Randolph Harris II International Institute

Home » World (Page 30)

Category Archives: World

Competitors Have Search for a Weapon with Which to Strike Down Goliath

Some individuals believe that televisions it a totally horrible, irredeemable technology and that we would all be better off without it. Television produces such a diverse collection of dangerous effects—mental, physiological, ecological, economic, political; effects that are dangerous to the person and also to society and the planet—that it seems to many only logical to propose that it should never have been introduced, or once introduced, be permitted to continue. It is not as though Americans have no precedent for action against things that are proven dangerous. We have seen various levels of legal control put on tobacco, saccharin, some food dyes, certain uses of polychlorinated biphenyls, aerosols, fluoroscopes and X-Rays to name a few. These have all been thought too dangerous to allow and yet their only negative effect is personal, they seem to cause cancer. It is at least possible, judging by the potential effects of the narrow spectra of television light, that television also causes cancer. However, is it only on the basis of cancer that we are able to think of banning something? Consider a few of television’s side effects: Television seems to be addictive. Because of the way the visual signal is processed in the mind, it inhibits cognitive processes. Television qualifies more as an instrument of brainwashing, sleep induction and/or hypnosis than anything that stimulates conscious learning processes. Television is a form of sense deprivation, causing disorientation and confusion. It leaves viewers less able to tell the real from the not-real, the internal from the external, the personally experienced from the externally implanted. It disorients a sense of time, place, history and nature. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Television suppressed and replaces creative human imagery, encourages mass passivity, and trains people to accept authority. It is an instrument of transmutation, turning people into their TV images. By stimulating action while simultaneously suppressing it, television contributes to hyperactivity. Television limits and confines human knowledge. It changes the way humans receive information from the World. In place of natural multidimensional information reception, it offers a very narrow-gauged sense experience, diminishing the amount and kind of information people receive. Television keeps awareness contained within its own rigid channels, a tiny fraction of the natural information field. Because of television we believe we know more, but we know less. By unifying everyone within its framework and by centralizing experience within itself, television virtually replaces environment. It accelerates the destruction of nature. It moves us father inside an already pervasive artificial reality. It furthers the loss of personal knowledge and the gathering of all information in the hands of a techno-scientific-industrial elite. Television technology is inherently antidemocratic. Because of its cost, the limited kind of information it can disseminate, they way it transforms the people who use it, and the fact that a few speak while millions absorb, television is suitable for use only by the most powerful corporate interest in the country. They inevitably use it to redesign human minds into a channeled, artificial, commercial form, that nicely fits the artificial environment. Television freewayizes, suburbanizes and commonditizes human beings, who are then easier to control. Meanwhile, those who control television consolidate their power. Television assists the creation of societal conditions which produce autocracy; it also creates the appropriate mental patterns for it and simultaneously dulls all awareness that this is happening. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Taking into account all these effects and the dozens of others described, is it really necessary to show that television causes cancer in order to get rid of it? Is it not possible to outlaw a technology based on its political or economic or psychological effects? For if even a small portion of these arguments are valid, then in the long run they are surely more important than the fact that a percentage of people get sick. Why does banning such a technology seem bizarre? It lies with the absolutely erroneous assumption that technologies are “neutral,” benign instruments that may be used well or badly depending upon who controls them. Americans have not grasped the fact that many technologies determined their own use, their own effects, and even the kind of people who control them. We have not yet learned to think of technology as having ideology built into its very form. Also, once any technology of a certain scale is introduced, it effectively becomes the environment of our awareness. While we may imagine life without X-rays or aerosols, we cannot imagine life without concrete, cars, gasoline, coal, or electricity. These are so ubiquitous that they literally spread themselves around our awareness. We are contained within them; the fish is the last creature which is capable of understanding water. So it is the most pervasive of the technologies that become invisible to us. Television is an extreme example of this pervasiveness and confinement. It becomes not only the external environment for an entire population, it also projects itself inside us. Television has so enveloped and entered us, it is hard for most of us to remember that it was scarcely more than a generation ago that there was no such thing as television, or that four million years of human evolution somehow tool place without it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Furthermore, another reason we do not believe it possible to control technological evolution is that, in fact, for most of us it is not possible to do so. The great majority of us have no say at all in choosing or controlling technologies. These choices, as I have described, are now solely within the hands of this same technical-scientific-industrial-corporate elite whose power is enhanced by the technology they create. From our point of view the machines and processes they invent and disseminate just seem to appear on the scene from nowhere. Yet all life adjusts accordingly, including human systems of organization and understanding. We do not get to vote on these things as they are introduced. All we get to do is pay for them, use them and then live within their effects. On the very rare occasions when we do perceive a technology’s negative effects, we find it takes a herculean organizing effort to do anything about it. Nuclear power is a dangerous technology, not only for our own generation but for the unthinkable but its existence. However, if Californians wished to eliminate nuclear power, then we would have to find a way around this desire of their, our need for that energy is too great. Similar stories could be told about genetic engineering, satellite communication systems, microwave technology, neutron bombs, laser technology, centralized computer banks, and a thousand other processes, including many about which we may not even have heard. Our technology may have made changes as momentous as the Gutenberg invention of movable type. Some have been bad technologies, good technologies, and others have both characteristics of good and bad. Computers are used to make investment decisions, which helps one, among other things, to create “what-if” scenarios, although with how much accuracy, we are not told. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Computer are also now used to help the police locate the addresses of callers in distress; now police officers have so much information instantly available about any caller that they know how seriously to regard the caller’s appeal for help. One may well wonder if Charles Babbage had any of this in mind when he announced in 1822 (only six years after the appearance of Laennec’s stethoscope) that he had invented a machine capable of performing simple arithmetical calculations. Perhaps he did, for he never finished his invention and started work on a more ambitious machine, capable of doing more complex tasks. He abandoned that as well, and in 1833 put aside his calculator project completely in favor of a programmable machine that became the forerunner of the modern computer. His first such machine, which he characteristically never finished, was to be controlled by punch cards adapted from devices French weavers used to control thread sequences in their looms. Babbage kept improving his programmable machine over the next thirty-seven years, each design being more complex than the last. At some point, he realized that the mechanization of numerical operations gave him the means to manipulate non-numerical symbols. It is not farfetched to say that Babbage’s insight was comparable to the discovery by the Greeks in the third century B.C. of the principle of alphabetization—that is, the realization that the symbols of the alphabet could be separated from their phonetic function and used as a system for the classification, storage, and retrieval of information. In any case, armed with his insight, Babbage was able to speculate about the possibility of designing “intelligent” information machinery, though the mechanical technology of his time was inadequate to allow the fulfillment of his ideas. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

The computer as we know it today had to await a variety of further discoveries and inventions, including the telegraph, the telephone, and the application of Boolean algebra to relay-based circuitry, resulting in Claude Shannon’s creation of digital logic circuitry. Today, when the word “computer” is used without a modifier before it, it normally refers to some version of the machine invented by John von Neumann in 1940s. Before that, the word “computer” referred to a person (similarly to the early use of the word “typewriter”) who performed some kind of mechanical calculation. A calculation shifted from people to machines, so did the word, especially because of the power of von Neumann’s machines. Getting to nanotechnology will require the work of experts in differing fields: chemists, who are learning how to make molecular machines; computer scientists, who are building the needed design tools; and perhaps the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) and atomic force microscope (AFM) experts, who can provide tools for molecular positioning. To make progress, however, these experts must do more than just work, they must work together. Because nanotechnology is inherently interdisciplinary, countries that draw hard lines between their academic disciplines, as the United States of America does, will find that their researchers have difficulty communicating and cooperating. In chemistry today, a half-dozen researcher assisted by a few tens of students and technicians is considered a large team. In aerospace engineering, enormous tasks like reaching the Moon or building a new airliner are broken down into tasks that are within the reach of small teams. All these small teams work together, forming a large team that may consist of thousands of engineers assisted by many thousands of technicians. If chemistry is to move in the direction of molecular-systems engineering, chemists will need to take at least a few steps in this direction. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

In engineering, everyone knows that designing a rocket will require skills from many disciplines. Some engineers know structures, others know pumps, combustion, electronics, software, aerodynamics, control theory, and so on and so forth down a long list of disciplines. Engineering managers know how to bring different disciplines together to build systems. In academic science, interdisciplinary work is productive and praised, but is relatively rare. Scientists do not need to cooperate to have their results fit together: they are all describing different parts of the same thing—nature—so in the long run, their results tend to come together in a single picture. Engineering, however, is different. Because it is more creative (it actually creates complex things), it demands more attention to teamwork. If the finished parts are going to work together, they must be developed by groups that share a common picture or what each part much accomplish. Engineers in different disciplines are forced to communicate; the challenge of management and team-building is to make that communication happen. This will apply to engineering molecular systems as much as it does to engineering computers, cars, aircrafts, or factories. Jay Ponder suggest that it is a question of perspective. “It’s all a matter of what’s perceived to be important by the different groups that have to come together to make this work: the chemists doing their bit and the computational people doing their bit. People have to come together and see the big picture. There are people who try to bridge the gaps, but they are rare compared to the people who just work in their own specialty.” Progress toward nanotechnology will continue, and as it does, researchers trained as chemists, physicists, and the like will learn to talk to one another to solve new problems. They will either learn to think like engineers and work in teams, or they will be eclipsed by colleagues who do. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Are these problems preventing advances? With all these problems, the advance toward nanotechnology steadily continues. Industry must gain ever-better control of matter to stay competitive in the World marketplace. The STM, protein engineering, and much of the chemistry are driven by commercial imperatives. Focused efforts would yield faster advances, yet even without clear focus, advances in this direction have an air of inevitability. As Bill DeGrado observes, “We really do have the tools. Experience has shown that when you have the analytic and synthetic tools to do things, in the end science goes ahead and does them—because they are doable.” Jay Ponder agrees: “Over the next few years, you are going to see slow evolutionary advances coming from people tinkering with molecular structures and figuring out their principles. People are going to work on a particular problem because they see some application for it or because they got grant funding for it. And in the process of doing something like improving a laundry detergent’s ability to clean protein stains, Procter and Gamble is going to help work out the principles for how to increase molecular stability, and to design spaces inside the molecules.” With the help of biotechnology, more and more foods will also be enhanced with disease-fighting properties—including illnesses widely prevalent in poor countries. Hepatitis B kills more than half a million people a year, a third of them in Asia. Four hundred million people around the World are carriers. In the United States of America, hepatitis inoculations consist of three shots that together cost about two hundred dollars—a sum far beyond the reach of millions of less affluent people. Researchers at Cornell University are trying to drive the cost down to about ten cents a dose by implanting hepatitis vaccines in bananas. Before long, we may also see tomatoes and potatoes fortified with vaccines to prevent hepatitis B. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Or take a strain of “golden rice” fortified with vitamin A to prevent the blindness now common among children in poor regions. In India, scientists are also working on vaccine-laden foods to fight cholera and rabies. Tomatoes that may protect against diarrhea (one of the worst baby killers), corn enhances to combat cystic fibrosis and vitamin-loaded fruits and vegetables—are all being studied. Moreover, it should surprise no one if, as we learn more about the genetic and proteomic makeup of individuals, other high-value-added foods are designed not merely for medical purposes but for cosmetic reasons or to enhance personal performance. As biotech companies continue to turn out new strains of seeds, “pharmers,” will be able to customize output for smaller and smaller high-value markets, and eventually even for individuals. In fields where everyone is still, so to speak, at the starting gate, there is no inherent reason why less affluent countries cannot “catch up” with leading nations and not only feed their own populations better but profitably export high-value-added agricultural products. All these, however, are just the state of possibilities. No longer ready to accept IBM’s dominance, competitors have searched for a weapon with which to strike down Goliath. And they found one. That mighty slingshot is a counter-standard called OSI (Open System Interconnection), which is intended to permit all kinds of computers to talk freely to one another. Heavily promoted by the European computer makers, OSI has forced IBM to retreat from its restrictive policies. The conflict heated up when a dozen European computer manufacturers, appalled by IBM domination, reached agreement in 1983 that would jointly undertake the incredibly complex work needed to design the specifications for an open system. Sensing the implications, European governments leaped to support them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

On the other side, Uncle Sam, watching this gang-up of forces against IBM, cried foul. Charging the Europeans with discrimination in their decisions, Donald Abelson of the Office of U.S. Trade Representative, stated that “Americans suspect…that we are the subject of a conspiracy.” Since then the anti-IBM campaign has expanded. Support for it has come from Esprit, the Common Market’s program for the support of science and technology. At the end of 1986 the Council of Ministers of the European Community ruled that a subset of OSI options would be the standard for computer sales to governments in the community. IBM responded to this attack with an offering confusingly called System Applications Architecture, or SAA, which included a version of SNA, and by offering customers a choice of either SNA or OSI products. Then faced with this formidable opposition, IBM once more followed the principle “If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.” Joining these various groupings, IBM pledged on scout’s honor that it will henceforth support the open standard. It was, as in the case of operating systems, a last-minute religious conversion called into question by IBM’s critics and competitors. Like General Motors and many other giants of the industrial age, IBM expanded to fill every available inch of its ecological niche, adapted itself all too comfortably to it, and now finds itself in an increasingly hostile, fast-changing environment in which sheer size, once an advantage, is now often a disadvantage. To some it appears that the battle over telecommunications standards is the beginning of the post-IBM era. On the surface, IBM’s main rivals, American and foreign, have won. It might also appear that Europe has won. The war, however, is not yet over. The battle over standard is never won. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

There is a hidden paradox in these power struggles. As business produces more diversified products, there is, in addition to a mounting pressure for more standards, a countereffort to make products more and more versatile by accommodating multiple standards. (This is why some portable TV sets provide a button that allows the user to switch back and forth among the European PAL and SECAM standards and the American NTSC standards.) Another technique used to make products more versatile is to break them down into smaller and more numerous modular components. This reduces the importance of the external standard. However, at the same time, it increases the number of “micro-standards” embedded inside the product and needed to make the components work together. However, no sooner is one standard established—OSI, for example—than new technologies drive it into obsolescence or irrelevancy. And as soon as we have arrived at standards for networks, or for software, the battleground shifts to a still higher and more complex plane. Thus, where two or more standards compete, new equipment appears that permits a user to convert from one system to another. However, the appearance of adaptors gives rise to a need for standards for adaptors. Today, therefore, we are even seeing attempts to create what might be termed “standards for standards”—a group called the Information Technology Requirements Council was established not long ago for precisely this purpose in the field of communications. The fight to control standards in other words, shifts from higher to lower levels and back up again. However, it does not go away. For the battle is part of the larger, continuing war for the control, routing, and regulation of information. It is a key front in the struggle for power based on knowledge, and it is raging not just in the technical thickets of television, computers, and communication, but in the nearest bierstube and, indeed in the kitchen itself. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

