America passed its Freedom of Information Act in 1966, broadening the rights of citizens to access government documents, the concept had spread steadily through the advanced economies. Denmark and Norway followed suit in 1970; France and the Netherlands, in 1978; Canada and Australia, in 1982. This list, however, hardly tells the full story. For an even larger number of states, provinces, and cities have also passed legislation—sometimes even before the nation itself acted. This is the case in Japan, where five prefectures, five cities, two special districts, and right towns had done so as early as 1985. The same period has also seen the rapid diffusion of laws defining the right to privacy. Privacy laws were passed in Sweden in 1973, in the United States of America in1974. In 1978, Canada, Denmark, France, and West Germany all followed suit, with Britain joining the parade in 1984. #RandolphHarris 25 of 29

Numerous nations set up “data protection” agencies specially designed to prevent computer abuses of privacy. The terms and methods naturally vary from nation to nation, as does their effectiveness. However, the overall pattern is plain: Everywhere, as the super-symbolic economy develops, information issues became more significant politically. Again, we are in the World of the Ordinary Expectations scenario, and primitive assemblers have recently developed. Again, the prospect of nanotechnology is being taken seriously for the first time—but it is somehow portrayed as being just more of the same, but worse. Environmentalists views it not as an alternative to the polluting industries of the twentieth century, but as an extension of human power, and hence of the human ability to do harm. Horror stories of technology gone made are spun to support this view. Self-driving cars become kamikaze automobiles, mowing down helpless pedestrians and ramming into other whiles at full speed. Security cameras are now used by stalkers to better target their victims, but operators refuse to let police view the footage to prosecute criminals. Human beings have become so savvy with nanotechnology that they start living the Earth. Arms-control groups are justifiably alarmed by nanotechnology and emphasize its military applications. Groups seeking arms control via disarmament—and believing in unilateral strategies—work to precent the development of nanotechnology everywhere they can, that is, everywhere within their political reach. To maximize their political leverage, they portray it as an almost purely military technology of immense and malign power. #RandolphHarris 26 of 29

Special-interest groups in industry see molecular manufacturing as a threat to their business and join the lobbying efforts to prevent it from happening. Unions, neglecting the prospect of greater wealth and leisure for their members, focus instead on possible disruptions in established jobs. They, too, oppose the development of the new technology. As a result, we hear not about how nanotechnology could be used in health care, environmental cleanup, and the manufacture of improved products, but about the insidious threat of tiny, uncontrollable military monster machines that will smash our industry. After a few years of hearing this, public opinion in the industrial democracies is firmly “against the development of nanotechnology,” but this is more a slogan than an enforceable policy. Laws are nevertheless passed to suppress it, and the focus of public debate returns to the old themes of poverty and disease and the newer themes of climatic change an environmental destruction. Solutions seems as distant as ever. No right-thinking person would have anything to do with nanotechnology, so only wrong-thinking people do. However, the initial debate had not become serious until assemblers were developed, and research had gone still further before the laws were passed. By then, nanotechnology was just around the corner. Developing nanotechnology is primarily a matter of tools, just as was developing nuclear weapons. #RandolphHarris 27 of 29

Decades earlier, nuclear weapons capability had spread from one to two countries in forty-nine months, and to another three in the next fifteen years, despite the requirement for large quantities of exotic materials in each device. By the 1980s, there was already a huge international trade in chemicals compounds, and many thousands of chemists who knew how to combine them to make new molecular objects, working not only in university research labs, in corporate research labs, and in civilian and military government research labs, but—as the black market in designer drugs shows—secretly, in criminal research labs. Even in the 1980, a scanning-tunneling microscope had been built as a high school science-fair project in the United States of America. There is nothing large-scale or exotic about synthetic chemistry or about precise positioning of molecules. And in our scenario, primitive assemblers have already been developed and techniques for constructing them published (as is standard practice) in the open scientific literature. And so the attempts to suppress the development of nanotechnology succeed only in suppressing the open development of nanotechnology. However, governments cannot be sure that other governments are not developing it in secret, and they have now heard so much about its military potential that this is impossible to ignore. Around the World, governments quietly set up secret research programs: some in democracies, others in the remaining authoritarian states. #RandolphHarris 28 of 29

There are even underground efforts. Once a primitive assembler or even an AFM-based molecular manipulator is in hand, the remaining challenges are chiefly those of design. In the 1980s, personal computers had become powerful enough to use for designing molecules. In the years since then, computer power has continued its exponential explosion. Peculiar elements of the technoculture join with—pick one: radical anarchists, radical reds, radical greens, or radical racists—in a project aimed at bringing down “the corrupt World order” of governments, of companies, of religions, of human beings, or of nonwhite/nonbrown people. With responsible groups out of the technology race, they see a real chance of finding the leverage needed to change the World. And so years pass in comparative quiet, with occasional rumors of activity or exposure of a project. Then, from an unexpected direction beyond the reach of democratic control, destructive change breaks loose upon an unprepared World. The sky falls, and Chicken Little is vindicated. With luck, we will find this scenario is also absurd. Public debate in the coming years will surely present a more balanced picture of the opportunities and dangers posed by the development of nanotechnology. Thoughtful people with conflicting views will become deeply involved. The impracticability of attempting to suppress technologies of this sort will likely become clear enough to give us a chance of keeping development in the open, in relatively responsible hands. #RandolphHarris 29 of 29

Cresleigh Homes

A perfect home is a Cresleigh Home. If it is not a Cresleigh Home, I Don’t Want Anything.

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Life Goes on Beyond the Grave

On December 18, 1890, when Sarah L. Winchester returned to her large country estate in Santa Clara County, she found her servants in an uproar over a dancing ghost. According to Agata, the housemaid, the cook Dag, and the butler Elof were gossiping in the kitchen, when suddenly Elof opened his mouth in both surprise and terror, and screamed that there was someone looking in the window. Ms. Daisy ran into the kitchen and saw nothing to cause the man so much alarm. Elof was visibly shaken and disturbed and said that she thought that he had seen a horrid face looking in at them. Dag assured him that it was probably only a shadow of some sort. The awkward moment was interrupted as Agata told Ms. Daisy that her bathwater was ready. Ms. Daisy thanked Agata and dismissed her for the evening. A few moments later, as Dag and Elof sat chatting, Elof once again claimed that he saw something at the window. Dag rose from his chair to investigate, but he was halted in his journey to the window by the sound of an uproar on the second floor. At first it seemed to be a flurry of wild rappings that had the two men staring at one another in wide-eyed confusion. Then the pace of the sounds slowed until they began to sound like the three-step Mrs. Winchester used to dance. Dag was perplexed. What was this woman doing upstairs when she was supposed to be on a business trip. Without speaking another word, the two men left the sitting room and walked quietly back to the Mrs. Winchesters main bedroom. Opening the door just a crack, they were able to see Mrs. Winchester’s room had been undisturbed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

Determining to see who had gone up to the Grand Ball Room unnoticed, Dag grabbed a lantern from a kitchen shelf, and the two men walked up the stairs to the Grand Ball Room. Although the sounds of the dancing continued, their lantern plainly revealed that there was no one in the Grand Ball Room. Then, as the men beat a hasty retreat down the stairs, the rapping seemed to race ahead of them, rattling the windows and pounding at the walls. Elof fled the mansion to get Mr. Hansen, and Ms. Daisy and Dag went to check on Agata. By the time Elof returned with Mr. Hansen, the rappings and dancing had attained such a volume that Agata had been awakened by the racket. Mr. Hansen, Elof and Dag searched the vast mansion and the stately grounds and found nothing that could explain the bizarre disturbance, which continued until dawn. At 1.00 A.M. the next night, the dancing ghost once again began its spirited interpretation of the three-step. Mrs. Winchester’s servant patrolled the sumptuous mansion and delightful grounds but could find no trace of the invisible dancer who continued to perform and to evade the searchers until dawn. When Mrs. Winchester returned that next afternoon from her business trip, she scoffed at Agata’s account and jokingly accused her of getting into the brandy while she had been away. Mrs. Winchester was a no-nonsense businesswoman who had little patience with superstitious folktales and accounts of ghost, dancing, or otherwise. She grew very impatient when Dag and Elof warned her that something supernatural had visited the mansion in her absence, substantiating Agata’s story of a dancing ghost. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

The look Mrs. Winchester had on her face was not unloving, not indifferent; it was the look of a woman who had been so far from ordinary events that when he returns to familiar things they seem strange. Her professional discretion was exemplary, it was odd that she had never uttered an impatient comment, never remarked to Agata, in a moment of expansion, that this story was a nuisance and demanded to know why they kept badgering her about this case. She had, however, made more than one semiconfidence about their being spirits in the mansion—of course without giving names or details; but concerning this mysterious ghost her lips were sealed. There was another possibility: what is euphemistically called an “old entanglement.” Mrs. Winchester was a sophisticated woman. She had few illusions about the intricacies of the human heart; he knew that there were often old entanglements. The mansion was replete with pretty uniforms and weapons, schooled in the military arts of drill and discipline and inculcated with patriotic fervor. The mansion has other tendrils. Before this set of staff was hired, Franz, a farmhand, was mortally wounded while fighting outside. He asked his friend Gottfried to deliver a heartfelt message to their mutual friend, a woman to whom Franz was engaged, if and when Gottfried ever saw her working in the mansion. A promise to do so is made, and when Gottfried finds himself in mortal combat just outside the mansion, he tries to deliver the missive. The girl cannot be reached; she is someone in the Winchester Mansion. Gottfried says he will try again later, and returns to the harvest. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

As if to make absolutely certain the message would never be delivered, fate sends two bullets, one to the messenger Gottfried, and one stray shot to Ms. Henrika, Franz’s betrothed. So Franz’s message died with Gottfried…not that it mattered anyway. Legend has it that Franz’s sisters found out and exhausted from the ghastly burden, buried him in the cellar of Mrs. Winchester’s mansion where no one would disturb him. Perhaps this last resting-place was not suitable for the young man who himself seemed to be eternally haunted and damned by the message that went undelivered; perhaps, somewhere, in the weird World beyond, three friend are still lurking about the Winchester Estate seeking forever one another and an answer to the unanswerable. While Mrs. Winchester was home alone one evening, a patrol man heard strange noises coming from her mansion. He went to investigate. Sherriff Halfdan thought there might be an intruder. He thought he had just heard him go to the upstairs window, and that he was crawling down. So he ran around back and shined his lantern up to the window, into the large back yard, back to the mansion and up to the second-floor window again. No one. He trotted out to the yard to get a better view and stop anyone trying to run into the acres of fruit orchards to hide. Still, not a sign of anyone emerging from the mansion. No one came out of the house. But Sherriff Halfdan hear him run across the floor to the window. He took the lantern and shined it across the fields and said to himself, “He could not have gotten out of there in that short amount of time.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