The thinkers of the Enlightenment, as I have said, reproached all earlier philosophers for their powerlessness to help men and themselves. The Republic’s formula, that power and wisdom must coincide if evils are ever to cease in the cities, is the perfect expression of what the Enlighteners meant. The necessary unity of power and wisdom is only a coincidence for the ancients, id est, dependent on chance completely out of the philosopher’s control. Knowledge is not in itself power, and though it is not in itself vulnerable to power, those who seek it and possess it most certainly are. Therefore the great virtue for the philosophers in their political deeds was moderation. They were utterly dependent on the prejudices of the powerful and had to treat them most delicately. They subjected themselves to a fierce discipline of detachment from public opinion. Although they inevitably had to try to influence political life in their favor, they never seriously thought of themselves as founders or lawgivers. The mixture of unwise power and powerless wisdom, in the ancients’ view, would always end up with power strengthened and wisdom compromised. He who flits with power, Socrates said, will be compelled to lie with it. In joining the Church of Satan, people not only managed to inject a little mystery into their otherwise banal lives, they achieved a satisfying sense of mastery over their own fates by the practice of ritual magic. By becoming masters of arcane powers, they became unique. As Edward Moody, an anthropologist who observed the church, noted, many Satanists were seeking “success denied them—money, fame, recognition, power—and with all avenues apparently blocked, with no apparent means by which legitimate effort will bring reward, they turn to Satanism and witchcraft.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Some people have had mystical experiences which gave them a sense of equality all round, although they are hierarchal in feeling and in the established order. With the great event of the aeon, which will bring with it the possibility of redemption to the whole of the Western World, has not yet been made manifest. We, who contain the knowledge of this event among Ourselves until the time is right, and who were in fact the instruments of its gestation, give the present indication. The Aeon of Horus is the nature of the child. To perceive this, we must conceive of the nature of a child without the veil of sentimentality—beyond good and evil, perfectly gentle, perfectly ruthless, containing all possibilities within the limits of heredity, and highly susceptible to training and environment. However, the nature of Horus is also the nature of force—blind, terrible, unlimited force. That is why the West stands in imminent danger of annihilation. That is why the West also stand in the possibility of the most rapid and tremendous evolution that the World has ever known. The balance must be love and understanding, or else all else fails. The uncompromisable difference that separates the philosophers from all others concerns death and dying. No way of life other than the philosophic can digest the truth about death. Whatever the illusion that supports ways of life and regimes other than the philosophic one, the philosopher is its enemy. There can never be a meeting of minds on this question, as both ancients and moderns agreed. It seemed only natural to the ancients to find their allies among the vulgarly courageous, id est, those willing to face death with endurance and even intrepidity, although they required unfounded beliefs about the noble, which made them forget about the good. They share the common ground with the philosophers on which something higher than mere life rests. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

However, they have no good reason for their sacrifice. Achilles’ laments and complaints about why he must die for the Greeks and for his friend are very different from Socrates’ arguments and the reasoning that underlies them for accepting death—because he is old, because it is inevitable, and because it costs him almost nothing and might be useful to philosophy. Anger characterizes Achilles; calculation, Socrates. Whatever sympathy there might be between the two kinds of men is founded, to speak anachronistically, on Achilles’ misunderstanding Socrates. The extraordinary device contrived by the new philosophy that produces harmony between philosophy and politics was to exchange one misunderstanding for another. All men fear death and passionately wish to avoid it. Even the heroes who despised it do so against a background of fear, which is primary. Only religious fanatics who believe certainly in a better life after death march gaily to death. If, instead of depending on the rare natures who have a noble attitude toward death, which goes against nature’s grain, philosophy could without destroying itself play the demagogue’s role—id est, appeal to the passion that all men have and that is most powerful—it could share in and make use of the power. Rather than fighting what appears to be human in nature, by cooperating with its philosophy could control it. In short, if philosophy should be revealed to man not as his moral preceptor but as his collaborator in his fondest dreams, the philosopher could supplant priests, politician and poet in the affection of the multitude. This is what Machiavelli meant when he blamed the old writers for building imaginary principalities and republics that neglect how men actually live in favor of how they ought to live. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Machiavelli counsels writers to accommodate themselves to the dominant passions instead of exhorting men to practice virtues that they rarely perfect, whose goodness for the individuals who practice them is questionable, and the preachings of which are boring to everyone concerned. In a word, turn philosophy into a benefactors, and it will be thought to be good and will enjoy the power accruing to benefactors. From the strong influences of magical secret societies on the development of National Socialism in Germany, to the close links in American between groups like the bizarre I AM cult and William Dudley’s Pelley’s fascistic Silver Shirts in the 1930s, the historical affinity between occultism and the radical right has been well documented. Both believe and adhere to the conspiracy theory of history—that is, that events are shaped by the workings of small, elite, but concealed groups—and both believe in the ability of one man, whether it be a Magus or a Hitler, to alter global events through the sheer force of his will. Thus, a 1971 Newsweek article expressed concern about LaVey’s political intensions: “If there is anything fundamentally diabolic about LaVey, it stems more from the echoes of Nazism in his theories than from the horror-comic trappings of his cult.” Radical-right groups besides Madole’s had sought to ally themselves with the Church of Satan, including the American Nazi Party and Robert Shelton’s United Klans of American, but LaVey had always rejected the overtures, just as he rejected Madole’s. The Klan, allegedly the last bastion of Native American Christianity holding back “Commie-atheist hordes of Satan,” would seek to align itself with the dark forces it professes to abhor is not as strange as it might first appear. According to sociologist Charles Glock and Rodney Stark, religious cults and radical political movements spring from the same source—deprivation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Radical rightists saw an ally in LaVey presumably because of his Machiavellian, power-oriented philosophy and because of public statements he had made advocating establishment of a “benign police state,” not to mention the strong Germanic flavor of some of his rituals. However, although LaVey was willing to use the sympathies of these groups when possible to his benefit, he kept them at arm’s length and privately expressed contempt for their anti-Sematic, racists ideas. In 1974, Lavey wrote: “The N.P.R. is enamored with the Church of Satan. Their racist ideals are also worn on their sleeves, and, I believe, are as removable as their armbands. The C/S must be O.K., like the Hell’s Angels. The colors are similar. The Angeles, the Nazis, and the C/S. All together. Even the Klan. Night Riders all. Now the enemy is the weakling. All my life I’ve been the weakling, but with my swastika, I’m strong. My Satanic amulet gives me power. I’m not the misfit anymore, with pimples and a heart murmur and flat feet. What does it matter anymore that I can’t play baseball or don’t spell too good? So what if I can’t get a girl? I got my armband. You see, we are dealing with intelligence levels on which imagery and ideals are easily interchangeable. Philosophy can be used to conquer fortune, so Machiavelli announced. It was, of course, fortune—chance—that made it impossible for philosophers to rule, according to Plato. Fortune governs the relations between power and wisdom, which means that men cannot be counted on to consent to the rule of the wise, and the wise are not strong enough to force them to do so. The conquest of fortune meant for Machiavelli that thought and thinkers could compel and guarantee the consent of men. If this is possible, then the ancient philosophers’ moderation looks like timidity. Daring in the political arena becomes the new disposition of the philosophers. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Danton’s “de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace,” is but a pale, merely political, duplicate of Machiavelli’s original call to battle. Bacon’s assertion that science will make man “master and possessor of nature,” and the commonplace that science is the conquest of nature are offsprings of Machiavelli’s revolution and constitute the political face adopted by modern philosophy. We are engulfed in war. Not simply a war fought with guns and bombs, “somewhere out there.” The skirmishes take place in the region of one’s own mind. The less one is aware of the invisible war, the more receptive one is to its ongoing process of demoralization, for the insensate human is vulnerable, malleable, weak, and ripe for control. Invisible warfare allows its victims to wallow in their sense of choice and freedom while actually feeling weak and ineffectual. Avenues for infection are everywhere. “Bombs” are falling on our doorsteps every day. Supermarket tabloids, radio, tv—all these are catechism of demoralization. Weather Control—unusually protracted weather conditions with little or no change (especially long periods of sunshine) provide ample opportunity for the incubation of viral and bacterial agents. An added advantage is that sunny, warm weather encourages people to get together in groups, going to games, the beach, the park. These masses of humanity create a mental wavelength which depletes creative energy and deadens the environment, contributing to the main objective of overall demoralization. Viral and Bacterial Agents—it is foolish to believe that research in bacteriological warfare ended with the invention of the nuclear bomb. Many diseases are now being traced back to invincible, ever-modifying viruses. The causes of everything from COVID to Monkey Pox to the much-discussed “Yuppie Disease” (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) seems to be isolated to breakdown the body’s immune system triggered by a viral infection. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

If “bombardments” were being manipulated so as not to arouse suspicion, attacks could be made on areas of the body already susceptible, causing “flare-ups” of already diagnosed diseases. “Spot” or arthritic-type pains could be induced in unlikely parts of the body. Irregularities in mucous membranes could cause cold-like symptoms that never quite develop into full-fledged colds, chronic yeast infections, symptoms of internal parasites (bloating and swelling), fluid retention, or a feeling of “pressure” in the head. Of course, few would feel bad enough to be incapacitated, just ill enough to wonder what was that matter. Ultrasonic targeting or saturation (White Noise)—I have done extensive experimentation with various frequencies, on both ends of the spectrum, and discovered what can be done, especially using the technology of microchips and synthesizers. Ultrasonic sound jams volitional thought, immobilizes the individual, induces mental confusion and increases suggestibility. White noise can be carried by radio and tv-audio signals, and enhanced by frenetic musical (MTV, et cetera) or frenetic spoken delivery. We become used to the “chipmunk” sound always going in the background, establishing a norm of hyper-pacing and overstimulation of the sense. Without an electronic device chattering away, things seem unnaturally quiet, so, under the  guise of seeking information and being entertained, we become addicted to the “presence” of tv, radio, or stereo as guiding and stabilizing influences. On the opposite end of the sound spectrum, subsonics can be used to drive people together during conducive periods (holidays, weekends, or special events.) Besides the depletion resulting from large numbers of people clustering together, black sound creates anxiety, hyperactivity behavior, agitation, and increased stress. Subsonic sound can also be employed to create Earthquakes. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Microwave radiation–not leaking from microwave ovens, but received through undetectable (or overlooked) receivers, from satellite or Earth-bound transmitters. No giant receiving dishes are necessary. Natural or man-made configurations can be utilized or constructed that are conducive to reception (areas between hills, valleys between skyscrapers, sports arenas, et cetera). Symptoms: respiratory ailments, circulatory problems, mucous membrane and kidney dysfunction, excessive thirst, cognitive disabilities, memory loss, forgetfulness. Food and beverage dispersal—outlets where large numbers of people are exposed to the mass-produced provisions are suspect. Chemical in widely consumed foodstuffs or drinks are an obvious arena for unseen chemical additives. (And those who actually fry or dispense the foods never need know exactly what is being dispersed.) Fast food and restaurant chains receive pre-mixed, pre-packaged supplies, as do supermarkets and other retail outlets. To “fuel-up” at these outlets is to perhaps induce and sustain lassitude, and foster mental incapacity and insensitivity. Those not yet conditioned by exposure to these chemicals can experience MSG-type symptoms (excessive thirst, hot flashes, wired yet tired feelings, metallic taste, et cetera). Psychological smokescreens—screening and misdirection are employed to divert attention from the agents of the invisible listed above. Some of the more obvious misdirections are: threat of nuclear attack, political “causes,” scandal and campaign hysteria, concern over “real” or conventional warfare, contrived revolts and shooting wars in far-away areas of the World, fear of contamination of water supplied by parties unknown (ensuring increased sales of chemical-laden beverages), poisoning or experiments by the CIA or other convenient groups, fear of the Appointed Enemy, id est, Christian-defined “Satanic” influences, UFOs, neo-Nazis (until they are absorbed to make room for a new, common enemy). These are all widely discussed and heatedly protested topics, and therefore effective as diversions. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The extended weekend—there have been occasional three-day weekends before, but never like this. Long weekends are necessary to allow spending and recreational time while maintaining the illusion of productivity. Three and four day weekends allow plenty of opportunity for “relaxation” (id est, intensive television viewing and other indoctrinational devices) and keep everyone happy. At this rate, we may yet see six day weekends. Urban warfare—Beyond the smokescreens, there are other psychological elements involved in the present war. By allowing heavy drug use to increase, and an underground network of sales and distribution to exist, people can be kept malleable and satisfied, while the drugs induce mental delays and declines. Drug skirmishes, rampant in urban sectors, thin the population. Another effective warfare agent is the individual annihilator—a person so frustrated with the injustices of the “justice system” or by the petty tyranny of contemporary life that one grabs an armful of guns and starts shooting into the nearest crowd. The serial killer—a contemporary phenomenon—cannot be overlooked. These incidents are often labeled “Satanic” or “cult” crimes, and will increase as a method of population reduction, which is why they are being allowed. Instead of the TV news media harping on these mass shootings, they should actually plead people to stop. Then the issue of focusing on gun control, right after, may make people feel like they are being controlled and make them act in a counterproductive manner. These are major weapons in use today. Inasmuch as neurological responses affect the entire physical organism, it must be emphasized that physical malaise or disease may originate in demoralization created and sustained by any warfare agent. Becoming aware of these agents can minimize unnecessary demoralization in those who wish to preserve their instinct for survival. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD

Lincoln, CA | from the high $600s

Now Selling!

No appointment needed! Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,377 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms. 

Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more!

Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included! 

Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand new neighborhood in the charming City of Lincoln. Palo Verde Park, is  just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. 

#CresleighHomes

#Havenwood

Her Life Was Unavoidably Affected by Departed Souls

According to legend, Mrs. Winchester enacted a nightly séance to help with her building plans and for protection from “bad” spirits. While she sometimes drew up simple sketches of the building idea, there were never any blueprints…or building inspectors! In the morning, she would meet with John Hansen, her dutiful foreman, and go over new changes and additions. There was an Electric Pentacle in the Blue Séance Room which was the most marvellous “Defense” against certain manifestations. Mrs. Winchester used the shape of the defensive star for this protection because she had, personally, no doubt at all that there was some extraordinary virtue in the old magic figure. Sometimes Mrs. Winchester had little doubt during her séances that she had run up against an abnormal monster, and she meant to take every possible care, for the dangers was abominable. One night, Mrs. Winchester turned to fit the Electric Pentacle, setting it so that each of its “points” and “vales” of the drawn pentagram upon the floor. Then she connected up the battery and the next instant the pale blue glare from the intertwining vacuum tubes shone out. She glanced about her then, with something of a sigh of relief, and realized suddenly that the dusk was upon her, for one of the windows had turned black and unfriendly. Then she stated round at the big, empty room, over the double-barrier of electric and candle light, and had an abrupt, extraordinary sense of weirdness thrust upon her—in the air, you know, it seemed; as it were a sense of something inhuman impending. The room was full of the stench of bruised garlic, and everyone knew Mrs. Winchester hated for the aroma of food to whiff out of the kitchen. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

Mrs. Winchester did not know what was going to materialize. No idea of what kind of ab-natural creature was going to manifest, but she had an idea something horrible was lurking. She could feel its presence and was in fear of what she was going to see. You see, she never forgot that thirteen staff members had been strangled, one after the other, when entering the east wing, and the fierce slamming of the door she heard herself. She had no doubt that there was something dangerous and ugly out to get her. The Christian Bible warns that Satanic delusions will be abound in the last days. It was nervy work waiting for that thing to come into the Blue Séance Room. Suddenly, Mrs. Winchester was aware that the candles were all a-flickering in an unnatural wind sweeping over her, coming from behind. She gave one great nerve-thrill and a prickly feeling went all over the back of her head. Then she pulled herself around with a sort of stiff jerk and stared straight against that queer wind. It seemed to come from the corner of the room to the left of the bed—the place where both times she had found the heap of notes the spirits had given her about the 500 rooms they wanted constructed in the mansion and exterior elevations that they found appealing. Yet she could see mothing unusual, no opening—nothing! Abruptly she was aware that the candles were all a-flicker in that unnatural wind…she just squatted there and stared in a horribly frightened, stone way for some moments. It was disgustingly horrible sitting in that vile, cold wind! And then—flick! flick! flicky! all the candles round the outer barrier went out, and there she was, locked and sealed in the Blue Séance Room with no light beyond the weakish blue glare of the Electric Pentacle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