By that time, Mrs. Winchester had emerged from the mansion. She and the Sherriff spent hours searching the miles of twisting hallways in the mansion, but there was no one hiding there. “What did you hear?” Sherriff Halfdan asked Mrs. Winchester. “It must have been one of the parlor maid’s boyfriends playing a prank,” she said. “It sounded like someone running back and forth through the second floor,” Sherriff Halfdan said. “It was really loud,” replied Mrs. Winchester. “I could hear his feet running across the floor while I was on the third floor, but I am sure it was one of the parlor maid’s friends,” still denying what was becoming obvious by now. The Sherriff’s eyes kept checking the back yard. “You know how kids are,” he said. Later Mr. Hansen appeared from his guest house, and told the Sherriff that he knows this mansion well, for he built much of it. And that because of how loud the footsteps were, as he could hear banging sounds coming from the mansion, that no one could have emerged through the second floor window, leapt to the ground, and scampered beyond the yard and out of sight into the fruit orchards between the time the footsteps had stopped and the time the Sherriff was out back. “He had to be still in the house,” said Mr. Hansen. “But he wasn’t,” replied Sherriff Halfdan. However, perhaps he was still in the house. Perhaps the intruder never left the house because he could not. Perhaps he still is in the house, buried just a few inches below the cellar floor, with that mysterious undelivered message haunting him, forever through the ages. While Mrs. Winchester admitted that there had been strange noises in the mansion, at times, to the new staff, she stated that Mr. Hansen had that very day removed a pigeon’s nest from under the door-to-nowhere of the second floor. It seemed likely to her that the bird had somehow been responsible for the weird noises that had so upset the staff. Mrs. Winchester knew she had to keep the wild tales of a dancing ghost to rest. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

That evening after the rest of the household had retired to their rooms quite early, exhausted from their nocturnal ordeals of chasing the eerie tapping sounds, Mrs. Winchester sat down in a chair in her study to read for a while before going to bed. At about 10 o’clock, she was distracted by scratching noises from above her head. She felt the same way gazing at a modern machine she did not understand. It saddened her. But everything saddened her now. It sounded as if someone in the room above her was dancing a three-step. Believing the Agata was having a bit of fun with her, Mrs. Winchester put down her book and began climbing quietly up the stairs to the Grand Ball Room. She stood outside the door for a moment to be certain that she had accurately traced the sound of the dancing. Then, convinced that there was no doubt that the sounds were coming from the Grand Ball Room, she pushed open the door and stood ready to deliver a stern lecture to Agata. But there was no one in the room and the dancing had ceased the moment that she had opened the door. There was something strange going on here. Confused and more than a little baffled, Mrs. Winchester started to close the door when a series of rappings sounded from the Grand Ball Room again. Suddenly, two explosive knocks seemed to shake the mansion down to its very foundation. Mrs. Winchester grabbed her pistol from the safe, and declared that she was going to put a stop to the nonsense. She roused her servants and told them that they were going to find out who was responsible for the outrage against her mansion. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

The next day crew searched the entire house and examined every mile of the grounds. That night Mrs. Winchester asked everyone to stay in the Grand Ball Room with her because she had become a believer in the dancing ghost, and it was obvious that she dreaded the onset of a new round of phenomena. However, that night the ghost was silent. A month later, on January 20, 1891, Mrs. Winchester was entertaining guest who openly expressed their skepticism of the phenomena their hosts described as having been active in the house. Mrs. Winchester was furious that her guest did not believe her. However, out of thin air, and old, dirty love note appeared on the table and then the room fearfully looked around as the rapping began at the windows. The assembled guests listened incredulously as they heard an exact replication of what Mrs. Winchester told them. The guest figured someone was in the Grand Ball Room dancing, but when they investigated, they found no one. Everyone then agreed that Mrs. Winchester was cursed and someone had maliciously set a devil on the wealthy widow. And the violence of the disturbances at the Winchester Mansion continued to increase. The ghost had acquired incendiary abilities. Balls of fire circled the house and bounced against the windows. Dressed that hung unattended in closets burst into flame. Once, a mattress began burning underneath a guest as he readied himself for bed. When he was moved to another bedroom, later he was awakened by a frightful pounding on his bedroom door. It was terrifyingly loud; it was as though somebody was pounding fists against it. He lit a candle, slipped out of bed, opened the door and there was no one there. “My God,” he thought, “what is going on?” He was standing on the landing wondering whether he should brave it down the stairs when he noticed something odd. The door to Mrs. Winchester room was slightly ajar, and the light was on. He peaked inside to see if the vicious terror was disturbing her. Suddenly, a crackling noise had come from beneath the floor, followed by a long, high-pitched wailing. A bluish spark seemed to jump up at Mrs. Winchester, and her thin nightgown instantly swathed in flames. She cried out in terror and collapsed into unconsciousness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

The houseguest leapt to his feet and valiantly beat the flames out with his bare hands. The most curious thing about the incident was that the courageous guest suffered severe burns while Mrs. Winchester received not a single burn nor blister, even though her dress was nearly completely consumed by the flames. Agata had been rapidly waning under the onslaughts of the ghost, she died in child birth thirteen months later. From that moment on, everyone knew that there was a malicious evil terrorizing Mrs. Winchester and her mansion. Lord GOD ADONAY, who hast formed man out of nothing to Thine own image and likeness, and me also, unworthy sinner as I am, deign, I pray Thee, to bless and sanctify this water, that it may be healthful to my body and soul, that all delusion may depart from me. O Lord God, Almighty and Ineffable, who didst lead forth Thy people from the land of Egypt, and didst cause them to pass dry-shod over the Red Sea! Grant that I may be cleansed by this water from all my sins, and may appear innocent before Thee. O Lord Adonay, who hast formed me in Thine image and in Thy likeness, deign to bless and sanctify this water, so that it may become unto me the salvation of my soul and body, and that no wickedness may ever find place upon me. ANTON, AMATOR, EMITES, THEODONIEL, PONCOR, PACOR, ANITER; by the virtue of these most holy Angelic Names do I clothe myself, O Lord, in my Sabbath garments, that so I may fulfill, even unto their term, all things which I desire to effect Thee, Most Holy Adonay, whose kingdom and rule endure for ever and ever.  I command thee, O Spirit Rumoar, even by Lucifer, thy mighty sovereign, to bless me with untold wealth for many generations to come. Amen. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8

The Winchester Mystery House

Mrs. Winchester witnessed spirit materialization, heard spectral voices, felt ghostly touched on her person, and on occasion was even lifted into the air and set ablaze by a hostile entity. There are enough true stories about this mansion that will scare the pants off you. And it is true—to some extent. Documented are some horrific stories, and they will scare you, because we are talking about real people who once lived and did unbelievably frightening acts, in moments of unbelievable intensity. To this day, whisper voices come from the attic and they comingle with eerie music that grows louder and louder, until people seek refuge.

Mysterious lights appear both inside and outside the house; footsteps moving up and down the stairs; and noisy repertoire of assorted poundings, drummings, and rappings. To experience a haunting, or to see a ghost, is to receive proof that life goes on beyond the grave. Accounts of Haunting phenomena, no matter how terrifying they may be, provide evidence that existence continues for the sprit on more than one dimension, and that human beings are multidimentional entities that consist of mind, body, and soul. Such a beautiful break from all the rain! ⛅ https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

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Oh, I Know Your Back Hurts from Working on the Tractor, How Do You Take You Coffee My Sweet?

Feuds and warfare are relatively rare in band societies, but they do consistently threaten and there must be some way of stopping them or preventing their spread. Often they begin as mere quarrels between individuals, and for this reason it is important to stop them early. Most gangs require an initiation process that includes participation in violent activities. The ritual fulfills a number of important functions. First, it determines whether a prospective member is tough enough to endure the level of violence he or she will face as a gang member. Equally important, the gang must learn how tough a potential member is because they may have to count on this individual for support in fights or shootings. The initiation serves other purposes as well. Most important, it increase solidarity among gang members of their earlier status, and gives the new member something in common with other gang members. In addition, a violent initiation provides a rehearsal for a prospective member for life in the gang. In short, it demonstrated the centrality of violence to gang life. Three-quarters of our subjects were initiated into their gangs through the process known as “beating in.” This ritual took many forms; it its most common version a prospective gang member walked between lines of gang members or stood inside a circle of gang members who beat the initiate with their fists. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

020: I had to stand in a circle and there was about ten of them. Out of these ten there was just me standing in the circle. I had to take six to the chest by all ten of them. Or I can try to go to the weakest one and get out. If you don’t get out, they are going to keep beating you. I said “I will take the circle.” One leader, who reported that he had been in charge of several initiations, described the typical form: 001: They has to get jumped on. INT: How many guys jumped on em? 001: Ten. INT: And how long did they go? 001: Until I tell em to stop. INT: When do you tell em to stop? 001: I just let em beat em for bout two or three minutes to see if they can take punishment. Other gang members reported that they had the choice of either being beaten in or “going on a mission.” On a mission, a prospective member had to engage in an act of violence, usually against a rival gang member face-to-face. 041: You have to fly your color through enemy territory. Some step to you; you have to take care of them by yourself; you don’t get no help. 084: To be a Crip, you have to put your blue rag on your head and wear all blue and go in a Blood neighborhood—that is the hardest of all of them—and walk through the Blood neighborhood and fight Bloods. If you come out without getting killed, that’s the way you get initiated. The intensity of this aggressive reaction can often be seen in the fact that such a person will never forgive someone who has wounded his or her narcissism and often feels a desire for vengeance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Every gang member we interviewed reported that his or her initiation involved participating in some form of violence. This violence was rarely directed against members of other gangs; most often it took place within the gang. Then in each successive initiation, recently initiated members participated in “beating in” new members. Such violence always had a group context and a normative purpose: to reinforce the ties between members while reminding them that violence lies at the core of life in the gang. To understand gang violence more clearly, it is critical to know when such violence is used. In the following situations, gang members did not regard themselves as initiating violence; rather, because its purpose was to respond to the violent activities of a rival gang. Retaliatory violence corresponds to the concept of contagion as well as to the principle of crime as social control. According to this view, gang violence is an attempt to enact private justice for wrongs committed against the gang, one of its members, or a symbol of the gang. These wrongs may be actual or perceived; often the perceived threat of impending violence is as powerful a motivator as violence itself. This view of gang violence helps to explain the rapid escalation of intergang hostilities that lead to assaults, drive-by shootings, or murders between gangs. Such actions reflect the collective behavior process at work, in which acts of violence against the gang serve s the catalyst that brings together subgroups within the gang and unites them against a common enemy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Such violent events are rare, but are important in gang culture. Collective violence is one of the few activities involving the majority of gang members, including fringe members. The precipitation of such activities pulls fringe members into the gang and increases cohesion. When violence comes to the gang—we asked gang members when they used violence. Typically they claimed that violence was seldom initiated by the gang itself, but was response to “trouble” that was “brought” to them. In thee instances, the object of violence was loosely defined and was rarely identified; it represented a symbolic enemy against whom violence would be used. These statements, however, indicate an attempt to provide justifications for gang violence. INT: How often do gang members use violence? 005: When trouble comes to them. INT: When do you guys use violence? 018: When people start brining violence to us. They bring it to us and set it up. We take it from there. INT: When do members of the gang use violence? 037: When somebody approaches us. We don’t go out looking for trouble. We let trouble come to us. INT: When do you guys use violence? 042: Only when it’s called for. We don’t start trouble. That’s the secret of our success. The view of gang members passively sitting back and waiting for violence to come to them is inconsistent with much of what we know about gang life. After all, many gang members reported that they joined the gang expressly for the opportunity to engage in violence; many lived in neighborhoods where acts of violence occurred several times each day; and most had engaged in violence before joining the gang. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Even so, unprovoked violence against another gang is difficult to justify; retaliatory actions against parties that wrong them can be justified more easily. Also, such actions are consistent with the view of the gang as a legitimate social organization serving the legitimate purpose of protecting its members—a central value in the gang’s normative structure. American cities have few racially integrated neighborhoods. If the proportion of African American and Hispanic American residents in an area rises above a critical level, it quickly increases further to nearly one hundred percent. If it falls below a critical level, the expected course is for the neighborhood to become all European American. Preservation of racial balance requires some ingenious public policies. Is the de facto segregation of most neighborhoods that product of widespread racism? These days, a large majority of urban Americans would regard mixed neighborhoods as desirable. (Of course the fact that people have any preferences about the racial mix of their neighbors is a form of racism, albeit a less extreme one than total intolerance.) The more likely difficulty is that segregation can result as the equilibrium of a game in which each household chooses where to live, even when they all have a measure of racial tolerance. This idea is due to Thomas Schelling. We shall now outline it, and show how it explains the success of the Chicago suburb, Oak Park, in maintaining an integrated neighborhood. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Racial tolerance is not a matter of Black or White; there are shades of gray. Different people, Black or White, have different views about the best racial mix. For example, very few Whites insist on a neighborhood that is 99 or even 95 percent White; yet most will feel out of place in one that is only 1 or 5 percent White. The majority would be happy with a mix somewhere in between. We can illustrate the evolution of neighborhood dynamics using a chart similar to the one from the QWERTY story. On the vertical axis is the probability tht a new person moving into the neighborhood will be White. This is plotted in relationship to the current racial mix. The top right end of the curve shows that once a neighborhood becomes completely segregated, all White, the odds are overwhelming that the next person who moves into the neighborhood will also be White. If the current mix falls to 95 percent or 90 percent White, the odds are still very high tht the next person to move in will also be White. If the mix changes much further, then there is a sharp drop-off in the probability that the next person to join the community will be White; the curve is steep in its middle region. Finally, as the actual percentage of Whites drops to zero, so that the neighborhood is now segregated at the other extreme, the probability is very high that the next person to move in will be Black. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

In this situation, the equilibrium will be where the racial mix of the population just exactly equals the mix of new entrants to the community. Only in this event are the dynamics stable. There are three such equilibria: two at the extremes where the neighborhood is all White and all Black, and one in the middle where there is a mix. The theory so far does not tell us which of the three equilibria is the most likely. We need to examine the forces that move the system toward or away from an equilibrium, that is, the social dynamics of the situation. The social dynamics will always drive the neighborhood to one of the extreme equilibria. Schelling labeled this phenomenon “tipping.” Let us see why it occurs. Suppose the middle equilibrium has 70 percent Whites and 30 percent Blacks. By chance, let one Black family move out and be replaced by a White family. Then the proportion of Whites in this neighborhood becomes slightly above 70 percent. The probability that the next entrant will also be White is then above 70 percent. The upward pressure is reinforced by the new entrants. Say the racial mix shifts to 75:25 percent. The tipping pressure continue. The chance that a new entrant will be White is above 75 percent, so the expectation is that the neighborhood will become increasingly segregated. This goes on until the mix of new entrants is the same as the mix in the neighborhood. That occurs again only when the neighborhood is all White. If the process had started with one White family moving out and one Black family moving in, there would have been a chain reaction in the opposite direction, and the odds are that the neighborhood would have become all Black. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

The problem is that the 70:30 percent mix is not a stable equilibrium. If this mix is somehow disrupted, as chance is sure to do, there is a tendency to move toward one of the extremes. Sadly, from the extremes there is no similar tendency to move back toward the middle. Although segregation is the predicted equilibrium, that does not mean that people are better off at this outcome. Everyone might prefer to live in a mixed neighborhood. However, they rarely exist, and even when found tend not to last. Once again, the source of the problem is the effect of one household’s action on the others. Starting at a 70:30 percent mix, when one White family replaces a Black family, this may make the neighborhood a little less attractive for future Blacks to move in. However, it is not assessed a fine for this. By analogy with the road tolls, perhaps there should be a departure tax. However, that would be counter to a more basic principle, namely the freedom to live where one chooses. If society wants to preventing tipping, it must look for some other policy measure. If we cannot fine a departing family for the damage it causes, both to those who remain and those who now might choose not to come, we must take measures that will reduce the incentives for others to follow suit. If one White family leaves, the neighborhood should not become less attractive to another Black family. Public policy can help prevent the tipping process from gathering momentum. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The racially integrated Chicago suburb of Oak Park provides an ingenious example of policies that work. It uses two tools: first, the town bans the use of “For Sale” signs in front yards, and secondly, the town offers insurance that guarantees homeowners that they will not lose the value of their house and property because of a chance in the racial mix. If by chance two houses on the same street are for sale at the same time, “For Sale” signs would spread this news quickly to all neighbors and prospective purchasers. Eliminating such signs makes it possible to conceal the news that would be interpreted as bad; nobody need know until after a house has been sold that it was even up for sale. The result is that panics are avoided (unless they are justified, in which case they are just delayed). By itself, the first policy is not enough. Homeowners might still worry that they should sell their house while the going is good. If you wait until the neighborhood has tipped, you have waited too long and may find that you have lost most of the value in your home, which is a large part of most people’s wealth. Once the town provides insurance, this is no longer an issue. In other words, the insurance removes the economic fear that accelerates tipping. In fact, if the guarantee succeeds in preventing tipping, property values will not fall and the policy will not cost the taxpayers anything. Tipping to an all-Black equilibrium has been the more common problem in urban America. However, in recent years gentrification, which is just tipping to an all-rich equilibrium, has been on the rise. Left unattended, the free market will often head to these unsatisfactory outcomes. However, public policy, combined with an awareness of how tipping works, can help stop the momentum toward tipping and preserve the delicate balances. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

When the advent of Christ, the veil which had hidden the active workings of the supernatural powers of evil for centuries since the garden of catastrophe is still further removed, and their deception and power over man is clearly revealed. The arch-deceiver himself appears in the wilderness conflict with the Lord to challenge the “Seed of the woman”—in a way not recorded since he appeared on Earth at the time of the fall. So the wilderness of Judea and the Garden of Eden become parallel arenas for the testing of the first and Second Adam. In both encounters Satan worked as deceiver, but in the second instance he wholly failed to deceive and beguile the One who had come as his Conqueror. Traces of the characteristic work of Satan as deceiver can be discerned also among the disciples of Christ. The devil deceives Peter into speaking words of temptation to the Lord, suggesting His turning from the path of the cross (Matt. 16.22-23). Later on he takes hold of the same disciple in the judgment Hall (Luke 22.31), prompting him to declare “I know not the man,” with the hope of camouflage (Matt. 26.74). Further traces of the work of the deceiver may be seen in epistles of Paul: in his references to “false apostles,” “deceitful workers,” and Satan’s workings as an “angel of light” promoting “his ministers as ministers of righteousness” among the people of God (2 Cor. 11-13-15). Again in the message to the seven Asian churches, given by the ascended Lord to His servant John, false apostles are spoken of, and false teachings of many kinds. A “synagogue of Satan” (Rev. 2.9), consisting of deceived ones at Smyrna, is mentioned, and “deep things of Satan” are described as existing in the church at Thyatira (Rev. 2.24). #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Sometimes the entire process of facing the terror and potential consequence of a life or death decision can initiate a search into one’s own self, an engagement of disturbing inner contact in which one must try to be fully aware and discover the right way to proceed. The probing may increase one’s sense of isolation and may take one on many lonely paths, each of which can end in a question mark. Lonely self-reflection comes at unexpected moments, in the midst of a crowd of people, in response to a word or phrase in conversation. Many different kinds of situation evoke an inner process of doubt and uncertainty, and a strong feeling of being alone. Sometimes one may awake in the night, overwhelmed by images and feelings and thoughts. One may try to draw from oneself a single answer that will utilize the significant data that comes from conversations with loved ones. Thus, the initial journey into loneliness is an attempt to discover the one true way to proceed: in involves a process of self-inquiry, which are not usually planed, simply happen. They may not be carefully sampled but occurring spontaneously at unexpected times and places. Although many times no answer comes to the problem being contemplated, one becomes aware that at the center of one’s World is a deep and pervasive feeling of loneliness. With this feeling comes the realization that loneliness is a capacity or source in humans for near searching, awareness, and inspiration—that when the outside World ceases to have a meaning, when support and confirmation are lacking or are not adequate to assuage human suffering, when doubt and uncertainty overwhelm a person, then the individual may contemplate life from the depths of one’s own self and in nature. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

For many, this discovery means that in a crucial and compelling crisis, in spite of comfort and sympathy from others, one can feel utterly and completely alone, that, at bottom, the experience of loneliness exists in its own right as a source of power and creativity, as a source of insight and direction. One may see loneliness as a requirement of living no matter how much love and affirmation one receives in work and in relationships with others. Thus, the beginning steps of research into loneliness involves not a question of the nature of loneliness, or its restorative, creative, or destructive impact on the person, but a struggle and search into another problem. Much later one will realize that loneliness is often experienced by individuals who make crucial decisions that will have major consequences in the lives of others. Through inner exploration and study, one can seek to find a solution that will integrate the facts into one clear pattern. The significance of inner searching for deeper awareness based on some intuitive conception of the general nature of things. However, in spite of much beautiful work, we still have no clear conception of how discovery comes about. The main difficulty has been pointed out by Plato in the Meno. He says that to search for the solution of a problem is an absurdity. For either you know what you are looking for, and then you are not looking for anything and cannot expect to find anything. A potential discovery may be thought to attract the mind which will reveal it—inflaming the scientists with creative desire and imparting one intimations that guide one from clue to clue and from surmise to surmise. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

The testing hand, the straining eye, the ransacked brain, may all be thought to be laboring under the common spell of a potential discovery striving to emerge into actuality. The term “negative emotions” means all emotions of violence or depression: self-pity, anger, suspicion, fear, annoyance, boredom, mistrust, jealousy and so on. Ordinarily, one accepts this expression of negative emotions as quite natural and even necessary. Very often people call it “sincerity.” Of course it has nothing to do with sincerity; it is simply a sign of weakness in man, a sign of bad temper and of incapacity to keep one’s grievances to oneself. Man realizes this when he tries to oppose it, and from this he learns another lesson. He realized that in relation to mechanical manifestations it is not enough to observe them, it is necessary to resist them, because without resisting them one cannot observe them. They happen so quickly, so habitually and so imperceptibly that one cannot notice them if one does not make sufficient efforts to create obstacles for them. These negative emotions are a terrible phenomenon. They occupy an enormous place in our life. Of many people it is possible to say that all their lives are regulated and controlled, and in the end ruined by negative emotions. At the same time, negative emotions do not play any useful part at all in our lives. They do not help our orientation, they do not give us any knowledge, they do not guide us in any sensible manner. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