A time of abominable tenseness passed and still that wind blew upon her, and then she suddenly knew that something stirred in the corner to the left of the table. Mrs. Winchester was made conscious of it rather by some inward, unused sense, than by either sight or sound, for the pale, short-radius glare of the of the Pentacle gave but a very poor light for seeing by. Yet, as Mrs. Winchester started, something began slowly to grow upon my sight—a moving shadow, a little darker than the surrounding shadows. She lost the thing amid the vagueness and for a moment or two she glanced swiftly from side to side with a fresh, new sense of impending danger. Mrs. Winchester then cast a spell, “I offer my hair as a symbol of my spiritual ties to the powers of divine darkness eternal.” Then she burned the strand of hair upon the flame dropping what remained into the urn. “I offer my blood so that in its place the venomous powers of darkness will flow through my veins!) She dropped 13 drops of blood upon the candle. Next the incantation said, “I offer my flesh as a vehicle for the powers of darkness to move through me and act in this World according to my own divine will.” She allowed the flame to burn her hand slightly. “I offer these nails as spears to pierce the very essence of my enemies whether they be of the World or those who dwell beyond the veil of limitation! (She touched the nails to the flame and then dropped them upon the urn.) “I offer these ashes which are my limitations and obstacles consumed by this, they very blackened fire of becoming! (She sprinkled a bit of ash upon the urn and then smeared a bit upon her ajna chakra.) Next she chanted, “All ashes from magickal work should be saved as they will serve the black adept well in their sorcerous applications.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

Mrs. Winchester suddenly noticed that there were five flaming Fibonacci spirals moving counter clockwise, which caused a physical manifestation of the ever-expanding powers of darkness infiltrating the limits of the corporeal realm. These flaming spirals were in the Circle of Counter Creation and were aethyrically present as the seals were fed with the blood of the sorceress. Mrs. Winchester was aware in a funny, subconscious, introspective fashion that the “creeps” had come upon her, prickling all over her head, yet she was cooler mentally than she had been for some minutes; sufficiently so to feel that her hands were sweating coldly. The faint noises from the bed creased once and there was a most intense silence, with only the dull thudding of the blood beating in her head. Yet immediately afterwards Mrs. Winchester heard again the slurring sound of the blood being sucked into the seals. In the midst of her nervous tension. Then there was a time of absolute quietness then for perhaps a couple of minutes and you can imagine how horrible she felt. The blood had been guzzled with such savageness! And then again the abominable unnaturalness of the thing that had just been done before her! Suddenly, over b the door, she heard a faint noise—a sort of crickling sound and then a pitter or two upon the floor. A great nervous thrill swept over her, seeming to run up her spine and over the back of her head, for the seal that secured the door had just been broken. Something else was there. Mrs. Winchester could not see the door; at least, it was impossible to say how much she actually saw and how much her imagination supplied. She made it out only as a continuation of the expanding darkness. There was an indistinct wavered there among the shadows. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

Abruptly she was aware that the door was opening with an effort, as she got up to see what was coming in, the door slammed with a terrific crash that filled the whole room with a sort of hollow thunder. Mrs. Winchester jumped like a frightened child. There seemed such a power behind the noise, as if a vast, wanton Force were “out.” Can you understand? She knew that was abroad was dangerous to Life. Therefore, beware, when people think of Satan merely as a man with a tail and horns, and just mock at the idea of a real devil, they make a terrible mistake and thus enable Satan to ensnare and attack his victims without hindrance. Mrs. Winchester was truly haunted and tried everything she know how to do to rid herself of these evil spirits the curse her fortune. The most dangerous area of satanic seduction is magic, for it is here that people consciously participate in Satan’s work even though he hides behind a camouflage of pious ceremonies. The ritual Mrs. Winchester performed began in total darkness. After the preliminary invocation, the four cardinal points were invoked, symbolically opening the “Gates of Hell.” The circle of light revealed the scarlet-robed priest seated on a throne, who appeared to be a werewolf. After the spell was cast. The red-robed invocator, half man, half beast appeared and drank from the seal. Mrs. Winchester, however, was attempting to close the gates of hell, not open them. Greater magic is regarded as the accomplishment of changes in the objective Universe through those great subjective outpourings of the will summoned during a ritual. This is how curses work. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

Modern America, much like Victorian times, can be a dark and scary place, largely inhabited by deeply ignorant people with an aching desire to crucify anything they regard as deviant. And although the media so often preaches the gospel of individual responsibility, it rarely applies that philosophy. The usual suspects are dragged out—the Internet, neo-Nazism, computer games, Hollywood films, rap, rock music, and TV shows, but some how the TV news who constantly airs evil, which they profit off of, goes unnoticed. They do not want to have discussions because it may diffuse their profits. Instead, local news just expands the time limits of their evil content, and then say they do not have time to discuss it. But, if your local news if on the air 7 hours a day, they do have time to talk, but they know the only thing that keeps them on the air is lies, crimes, and violence because it is entertaining and can compete with TV shows. Furthermore, one will notice, if at a crime scene where The Satanic Bible is found or other occult symbols or objects, it is immediately labelled a “Satanic crime”—whereas a crime sense where The Holy Bible is found or where people are calling on God or there are biblical signs and symbols, it is not automatically identified as “Christian crime.” Just as the ignorant like to maintain they were made in the image of God, they also prefer to believe the Devil was fashioned from the likeness of that weird family down the street that work at the TV station. The ritual of driving the scapegoat out into the desert, stemming from biblical times, persists into the new millennium. Satanists will continue to play with “spiritual nitroglycerine,” while taking responsibility for their own actions and insisting that others accept responsibility for theirs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

In embracing perennial Christian taboos, rejecting both the tradition of scapegoating and the “victim culture,” we intend to prevent present-day idiocies from dragging the next millennium into another miserable Dark Age. If a new Satanic Age is born, it will be born from the ideals of curiosity, independence and pleasures. From a Satanic perspective, there is room for optimism. The Devil is winning. Christians cannot control themselves or modify their behaviors to honor their God. Seekers after supernatural cures may be deluded into a healing by demon-energized magic. The power to heal diseases is frequently manifested in spiritism, mafic, and demon possession. The clairvoyant medium often claims that one can heal the body, as well as foretell the future. The magical charmer and mesmerizer can both cure and cause diseases. The person afflicted with an evil spirit is often promised ability to cure physical ailments if he will serve the dominating demon. The danger of delusion increases in these last days as demonic activity accelerates and serious study of God’s Word wanes. Satan heals but demands some sort of payment in the form of psychic enslavement, cult involvement, or bondage to some for of fanaticism. Black-magic conjuration openly uses the name of Satan and demonic powers. People who are dept in the black arts and workers of diabolic miracles open doors to the unknown. Such occultists were popular in the courts of ancient pagan kings. They not only advised the heads of government but performed supernatural feats, including magical charming of the sick. The ability of such magicians is conditioned on the human plane by their inherent psychic power, and on the supernatural plane by their degree of abandonment to demonic domination. We may never know if Mrs. Winchester built her house to accommodate the spirits, but over the years the story has come down that she believed her life was unavoidably affected by departed souls. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7

Winchester Mystery House

At this 160-room mansion built to appease departed spirits, some guests have caught some interesting shadows on camera during their visits to the house. What do you think? See more on The Walk With Spirits Tour this weekend!

🎟️ link in bio. https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/

The Much-Bewailed Electronic Tower of Babel

Nice little dollies, they were, and not bigger than Gulliver’s Lilliput people. Their ways were like ours. In their America they had a republic on our own plan, and in their Europe, their Asia and their Africa they had monarchies and established churches, and a pope and a czar, and all the rest of it. They were not afraid of us; in fact they held us in rather frank contempt, because we were giants. Giants have never been respected, in any World. These people had a quite good opinion of themselves, although they were no bigger than a banana, and many of them no bigger than a clothespin. In church it was a common thing for the preacher to look out over his congregation and speak of them as the noblest work of God—and never a clothes pin smiled! These little animals were having wars all of the time, and raising armies and building navies, and striving after the approval of God every way they could. And wherever there was a savage country that needed civilizing, they went there and took it, and divided it up among the several enlightened monarchs, and civilized it—each monarch in his own way, but generally with Bibles and bullets and taxes. And the way they did whoop-up Morals, and Patriotism, and Religion, and the Brotherhood of Man was noble to see. I could not see that they differed from us, except in size. It was like looking at ourselves through the wrong end of the spyglass. However, Sandy said there was one difference, and a big one. It was this: each person could look right into every other person’s mind and read what was in it, but he thought his own mind was concealed from everybody but himself! “The Lord speaks unto men according to their language,” reports 2 Nephi 31.3. Aristotle in his Ethics shows how the philosopher appears as the ally of the gentlemen, speaking to them about the noble deeds that are their specialty (not his). #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

All he apparently does is clarify for them what they already practice. However, he makes slight changes that point toward philosophy. Piety is not even included in the list of the individual virtues. And shame, a quality of the noble and a great enemy of reason, is mentioned only in order to be banished from the canon. The virtuous man has nothing to be ashamed of, says Aristotle—and observation that fits Socrates’ view of himself but is not typical of gentlemen. And gradually Aristotle turns his readers’ attention to the theoretical life, not by seriously theorizing with them but by pointing to the direction in which it lies. He makes it godlike and the completion of their own incompleteness, which they used to achieve by admiring. Achilles and revering the Olympian gods. Now they admire the theoretical men who contemplate a thinking god. It is an open question whether the gentleman grasped the essence of philosophy less accurately in this way than does the modern man who respects the scientist because he provides him with useful things. Similarly in his Poetics, Aristotle explains to gentlemanly lovers of the theater what tragedy is and what they get from it. However, here too the changes things a bit. The poet is not, as Homer presents himself, inspired by the Muse but is an imitator of nature, id est, of the same thing the philosophers study, and hence does not depict a World alien to the one studied by philosophy, or one that results from causes in conflict with those admitted by science. Aristotle explicitly connects poetry with philosophy. And the end, the final cause, of tragedy is said to be the purgation of pity and fear, the two passions that combined lead to enthusiasm, religious possession or fanaticism. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Socrates had attacked the poets for appealing to those passions that make men ecstatic from terror at what they can suffer and their unprotectedness in their suffering. It is just here, according to Socrates, that reason should be invoked, to face the necessary, to remind men of the order in things that exists in spite of the accidents that happen to them individually. Pity and fear cry out for satisfaction, for attention, for being taken seriously. Above all, the World men incline to see is full of benevolent and malevolent deities who take their cases seriously. Poetry to succeed must speak to these passions, which are more powerful than reason in almost all men. Because poetry needs an audience it is, in Socrates’ view, too friendly to the enemies of reason. The philosopher has less need to enter into the wishes of the many or, as the wise of our time would put it, into the drama of history, or to be engage. This is why Socrates heightens the enmity between philosophy and poetry. Aristotle, actually following Socrates’ lead, suggests that the poet can be the doctor of mortals who are so mad as to insist they should be immortal. The poet, not the philosopher, can treat the passions that are dangerous to philosophy, which Socrates had to his great cost ignored. He can arouse these passions in order to flush them out of the soul, leaving the patients more relaxed and calmer, more willing to listen to reason. Aristotle tells the poets they should present heroes who deserve their fates, whose sad ends are plausibly attributable to a flaw in their characters. Their suffering, while pitiable, is not promiscuous, a reproach to the moral order, or the lack of one, in the World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

The effect of such drama would be to make men gentle and believers in the coherence of the World, in the rational relation of cause and effect. They are not made reasonable by this but are saved from hatred of reason and more disposed to accept it. Aristotle does not attempt to make scientists out of gentlemen, but he tempers their prevailing passions in such a way as to make them friends of philosophy. Socrates does much the same thing in the Apology when he addresses those who voted for his acquittal and tells them myths that tend to make death seem less terrible. The tales are not true, but they reinforce the gentleness that kept them from fearing and hence condemning Socrates. Socrates criticizes poetry in order to encourage it to be an ally of the philosophers instead of the priests. Thus philosophy’s response to the hostility of civil society is an educational endeavor, rather more poetic or rhetorical than philosophic, the purpose of which is to temper the passions of gentlemen’s souls, softening the hard passions such as anger, and hardening the soft ones such as pity. The model for all such efforts is the dialogues of Plato, which together rival the Iliad and the Odyssey, or even the Gospels, introducing a new hero who excites admiration and imitation. To introduce a new hero, a new taste has to be established, and the taste for Socrates is unique, counter to all previous tastes. Plato turns the personage of The Clouds into one of those civilization-constituting figures like Moses, Jesus or Achilles, who have a greater reality in men’s souls than do their own flesh-and-blood contemporaries. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

As Achilles is said to have formed Alexander the Great; Alexander, Caesar; and Caesar, Napoleon—reaching out to one another from the peaks across the valleys—so Socrates is the teacher of philosophers in an unbroken chain for two and a half millennia, extending from generation to generation through all the epochal changes. Plato insured this influence, not by reproducing Socrates’ philosophy, in the manner of Aristotle or Kant, but by representing his action, more in the manner of Sophocles, Aristophanes, Dante and Shakespeare. Socrates is made to touch the prevailing passion of each of the different kinds of soul in such a way as appear to be divinatory of their longings and necessary to their self-understanding. There are dialogues that touch the pious; some move the ambitious and the idealistic; others excite the erotic and still others the warriors and the politicians; some speak to the poets, others to the mathematicians; lovers of money are no more forgotten than are lovers of honor. There is hardly anyone who is not made indignant by one aspect of another of Socrates’ discourse, but there is also hardly anyone who is not moved and heartened by other aspects. Socrates stated the case for all human types better than they could have stated it for themselves. (He, of course, also stated the problem with each of those types and their aspirations.) Plato demonstrates the need for Socrates and in so doing makes the need felt in his readers. It is not only Alcibiades who felt incomplete without Socrates. In almost on case was there a total conversion of a man. Certainly none is ever depicted in the dialogues. Plato himself, and a few others, were converted to philosophy, and their self-discovery was possible because Socrates was more or less tolerate in Athens. The toleration of philosophy requires its being thought to serve powerful elements in society without actually becoming their servant. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