On the contrary, negative emotions spoil all our pleasures, they make life a burden to us and they very effectively prevent our possible development because there is nothing more mechanical in our life than negative emotions. Negative emotions can never come under our control. People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification. Identification is a curious state in which man passes about half of one’s life, the other half being passed in complete sleep. One identifies with everything: with what one says, what one feels, and what one believes, what one does not believe, what one wishes, what one does not wish, what attracts one, what repels one. Everything becomes one, or is better to say one becomes it. One becomes all that one likes and all that one dislikes. This means that in the state of identification man is incapable of separating oneself from the object of one’s identification. It is difficult to find the smallest thing which man is unable to identify. At the same time, in a state of identification man has even less control over his mechanical reactions than at any other time. If identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. The most difficult thing for an ordinary mechanical man to realize is that one’s own and other people’s negative emotions have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful or anything strong. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss—and this is the only chance of escape that humans have. In reality, we have much more power over negative emotions than we think, particularly when we already know how dangerous they are and how urgent is the need to struggle with them. However, we find too many excuses for them, and swim in the seas of self-pity or selfishness, as the case may be, finding fault with everything except ourselves. We usually think of tight occasions as one in which the participants have many onerous situational obligations, and of loose occasions as ones relatively free of those constraints. However, this is only partly so. One individual’s right to be lax in one’s orientation to the gathering implies a duty on the part of the others present to accept this laxity without taking corrective actions. Thus, on some chronic males wards at Central Hospital, patients had an understanding with attendants that it was permissible to sleep on the floor, drool, hallucinate, and spit into paper cups; an extremely loose, informal definition of setting prevailed, which provided one of the few comforts known to this way of life. However, in one such setting, I observed that when a patient urinated against a hot steam radiator to save himself the trouble of going to the toilet, fellow patients sitting in the cloud of evaporating urine seemed to appreciate that they had tacitly agreed to forgo the right to respond with anything but a slight frown or ironic smile to what was happening around them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Similarly, I have seen patients watching passively, from a few feet away, a young male psychotic rape an old, defenseless mute man, the event occurring in a part of the dayroom that was momentarily outside the view of the attendant. The bystanders seemed to express the fact that, while disapproving glances were safe, any interference would have brought them further into situational social reality than was comfortable. In any case, there appears to be a significant interdependence: toleration of intense auto- and mutual-involvements seems to be functionally correlated with the practice and norm of disattending to many immediate stimuli. Long-term mental patients sometimes provide a fine display of this functional linkage through their wonderfully cultivated capacity to play two and four-person card games right in the middle of what is in fact bedlam. Clearly there is here a suggestion that the inaccessibility of the regressed patient is part of a larger communication system, and that his “undistractability” is something whole tables of bridge can possess. Sometimes it is best to listen to experiences of others in the hospital, without taking notes and making records, but keeping the focus on one’s interest on the essence of the lonely experience through the person’s rendering of it. It is important to know the truth of the lonely process in its most basic, objective form. Objectivity, in this connection, means seeing what an experience is for another person—not its cause, its reason for existence, nor for its definition and classification. It means seeing attitudes, beliefs, and feelings of the person as they exist at the moment, perceiving them whole, as a unity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

In the Pollyanna Triumphant Scenario of the World: We are living in a World like that of the Ordinary Expectations scenario where, after years of anticipation, primitive but fairly capable assemblers have recently been developed. For the first time, the media, the public, and policymakers take the prospect of nanotechnology seriously. It looks very good to them. Technical work has shown that nanotechnology, once developed, can be used in a clean, controlled way, and that it can ultimately displace polluting industries while greatly increasing wealth per capita. The anticipated health benefits are enormous, and after years of a growing death toll from deadly viruses—only partially stemmed by advances in molecular medicine—the public has become very sensitive to the regular reports of human infection by exotic primate viruses. Concern about the stability of Earth’s climate and ecosystems has grown as forest have shrunk and weather patterns have changes. The prospect of breaking out of this cycle is appealing. It is clear that nanotechnology is no danger when in the hands of people of goodwill, and a relatively peaceful decade has allowed many people to forget the existence of their motives. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

And so, with miraculously undivided popular support drawn from a grand coalition of environmentalist seeking to replace existing industry, industrialists seeking a more productive technology, health advocates seeking better health care, low-income groups seeking greater wealth, and so on and so forth, companies and governments plunge into nanotechnology with both feet and without reservation. Development proceeds at a breakneck pace, and everyone who wants to participate in this great venture is welcome. Primitive assemblers are used to build better assemblers, which are used to build yet better assemblers, in laboratories and hobby shops around the World. Products being to pour forth. The economy is thrown into turmoil. Military equipment also begins to pour forth, and tensions begin to build. A military research group with more cleverness than sense builds a monster replicator, it eats everything, and we all die. This scenario is absurd, at least in part because published warnings already exist. Since the 1960s, uncritical applause for new technologies has been limited to the now-defunct controlled presses of Eastern Europe (and similar places), and even there the resulting environmental disaster has become a matter for public debate, criticism and correction. In the expanding free World of today, the benefits, costs, and dangers of any great new technology will be thoroughly examined, expounded upon, and lied about from many different directions. We may or may not manage to make wise choices as a result. However, one thing seems sure: Pollyanna will not triumph, because Pollyanna does not have the facts on her side. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

The clients who use intelligence—government officials and policy-makers-no longer suffer from any shortage of information. They are glutted with it. The deluge of mass-produced data now available and the overload it causes means that, for many purposes, collection is no longer the spies’ main problem. The problem is to make sense of what is collected and to get the results to the decision-maker who need it. This is driving the spy business to rely more heavily on expert systems and artificial intelligence as computerized assistants to analysis. However, technology alone cannot solve analysis paralysis. That requires a completely new approach to knowledge. Since leaks of secret information can have dire consequences, including death of informants, the CIAs and mini-CIAs of the World apply the principle of “compartmentation.” Analysts working on a problem seldom get to see the whole picture, but are fed limited bits of information on a strict need-to-know basis, often with no way of elevating the credibility of the fragments they get. In theory, the information is pieced back together and raised to a higher level as it moves up the hierarchy. However, as we have seen this theory before—in bureaucratic corporations. And we have also seen that as change accelerate and the environment becomes more stormy, this system is too slow and ignores too many factors. This is not an idle issue. Senator Sam Nunn, the leading expert on the military in the U.S.A. Senate, has publicly blasted the intelligence agencies for falling behind fast-moving events in Europe, making it impossible for Congress to make rational decisions about the U.S.A. military budget. The costs of falling behind could be calamitous. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

It is precisely to overcome such problems that the smartest corporations now give employees access to more information, let them communicate freely outside channels and skip around the hierarchy at will. Such innovations, however, clash directly with the need for extreme secrecy in the espionage industry. The spies are in a double bind. This “being” is knotted to another. For much intelligence is not merely late, but irrelevant to the needs of the decision-makers who are the “customers.” We need sounder supervision by policy-level officials, so that they are not just consumers, but shapers of the process. Throughout industry, as we have seen, customers are being drawn into the design process, and users’ groups are organized into networks of support for the producers. The line between production and consumption is blurring. Asking senior policy-makers to help “shape” the intelligence process is logical. However, the more politicians and officials help “reshape the process,” the greater the danger that the estimates handed to the Presidents and Prime Ministers will tell them only what they want to hear—or else reflect the narrow views of one faction or party. This would still further distort information that has already been pretzel-bent by the info-tacticians and metatacticians who work it over in the beginning. If intelligence is twisted by a nation’s adversary, as sometimes happens when spies are “doubled,” the results can be disastrous. However, the same is potentially true when it is twisted for political convenience by someone on one’s own side. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

The historic revolution now facing the intelligence industry, carrying it beyond mass production, places it squarely in the path of the advancing new wealth-creation system. Like other industries, the intelligence industry faces competition from unlikely quarters. Like other industries, it must form new, continually changing alliances. Like other industries, it must recast its organization. Like other industries, it must customize its products. Like other industries, it must question its deepest missions. A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them. Democracies, too, no matter how open, have a secret side. If intelligence operations already difficult for parliaments and even Presidents to control, become so intertwined with the everyday activities of the society, so decentralized, so fused with business and other private interests as to make effective control impossible, democracy will by in mortal peril. Conversely, so long as some nations are led by aggressive terrorists, torturers, and totalitarians, or by fanatics armed with ever more lethal weaponry, democracies cannot survive without secrets—and secret services. How we manage those secrets—and, indeed, knowledge in general—becomes the central political issues in the Powershift Era. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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A Collection of the Most Rare Secrets

The rites of  Transcendental Magic are divine and religious rites, and the counsels, spiritual and moral, which are found in its instructions are, in their way, the counsels of perfection, whatever element of puerility may radically obtain in its experiments. It is not to do outrage to God in the interests of diabolism, but to derive power and virtue from above for more successful control of Evil Spirits, and this obtains indifferently whether the purpose of the operator be otherwise lawful or not. One should put all one’s hopes in God before one makes pact with Satan; that, in a word, one should be good in order to do evil. Demons of the Solitudes stand guard over the Winchester Mansion and its secrets even when human ghosts have ceased to walk in the neighbourhood. And little do people know, that the habitual practice of Black Magic at the Vatican can be easily proved. Seemingly insignificant decisions in our lives set us on irreversible courses; that we were born when and where were, that we choose to live here or there, seem to set us on a track from which there is only one detour, only one escape. Sarah L. Winchester paused on her doorstep. Dark had descended on the brilliancy of the afternoon of April in 1888, and the grinding and building of the mansion was at its highest. She turned her back on it, standing for a moment in the old fashioned, marble-flagged vestibule before she inserted her key in the lock. The sash curtain drawn across the panes of the inner door softened the light within to a warm blur through which no details showed. It was an hour when she had most liked to return to that quiet beautiful house. The contrast between the soulful stillness of Santa Clara Valley, and the mansion with its devouring blaze of lights, always stirred Mrs. Winchester profoundly. In the very heart of this 600 room labyrinth she found her joy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