The philosopher must come to terms with the deepest prejudices of men always, and of the men of his time. The one thing he cannot change and will not try to change is their fear of death and the whole superstructure of beliefs and institutions that make death bearable, ward it off or deny it. The essential difference between the philosopher and all other men is his facing of death or his relation to eternity. He obviously does not deny that many men die resolutely or calmly. It is relatively easy to die well. The question is how one lives, and only the philosopher does not need opinions that falsify the significance of things in order to endure them. He alone mixes the reality of death—its inevitability and our dependence on fortune for what little life we have—into every thought and deed and is thus able to live while honestly seeking perfect clarity. He is, therefore, necessarily in the most fundamental tension with everyone except his own kind. He relates to all the others ironically, id est, with sympathy and a playful distance. Changing the character of his relationship to them is impossible because of the disproportion between him and them is firmly rooted in nature. Thus, he has no expectation of essential progress. Toleration, not right, is the best he can hope for, and he is kept vigilant by the awareness of the basic fragility of his situation and that of philosophy. Socrates allies himself with those who are powerful in the city and at the same time fascinated or charmed by him. However, the charm only endures so long as he does not confront their most important concerns. Crito, the family man, thinks of Socrates as a good soldier. Those who get angry at Socrates and accuse him always see something the more gently disposed miss. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Thrasymachus sees that Socrates does not respect the city. He sees the truth about Socrates, but he cannot, at least in the beginning, appreciate him. The other appreciate him. The others appreciate him, but partly because they are blind to what is most important to him. This provides the model for the political tactics followed by the philosophers from Plato up to Machiavelli. None was primarily political, for there was a definite limit on what one could expect from politics, and it was essential not to make the pursuit of the truth dependent on what is politically relevant. Politics was a serious study to the extent that one learned about the soul from it. However, the practical politics of all the philosophers, no matter how great their theoretical differences, were the same. They practiced an art of writing that appealed to the prevailing moral tastes of the regime in which they found themselves, but which could lead some astute readers outside of it to the Elysian Fields where the philosophers meet to talk. They frequently became the interpreters of the traditions of their nations, subtly altering them to make them open to philosophy and philosophers. They were always suspect, but they also always had their well-placed friends. For this reason the form and content of the writings of men like Plato, Cicero, Farabi and Maimonides appear very different, while their inner teachings may be to all intents and purposes the same. Each had a different beginning point, a different cave, from which he had to ascend to the light and to which he had to return. Thus they appeared to be “relevant” without forming their minds to the prejudices of the day. This protected them from the necessity of the temptation to conform to what is most powerful. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Classical philosophy was amazingly robust and survived changes as great as are imaginable, such as that from paganism to the revealed Biblical religions. Marsilius of Padua was as Aristotelian as was Aristotle, proving that the problems are permanent but their expressions are changing. We moderns think that a comparatively minor change, like that wrought by the French Revolution, necessitates new thought. The ancients held that a man must never let himself be overcome by events unless those events taught something essentially new. They were more intent than were any men before or since on preserving the freedom of the mind. This was their legacy to the university. They, however, never let the principle become a dogma and never counted on its having any other ground than their wits. They were ever mindful of the responsibilities and the risks of their enterprise. In sum, the ancient philosophers were to a man proponent of aristocratic politics, but not for the reasons intellectual historians are wont to ascribe to them. They were aristocratic in the vulgar sense, favoring the power of those possessing old wealth, because such men are more likely to grasp the nobility of philosophy as an end itself, if not to understand it. Most simply, they have the money for an education and time to take it seriously. Only technology, with its attendant problems, makes universal education possible, and therefore opens the prospect of a different kind of relationship of philosophy to politics. Lavey’s brand of Satanism was designed to fill the void between religion and psychiatry, meeting man’s need for ritual, fantasy, and enchantment while at the same time providing a rational set of beliefs on which to base one’s life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

The other major religions are outmoded, he asserts, because they are trying to keep superstition alive in a technological age. Christianity preaches the virtues of altruism and asceticism, LaVey acknowledges, but for political, not World reasons. “What are the Seven Deadly Sins?” he is fond of asking. “Gluttony, avarice, lust, sloth—they are urges every man feels at least once a day. How would you set yourself up as the most powerful institution on Earth? You first find out what every man feels at least once a day, establish that as a sin, and set yourself up as the only institution capable of pardoning that sin.” For LaVey, it is the guilt that makes people sick, not their urges. If an individual is law-abiding and causes harm to no other creature, then he or she should be able to indulge in whatever activity, pleasures of the flesh or otherwise, that one finds pleasurable. Distinguishing self-indulgence from compulsion, however, LaVey cautions, “If a person has no proper release for his desires, they rapidly build up and become compulsions.” In reality, it might not be so easy to tell when the line between the two has been crossed. Like a drug addict or alcoholic who insists he or she can stop anytime her or she wants, a person may try to present a sexual compulsion simply as a preference. Yet, as long as the compulsions were not alarming overt, LaVey, in the early days of the Church of Satan, was not strict in applying the distinction. He recognized that many of those applying for membership did indeed have emotional and psychological problems and were attracted to his church because of their feelings of alienation from the rest of society. In fact, many of the rituals held at midnight on Fridays at the black house took that fact into account with accommodating calculation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

John Whiteside Parsons was born on 2 October 1914 in Los Angeles, California. His mother and father separated while he was quite young, and Parsons said later that this left him with “…a hatred of authority and a spirit of revolution, as well as an Oedipal attachment to his mother. He felt withdrawn and isolated as a child, and was bullied by other children. This gave him, he thought, “…the requisite contempt for the crowd and for the group of mores…” Parsons was born into a rich family, and sometime in his youth there was what he referred to as a loss of family fortune. This loss must only have been a temporary one, though—perhaps caused by the break-up of the family—since in the 1940s he inherited from his father a large, Victorian-style mansion in the well-to-do area of Pasadena. During adolescence, Parsons developed an interest in science, especially physics and chemistry, and in fact he went on to develop a career as a brilliant scientist in the fields of explosives and rocket-fuel technology. His achievements as a scientist were such that the Americans named a lunar crater after him when they came to claim that territory for their own. Appropriately enough, Crater Parsons is on the dark side of the moon. Many people—the ones who retain a rich cultural perspective that is not fully Americanized—is not the one who is chosen for the network television show or the corporate vice-presidency. He or she would not be chosen because, in so many ways, this person would be ill suited for the objective, mental, aggressive, unfeeling styles that are rewarded in corporate life. Instead, the corporations pick the rare person who is more like the traditional White males who already occupy the center stage. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

What is true for television commentators and corporation executive is also true for government officials. As the personnel within the institutions change, the institutions maintain their inflexible form. The balance of power among races and genders begins to alter, but the power arrangement themselves—some people on top, other people on the bottom, other people are often times totally excluded. If alternative to the life-style of the system exist, they are not represented. None of this is to argue that the non-dominant culture or any group which has been denied access should not seek the success they are presently beginning to achieve in the objective World of money and power. In their shoes I would certainly do the same. It is only a remark that the subtle pressures of technological and corporate form create an archetypal Faustian bargain. In winning rights or money or power, the diverse elements in American culture lose their unique identity, their cultural roots. They become what they oppose. And so the real power is revealed as existing in the institutions and the technology itself. For proof, you have only to watch the diverse cultural programming on television. It might as well be American Housewife of Chicago Fire. As with Flowers of the Attic, a way of mind is reduced to the exigencies of soap opera and sitcoms. As for mainstream American “culture,” presumed to be the oppressor, it does not exist either. It is itself subordinate to corporate culture, or corporate consciousness, commodity life and the channelization of all behavior and thought into a nice package that suits a machine. Speaking of machines, one of the most important things computers do today is talk to one another. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

In fact, computers and communication are so closely fused today as to be inseparable. This means that computer companies must defend not only their operating systems, but also their access to, or control of, telecommunications networks. If operating systems control what goes on inside computers, telecommunications standards control what does on between computers. (The distinction, in reality, is not so neat, but good enough for our purposes here.) And here again we find companies and countries locked in a bitter struggle over the main systems that process our information. Because more data, information, and knowledge now flows across national boundaries, the info-war over telecommunications is, if anything, even more politically fraught than the war over operating systems. General Motors, for example, in trying to tie together its global production, has devised its own standard to allow its machines to communicate with one another even though they come from different makers. It calls this standard MAP (for Manufacturing Automation Protocol) and has tried to promote its Worldwide adoption by other manufacturers and its own supplies. To block GM, the European Community (EC) has talked thirteen giant manufacturing companies, including BMW, Olivetti, British Aerospace, and Nixdorf, into supporting a counter-standard called CNMA. If European machines are going to talk to one another, the EC seems to be saying, it will not be on terms defined by General Motors—of the United States of American. This toe-to-toe over electronic communication in the factories of the plants, however, is only part of a larger battle for control of the World’s extra-intelligent networks. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

As Japanese firms began to connect up electronically with plants and offices around the World a host of companies rushed to sell them the necessary computers and telecommunications links. This is a field in which U.S.A technology still outstrips that of Japan; and IBM, once again, was a major player. However, the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications announced that any networks linking Japan with the outside World would have to conform to a technical standard set by an obscure United Nations consultative committee on telecom policy. This ruling would have kept IBM in Japan from using equipment and systems designed to its own proprietary standard. The result was a massive lobbying effort in Washington and Tokyo, negotiations between the two governments, and ultimately, a back-off by Japan. When each country’s telephone system was controlled by a single company or ministry, national standards were set and international standards were then decided by the International Telecommunications Union. Life was simple—until computers wanted to talk to one another. By the 1980s, as new technologies avalanched into the market, businesses and individuals alike were using machines built by different manufacturers, using different operating systems, running programs written by different software houses, and trying to send messages around the World through a patchwork of cables, microwaves, and satellites belonging to different countries. The result today is the much-bewailed electronic Tower of Babel, and it explains why desperate cries for “connectivity” and “interoperability” echo around the business World. And here yet again the main struggle has shaped up as IB versus The World. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

IBM has long promoted a standard called System Network Architecture. The problem with SNA is that while it allows (some, not all) IBM machines to talk to other IBM machines, it is decidedly deaf to a great many non-IBM computers. As The Wall Street Journal once put it: “Hooking any non-SNA computers into those networks is a programmer’s nightmare. Rivals wanting to sell their computers to IMB’s legion of customers must mimic SNA in their own machines.” This indirect control of access to information may have been tolerable when most computers were IBMs, but not today. Hence the cry had gone up for computer democracy. While we are focusing on technology, consider the case of cesarean sections. Close to one out of every four Americans is now born by C-section. Through modern technology, American doctors can deliver babies who would have died otherwise. As Dr. Laurence Horowitz notes in Taking Charge of Your Medical Fate, “…the proper goal of C-section is to improve the chances of babies at risk, and that goal has been achieved.” However, C-sections are a surgical procedure, and when they are done routinely as an elective option, there is considerable and unnecessary danger; the changes of a woman’s dying during a C-section delivery are two to four times greater than during a normal traditional delivery. In others words, C-sections can and do save the lives of babies at risk, but when they are done for other reasons—for example, for the convenience of doctor or mother—they pose an unnecessary threat to health, and even life. Your body is not a machine. It is a living organism. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

To take another example: a surgical procedure known as carotid endarterectomy is used to clean out clogged arteries, thus reducing the likelihood of stroke. In 1987, more than one hundred thousand Americans had this operation. It is now established that the risks involved in such surgery outweigh the risks of suffering a stroke. Horowitz again: “In other words, for certain categories of patients, the operation may actually kill more people than it saves.” To take still another example: about seventy-eight thousand people every year get cancer from medical and dental X-rays. In a single generation, it is estimated, radiation will induce 2.34 million cancers. Examples of this kind can be given with appalling ease. However, in the interests of fairness the question about the value of technology in medicine is better phrased in the following way: Would American medicine be better were it not so totally reliant on the technological imperative? Here the answer is clearly, yes. We know, for example, from a Harvard Medical School study which focused on the year 1984 (no Orwellian reference intended), that in New York State alone there were thirty-six thousand cases of medical negligence, including seven thousand deaths related in some way to negligence. Although the study does not give figures on what kinds of negligence were found, the example is provided of doctors prescribing penicillin without asking the patients whether they were hyper-sensitive to the drug. We can assume that many of the deaths resulted not only from careless prescriptions and the doctors’ unwise thoughts about their patients’ histories but also from unnecessary surgery. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

In other words, iatrogenics (treatment-induced illness) is not a major concern for the profession, and an even greater concern for the patient. Doctors themselves feel restricted and dominated by the requirement to use all available technology. Technology is not a neutral element in the practice of medicine: doctors do not merely use technologies but are used by them. Second, technology creates its own imperatives and, at the same time, creates a wide-ranging social system to reinforce its imperatives. And third, technology changes the practice of medicine by redefining what doctors are, redirecting where they focus their own attention, and reconceptualizing how they view their patients and illness. Like some well-know diseases, the problems that have arisen as a result of the reign of technology came slowly and were barely perceptible at the start. As technology grew, so did the influence of drug companies and the manufacturers of medical instruments. As the training of doctors changed, so did the expectations of patients. As the increase in surgical procedures multiplied, so did the diagnoses which made them seem necessary. Through it all, the question of what was being undone had a low priority if it was asked at all. The Zeitgeist of the age placed such a question in a range somewhere between peevishness and irrelevance. In a growing Technopoly, there is no times or inclination to speak of technological debits. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Ho do researchers design what they cannot see? To make a new molecule, both its structure and the procedure to make it must be designed. Compared to gigantic science projects like the Superconducting Supercollider and the Hubble Space Telescope, working with molecules can be done on a shoestring budget. Still, the costs of trying many different procedures add up. To help predict in advance what will work and what will not, designers turn to models. You may have played with molecular models in chemistry class: colored plastic balls and sticks that fit together like Tinker Toys. Each color represents a different kind of atom: carbon, hydrogen, and so on. Even simple plastic models can give you a feel for how many bonds each kind of atom makes, how long the bonds are, and at what angels they are made. A more sophisticated form of models uses only sphere and partial spheres, without sticks. These colorful, bumpy shapes are called CPK models, and are widely used by professional chemists. Nobel laureate Donald Cram remarks that “We have spent hundreds of hours building CPK models of potential complexes and grading them for desirability as research targets.” His research, like that of fellow Nobelists Charles J. Pederson and Jean-Marie Lehn, has focused on designing and making medium-sized molecules that self-assemble. Although physical models cannot give a good description of how molecules bend and move, computer-based molecules can. Computer-based modeling is already playing a key role in molecular engineering. As John Walker (a founder and leader of Autodesk) has remarked, “Unlike all of the industrial revolutions that preceded it, molecular engineering requires, as an essential component, the ability to design, model, and simulate molecular structures using computers.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

This has not gone unnoticed in the business community. John Walker’s remark was part of a talk on nanotechnology given at Autodesk, a leader in computer-aided design, model, and simulate molecular structures using computers.” This has not gone unnoticed in the business community. John Walker’s remark was part of a talk on nanotechnology given at Autodesk, a leader in computer-aided design and one of the five largest software firms in the United States of America. Soon after this talk, the company made its first major investment in the computer-aided design of molecules. How does molecular design compare to more familiar kinds of engineering? Manufacturers and architects know that designs for new products and buildings are best done on a computer, by computer-aided design (CAD). The new molecular-design software can be called molecular Cad, and in its forefront are researchers such as Jay Ponder of the Yale University Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. Ponder explains that “There’s a strong link between what molecular designers are doing and what architects do. Michael Ward of Du Pont is designing a set of building blocks for a Tinker Toy set so that you can build larger structures. That is exactly we’re doing with modeling techniques. All the designs and mechanical engineering principles that apply to building a skyscraper or a bridge apply to molecular architecture as well. If you’re building a bridge, you’re going to model it and see how many trucks can be on the bridge at the same time without it collapsing, what kind of forces you’re going to apply to it, whether it can stand up to an earthquake. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

“And the same process goes on in molecular design: You’re designing pieces and then analyzing the stresses and forces and how they will change and perturb the structure. It’s exactly the same as designing and building a building, or analyzing the stresses on aby marco-scale structure. I think it’s important to get people to think in those terms. The molecular designer has to be creative in the same way that an architect has to be creative in designing a building. When people are looking at the interior of a protein structure and trying to redesign it to create a space that will have a particular function, such as binding to particular molecules, that’s like designing a room to use as a dining room—one that will fit certain sizes of tables and certain numbers of guests. It’s the same thing in both cases: You have to design a space for a function.” Ponder combines chemistry and computer science with an overall engineering approach: “I’m kind of a hybrid. I spend about half my time doing experiments and about half my time writing computer programs and doing computational work. In the laboratory, I cate or design molecules to test some of the computational ideas. So I’m at the interface.” The engineering perspective helps in thinking about where molecular research can lead: “even though with nanotechnology we’re at the nanometer scale, the structures are still big enough that an awful lot of things are classical. Again, it’s really like building bridges—very small bridges. And so there are many almost standard mechanical-engineering techniques for architecture and building structures, such as stress analysis, that apply. That American Technopoly has now embraced the computer in the same hurried and mindless way it embraced medical technology is undeniable, was perhaps inevitable, and is certainly most unfortunate.  #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

This is not to say that the computer is a blight on the symbolic landscape; only that, like medical technology, it has usurped powers and enforced mind-sets that a fully attentive culture might have wished to deny it. Thus, an examination of the ideas embedded in computer technology is worth attempting. Others, of course, have done this, especially Joseph Weizenbaum in his great and indispensable book Computer Power and Human Reason. Weizenbaum, however, ran into some difficulties, as everyone else has, because of the “universality” of computers, meaning (a) that their uses are infinitely various, and (b) that computers are commonly integrated into the structure of other machine. It is, therefore, hard to isolate specific ideas promoted by computer technology. The computer, for example, is quite unlike the stethoscope, which has a limited function in a limited context. Except for safecrackers, who, I am told, use stethoscopes to hear the tumblers of locks click into place, stethoscopes are used only by doctors. However, everyone uses or is used by computers, and for purposes that seem to know no boundaries. Putting aside such well-known functions as electronic filing, spreadsheets, and word-processing, one can make a fascinating list of the innovative, even bizarre, uses of computers. Computers are enabling aquatic designers to create giant water slides that mimic roller coasters and eight-foot-high artificial waves. Of course you know computers are used in board room meetings, but computer graphics help jurors to remember testimony better. We are sandwiched-on, tuned-in, visually oriented society, and jurors tend to believe tht they see. This technology keeps the jury’s attention by simplifying the material and by giving them little bursts of information. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20


Cresleigh Homes

If you like windows, this is the house for you. Buyers will be impression by all the light, which makes this etheral opened concept home feel like Heaven on Earth.