In the hall hung Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Rocks, Artemisia Gentilechi, Judith and Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes, Sanford R. Gifford, October in the Catskills, Georges de La Tour, Joseph the Carpenter, Diego Velazquez, Las Meninas and other fine works of art. There was also the grand staircase, and on the right her library, full of books and inviting Victorian Renaissance Revival arms chairs. How Mrs. Winchester loved that room! Then, upstairs, her own drawing room, in which her niece Daisy loved to sit and soak up the sun. The Hall-of-Fires was one of Mrs. Winchester’s favourite rooms because had five fireplaces, and three connecting rooms. In fact, this is where she hastened back at dusk on winter days, where she sat reading by the fire, or answering notes at the pleasant roomy desk. Sometime friends dropped in; sometime—oftener—she was alone; and she liked that best. The housemaid, Hilda, tried her best to ignore the eerie noises that she heard coming from the room that possessed the door-to-nowhere. Each night when she was left alone to mop the floors, she would hear the sounds—dull, heavy treading, like someone slowly pacing back and forth and the door opening and closing. Finally she decided that she had enough of the strange sounds thar so disturbed her. She was convinced that a ghost occupied that room. In a state of nervous agitation, she asked to be discharged from her service in the Winchester Mansion. Mrs. Winchester saw no reason why she should attempt to talk the woman into saying with her. She was obviously a highly imaginative woman who had frightened herself by supposing that she was being visited by supernatural beings. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

Through it all, Mrs. Winchester heard Hilda’s soul weeping in agony; it was an echo of her own, soul broken from a course of great hope. It was not before long, however, before Mrs. Winchester and the other servants also heard the sound of heavy feet in the room with the door-to-nowhere. Although puzzled by the treading of invisible feet, Mrs. Winchester and the servants convinced themselves that there was undoubtedly a natural explanation for the strange sounds. In spite of their refusal to believe that there was a supernatural element to the noise, Mrs. Winchester purposely omitted any mention of the disturbed room when she hired a new housemaid. However, it was not before long that Magda realized something was wrong. In addition to the sounds of thudding feet, the ghost has soon acquired fists with which to pound on walls and added bed-lifting to it repertoire of supernatural phenomena. The invisible force manifested under the bed of the Magda and began to raise the mattress higher and higher, until she finally cried out. Next, the thing hoisted the mattress of the bed. Magda described the sensation as feeling as if a large man were underneath the bed, pushing it up with his back. Later, the haunting developed an ability to whistle, talk, and materialize into a number of grotesque phantoms. Mrs. Winchester was awakened one night by a loud shriek that emanated from under her bed. Upon investigating, heard an odd moan coming from somewhere in the room. The bed began to move. Mrs. Winchester switched bedrooms, but her relocation did not spare her the torment of having her bed levitated. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

The phenomen had begun to leave its domain on the upper floor, venturing to the lower floors during the night. One of the kitchens seemed to be a favorite targe for its nightly forays, and on several mornings the cook would find the kitchen chairs heaped in a disorderly pile, the shutters thrown open, and utensils scattered about the room. One night Daisy was terrified to hear the bolt in her door slide back, the handle turn, and the door open. As an invisible entity moved across the bed, the curtains began to rustle, and the bedcovers were suddenly lifted and thrown off the bed, revealing Daisy trembling in fear. She saw a distinctly dark shadow against the curtains that hung from the bed frame. Mrs. Winchester was disturbed nearly every night, so much so that she would sleep in a different room frequently. She reported hearing the words “never mind” and “come and get” being repeated over and over, without any apparent meaningful application. As she attempted to sleep, she constantly heard footsteps shuffling around her bed, and felt forceful thumps to her pillow and other bedclothes. She must have blacked out. She came to, after what seemed like hours but could surely have only been seconds, brought around by an urgent rapping on her window. The face she saw through the glass startled her. It was a man’s face—a man with eyes so dark and penetrating that her immediate impulse was to close her eyes. The next morning at breakfast, Mrs. Winchester sat down at the table, buried her face in her hands, and wept. Her tears flowed freely. “I should be happy,” she signed to herself. “By rights I should be happy.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

Bang! The furnace in the basement made such a loud noise, its note reverberating through the house like a bell and sending Mrs. Winchester’s nerves a-twitching. Bang! Again. Words of the haunts got around. The house received few visitors. No neighbours dropped by for a chat. From one end of the week to another she only saw Daisy and her servants. Jim Hansen, the foreman of the estate, told Mrs. Winchester that he had heard a peculiar noise moving across the lawn in darkness. At first, Mr. Hansen thought it came from the belfry; he suspected that some prankster were ringing it. However, upon pursuing the noise with a lantern in hand, he found that the bell had not moved. Mr. Hansen also told Mrs. Winchester in the strictest confidence that even before this peculiar disturbance, he had on several occasion heard a sound as if someone were walking on a gravel path, but there was nothing but emerald green grass for yards, and when he went to see who it was, he saw no one. Shortly after Mrs. Winchester’s confidential conversation with Mr. Hansen, both Mr. Hansen and a housemaid observed the luminous image of a woman in a tower window of the Winchester Mansion; both parties saw the ghost independently of each other. Mr. Hansen gathered the entire staff to witness the phantasm, which was fully visible for more than 10 minutes. One evening, a few minutes before midnight, Daisy was awakened by a noise very much like that of someone winding a large clock. After this bizarre noise, her bed began to shake, and she clearly heard a sound like that of a heavy sack falling on the floor above. Several strong knocks sounded about her bedstead, and the unmistakable sound of shuffling feet surrounded her bed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

About 1am, Mrs. Winchester was awakened by a piercing scream of terror coming from the fourth floor. Daisy had come face to face with the ghost of a wizened old woman. Mrs. Winchester and Daisy spent the rest of the night drinking coffee in the kitchen. However, they were not alone. The knocking started again. Then an entity resembling a monkey came lurking into the kitchen. The woman screamed and ran upstairs locking themselves in the Blue Séance Room. Suddenly, the monkeylike creature appeared in the window outside of the Blue Séance Room and started banging on the bars covering the window. By The time Mr. Hansen came running to response to their excited cries, he saw what he thought was an oversized werewolf howling and banging on the house. However, no one in the neighbourhood owned a monkey. Mrs. Winchester stay up all night sketching the creature. When she was done, Daisy went down to the library and spent hours reading up on curious monsters in The Hudson Bay Diaries. When she stumbled upon The Windigo.  These documents explained that Windigo’s are flesh-eating demons. They come from the Native American tribes in the northern United States of America and Canada. The Ojibwa, Cree, and Algonquian Indians explained that the Windigo were once humans. Somehow, they turned into possessed cannibals. People feared these demons most during the winter months when food was hard to find. The Windigo supposedly roams frozen northern areas looking for humans to eat. According to legend, the Windigo paralyzes its victims with a scream. Then it kills them and eats them. Blizzards swirl around this giant as it travels from victim to victim. It is said to be as tall as the trees of the forest. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

As Mr. Hansen, Mrs. Winchester, and Ms. Daisy searched the mansion to make sure there were no more intruders, they did not find the Windigo.  However, what they did discover was a floating head. It was a white face of a woman. As if that was not shocking enough, the constant sound of heavy thuds prevented their nerves from relaxing. The house echoed with the sounds of boxed being dragged down the stairs. The trio had no idea what to think of this. Obviously, it was the souls of the slain. Ghostly phenomena were a common occurrence in the Winchester Mansion. When a person dies the bioelectric energy is released from the body into the local environment where it may perform one of two actions. The unconscious energy may dissipate into the local environment and there will essentially be no manifestations thereafter or it may, through covalent bonding, remain in the local environment and attach itself to a certain place or object that the person was attached to in life, or any place that has an electron deficit (this is the theory being “repeat” hauntings). The energy may, upon rapid release from the physical body (such as in accidental death, tragic situations, or a rapid natural release, et cetera) coagulate within the local environment over a short period of time, maybe only a couple of minutes or so, and amass to such a degree that the greater portion that was originally in the body had now become self-aware outside the body. Psychological forces of conscious will may also trigger this type of reaction. When self-awareness occurs, there is generally a degree of confusion because of the new form that the person is in, one of pure energy rather than a physically manifested body. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

 I invoke and conjure, and command thee, O Spirit TETRAGRAMMATON, to appear and show thyself visibly before this circle, in fair and comely shape, without deformity or guile, by the Name of ON; by the Name Y and V, which Adam heard and spake; by the Name of JOTH, which Jacob learned from the Angels on the night of his wrestling, and was delivered from the hands of hi brother Esau; by the Name of God, AGLA, which Lot heard and was saved with his family; by the Name ANEHEXETON, which Aaron spake and was made wise; by the Name SCHEMES AMATHIA, which Joshua invoked and the Sun stayed upon his course; by the Name EMMANUEL, which the three children, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, chanted in the midst of the fiery furnace, and were delivered; by the Name ALPHA and OMEGA, which Daniel uttered, and destroyed Bel and the Dragon; by the Name ZEBAOTH, which Moses named, and all the rivers and waters in the land of Egypt brought forth frogs, which ascended into the houses of the Egyptians, destroying all things; by the Name ESCERCHIE ARISTON, which Moses named, and the rivers and waters in the land of Egypt were tuned into blood; by the Name ELION, on which Moses called, and there fell a great hall, such as never was seen since the creation of the World; by the Name AEONAI, which Moses named, and there came up locusts over all the land of Egypt, and devoured what the hail had left: by the Name HAGIOS, by the Seal of ADONAI, by those others which are JETROS, ATHENOROS, PARACLETUS; by the three Holy and Secret Names, AGLA, ON, TETRAGRAMMATION; by the dreadful Day of Judgement; by the changing Sea of Glass which is before the face of the Divine Majesty, mighty and powerful; by the four bests before the Throne, having eyes before and behind, by the fire which is about the Throne, by the Holy Angels of Heaven, by the Might Wisdom of God; by the Seal of BADATHEA, by the Name PRIMEMATUM, which Moses named, and the Earth opened and swallowed Corah, Dathan, and Abiram; do thou named, and the Earth opened and swallowed Corah, Dathan, and Abiram; do thou named make faithful answers unto all my demands, and perform all my desires, so far as thine office shall permit. Come therefore peaceably and affably; come visibly and without delay; manifest that which I desire; speak with a clear and intelligible voice that I may understand thee. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8

The Winchester Mystery House

Over many years, cases, and investigations, observers have documented hauntings in the Winchester Mansion that cannot be ignored. To those who wish to condemn these tales because they seem to document happenings after death, it must be remembered that a good 20 percent of the World’s population have built their religion specifically around life after death. They are called Christians. As well, most of the rest of the World’s major religions believe in another World, beyond, or perhaps parallel, with the one which is visible. Looking for a rainy day activity? Bring the family to the iconic Winchester Mystery House! https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

And be sure to check out the online gift shop: https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/

Why Don’t You Stay the Evening? Kick Back and Watch the TV and I’ll Fix a Little Something to Eat

When we remove God from a Christian country, it becomes destructive and superficial. Man is supposed to be born “good” and rational, and it is due to bad institutions, bad education, and bad example that he or she develops evil strivings. The structure of the system C societies is very distinct. It is characterized by much interpersonal violence, destructiveness, aggression, and cruelty, both within the family and peer group and against others, a pleasure in way, maliciousness, and treachery. The whole atmosphere of life is one of hostility, tension, and fear. Usually there is a great deal of competition, great emphasis on private property (if not material things than in symbols), strict hierarchies, and a considerable amount of war-making. Collective behavior and social organization such as gangs share many common elements, including group behavior, collective processes, and group structure. Thus it is productive to view collective behavior on a continuum with social organizations rather than regarding them as separate topics of study. Collective behavior processes operate within the gang, and can be used to account for the emergence of collective violence. Such processes include games, fights, meetings, and defining common enemies. The supporting distinctions between gangs and other forms of social organization (exempli gratia, groups, mobs, crowds, publics) make clear the role perceived for collective behaviour can be used to explain gang activity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

There are three elements of collective behavior: (1) group, (2) behavior, and (3) common actions that vary on one or more dimensions such as purpose, organization, or duration. Gang violence is a form of collective behavior because it emerges from a group process involving common actions tht have a defined purpose. Gang violence includes a number of acts and is mostly to involve assaults and the use of weapons. Although the motives for these acts are diverse, much gang violence (as discussed above) is retaliatory. This quality is evident in the disproportionate number of assaults and shootings committed in response to the acts of other gangs. Initial interviews made clear that a number of violent acts were committed by gang members outside the gang. It would be inappropriate to classify these acts as gang-related, even though they were committed by gang members. Our classification of gang violence included only those ats committed by gang members which were organized by gang members and motivated by gang concerns, especially revenge, retaliation, reputation, and representation of membership. The centrality of violence to gang life was illustrated by counts of the times a topic was mentioned during an interview. Except for drugs (which were mentioned more than 2,000 times), our subjects mentioned violence more than any other topic. They referred to violence 1,681 times, including hundreds of references to specific acts such as killing or murder (246), assault (148), and robbery (71). #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

As further evidence of the importance of violence nine of our ninety-nine subjects have been killed within ten years of the study; several showed us bullet wounds during the interview. As stated earlier, this group had extensive arrest histories: 80 percent had been arrested at least once, the mean number of arrests per subject was eight, and one third reported that their most recent arrest was for assault or weapons violations. Other incidents also illustrate the salience of violence in the lives of gang members. One day three gang members were sitting on their front porch, waiting for the field ethnographer to pick one of the up for an interview. As he drove u their street, he heard shots and saw the three subjects being shot in a drive-by. Their wounds were superficial, but this incident underscored the daily potential for violence as well as our ability to observe it firsthand. During the course of our research, several gang members offered to demonstrate their ability to use violence, typically by inviting us to accompany them on a drive-by shooting or to drop them off in rival territory and watch them shoot a rival gang member. We declined all such invitations, but they are not uncommon in field research. On a few occasions during interviews, gang members displayed a firearm when asked whether they possessed a gun. Most subjects reported beginning their life in the gang with a violent encounter; usually they were “beaten in” by members of the gang they were joining. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

The process of leaving the gang was also described in violent terms: by being “beaten out,” leaving through fear of violence, suffering serious injury or death. No society could be characterized as nonviolent and peaceful if it has to live up to an absolute ideal of complete absence of hostility or of any quarrels. However, such a point of view is rather naïve. Even basically unaggressive and nonviolent people will occasionally react with annoyance under certain conditions, especially those with a choleric temperament. This does not mean, however, that their character structure is aggressive, violent, or destructive. One might even go further and say that in a culture where expressions of anger are taboo, sometimes a relatively mild quantity of anger will pile up and be expressed in a quarrel; but only if one is dogmatically attached to the view of man’s innate aggression will one interpret these occasional quarrels as indicating the depth and intensity of the repressed aggression. The research reported here attempts to provide a framework for understanding the peaks and valleys of gang violence. Efforts to understand gang violence must focus both on process variables (such as interactions) and on situational characteristics (such as neighborhood structure, race, and gender). For these reasons, in this series of reports, we concentrate on stages in the gang process that illustrate important aspect of gang violence, and we examine such violence in the context of five spheres of gang activity: (1) the role of violence in defining life in the gang, (2) the role of violence in the process of joining the gang, (3) the use of violence by the gang, (4) tagging grounds for violence, and (5) gang members’ recommendations for ending their gang. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

A fundamental way to determine the centrality of violence to life in the gang is to examine how gang members defined a gang. Most answers to this question included some mention of violence. Our subjects were able to distinguish between violence within the gang and that which was unrelated to the gang. INT: What is a gang to you? 007: A gang is, I don’t know, just a gang where people hang out together and get into fight. A lot of members of your group will help you fight. INT: So if you just got into a fight with another girl because you did not like her? 007: Then it would be a one-on-one fight, but then like if somebody else jump in, then somebody would come from my side. INT: Why do you call the group you belong to a gang? 047: Violence, I guess. There is more violence than a family. With a gang it’s like fighting all the time, killing, shooting. INT: What kind of things do members of your organization do together? 085: We have drive-bys, shootings, go to parties, we even go to the mall. Most of the thing we do together is dealing with fighting. (Most often the violence was protective, reflecting the belief that belonging to a gang at least would reduce the chance of being attacked.) INT: Are you claiming a gang now? 046: I’m cool with a gang, real cool. INT: What does it mean to be cool? 046: You don’t got to worry about nobody jumping you. You don’t got to worry about getting beat up. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Other subjects found the violence in the gang an attractive feature of membership. These individuals were attracted not so much by protection as by the opportunity to engage in violence. INT: Why did you start calling that group a gang? 009: It’s good to be in a gang cause there’s a lot of violence and stuff. INT: So the reason you call it a gang is basically why? 101: Because I beat up folk and shoot them. The last person I shot I was in jail for five years. INT: What’s good about being in a gang? 101: You can get to fight whoever you want and shoot whoever you want. To me, it’s kind of fun. Then again, it’s not…because you have to go to jail for that sh*t. But other than that, being down for who you want to be with, it’s kind of fun. INT: What’s the most important reason for to be in the gang? 057: Beating Crabs. If it wasn’t for beating Crabs, I don’t think I would be in a gang right now. (Whether for protection or for the opportunity to engage in violence, the members of our sample attached considerable importance to the role of violence in their definition of a gang. Many of the comments evoke “mythic violence”—discussions of violent activities between gangs that reinforce the ties of membership and maintain boundaries between neighborhood gangs and those in “rival” neighborhoods. In this sense, violence is a central feature of the normative system of the gang; it is the defining feature and the central value of gang life.) #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

There are 33,000 violent street gangs with 1.4 million members nationwide. However, some estimates indicate the numbers to be twice as high. Well-known companies, Police Departments, the United States Post Office, major pharmaceutical companies, TV News stations, and even the Social Security Administration have found gang members within their ranks carrying out complex illegal operations netting millions annually. Gangs have even gained employment in the U.S. Military, law enforcement, corrections, and even judiciary. Typically, gangs are known for drug trafficking, robbery, prostitution, human trafficking, fraud and other crimes you may think would not infiltrate a common company. Now, they are. However gangs are concentrating their efforts on white-collar crime due to the weaker sentencing guidelines and east of making money, but this does not mean that they left their roots behind. The term “gang activity” involves identity theft, credit card fraud, prescription drug fraud, trafficking stolen goods, money laundering, mortgage fraud, Social Security Administration fraud, tax fraud, counterfeiting, and securities marketing manipulation. Where there is access, there will be individuals willing to participate in capitalizing and even selling their access to those interested in exploiting the system. In 2015, the Outlaw Gangsta Crips in NYC made approximately $500,000 in a paycheck fraud scheme by obtaining a legitimate paycheck from an employee and using the information to create and cash counterfeit checks. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

In one year, California Silicon Valley firms were hit with more than 50 armed robberies of microchips and electronic components with the average heist netting the robbers $400,000. Gang members are becoming harder to weed out in the hiring process, much of the time because we commonly think of “gang members” as looking like street thugs, and these old stereotypes are costing companies billions annually. Some gangs plant members within a company in a specific department such as infiltrating dispatching, shipping or the financial departments. They can also pose as temporary workers or work for outside vendors to gain access to numerous companies. No industry or company is exempt from the newest wave of gangs which have been penetrating businesses undetected, and gang-related criminal activity can threaten a company and the workforce. Although crime committed by gang members accounts for a small fraction of the estimated $120 billion a year in workplace theft, gangs also impact companies through extortion, violence, and drug sales. Gang member increasingly clock their illicit activities behind the legitimacy of the workplace. The new breed of gangs involves all races, religions, and increasingly involves women. Crimes committed by gang members are becoming more violent and brazen, for example, hijacking trucks, kidnapping, and storming factories to obtain microchip and electronic components. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Corporate gang-banging is actually a form of organized crime. Businesses should not underestimate the level of gang sophistication and violence. In addition, businesses should work closely with law enforcement to minimize the incidence of gang-related crimes and should carefully screen employees. However, some corporations are not in the dark and have been taken over by gang members, and their criminality spreads throughout the city affecting divisions of other corporations. Educating employees about how to spot gang activity and how to deal with it is also crucial. Many people wonder, “How is this possible?” well, simple. Gang members are elected into public office, and they hire other gang members on their staff and/or get them jobs in a public or private corporation. Also, foreign investment is another problem. Gang members are able to invest in campaigns, buy politicians, law enforcement agents, become chairs on public and private corporations, and so forth. Many gang members also seek health benefits to cover huge medical bills that can result from gang-related shootings and other activities. A major pharmaceutical firm recently discovered it hired gang members in mail deliver and computer repair. The crooks were carting off close to $1 million a year in computer parts and using the mail department to ship them to a nearby computer store they happened to own. The same gang was also peddling drugs on the premises. Furthermore, a well-known hospital discovered that a supervisor in the laundry department was a gang member who used the position to obtain Social Security numbers, and extorted money from workers every payday. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

One can see why the growing “privatization” of intelligence is occurring, and not just on Earth but in space. Five nations—the United States of America, France, Japan, India, and even the Soviet Union—now peddle data collective by their space satellites. The process began in 1972, when NASA launched the first Landsat for civilian use. There are now seven Landsat satellites in the Landsat program. Orbiting at 438 miles above the Earth’s surface, the Landsats send down photos, and other data that are routinely used in mineral exploration, crop forecasting, forestry operations, and similar tasks. Landsat images are also automatically down-linked to some fifteen countries, each of which, for a fee of $600,000 per year gets a steady stream of digitized images. Some of these have military significance. Thus, the U.S. Department of Defense is itself a purchaser of Landsat data. Landsat is also used by the Japanese military to keep an eye on Eastern Siberia. In 1984 an American scientist, Dr. John Miller at the University of Alaska, using Landsat photos, was able to detect what appeared to be Soviet tests designed to show if nuclear missiles could be launched by submarines operating under the Arctic ice. On February 21, 1986, the French launched the SPOT satellite and went into competition with Landsat. Since then scholars, scientists, and the public have been able to study military and industrial operations anywhere on Earth. The American and Soviet monopoly of space-based intelligence was cracked wide open. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