Live life on your unique terms when you’ve chosen a home at #MillsStation – this bedroom is just one of three at Residence 3.

This layout also boasts a den with a fireplace; check out more info in our bio and peep 👀 some more pics.

The exciting addition to the sought-after Cresleigh Ranch masterplan, offers a distinctive collection of ranch homes with designer details, thoughtful layouts and abundant personalization options.

There are only a few homes left in this highly coveted Cresleigh Homes Community, but there are also other homes available and being built.

#CresleighRanch
#CresleighHomes

011001-D-2987S-138 The Joint Service Color Guard advances the colors during the retirement ceremony of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry H. Shelton, at Fort Myer, Va., on Oct. 2, 2001. DoD photo by Helene C. Stikkel. (Released)

Custom DNA—Purified and Delivered in 48 Hours!

Today’s blistering pace of innovation forces manufacturers to choose a strategy: either invent and impose a standard on your industry, or piggyback on someone else’s standard—or be driven into a commercial Siberia in which your products have limited uses and markets. IBM has been the dominant force in the computer industry since its inception. It was IBM’s blue-suited and buttoned-down salespeople who first put mainframes into government offices and corporations. And for nearly two decades IBM faced only weak and disorganized competition. Much of IBM’s monumental success could be traced to its early ability to set—and enforce—a standard for what goes on inside computers. At first it was the hardware that counted most. However, gradually it became clear that software is the most important element in any computer system. So-called “applications programs” were sets of instructions to the machine to perform tasks like accounting or word-processing, printing, displaying graphics, and communicating. However, every computer has built into it a kind of meta-program called an “operating system,” which determines what other kinds of programs it can or cannot run. The key to dominating the computer industry lies in software—without which the machines are inert and useless. However, the key to dominating software is the operating system. And the ultimate lever of control—the key to dominating operating systems—lies in the standards to which they, in turn, are held. It was IBM’s control of these that made it the superpower of the computing World. Despite IBM’s efforts, however, other operating systems have sprung up over the years, from Ada, which is promoted by the U.S. Department of Defense, to Unix, originally offered by AT&T, plus many variations of these. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

When Apple Computer started the microcomputer revolution in the mid-seventies, it specifically opted to create non-IBM-compatible machines, choosing a different operating system. Today an all-out battle is being fought internationally between IBM and its chief competitors to set the operating systems standard for the future. The struggle is highly technical, with experts arguing with other experts. However, the implication reach far beyond the computers industry itself, and governments see it as directly related to their economic development plans for tomorrow. Because IBM still dominates the field, and because its operating systems constrain users and competitors alike, a London-based organization called X/Open has been set up to create a standard for the operating systems of mini-computers, workstations, and PCs—the newer fields in which IBM is most vulnerable. Originally set up by AT&T, Digital Equipment, and the German Siemens, it now includes Fujitsu as well, all demanding a new standard that is “open,” rather than a barrier to non-IBM equipment. Since then the pressure on IBM has become so strong, it has been compelled to join the group and to pledge, cross its heart, that it will in the future commit itself to “open” policies. Even before this setback had fully sunk in, IBM faced another challenge, this time pitting it directly against Ma Bell, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. As long as the 1960s, AT&T software engineers had developed an operating system called Unix for their own use. It had certain characteristics that made it attractive to universities and to some of the smaller computer makers. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Not yet in the computer business itself, AT&T let them use Unix for pennies. They, in turn, produced their own customized variations of Unix. Since then Unix has become increasingly popular, with Sun Microsoftsystems selling Unix-based machines to the fast-growing workstation market. In a shrewd strategic stroke, AT&T promptly bought into Sun and formed an alliance with Xerox, Unisys, Motorola, and other companies to create a single Unix standard under AT&T’s leadership. Backed by AT&T and these allies, Unix’s growing popularity presented a direct threat to the dominance of IMB and other computer manufacturers with proprietary operating systems. Thus IBM, the new convert to operating-system glasnost, or openness, counterattacked. Faced with the danger that a unified version of Unix would be available on AT&T machines before anyone else’s, IBM now formed its own alliance to fight back. Called the Open Software Foundation, this group now includes DEC, Groupe Bull from France, Siemens and Nixdorf from West Germany, and many others. It is working to formulate its own alternate standard for Unix Charges and countercharges blare from full-page ads in The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times as the battle over computer operating-system standards heats up. Once more the fate of giant corporations and whole industries hinges on a war over standards. Another war over standards we are seeing is with the public pressure to improve safety and prevent accidental cross-contamination of crops. This is a valid war and socially helpful. However, attempts to ban genetically modified (GM) foods altogether are irresponsible and potentially deadly. Even the cofounder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, has charged that the campaign against these foods is based on “fantasy and a complete lack of respect for science and logic.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Despite Luddite opposition, the World is going to move toward the production and use of environmentally safe genetically modified foods and other production of biotechnology. And that, combined with innovations brewing in a dozen other fields, can help crack once and for all the core of poverty on Earth. We know by now that genetic modification (GM) and other biotech methods can increase a crop’s nutritional content. They can reduce the need for fertilizers, irrigation and pesticides. They can help plants grow on arid land or in cold climates. They can radically boost per-acre yield. They can slash costs and increase the value of agricultural output. Until now, GM food crops have been widely grown in only six countries and have been largely limited to soybeans, canola, corn, and cotton because these crops are popular in the West and are commercially profitable. However, this is changing. The Indian Department of Biotechnology sees in the near future large-scale production of transgenically improved cabbage, tomato and potato crops. According to India’s former minister of agriculture, Rajnath Singh, the country also plans genetic research into twelve major poor-World crops, including maize, cassava and papaya. China has recently approved the importation of Monsanto’s genetically modified corn and soybeans, having, according to some, delay until now in order to give its own scientists more time to catch up with the technology. However, some farmers do not want to wait. Strict measures adopted in recent years to tighten control over imports of GM soybeans have failed to stop the growth rate of GM imports. In the first half of 2021, China bought some 22 million tonnes of U.S.A. soybeans. Approximately $7.7 billion USD. More than 70 percent of China’s imported soybeans are genetically modified. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

This underlines the difficulty of regulating or policing the new tools, especially in regions where governments have little control. However, it hardly invalidates the crying need for them. Recognizing this reality, according to Science, “China is developing the largest plant biotechnology capacity outside North America. Richard Manning, author of Against the Grain, a study of the historical rise and impact of agriculture, reminds us that farmers have been crossbreeding and raising hybrids for centuries—all based on trial, error, and luck. “Now,” he writers, “replace those fuzzy factors with precise information about the role each gene plays in a plant’s makeup. Today, scientists can tease out desire trains on the fly—something that used to take a decade or more to accomplish.” How can mixing chemicals (at least those specializing in synthesis) are doing construction work, and would be amazed that they can accomplish anything without being able to grab parts and put them in place. Chemists, in effect, work with their hands tied behind their backs. Molecular manufacturing can be termed “positional chemistry” or “positional synthesis,” and will give chemists the ability to put molecules where they want them in three-dimensional space. Rather than trying to design puzzle pieces that will stick together properly by themselves when shaken together in a box, chemists will then be able to treat molecules more like bricks to be stacked. The basic principles of chemistry will be the same, but strategies for construction will become far simpler. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Without position control, chemists face a problem something like this: Picture a giant glass barrel full of tiny battery-powered drills, buzzing away in all directions, vibrating around in the barrel. Your goal is to take a piece of wood and put a hole in just one specific spot. If you simply throw it in the barrel, it will be drilled haphazardly in many places. To control the process, you must protect all the places you do not want drilled—perhaps by gluing protective pieces of metal over most of the wood surface. This problem—how to protect one part of a molecule while altering another part—has forced chemists to develop ever-cleverer ploys to build larger and larger molecules. If chemists can make molecules, why are they not building fancy molecular machines? Chemists can achieve great things, but have focused much of their effort on duplicating molecules found in nature and then making minor variants. As an example, take palytoxin, a molecule found in a Hawaiian coral. It was so difficult to make in the lab that it has been called “The Mount Everest of synthetic chemistry,” and its synthesis was hailed as a triumph. Other efforts are poured into making small molecules with unusual bonding, or molecules of remarkable symmetry, like “cubane” and “dodecahedrane” (shaped like the Platonic solids they are named after). Chemist, at least in the United States of America, regard themselves as natural scientists even when their life’s work is the construction of molecules by artificial means. Ordinarily, people who build things are called engineers. And indeed, at the University of Tokyo the Department of Synthetic Chemistry is part of the Faculty of Engineering; its chemists are designing molecular switches for storing computer data. Engineering achievements will require work directed at engineering goals. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

How could chemist move toward building molecular machines? Molecular engineers working toward nanotechnology need a set of molecular building blocks for making large, complex structures. Systematic building-block construction was pioneered by Bruce Merrifield, winner of the 1984 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His approach, known as “solid phase synthesis,” or simply “the Merrifield method,” is used to synthesize the long chain of amino acids that form proteins. In the Merrifield method, cycles of chemical reaction each add one molecular building block to the end of a chain anchored to a solid support. This happens in a parallel to each of the trillions of identical chains, building up trillions of molecular objects with a particular sequence of building blocks. Chemists routinely use the Merrifield method to make molecules larger than playtoxin, and related techniques are used for making DNA in so-called gene machines: an ad from an Alabama company reads, “Custom DNA—Purified and Delivered in 48 hours.” While it is hard to predict how a natural protein chain will fold—they were not designed to fold predictably—chemists could make building blocks that are larger, more diverse, and more inclined to fold up in a single, obvious, stable pattern. With a set of building blocks like these, and the Merrifield method to string them together, molecular engineers could design and build molecular machines with greater ease. By the turn of the century, medicine was well on its way to almost total reliance on technology, especially after the development of diagnostic laboratories and the discovery and use of antibiotics in the 1940s. Medical practice had entered a new stage. The first had been characterized by direct communication with the patient’ experiences based on the patient’s reports, and the doctor’s questions and observations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

The second was characterized by direct communication with patients’ bodies through physical examination, including the use of carefully selected technologies. The stage we are now in is characterized by indirect communication with the patient’s experience and body through technical machinery. In this stage, we see the emergence of specialists—for example, pathologists and radiologists—who interpret the meaning of technical information and have no connection whatsoever with the patient, only tissue and photographs. It is to be expected that, as medical practice moved from one stage to another, doctors tended to lose the skill and insight that predominated in the previous stage. So, without realizing what has happened, the physician in the last two centuries has gradually relinquished his unsatisfactory attachment to subjective evidence—what the patient says—only to substitute a devotion to technological evidence—what the machine says. He has thus exchanged one partial view of disease for another. As the physician makes greater use of the technology of diagnosis, he perceives his patient more and more indirectly through a screen of machines and specialists; he also relinquishes control over more and more of the diagnostic process. These circumstances tend to estrange him from his patient and from his own judgement There is still another reason why the modern physician is estranged from his or her own judgment. To put it in the words of a doctor who remains skilled in examining his or her patients and in evaluating their histories: “Everyone who has a headache wants and expects a CAT scan.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Roughly six out of every ten CAT scans the doctor order are unnecessary, with no basis in the clinical evidence and the patient’s reported experience and sensations. Why are they done? As a protection against malpractice suits. Which is to say, as medical practice has moved into the stage of total reliance on machine-generated information, so have the patients. Put simply, if a patient does not obtain relief from a doctor who has failed to use all the available technological resources, including drugs, the doctor is deemed vulnerable to the charge of incompetence. This situation is compounded by the fact that the personal relationship between doctor and patient now, in contrast to a century ago, has become so arid that the patient is not restrained by intimacy or empathy from appealing to the courts. Moreover, doctors are reimbursed by medical-insurance agencies on the basis of what they do, not on the amount of time they spend with patients. Nontechnological medicine is time-consuming. It is more profitable to do a CAT scan on a patient with a headache then to spend time getting information about his or her experiences and sensations. What all this means is that even restrained and selective technological medicine becomes very difficult to do, economically undesirable, and possibly professionally catastrophic. The culture itself—its courts, its bureaucracies, its insurance system, the training of doctors, patients’ expectations—is organized to support technological treatments. There are no longer methods of treating illness; there is only one method—the technological one. Medical competence is now defined by the quantity and variety of machinery brough to bear on disease. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

Three interrelated reasons converged to create this situation. The American character was biased toward an aggressive approach and was well prepared to accommodate medical technology; the nineteenth-century technocracies, obsessed with invention and imbued with the idea of progress, initiated a series of remarkable and wondrous inventions; and the culture reoriented itself to ensure that technological aggressiveness became the basis of medical practice. The ideas promoted by this domination of technology can be summed up as follows: Nature is an implacable enemy that can be subdued only by technical means; the problems created by technological solutions (doctors call these “side effects”) can be solved only by the further application of technology (we all know the joke about an amazing new drug that cures nothing but has interesting side effects); medical practice must focus on disease, not on the patient (which is why it is possible to say that the operation or therapy was successful but the patient died); and information coming from a machine, from which it follows that a doctor’s judgment, based on insight and experience, is less worthwhile than the calculations of one’s machinery. Do these ideas lead to better medicine? In some respects, yes; in some respects, no. The answer tends to be “yes” when one considers how doctors now use lasers to remove cataracts quickly, painlessly, and safely; or how they can remove a gall-bladder by using a small television camera (a laparoscope) inserted through an equally small puncture in the abdomen to guide the surgeon’s instruments to the diseased organ through still another small puncture, thus making it unnecessary to cut open the abdomen. Of course, those who are inclined to answer “no” to the question will ask how many laparoscopic cholecystectomies are performed because of the existence of the technology. This is a crucial point. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