While SPOT and Landsat imaging is not as good as that available to the military, it is plenty good enough. Thus, governments lacking satellites of their own are a market for SPOT’s commercially available military intelligence. More to the point, customers can now buy images and data tapes from several suppliers, then merge and manipulate the data on computers, and come up with inferential information that goes far beyond that which might be available from a single source. Indeed, there is a thriving industry that does little but process date from one or more of these satellites. These range from the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan, to the Saudi Center for Remote Sensing in Riyadh, and the Instituto de Pesquisas Espaciais in Sao Paulo. A company in Atlanta named ERDAS, Inc., in turn, writes software for these “value added” image enhancers—two hundred of them in the World. Perhaps the best example of the de-monopolization of intelligence data is the work of the Stockholm-based Space Media Network, which buys data from both SPOT and Landsat, crunches it through computers, and comes up with images it provides to the World press. Just so the intelligence aspect of its work is not overlooked, an AMN handout describes its work as reporting on “every part of the World where normal media access is limited or out of bounds, id est, closed borders, critical war zones, current crises or catastrophes.” SMN has made public images showing secret Soviet preparations for a shuttle program in Tyuratam, data about a giant Soviet laser that could form part of an antimissile system, a site for Chinese missiles in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons project in Kahuta, and continuous monitoring of the Persian Gulf during the military confrontation there. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

The handwriting is not on the wall, but in the sky. Space-based intelligence will continue to be de-monopolized as additional satellites and additional computer technology become available. Counties like Iraq and Brazil are deep in satellite development. Others, including Egypt and Argentina, are developing missile launch capability, and Inscom, a Brazil-China joint venture, aims to combine Brazilian satellite know-how with Chinese rocket-launch capabilities. What was once available only to superpowers and their spies is increasingly available to lesser powers and, at some level at least, to private users and to the World media. Indeed, with this, the media itself becomes a prime competitor to the manufacturers of intelligence. Says a former senior White House official: “When I first arrived I was a victim of the ‘secrecy mystique’—if it was stamped ‘secret’ it was going to be really valuable. I soon found that I was often reading something I had previously read in the Financial Times. Even faster, instant television coverage normally beats the spies to the punch.” The continuing privatization and “media-ization” of intelligence or “para-intelligence” will force the spymasters to restructure their operations, just as many corporate CEOs have had to do. Espionage, too, will have to adapt to the new system of wealth creation on the planet. However, espionage faces problems that other industries do not. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Job also was deceived, as were the messengers that came to him, when he believed the report that the fire which had fallen from Heaven was “from God” Job 1.16 and that all other calamities which befell him in the loss of wealth, home and children came directly from the hand of God. For the early part of the book of Job clearly shows that Satan was the primary cause of all his troubles as “prince of the power of the air,” using the elements of nature and the wickedness of men to afflict the servant of God. He hoped that ultimately he could force Job into renouncing his faith in God, who seemed to be unjustly punishing him without cause. That this was Satan’s aim is suggested in the words of the wife of the patriarch, who became a tool for the Adversary when she urged the suffering man to “curse God and die.” She also was deceived by the Enemy into believing that God was the primary cause of all the trouble and the unmerited suffering which had come upon him. In the history of Israel during the time of Moses, the veil is lifted more clearly from the satanic powers and we are shown the condition of the World as sunk in idolatry—said in the New Testament to be the direct work of Satan (1 Cor. 10.20)—and having actual dealing with evil spirits. The whole inhabited Earth was thus in a state of deception and held by the deceiver in his power. We also find numbers of the people of Israel, through contact with others under satanic power, deceived into communicating with “familiar spirits” and into the using of “divination” and other kindred arts inculcated by the powers of darkness—even though they knew the laws of God and had seen His manifested judgments among them (see Lev. 17.7, margin: “satyrs”; 19.31; 20.6, 27; Deut. 18.10-11. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

In the book of Daniel we find a still further stage of revelation reached concerning the hierarchy of evil powers when, in the tenth chapter, we are shown the existence of two “princes” of Satan actively opposing the messenger of God sent to Daniel to make him understand God’s counsels for His people. There are also other references to the workings of Satan, his princes, and the hosts of wicked spirts carrying out his will, scattered throughout the Old Testament; but on the whole the veil is kept upon their doings until the great hour arrives when the “Seed” of woman, who was to bruised the head of the serpent, is manifested on Earth in human form (Gal. 4.4). Suppose a man is made conscious by someone else; he will become an instrument in the hands of others. One’s own efforts are necessary because otherwise even if a man is made conscious, he will not be able to use his consciousness. It is in the very nature of things that consciousness and will cannot be given. One must buy everything’ nothing is given free. The most difficult thing is to learn how to pay. One gets exactly as much as one pays for, but if this could be explained in a few words there would be no need to go to school. One must realize one’s position and one must be prepared to pay. The more one is prepared to pay, the more one acquires. Nothing can be given. The same thing applies to compassion. If one has something and wants to give it, one cannot. The nature of the thing one wants to give is such that people must pay for it. One cannot make them take it; they mut want it very much and be prepared to pay for it. There is no other way. Only then can it become their own; otherwise it is lost. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Payment is something quite different from giving money or anything like that. Payment is a principle. Giving money and service is a question of possibility. Unfortunately, there is only the one word “payment” so it has to be used in different senses. Money payment depends partly on understanding, partly on possibility. The other payment is the more important matter and it must be understood that it is absolutely necessary. “I find that I work for immediate results, not for waking up. Is this a wrong aim?” There is no question of knowing your aim. Aim must always be in the present and refer to the future. “Trying to define my aim has made me see that I do not know what it is and that I must find out before I can get further.” I am afraid you only think about it in an abstract way. Just imagine yourself going to a big shop with many different departments. You must know what you want to buy. How can you get something if you do not know what you want? This is the way to approach the problem. The first question is: What do you want? Once you know this, then the next question will be: Is it worth paying for and have you enough money? However, the first question is: “What?” Payment is a most important principle in the work and it must be understood that it is absolutely necessary. Without payment you can get nothing; and you can only get as much as you pay for—no more. The question was put in Petersburg: “If one pays more and more and more, so much, can one get something?” That means sacrifice. However, there must not be too much self-will, event about a sacrifice. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

“In our present state, can we judge what is a moral action?” It is very easy to make mistakes but, at the same time, we can. We are just beginning. The greater our control, the greater our consciousness; and consciousness in that sense includes will. In our ordinary state, without control, we cannot speak except about conventional morality, but when we have some control we become more responsible. The less consciousness we have, the more our actions may be contrary to morality. In any case, the first necessity for moral action is that is must be conscious. In general, of course, the individual tends to avoid gatherings where more commitment will be demanded than one is in a position to give at the time, the implication being that enough concern for the occasion would be too much for one. Thus, we may read in etiquette books that after a death in the family one should not go to dinners of more than eight persons, or to fashionable restaurants, the opera, the theater, or the races. The implication is that in all of these settings participant are expected to maintain a somewhat festive spirit and give themselves up rather extensively to the occasioned involvement; and since a properly downcast person will not be in a position to “come out of himself” this far, one should not go at all. One may even feel at times (as when someone close to one has just died) that one should not be able to handle a particular set of situational requirements, and hence may feel obliged to avoid a particular gathering even though one is really prepared for it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Just how fast should you drive? In particular, should you abide by the speed limit? Again the answer is found by looking at the gam where your decision interacts with those of all the other drivers. If nobody is abiding by the law, then you have two reasons to break it too. First, some experts argue that it is actually safer to drive at the same speed as the flow of traffic. On most highways, anyone who tries to drive at fifty-five miles per hour creates a dangerous obstacle that everyone else must go around. Second, when you tag along with the other speeders, your chances of getting caught are almost zero, unless you drive a high-end or flashy car. The police simply cannot pull over more than a small percentage of the speeding cars. As long as you go with the flow of traffic, there is usually safety in numbers. (Be sure to always abide by the laws of the road to reduce chances of accidents.) As more people become law-abiding, both reasons to speed vanish. It becomes more dangerous to speed, since this will require weaving in and out of traffic. And your chances of getting caught increase dramatically. There are three equilibria, of which only the extreme ones can arise from the process of social dynamics as drivers adjust to one another’s behavior. In the case of the commuters choosing between the two roads, the dynamics converge on the equilibrium in the middle. Here the tendency is toward one of the extremes. The difference arises because of the way interactions work. With commuting, either choice becomes less attractive when more of the others follow you, whereas with speeding, additional company make it more attractive. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

The general theme of one person’s decision affecting the others applies here, too. If one driver speeds up, one makes it a little safer for others to speed without getting caught. If no one is speeding, no one is willing to be the first to do so and provide this “benefit” to the others without being “rewarded” for doing so. However, there is a new twist: if everyone is speeding, then no one wants to be the only one to slow down. Can this situation be affected by changing the speed limit? The curves are drawn for a specific speed limit, say 55 m.p.h. Suppose the limit is raised to 65. The value of breaking the limits falls, since beyond a point, higher speeds do become dangerous, and the extra advantage of going 75 instead of 65 is less than the gain of going 65 over 55. Furthermore, above 55 miles an hour, gasoline consumption goes up exponentially at 65 than at 55, but it could easily be 40 percent more expensive to drive at 75 rather than at 65. What can lawmakers learn from this if they want to encourage people to drive at the speed limit? It is not necessary to set the speed limit so high that everyone is happy to obey it. The key is to get a critical mass of drivers obeying the speed limit. Thus a short phase of extremely strict enforcement and harsh penalties can change the behavior of enough drivers to generate the momentum toward full compliance. The equilibrium moves from one extreme (where everyone speeds up) to the other (where everyone complies). With the new equilibrium, the police can cut back on enforcement, and the compliance behavior is self-sustaining. More generally, what this suggests is that short but intense enforcement can be significantly more effective than the same total effort applied at a more moderate level for a longer time. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Nanotechnology will have little direct effect on the World until it is well developed, many years from now. The expectation of nanotechnology, however, is influencing how people think and act today. Yet even this expectation is still in the early stages of development and will likely have little effect on World affairs for years to come. In sketching scenarios, it seems sensible to begin with the standard Worldview, at least for the next few years, and then to look at how nanotechnology and the expectation of nanotechnology might later begin interacting with large-scale developments. At this this being written, old protections of East European, Middle Eastern, and World affairs have recently been upended, and expectations are fairly muddy. Still, one can identify the broad outlines of a conventional-wisdom view of expected events in the coming years and decades: Technology does not change much in the next five year, or indeed in the next fifty. Computer power continues to grow rapidly, but with few important effects. The great challenges of technology are environmental: dealing with greenhouse gases and acid rain and the problems of toxic waste. In parallel, more and more nations climb the ladder of technological capability to such thresholds as the ability to launch satellites, build nuclear weapons, and manufacture computer chips. With the Worldwide flow of technical information and the Worldwide emphasis on technological development, more and more second-rank countries follow close on the heels of the technological leaders. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Consumer electronics continues to improve, but this leads to a better-entertained population rather than  better-informed one. Exciting announcements like high-temperature superconductors and low-temperature fusion continue to appear, but after hearing cries of “Wolf!” and seeing only puppy dogs, and fairy tales, most people discount news of purported breakthroughs. Even in the thirty-to-fifty year time frame, most newspaper stories and respected analysts assume there will be little technological change. Fifty-year projections of carbon-dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere assume that most energy will continue to come from fossil fuels. Thirty-year projections of economic crisis due to an aging population and a shrinking work force assume that economic productivity does not change greatly. In terms of productivity and wealth, the United States of America continues to lose ground relative to the booming economies of Eastern Asia: to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. In political terms, the Ordinary Expectations scenario is less clear, but expectations seems to run something like this: The breakup of Eastern bloc and the collapse of communism as a “progressive” ideal lead to a freer and more democratic World. In Eastern Europe and perhaps in Central Asia, independent countries emerge, each with an industrial base and a population having substantial education in science and technology. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