This hostile relationship between the prevailing passions of the philosopher and those of the demos was taken by the philosophers to be permanent, for human nature is unchanging. As long as there are men, they will be motivated by fear of death. This passion is primarily what constitutes the cave, a horizon within which hope seems unjustified. Serving the community that lives in the cave, risking one’s life for what preserves life, is honored. Vulgar morality is the code of this selfish collectivity, and whatever steps outside its circle is the object of moral indignation. And moral indignation, not ordinarily selfishness or sensuality, is the greatest danger to the thinker. The fear that the gods who protect the city will be angered and withdraw their protection indices ecstasies of terror in men and makes them wildly vindictive against those who transgress the divine law. There is a law that is the decree of God. When America was established, God told the founding Fathers that they were to expand its boarders, and grow more land to established Christianity and Capitalism. In the Apology, Socrates explains why he, such a good citizen, stayed out of Athens’ political life. When he presided in the Council he refused to put to the vote—and was overridden—a motion to put to death the commanders of Athens’ greatest naval victory because they had prudently refused to try to pick up the bodies of their dead from the water due to a storm that endangered the living. However, the divine law required the recovery of the bodies, and moral rage insisted on capital punishment for the commanders. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Mere prudence cannot override the sacred. Socrates’ philosophy has more in common with that prudence than it does with the popular moral fervor, which also caused his death, essentially for putting the prudent above the sacred. This fervor Socrates took to be the substrate of civil society. Thus there are two possibilities: the philosopher must rule absolutely, or he, “like a man in a storm when dust and rain are blown about by the wind, stands aside under a little wall.” There is no third way, or it belongs only to the intellectual, who attempts to influence and ends up in the power of the would-be influenced. He enhances their power and adapts his thought to their ends. The philosopher wants to know things as they are. He loves the truth. That is a moral virtue. Presumably he would prefer not to practice deception; but if it is a condition of his survival, he has no objection to it. The hopes of changing mankind almost always end up in changing not mankind but one’s thought. Reformers may often be intransigent or extreme in deed, but they rarely intransigent in thought, for they have to be relevant. However, they are rarely intransigent in thought, for they have to be relevant. However, the man who fits most easily into the conventions and is least constrained by struggle with them has more freedom for thought. The real radicalism of ancient thought is covered over by its moderation in political deed, and this misleads many modern scholars. The ancients had no tenure to protect them and wanted to avoid the prostitution to which those who have to live off their wits are prone. There is no moral order protecting philosophers or ensuring that truth will win out in the long, or the short, run. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

So philosophers engaged in a gentle art of deception. There is no leaving civil society, no matter what Thoreau may have thought. However, they cannot avoid being noticed. They are different. Therefore philosophers allied themselves with the gentlemen, making themselves useful to them, never quite revealing themselves to them, strengthening their gentleness and openness by reforming their education. Why are the gentlemen more open than people? Because they have money and hence leisure and can appreciate the beautiful and useless. And because they despise necessity. Nietzsche said with some good reason that ancient gentlemen despised eating and pleasures of the flesh because these acts are forced on them by their animal nature, and they had the pride of the free. And although they tend to be reverent, they can be irreverent, and certainly are less prone to religious fanaticism than the many, because they are less in the grip of fear. Now, one day, a Processian whose name I do not remember began to tell me how much he enjoyed our music, and then in a sort of off-the-wall manner, began to speak on other matters: “You know, a lot of people say The Process is a Fascist organization It’s actually half-true. It was founded by the German Democratic Party, a neo-Nazi group in Germany as a front to raise money over here in the States. But since that time it’s grown more or less independent of the German group. I know a number of American Nazis and fascists who won’t have anything to do with The Process. They say they don’t want to be a part of a group that’s run by Europeans. When I was over in Europe, Interpol approached me and offered to pay me to spy on The Process. But I turned them down. They approached me a second time when I was at The Process headquarters in Toronto, but I told them I couldn’t do anything like that.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

The fellow went on to mention that he was of White Russian extraction, that his father escaped after the Revolution, and had lived for many years in Mexico. He mentioned that his brother had been busted for possession of drugs, and that he had to leave to bail him out of jail. I listened to all of this with little comment. Later that evening, Father Matthew sided-up to me and asked whether if I would do artwork for them. My illustration of a dragon showed up in the Death Issues of the Process Magazine. At closing time, after my folk group Changes was finishing up a set, Father Matthew told us, “You guys are welcome to stay, we have a little private party after closing we call an ‘Aesop,’ we sort of get loose and have a good time.” My partner, who had reservations about the group from the start, said he wanted to start heading home. I begged off as well. Father Matthew looked a bit crestfallen, but made no attempt to change our minds. Matthew asked us if we were interested in going out with the Processians to the main mental health facility in the area. Neither of my partners in Changes wanted to go. I gathered that the Processian provided entertainment to the inmates at Cook County Jail and Reed Mental Health Facility. I had no idea whether these visitations were intended as a charitable activity or for recruiting purposes. But over the years The Process seemed to attract some pretty strange characters. One woman member had been convicted of pouring blood on the draft tables at the Army Induction Center. This same woman subsequently became a leading personality in the emerging pagan movement in Chicago. She also operated a prostitution ring in the East Rogers Park area of Chicago’s North Side. In the Spring of 1980 a former Process member, Yvonne Kleinfelder, was found guilty of murdering her live-in mate, John Comer, and received a 25-year prison sentence. Comer was tied to a chair for six days after Kleinfelder emptied a foot-high lobster pot of boiling water on him. Prior to her murderous deed, Kleinfelder proclaimed herself a born again Christian. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

It is always good, then, to consider the background to the facts recorded in the Bible. Those who claim that a Christian should reject all medical help and who base their arguments on James chapter 5 may find that it is this very chapter that urges us not to neglect the use of medicine. Nevertheless it is true that the passage in the main dealing with the question of faith healing. Thus if a Christian feels constrained to refuse medical help and to rely solely on the Lord for healing, ne cannot be criticized. However, such an attitude of faith must never be made into a law which is binding on all Christians. I am sad to say that I know of many unfortunate examples where this has been the case. One of the most important points to bear in mind when considering the historical background is the fact that there is a distinction to be made between healing motivated by God and magical healing. In the ancient World it was common to imagine that sickness was caused by evil spirits. Hence the process of healing a person was often akin to the exorcising of demons, and would consist of the exorciser or the magic charmer calling on the name of the spirit in question or on the name of a more powerful spirit. We have a case of this recorded in Acts 19, where some travelling Jewish exorcists attempted to cast out a demon in the name of Jesus. They themselves were not Christian and the result was that they were overpowered and had to flee. We could easily say that the type of healing recorded in the New Testament is no longer valid for today, were it not for the fact that people claim that similar miracles still happen today. With this we come to the center of the problem. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

It is true to say that almost everyone who falls ill will at some time or other ask one’s self the question, “How can I get well?” The majority of people will first of all consult a doctor, but if this does not bring the relief they want, many will then turn aside to seek help in occult forms of healing. And these still exist in the 21st century. Times have not changed. In conselling people I have met with a number of different types occult healing. After a nine-month sojourn in New Mexico, I returned to the Process headquarters to attend a Midnight Meditation, Father Barnabas had been transferred to New Orleans. Mother Mercedes was now in New York. Father Matthew was still in Chicago, but his wife and children had been moved someplace else. It was not long after when the Schism occurred. DeGrimston had been “purged,” and his estranged wife Mary Anne had reorganized the group into the “Foundation Church of the Millennium.” Gone were the old symbols. Gone too were the black outsides and cowled heads; gone where the old books and magazines. The new symbol was a six-pointed Star of the David with two F’s—one upside-down, the other upright. The new Wells Street coffee house was on the first floor at street level. Whatever mystique the Process had previously projected, the new group seemed only a bland shadow. I ran into Father Matthew one day across the street from J’s Place (the J stood for Jehovah, the only surviving God from the old pantheon which the Foundation Church still believe in). He borrowed a phone from phone from me and we stood at the curb talking…apparently he was being transferred to Miami. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

When I asked about what happened to the old group, he looked down, shook his head and said, “It’s really just too complex to go into.” Later I was to learn that Matthew changed his name to Father Nathan and was leading the Miami group. They gave the appearance of being involved in community and charitable work. By 1974 the Foundation Church place in Chicago folded. Robert DeGrimston, meanwhile, attempted to lead his remaining loyal retinue, but later faded out of sight American urban center, and can be found in the white pages of the phone book. An urbane, different, private man, DeGrimston decried the sensationalized histories of The Process as “unbearable,” and lambasted Bainbridge’s account, too, as a “pack of lies.” The fact that DeGrimston was so easily reached by phone immediately rendered as nonsense Maury Terry’s (and others) accusations of DeGrimston as a shadowy and unreachable ritual murder team captain. Filmmaker Kenneth Anger and novelist Steven Schneck, and with the LaVey formed the Magic Circle, whose weekly rituals were not open to the public. The thought soon struck LaVey that the energy the group was being squandered trying to move a teacup by psychic means and might be better put to use spreading the philosophy he had developed throughout his eclectic evolution. Thus, on Walpurgisnacht 1966, the Magic Circle became the Church of Satan, with LaVey as its High Priest, and his pretty blonde wife, Diane, as High Priestess. In 1967, the Church received national press coverage when LaVey performed a Satanic wedding of socialite Judith Case and radical journalist John Raymond. In may of that year, it made news again when LaVey performed a Satanic baptism of the Lavey’s three-year-old daughter, Zeena, and in December, he crated another media event when he performed Satanic last rites for a sailor member, complete with a full naval color guard. With the publicity came a flood of would-be initiates to the church. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Among the curious seeking entrance to the “Devil house” were celebrities like Sammy Davis, Jr., singer Barbara McNair, and veteran actor Keenan Wynn, upon whom Lavey later bestowed an honorary priesthood. Davis was such a fervent member that, for a time, he wore a Satanic Baphomet medallion on stage and actively proselytized the cause, setting up dinner meetings at his Los Angeles home between LaVey and various movie and entertainment personalities. While most of the more famous Hollywood figures requested their affiliation with the church be kept secret for fear of harming their careers, one who did not mind was buxom sex symbol Jayne Mansfield. Mansfield showed up at the church in 1966 with a request that the High Priest put a curse on her second husband, Matt Cimber, with whom she was engaged in a child custody battle. After she won a favorable court ruling, she became an ardent Devil’s disciple. When her young son, Zoltan, was later critically mauled by a lion at Jungleland Wild Animal Park, the actress called LaVey for help. The High Priest drove to the top of Mount Tamalpais, near San Francisco, and in the middle of a torrential rainstorm summoned all his magical powers while slowing out a soliloquy to Satan. Mansfield credited the boy’s miraculous recover to Satanic intervention and swore her undying loyalty to LaVey and the Prince of Darkness. There are many cases where people have been healed by black magic. There was a woman with mental and psychic disturbances who came for counselling. In the course of conversation an amulet was found in her possession. At first the woman refused to part with it because she was convinced that is she did so she would die in a few days. At least this is what the magic charmer said. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Finally however, she handed it over and she was shocked on opening it to find a piece of paper with the words, “Satan is your Lord and Master.” As she hocked her amulet, she became sick again. Now, this is common. Unfortunately the relationship with LaVey inspired the jealousy of Mansfield’s boyfriend, Sam Brody, who threatened to expose LaVey as a charlatan unless he stayed away from Jayne. LaVey responded by putting a curse on Brody, who shortly thereafter smashed up his Maserati and broke his leg. Undeterred, Brody continues his threats and LaVey retaliated with yet another cursing ritual, this one more serious. LaVey claims that he called Jayne and warned her to stay away from Brody, but she did not, and on June 29, 1967, the car in which she and Brody were traveling rear-ended a truck outside New Orleans. Brody and the driver were killed instantly and Mansfield was decapitated in the crash. LaVey blamed himself for Jayne’s death. It seems that while clipping some newspaper articles, he noticed that on the back of one was a photograph of Mansfield and that he had cut off her head. It was then he received the phone call saying she had been killed. To this say, LaVey claims to be shaken up by the “coincidence.” Mansfield’s tragic death and the subsequent revelations about the “curse” proved to be a media bonanza for the Church of Satan, and membership mushroomed. LaVey’s The Satanic Bible, expounding his philosophy, became an immediate occult best-seller upon its publication in 1969, its sales soon topping the million mark. There was even a poster copying the Army’s image of Uncle Sam: a horned, pointing LaVey announcing, “Satan Want You.” Both God and Lucifer are a well-crafted product re-evaluating the mythical conflict between Heaven and Hell, from a cultured and witty perspective. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

The rise of the demonic anti-hero in youth culture is also reflected in, of all places, the toy market. In April 1998, the Torture Garden—London’s leading fetish club—held a “Requiem for Anton LaVey.” “We the participants are serious Magickians [sic],” announced the organizers, “and we are performing this important ritual with real intent. At this time, near the end of the second millennium of Christian oppression, it is time…to throw off the shackles of religion and break its power. WE HAVE NO GODS BUT OUR OWN TRUE SELVES. The Black Mass is a great celebration of Flesh, Ecstasy and Freedom. Our intent:- it is our Will, to summon Satan—FOR FUN!!!” The vent was entertaining, with four floors of self-conscious exhibitionism, though, sadly Satan never put in an appearance. Perhaps this is because fetishism is almost conformist today, unlike the days when LaVey was an enthusiastic advocate. The Black Pope never advocated universal promiscuity but indulgence of whatever appetites an individual might possess. With the occult becoming so popular and mostly through the TV, it means television is not utterly useless. There are the old examples of the destruction of Joseph McCarthy, the exposure of the Vietnam War, voting fraud, the civil rights movement. We cannot deny that television has occasionally served what appears, even to me, as a progressive purpose. And yet what ties all of these together is the extent to which they were framed in the sort of objective terms that television can handle. Mail-in ballots, a broken immigration shortage, corruption in California were exposed because the issues were lies, deceits, corruption—objective matters. These are all “good television.” And everyone has to face the hard realities of racism, even in their own families. The wiring-in of everyone to television is nearly almost complete. A new national attitude is developing. The obvious rightness of the struggle to rebuild America and American pride cannot be avoided. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

 In turning the television telescope upon the American rights movement, the powers that be in television are not necessarily acting out of any deep moral or political enlightenment; they are following the inexorable dictates of the medium itself. The Rebirth of America, American produced and American made is the luckiest, most conscious, and deliberate, it is the smartest civil rights movement yet because it is controversial. There has been a good deal of violence. The issues are framed in objective terms: rights, opportunities, jobs, housing, homelessness, wages, taxes, health care, Americana, energy, cars, fuel, and schools. There are the good guys and the bad guys. It is simple to tell which is which because they even come in different political colors. There are inspired leaders who stand bravely against dazzling odds. There are mass demonstrations. All of this is the ingredients of “good television.” They have action, they highlight, they are highly visible, they are people-centered, they even deal with the subject of sensory, and they do require contextual understanding, they are “issues.” The American Unity and Civil Rights Movement is about power and restoring wealth to America. Everyone wants to be like America because they want laws, order, freedom, capitalism, the ability to get a job and become a billionaire. They want to buy their own house and the freedom to buy the car of their dreams and save for their retirement. And now we find every suburban community wanting prestigious and top-rated schools. There is something odd in the quality of success that America allows people. It is all free! All you have to do is work hard and everything you want is within the touch of your hands. No one can cap your career or salary; all you need is the skills or education and everything you want can be yours. Success is better than beauty, wealth, or being the prettiest person in the World. Capitalism is the way to go. Money and status can make the dullest people, the most desirable persons in the entire World! #RandolphHarris 21 of 21


Cresleigh Homes

Talk about flexibility – the Residence 1 home at #Havenwood lets you find the best use of space for the den.

And psst…the one on homesite 73 is available for owners! It is truly designed for luxury living.

Innovative areas of the homes offer plenty of flexibility. Turn it into an office, a fourth bedroom, an art space…you name it!


We can’t wait to see these rooms filled with love and laughter – it’s the best way to decorate any interior space. 😀

Embrace indoor/outdoor living, and you can entertain to your heart’s content. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-one/


#CresleighHomes

One Day, Whilst I Was There in Heaven

Although the philosophic experience is understood by the philosophers to be what is uniquely human, the very definition of man, the dignity and charm of philosophy have not always or generally been popularly recognized. This is not the case with the other claimants to the throne, the prophet or the saint, the hero or the statesman, the poet or the artist, whose claims, if not always accepted, are generally recognized to be serious. They were always present, apparently coeval with civil society, whereas philosophers appeared late on the scene and had to make their way. And this has something to do with the problem, but it may be symptom rather than cause. I doubt that the people have much greater access to the typical experiences of prophets, kings, and poets than to those of the philosophers. Great imagination, inspiration, intrepidity in the pursuit of glory are further from the ordinary lives of ordinary men than is the experience of reasoning found in the practical arts in daily use, like farming, building, shoemaking, and which is despised by the higher men. Socrates always has to remind his aristocratic interlocutors of these crafts and uses them as models of the knowledge aristocrats lack. However, this may indicate part of the difficulty: the people want something higher, something exalted, to admire. And certainly Socrates’ person, at first sight anyway, does not provide such an object of admiration, as Aristophanes’ comedy makes abundantly clear. Moreover, and more important, the prophets, kings, and poets are clearly benefactors of mankind at large, providing men with salvation, protection, prosperity, myths and entertainment. They are the noble bulwarks of civil society, and men tend to regard as good what does good to them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Philosophy does no such good. All to the contrary, it is austere and somewhat sad because it takes away many of men’s fondest hopes. It certainly does nothing to console men in their sorrows and their unending vulnerability. Instead it points to their unprotectedness and nature’s indifference to their individual fates. Socrates is old, unattractive, and not well off, of no family, without prestige or power in the city, and babbles about Ether’s taking Zeus’s place. The kings praised by poetry and illustrated in sculpture are ambiguous. On the one had they seem to exist for their own sake, beauty in which we do not participate and to which we look up. on the other hand, they are in our service—ruling us, curing us, perhaps punishing us, but for our sakes, teaching us, pleasing us. Achilles is perfection, what most men can only dream about being, and is therefore their superior and properly their master. However, he is also their warrior protector, who in order to save Greece overcomes the fear of death that other men cannot overcome. All the heroes are in the business of taking care of and flattering men, the demos, receiving admiration and glory as their pay. In some sense they are fictions of civil society, whose ends they serve. Not that they do not do the deeds for which they are praised, but the goodness of those deeds is measured, alas, by utility, by the greatest good of the greatest number. The statesman possesses virtues that are supposed to be good in themselves; but he is measured by his success in preserving the people. Those virtues are means to the end of preservation, id est, the good life is a good way of life, it cannot, at least in its most authentic expression, be, or serious be understood to be, in the city’s service. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

The theoretical life, therefore, has an almost impossible public relations problem. Socrates hints at this in his Apology when, ridiculously—since he was never angry and since he distinguished himself as a soldier exclusively in retreats—he likens himself to Achilles. The defenselessness of philosophy in the city is what Aristophanes points out and ridicules. He, the poet, has much sympathy with the philosopher’s wisdom but prides himself on not being so foolish. He can take care of himself, win prizes from and be paid by the people. His stance is that of the wise guy in the face of the wise man; he is city smart. He warns the philosophers and proves prophetic in comically portraying the city’s vengeance. The generation of great men who followed Socrates, including Plato, Xenophon and Isocrates, took the warning very much to heart. Philosophy, they recognized, is weak, precisely because it is new, not necessary, not a participant in the city’s power. It is threatened and is a threat to all the beliefs that tie the city together and unite the other high types—priests, poets, and statesmen—against philosophy. So Socrates’ successors gathered all their strength and made a heroic effort to save and protect philosophy. Socrates in Aristophanes’ story minded his own business, was the subject of rumor and ridicule, until a father who was in debt because of his son’s prodigality wanted to free himself of his obligations. Socrates’ atheism was the right prescription for him, insofar as it meant that he need not fear Zeus’s thunderbolt if he broke the law, if he perjured himself. The law is revealed to be merely manmade, and hence there is no witness to his misdeeds if he can escape the attention of other men. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Philosophy liberates this unwise old man. His son, too, is liberated, but with the unexpected consequence that he loses reverence for his father and his mother, who are no longer under divine protection. This the father cannot stand and returns to his belief in the gods, who it turns out protect the family as well as the city. In a rage he burns down Socrates’ school. Aristophanes was prescient. The actual charges against Socrates were corrupting the youth and impiety, with the implication that the latter is the deepest cause of the former. And whatever scholars may say about the injustice of Aristophanes’ or Athens’ charges, the evidence supports those charges. In the Republic, for example, marriages are short-term affairs arranged only for reproduction, the family is dissolved, wise sons rule over and can discipline unwise fathers, and the prohibitions against incest are, to say the least, relaxed. The reverence for antiquity is replaced by reason, and the rule of fathers and the ancestral are disputed. This follows immediately from Socrates’ procedures, and it entered into the bloodstream of the West, one of the innumerable effects of philosophy that, for better or worse, are to be found only there. Angry fathers are one of the constituencies morally hostile to Socrates, who was not trying to achieve this result, or to reform the family. His example and the standards of judgment he invoked simply led to it. Socrates collided not with culture, society or economy but with the law—which means with a political fact. The law is coercive. The human things impinge on the philosophers in the form of political demands. What philosophers need to survive is not anthropology, sociology or economics, but political science. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Thus without any need for sophisticated reasons, political science was the first human science or science of human things that had to be founded, and remained the only one until sometime in the eighteenth century. The stark recognition that he depended on the city, that as he looked up to the Heavens he lost his footings on the ground, compelled the philosopher to pay attention to politics, to develop a philosophic politics, a party, as it were, to go along with the other parties, democratic, oligarchic, aristocratic and monarchic, that are always present. He founded the truth party. Ancient political philosophy was almost entirely in the service of philosophy, of making the World a safer place for philosophy. Moreover, the law against which Socrates collided was the one concerning the gods. In its most interesting expression of the law is the divine law. The city is sacred, it is a theological-political entity. (This is, by the way, why the Theological-Political Treatise is for Spinoza the book about politics.) The problem for the philosophers is primarily religion. The philosophers must come to terms with its authoritative presence in the city. Socrates in the Apology makes some suggestions as to how the philosopher must behave. He must deny that he is an atheist, although he remains ambiguous as to the character of his belief. Any careful reading of the Apology makes clear that Socrates never says he believes in the gods of the city. However, he does try to make himself appear to be a sing sent from the gods, commanded to do what he does by the Delphic god. Nonetheless he is condemned. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Socrates states his problem succinctly in explaining his way of life to his jurors: “If I tell you that I would be disobeying the god and on that account it is impossible for me to keep quiet, you will not be persuaded by me, taking it that I am ironizing. And if I tell you that it is the greatest good for a human being to have discussions everyday about virtue and the other things you hear me talking about, examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, you will be even less persuaded.” The people recognize Socrates’ irony, his talking down to them, and see how implausible his religious claims are. His irony appears as irony and is therefore not successful. However, the truth, unadorned by the Delphic cover, is incomprehensible, corresponding to no experience his audience has. He would be closer to success in sticking to his first story. One can from this very description analyze the political situation. There are three groups of men: most do not understand him are hostile to him, and vote for his condemnation; a smaller but not inconsiderable group also do not understand Socrates but glimpse something noble in him, are sympathetic to him and vote for his acquittal; finally, a very small group knows what he means when he says the greatest good for a human being is talking about—not practicing—virtue (unless talking about virtue is practicing it). The last group is a politically inconsiderable. Therefore the whole hope for the political salvation of philosophy rests with the friendliness of the second group, good citizens and ordinarily pious, but somehow open. And it was to such men, the gentlemen, that philosophy made its rhetorical appeal for almost two thousand years. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

When they ruled, the climate for philosophy was more or less salubrious. When the people, the demos, ruled, religious fanaticism or vulgar utility made things much less receptive to philosophy. Tyrants might be attracted to philosophers, either out of genuine curiosity or the desire to adorn themselves, but they are the most unreliable of allies. All of this rests on a psychological analysis that was forced on the philosophers, who had previously not paid much attention to men or their souls. They observed that the most powerful passion of most men is fear of death. Very few men are capable of coming to terms with their own extinction. It is not so much stupidity that closes men to philosophy but love of their own, particularly of their own lives, but also love of their own children and their own cities. It is the hardest task of all to face the lack of cosmic support for what we care about. Socrates, therefore, defines the task of philosophy as “learning how to die.” Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death—in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life—which is characteristic of a serious life. Individuals demand significance for this individual life, which is so subject to accident. Most human beings and all cities require the unscientific mixture of general and particular, necessity and chance, nature and convention. It is just this mixture that the philosophers cannot accept and which he separates into its constituent parts. He applies what he sees in nature to his own life. “As are the generations of leaves, so are the generations of men,”—a somber lesson that is only compensated for by the intense pleasure accompanying insight. Without that pleasure, which so few have, it would be intolerable. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

The philosopher, to the extent that he really only enjoys thinking and loves the truth, cannot be disabused. He cherishes no illusion that can crumble. If he is comic, at least he is absolutely immune to tragedy. Nonphilosophic men love the truth only as long as it does not conflict with what they cherish—self, family, country, fame, love. When it does not conflict, they hate the truth and regard as a monster the man who does not care for these noble things, who proves they are ephemeral and treats them as such. The gods are the guarantors of the unity of nature and convention dear to most men, which philosophy can only dissolve. The enmity between science and mankind at large is, therefore, not an accident. Behind every strategy there is a dream, an image of what should be. A Third Wave strategy for breaking the back of poverty begins with what may, to some, seem like a dream—but could well become a reality, and soon. Indeed, it is the old anti-poverty strategies, not the new one, that are unrealistic. Incremental microchanges at the village level are not enough to bring about the massive progress that is needed. Nor can China or India, or those who follow their course, hope to succeed by turning themselves into megafactories polluting their air, land, and water to degrees never before seen and jam-cramming hundreds of millions more peasants into cities already at the breaking point. We will keep people from fleeing the countryside into urban favelas, villas miserias, shantytowns and squatter villages only when the productivity gap is closed between what brute labor on the soil can accomplish and what advanced technology makes possible today—and will make possible tomorrow. It will also take far greater clarity of purpose. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The entire public discussion of global poverty is muddied by a failure to decide whether the goal is to minimize absolute poverty—or to close the much-discussed “gap” between rich and poor. Closing the gap can be accomplished by impoverishing the affluent without necessarily raising the living standards of the poor one iota. However, contrast, the individual revolution radically widened the gap—but also reduced poverty. Attempts to move everyone forward equally have repeatedly proved a disaster. The prime goal should be to raise the living conditions above absolute poverty, whether or not the relative gap widens. Only after every baby is fed, after everyone’s drinking water is safe, after average life expectancy in poor countries reaches at least seventy and after basic education targets are met should closing the gap be a priority. What is needed is a strategy aimed at nothing less than the transformation of today’s impoverished rural areas into centers of advanced, highly productive enterprise—regions no longer dependent on the muscle power of emaciated, old-before-their-time parents but on the brainpower of their children. To be realistic, this strategy must look beyond the immediate—at what is emerging, even embryonic. Fortunately, powerful tools now being developed can help us. They begin with the fiercely contested issue of genetically modified food. Where is protein engineering headed? Protein engineering is a powerful tool in synthetic biology that can create proteins with tremendous potential for therapeutic and industrial use. The field has recently taken giant leaps forward from its origins, and some of its pioneers predict that the next five to ten years hold exponentially more promise. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

True protein engineering is building proteins completely from scratch, engineered to do what you want them to do. Like the IBM physicists, protein designers are moved by a vision of molecular engineering. Bill DeGardo predicted, “I think we will be able to make catalysts or enzymelike molecules, possibly ones that catalyze reactions not catalyzed in nature.” Catalysts are molecular machines that speed up chemical reactions: they form a shape for the two reacting molecules to fit into and thereby help the reaction move faster, up to a million reactions per second. New ones, for reactions that now go slowly, will give enormous cost saving to the chemical industry. Denver researchers John Stewart, Karl Hahn, and Wieslaw Klis announced their new enzyme, designed from scratch over a period of two years and built successfully on the first try. It is a catalyst, making some reactions go about 100,00 times faster.  Nobel Prize-wining biochemist Bruce Merrifield believed that “if others can reproduce and expand on this work, it will be one of the most important achievements in biology.” DeGrado also has longer-terms plans for protein design, beyond making new catalysts: “It will allow us to think about designing molecular devices in the next five to ten years. It should be possible ultimately to specify a particular design and build it. Then you will have, say, proteinlike molecules that self-assemble into complex molecular objects, which can serve as machinery. However, there is a limit to how small you can make devices. You will shrink things down so far and then you will not be able to go any further, because you have reached your molecular dimension.” Mark Pearson shows that management at Du Pont also has this vision. Regarding the prospects for nanotechnology and assemblers, he remarked, “You know, it’ll take money and effort and good ideas for sure. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

“But to my way of thinking, there is no absolute fundamental limitation to preclude us from doing this kind of thing.” He did not say his company plans to develop nanotechnology, but such plans are not really necessary. Du Pont is already on the nanotechnology path, for other—shorter-term, commercial—reasons. Like IMB, if they do decide to move quickly, they have the resources and forward-looking people needed to succeed. Scientists have moved beyond predicting the structures of proteins that exist in nature to designing completely new “unnatural” proteins—and then custom-designed proteins for particular purposes. For example, scientists working with virologist Ian Wilson, Ph.D., a professor of structural biology at the Scripps Research Institute, designed a protein that can exploit a vulnerability on the surface of the influenza virus. Using a program called Rosetta, they identified candidate chains of amino acids that might fold in the right way, and tested the top candidates on the real flu virus. The most successful of the new proteins, which they named HB1.6928.2.3, proved 100% protective against death from the flu in a mouse model in a study published in Nature in October 2017. Now, if three different materials are arranged in a grid capable of generating electricity, researchers at Martin Luther University (MLU) Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) have found that the energy generations of ferroelectric crystals in solar cells can be increased by a factor of thousands. To achieve this increase in electrical energy production, the researchers created crystalline layers of barium titanate, strontium titanate, and calcium titanate, which they placed alternatively on top of one another, separating the positive and negative charges in the same photovoltaic device. This arrangement could greatly increase the efficiency of solar panels. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Who else build molecular objects? Chemists, most of whom do not work on proteins, are the traditional experts in building molecular objects. As a group, they have been building molecules for over a century, with ever-increasing ability and confidence. Their methods are all indirect: they work with billions of atoms at a time—massive parallelism—but without control of the positions of their workpieces. The molecules typically tumble randomly in a liquid or gas, like pieces of a puzzle that may or may not fit together correctly when shaken in a box. Scientist need more control of the accuracy of their designs. One outstanding challenge is developing catalysts for reactions for which there currently are no catalysts. Another critical issue is understanding how these designed proteins interact with biological systems. In the past, a grad student or post-doc would make the mutations in a protein, evaluate the effect, and come up with a hypothesis for how the protein is working. Then they would make more mutations, repeat the process five or ten times, and slowly get something improved. Scientists think they can fully automate the entire process. Once the computational methods the lab has developed to identify key protein design sequences, they are handed over to a liquid-handling robot that mimics the process of a protein engineer in an automated fashion. The robot can be working around the clock, optimizing. They can let this thing go for a week or so and it will have gone through tends of rounds of optimization without any need for input from a human. The goal is to optimize enzymes that can degrade biomass into sugars to in turn be transformed into fuel. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Scientists can make new fluorescent proteins for probes and diagnostics and more sophisticated medicines that can recognize targets with higher specificity—mimics of naturally occurring hormones that have improved pharmacological properties. Within the next few years, an entirely new class of medicines and materials based on de novo protein designs will exist. Chemists mix molecules on a huge scale (in our simulation view, a test tube holds a churning molecular swarm with the volume of an inland sea), yet they still achieve precise molecular transformation. Given that they work so indirectly, their achievements are astounding. This is, in part, the result of enormous amount of work poured into the field for many decades. Thousands of chemists are working on molecular construction in the United States of America alone; add to that the chemists in Europe, in Japan, and in the rest of the World, and you have a huge community of researchers making great strides. Though it publishes only a one-paragraph summary of each research report, a guide to the chemical literature—Chemical Abstracts—covers several library walls and grows by many feet of shelf space every year. However, a serious objection raised by physicians, and one which has resonated throughout the centuries of technological development in medicine, is that interposing an instrument between patient and doctor would transform the practice of medicine; the traditional methods of questioning the patients, taking their reports seriously, and making careful observations of exterior symptoms would become increasingly irrelevant. Doctors would lose their ability to conduct skillful examinations and rely more on machinery than on their own experiences and insight. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