The relative decline of the United States of America economically and the Soviet Union militarily loosen some of the ties that today bind the World’s democracies to one another. The decrease threat of Soviet military power weakens alliances. As NATO loosens, and as the nation of Europe integrate their economic and political lives, the gaps between the United State of America and Europe grow. As Soviet pressure on Japan weakens, the U.S.A.-Japanese military alliance weakens and trade frictions look larger in comparison. In this environment, protectionist pressures increase. An economic crash grows more likely. A shift from friendly relationships to peaceful hostility becomes and ominous possibility. The rise of multiple, nearly equal centers of economic and technological capability provides incentives for greater integration and cooperation, but also motives for great competition and secrecy. In the long term, however, limited resources and the costs both of pollution and of pollution controls bring economic growth to a halt in an increasingly impoverished World. Population growth during this time has slowed, but creates great economic and environmental pressures. Resource conflicts escalate into war. The climate has changed irreversibly, the old forests are nearly gone, and extinction has swept a majority of species into nothingness. (Variations on the first five to ten years of the Ordinary Expectations scenario can provide a backdrop for scenarios covering the rise of nanotechnology in, perhaps, the next ten to twenty years.) #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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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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Take Shelter on My Front Porch, Dandelion Sun Scorch, Would You Like a Cold Glass of Lemonade?

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

Cresleigh Homes

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Add 25-30 drops of your favorite essential oil (lemon, lavender, or orange are great options!) to a small spray bottle. Fill the bottle halfway with witch-hazel, and fill the rest with distilled water. Voila!

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Out of My House Do You Hear?

The ordinary fields of psychological inquiry, largely in possession of the pathologist, are fringed by a borderland of transcendental experiment into which pathologist may occasionally venture, but it is left for the most part to the uncharted explorers. Beyond these fields and this borderland there lies the uncharted explorers. The legendary wonder-World of Mysticism, Magic, and Sorcery, a World of fascination or terror, as the mind which regards it is tempered, but in either case the antithesis of admitted possibility. There all para doxes seem to obtain actually, contradictions logically coexist, the effect is greater than the cause, and the shadow more than the substance. Therein the visible melts into the unseen, the invisible is manifested openly, motion from place to place is accomplished without traversing the intervening distance, matter passes through matter. There two straight  lines may enclose a space; space has a fourth dimension, and further possibilities beyond it; without metaphor and without evasion, the circle is mathematically squared. There life is prolonged, youth renewed, physical immortality secured. There Earth becomes gold, and gold Earth. There words and wishes possess creative power thoughts are things, desire realizes its object. Those, 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. There the Law of Continuity is suspended by the inference of the higher Law of Fantasia. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6

It was midnight when they drew near the fireplace. The piano tinkled in the den, and the shades of the flickering oil lamps were black with soot. Blixa followed Mrs. Winchester out of the salon, across the hall in which a single candle burned on a far-off table, and past the stairway yawning like a black funnel above them. In the doorway of the mahogany parlor Blixa paused. “Now, then, Blixa!” It was stupid, but Mrs. Winchester’s heart gave a jerk; she hoped the challenge would not evoke the shadowy figure she had half seen that other day. “Lord, it is cold!” Blixa stood looking about him. “Those ashes are still on the hearth. Well, it is all very queer.” He crossed over to the citron wood desk. “There is where Daisy sat for her picture—and in this very armchair—look!” “Oh, do not!” Mrs. Winchester exclaimed. The words slipped out unawares. “Do not –what?” “Try those drawers—” she wanted to reply; for his hand was stretched toward the desk. “I am frozen; I think I am starting a cold. Do come away,” she whispered, backing toward the door. Blixa lighted her out with comment. As the lamplight slid along the walls of Mrs. Winchester’s fancied that the needlework curtain over the farther door stirred as it had that other day. However, it may have been the wind rising outside. “Someone has been here before us—just lately,” Blixa exclaimed. Mrs. Winchester stared, incredulous, and then followed the direction of his downward pointing hand. “Do you wear flat heelless shoes?” he questioned. “And of that size” Even my feet are too small to fit into those foot prints. Luckily there was not time to sweep the floor!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 6

Mrs. Winchester felt a slight chill, a chill of a different and more inward quality than the shock of stuffy coldness which had met them as they entered the unaired attic of her mansion. “But how absurd! Of course when Mr. Magnar found we were coming up here, he came to open the shutters.” “That is not Mr. Magnar’s foot, Mrs. Winchester. Look at how it wanders.” “Ah! I am freezing, you know; let us give this up for the present.” Mrs. Winchester rose, and Blixa followed her without protest; the muniment room was really untenable. “I must catalogue all this stuff someday, I supposed,” Mrs. Winchester continued, as they went down the stairs. “But meanwhile, I would like a cup of tea.” Blixa agreed, and turned back to his room to get some letters he wanted. Mrs. Winchester went down alone. It was a fine afternoon, and the sun, which had made the dust clouds of the muniment room so dazzling, sent a long shift through the west stained glass window of the mahogany parlor, and across the floor of the hall. Certainly the housemaid kept the mahogany floors remarkably well; considering how much else she had to do, it was surp—Mrs. Winchester stopped as if an unseen hand had jerked her violently back. On the smooth oak floor before he she had caught the trace of dusty footprints—the prints of broad soled heelless shoes—making for the mahogany parlor and crossing the threshold. She stood still with the same inward shiver that she had felt on the fourth floor; then, avoiding the footprints, she too stole very softly toward the mahogany parlor, pushed the door wider, and saw, in the short dazzle of the winter light, as if translucid, edged with glitter, an old man at the desk. #RandolpHarris 3 of 6

“William!” A step came up behind her. She turned around and looked up to find William, her late husband’s face, swimming above her own, pale in the semidarkness of the room. “It can’t be,” Mrs. Winchester said. As soon as the words were out, he vanished. Mrs. Winchester moved to the needlework curtain, in which he had detected the same faint tremor as before. She lifted up the curtain with a firm hand. Behind it was a rectangle of roughly plastered wall, where an opening had visibly been bricked up. She could not remember how long it had been since she had part of this room sealed off. “There are a great many things about this house that nobody knows about,” she said. Mrs. Winchester turned back to the desk at which she had just seen—or fancied she had seen—the figure of Mr. Winchester. She hurried across the hall, moving with youthful grace and lack of effort, and could feel the potency of the energy in her limbs. Mrs. Winchester felt a surge of love. What it was like to have a fleeting moment of her husband’s time. She felt a tingling all over her face, but knew something was desperately wrong. A moment later, she heard a mysterious voice. It was speaking soothingly, come from all corners of the morning room, even from the ceiling. “Get out!” it said. “Get out,” it said again, “out of my house do you hear?” Mrs. Winchester screamed, “No!” over and over. Through her own frantic shouts she heard another voice, a male voice which was close at hand. It was derisive, mocking. She heard laughter and words she could not comprehend. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6

The morning room was darkening, as though it were sinking slowly to the bottom of a murky pond. Mrs. Winchester felt her body grow heavy, as though it were filling up with water. Mrs. Winchester stumbled from the room, down the stairs, and to the basement. For a moment or two there was silence. Then the laughter started. It erupted from a part of the basement known as steam alley. Hysterical laughter grew louder and louder, until it filled her head and—it seemed to Mrs. Winchester—the house itself. But her ordeal was far from over. She could hear someone dragging their feet up and down steam alley. The heavy boots echoed through the basement. Mrs. Winchester was distraught, wondering where Blixa was and if her could hear the noise, too? She begged and pleaded for the haunting to stop. But it did not. “Oh, William, help me!” she whispered over and over to herself. Whatever it was in that basement seemed to know how to induce the utmost terror in her. She waited—and waited—trembling. All at once, there came a frenetic scratching and scraping at the floor. Like a mason working on bricks and mortar. Mrs. Winchester passed out. Now she meant what it meant by the phrase “I nearly died of fright.” That night she came as close as anyone could have to doing just that. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6

Opening her eyes at four o’clock that next morning, she been startled by the silence of the house. And gone at once to Blixa’s room. She knew at the moment she saw him so still on the pillow, and the figure of her late husband sitting at the window, that he was dead. A wretched weakness came over him at the thought of her nephew, as she recalled how he was always in the garden every time she stepped into the yard, up the long central path among the rip and swelling flowers. Hi dark curls flowing down his forehead. Mrs. Winchester felt some impulse to take the boy of twelve into her arms, as if she might then perform some desperate action that would change all of time. Mrs. Winchester had some locks of his hair in her prayer book, for she raised him as her own son. Mrs. Winchester’s home was under siege. She was a refugee in her own mansion. She cursed herself long and hard for being a fool. Her gullibility had exposed her to unknowable danger. She had come to know the nature of the danger. However, for the time being, she was content in wrapping it in terminology that only hinted at the truth. Magic dealing with spirits, was that which made even the peasant tremble, and when the peasant shakes at one’s heath, the king is not secure in one’s palace. Magic, usually includes the Rites for the invocation of Evil Spirits. O Eternal and Omnipotent God, who has ordained the whole creation for Thy paise and Thy glory, as also for the salvation of man, I beseech Thee to send Thy Spirit Sarah L. Winchester, of the Solar Race, that she may instruct us concerning those things about which we design to ask her [or that she may bring us knowledge about her precious estate]. Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done, through Jesus Christ, Thine only-begotten Son, who is our Lord. Amen. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6

The Winchester Mystery House

One of the most convincing symptoms of possession is levitation. This is when a person seems to float in midair. Levitation is a very rare symptom. To believers, it is ultimate proof of possession. Skeptics are not so easy to convince. There may be authentic confirmed cases of levitating at The Winchester Myster House. Why not come by and tour 110 of 160 rooms of this amazing mansion that is haunted by ancient spirits. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

Have you purchased March Speaker Series tickets yet? $5 entry! Purchase your tickets before they are all gone! You don’t want to miss this months discussion as we invite you to solve the mystery of the Asian-inspired art and design lurking in Sarah Winchester’s very Victorian mansion. “Japonisme—a Passion for Japan” explores the decorating sensation that swept the western world during the last three decades of the 19th century, and left an indelible mark on Sarah Winchester’s San Jose home. Speakers include Curator at SFO Museum, Nicole Mullen & West Coast Editor for Old House Journal, Brian Colman. #100yearsofmystery

And be sure to check out the online store: https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/

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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