In his detailed book Medicine and the Reign of Technology, Stanley Joel Reiser compares the effects of the stethoscope to the effects of the printing press on Western culture. The printed book, he argues, “helped to create the detached and objective thinker. Similarly, the stethoscope helped to created the objective physician, who could move away from involvement with the patient’s experience and sensations, to a more detached relation, less with the patient but more with the sounds from within the body. Undistracted by the motives and beliefs of the patient, the auscultator [another term for the stethoscope] could make a diagnosis from sounds that he alone heard emanating from the body organs, sounds that he believed to be objective, bias free representations of the disease process.” The stethoscope could not by itself have made such ideas stick, especially because of the resistance to them even in America, by doctors whose training and relationship to their patients led them to propose mechanical interpositions. However, the ideas were amplified with each new instrument added to the doctor’s arsenal: the ophthalmoscope (in vented by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1850), which allowed doctors to see into the eye; the laryngoscope (designed by Johann Czermark, a Polish professor of physiology, in 1857), which allowed doctors to inspect the larynx and other parts of the throat, as well as the nose; and, of course, the X-ray (developed by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895), which could penetrate most substances but not bones. “If the hand be held before the fluorescent screen,” Roentgen wrote, “the shadow shows the bone darkly with only faint outlines of surrounding tissues.” Roentgen was able to reproduce this effect on photographic plates and make the first X-ray of a human being, his wife’s hand. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Three basic television standards are in use in different parts of the World at present: NTSC, PAL, and SECAM, each slightly different but incompatible. Because of this, an American program like Flowers of the Attic usually has to be converted from one system to another before it can be telecast abroad. However, the images produced by all three systems are fuzzy by contrast with what is known as QLED. “Quantum dot display” is a display device that uses quantum dots (QD), semiconductor nanocrystals which can produce pure monochromatic red, green, and blue light. QLED is to today’s home video screens what the compact mp3 is to the scratchy platter played on great, great-grandma’s gramophone. Quantum dot can put pictures on the TV screen that are better than the quality of the best big-screen movies. It can make an image blast off the computer monitor looking as bright and sharp as in person, if not better. QLED TV represents a new generation of consumer electronics, one that will drive technological developments in dozens of areas, from chip to fiber-optic to battery to camera technology. Because QD image quality is so good, it could even make it possible for cinemas all over the World to receive their movies via satellite, rather than on film as at present, which could open an additional immense market for satellite receivers and other equipment. In total, therefore, the decisions to which QLED TV standard(s) to use will shape a World market estimated to be worth nearly a trillion dollars. Japanese engineers have worked on QLED TV for nearly twenty years. Now high definition has burst on the World economic scene. The Japanese and Americans threat to render all European television sets obsolete—and to be the only ones with the power to replace them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Economic paranoia is rampant in the United States of America as well as the entire World, people are bogged down in hairsplitting debates, political controversy, and with the health of the planet, its animals and people. However, these could be the result of removing God from his nation. Students no longer pledge allegiance to the flag in class, the ten commandments have been removed from government buildings, saying “God bless you,” to someone is seen by many being as bad as shouting to bad word to them, people no longer stand for the national anthem, and some refuse to play it. Christ said: love thine enemy. Christ’s enemy is Satan, and Satan’s enemy is Christ. Through love enmity is destroyed. Through love Christ and Satan have destroyed their enmity and come together for the End. Christ to judge, Satan to execute Judgement. Consciously or unconsciously, apathetically, half-heartedly, enthusiastically or fanatically, under countless other names by which we know them, and under innumerable disguises and descriptions, men have followed three Great Gods of the Universe ever since the Creation. Each one according to his nature. For the three Gods represent three basic human patterns of reality. Within the framework of each pattern there are countless variations and permutations, widely-varying grades of suppression and intensity. Yet each one represents a fundamental problem, a deep-rooted driving force, a pressure of instincts and desires, terrors, and revulsions. All three of them exist to some extent in every one of us. However, each of us leans more heavily toward one of them, whilst the pressures of the other two provide the presence of conflict and uncertainty. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Only through Christ can we reconcile our differences. The words in the Christian and Mormon Bibles leave the impression that they have welled-up from a deeper source than the intellect. Processian Social Darwinism elicited my sympathy, and their inherent apocalypticism mirrored my own forebodings of the near future. Were they the last National Socialists who would pass through the Flame of the End-Time, as foretold by Savitri Devi in The lightning and the Sun? Could they be the Vanguard of the Second Religiosity of the West as foretold by Oswald Spengler, or were they the Western various of the Thuggee, just one more element in our continuing descent into decadence? Around the time I began to ask these questions, Ed Sanders published The Family. Sanders claimed that The Process were pro-Hitler and Fascist in nature. It was true that they used a variation of the Swastika for their symbol. Their Social Darwinism was not so far afield from Nazi philosophy. They wore black uniforms and groomed themselves as an elite order. And a book they issued, Man’s Greatest Crime, was more hard-hitting and graphic than any anti-vivisectionist literature that I had ever seen. Did not the Nazis, whose Green Party advocate Walther Darre also champion the rights of the animal kingdom and nature? On the other hand, The Process operated a soup kitchen for the homeless and hungry. And they never mentioned politics or economics in any conversations I had with them. A number of members I met among the American recruits were Jewish. Sanders’ accusations and my own speculations raced across my mind, but I could never see any concrete evidence to confirm anything one way or the other. During meditations, we used the same chants Manson used to program others with subliminal messages. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

We were asked to close our eyes and meditate on something like Peace or Love or Fulfillment or whatever. After the meditation came to a close, we played for another hour and a half in the coffee house. Father Barnabas had a good voice for ballad and his folk-style guitar playing was reminiscent of Ian Anderson. One song in particular was quite beautiful in its lyrics and melody. It was about the God Lucifer. Father Matthew and I asked Father Barnabas to show us the chords to the song and give us the lyrics, and to the request his face contorted in anger and said “No!” We were taken aback by his anger, and never again had any personal contact with him. Much like the American Indians, Americans are now being slaughtered and driven off their lands, and many feel they are being forced to assimilate to an alternative lifestyle they do not agree with. Speaking in cultural terms, it is death either way. The only way members of the press could possibly care enough about American people is to have an anthropologist tell rambling stories about the impact on immigration, taxes, and globalization on the American people. Our culture, one that has been functioning well for two thousand years, could be destroy in one generation, in our lifetime, depending on who is in that White House in 2024. It is not only a physical assault, but a technological assault through most of the TV new media. Is it possible to adopt the hard-edged, fact-fascinating, aggressive, gross form in order to preserve a way of thinking that is totally American and completely alien to this new model being drive by California, New York, and the White House? They are totally ignoring people and their struggles and 161,548 people are homeless in California; and that 552,830 Americans are homeless (probably more like 4 million in California alone and 20 million natiin wide) and we do not have the resources to help them, but we can leave our borders open and send at least $52 billion a year to other countries. It takes 1.63 million Americans, who earn the national average salary of $32,000 anually to donate their full pay checks to the government, to generate $52 billion a year. To put that in perfect the top 1 percent pays $612 billion in taxes and the other 90 percent pays $461 billion in taxes. So a substantial amount of your money is being given away. Americans despertaly need that money for housing food and education. They once worked and paid taxes, now other nations are getting rich off of their labor, while the government refuses to help its own people. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

The struggle of the American people today is as much a consciousness struggle as it is a civil rights battle. To the extent that it is framed exclusively as a civil rights issue, the Americans lose, at least in cultural terms. Individual Americans may win a job, or a right, or, if they are ever acknowledged, a small payment for an injustice, but their children and Americans of the future will not be Americans anymore; they will have been moved out nationwide artificially. Since television itself is an outgrowth of an issues argued within it would be predetermined. However, imagine for a moment that television did not exist. Let us say that only print media existed. It so happens that print media, while not perfect, can convey a lot more about American ways of mind than electronic media can because print can express much greater depth, complexity, change of mood, subtlety, detail and so on. Books, especially, can be written in much slower rhythms, encouraging a perception that builds, stage by stage, over the length of a long reading process that make take many hours, or days. Of course, publishers, these days, also riding the rapids of modern life and responsive to commodity-mind, discourage books that move at deliberate speed, preferring those that are punchy, fast-reading, highlighted, riding the tops of waves, like television sitcoms, or advertising. Yet many books do exist that are solely devoted to states of feeling or expression of intuition, or that deal in the realm of subjective reaction. There are books which are exclusively Americana. And so such works as American Pride: Poems Honoring America and Her Patriots by David Bancroft, American Pride by Diana Rosen, and American Titans by Michael Gray, are able to convey more on an imagery level, a sensory level, and an evocational level than all the TV specials combined. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

This is not to say that these books are sufficient. Only direct experience is. However, if the battle were fought in books, Americans might win. If print were the only media in the World, the natural advantage of today’s dominant forms—corporate, military, technological, scientific—over concrete ways of thinking would be vastly diminished. In a wider information field, the American mind would have greater validity. So people who are interested in celebrating and saving American cultures, like people interested in the arts or ecology or nay nonhierarchical political forms, might be well advised to cease all efforts to transmit these intentions through television and devote greater effort to undermining television itself and accelerating the struggle within other information fields. “Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith will save the sick man, and the Lord will raise him up; and if he had committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed,” reports James 5.14-16. A protestant minister told me that one day one of the members of his church who was ill had asked if he lay hands on him and pray for him. The elders however, in every cause refused to do as the man asked. None of them had ever done such a thing before and all thought themselves incapable of doing it. The whole idea was complete alien to them. Why is this? Why is Christendom so ignorant of what the Bible says about the laying on the hands and prayer for the sick? Why do Christians often lack the courage to put into practice the various passages that refer to healing? Why is it left to the sects and the cults to monopolize these Scriptures? Are these promises only meant for the extremist groups? #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Is this a sign of the Church’s poverty that it no longer lives in the light of the promises of the Bible? These are questions which are relevant today. Let us then consider this problem in the light of the passage we have already quoted from the letter of James, and similar passages. It was custom in Jewish communities for the sick to call for the elders to visit them and to pray for them. The early Christians continued this practice although their view of sickness changed somewhat, for they no longer always considered it to be a punishment inflicted on the person by God for some particular sin in his life. The practice of anointing a person with oil was associated in the Old Testament with the choosing of a king and the sanctifying of a priest. It was also a sign of festive joy as we see it expressed. In Psalm 23, “Thou anointest my head with oil, my cup overflows.” Oil was considered to be one of the best medicines in existence. This suggests that in spite of the prayers of the elders, medicine itself was not rejected but actually used to combat the disease. It is evident from the Scriptures that oil had both a liturgical and a medicinal use. “Thus we may see that the Lord is merciful unto all who will, in the sincerity of their hearts, call upon His holy name. Yea, thus we see that the gate of Heaven is open unto all, even to those who will believe on the name of Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God. Yea, we see that whosoever will may lay hold upon the word of God, which is quick and powerful, which shall divine asunder all the cunning and the snares and the wiles of the devil, and lead the man of Christ in a strait and narrow course across that everlasting gulf of misery which is prepare to engulf the wicked—and land their souls, yea, their immortal souls, at the right hand of God in the kingdom of Heaven, to sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and with Jacob, and with all our holy fathers, to do not more out,” reports Helaman 3.27-30. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD

Lincoln, CA | from the high $600s

Now Selling!

Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,377 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms. 

Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more!

Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included! 

Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand new neighborhood in the prestigious City of Lincoln, California. 

Palo Verde Park, is  just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. 

Cresleigh Homes offers versatile flex space, an inviting great room and an open dining room that flows into kitchen with a center island and walk-in pantry. Some homes come with a Butler’s Pantry. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/

Whether we’ve been away for business or recreation, it’s hard to beat that feeling of getting back to our own Cresleigh Home.

#CresleighHomes

#CresleighHavenwood

Good Hearted People You See on Sesame Street: All-American

This, indeed, is true not merely for China and India but for Asia in general and the rest of the World. It is a reality grasped by a remarkable generation of Asian leaders long before their counterparts elsewhere. Lee Kwan Yew, the founder of independent Singapore, propelled a once sleepy colonial port into a World leader in high technology and services. In 2002 it became Asia’s top investor in biotech. Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s controversial former prime minister, set high-tech goals for Malaysia 2020 and attracted investment from Microsoft, Intel, Japan’s NTT, British Telecom and others. When Malaysia gained independence in 1957, its key exports were rubber and tin. Today it is a leading exporter of semicondctors and electrical goods. President Kim Dae-jung in South Korea, who served on the National Committee on Science and Technology before his election, approved $1.1 billion in funds for nanotechnology research. Once in the Blue House, he campaigned successfully to make his country a World leader in the application of I.T. and broadband communications—which it is today. Our talks with these and other Asian leaders make it clear that for them low-wage manufacturing jobs—and even routine call-center jobs like those outsourced to India—are just baby steps toward something far more dramatic: The leap to an advanced knowledge-based economy and society. As we scan the rest of the World, we can only ask, Where are the Lee Kwan Yews of Kin Dae-jungs of Latin America or Africa? In the Arabian World, hopefully, we see the first glimmerings of awakening in some of the Gulf States and in Jordan under young, computer-literate King Abdullah. What is it that has kept these various regions so mired in poverty? The hangover of colonialism? Religion? Culture? Corruption? Climate? Unstable politics? #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

 Is it politics that is keeping these various regions in poverty? Or could it be tribalism? Or combinations of these? Why do these regions lag so far behind the United States of America, Europe and fast-rising Asia? The answer differs by time and place. However, one thing is clear: It is in Asia—in rural China and rural India—that the true core of World poverty is found, and it is in these regions that the knowledge-based wealthy system can have its greatest success. It would be naïve to assume that India or China can wipe out poverty with technology alone. No country can. We have repeated throughout that the wealth revolution involves more than computers and hardware—more, in fact, than economics. It is clearly a social, institutional, educational, cultural and political revolution as well. However, it is also true that no country can eradicate its age-old rural poverty without drastically increasing agricultural productivity, and that cannot be done on a wide scale just by building better hoes and plows. Nor can it be accomplished by eliminating the agricultural subsidies paid by Europe and the United States of America to their minute handful of farmers. The effects of these subsidies are far more complex than their opponents suggest. A controversial case can even be made that, while they severely hurt subsistence peasants, they can indirectly spur industrial development. However, there is no doubt about the immediate short-term devastation they create in many less affluent countries. Yes, European and American subsidies—mainly payoffs to favored political constituencies—should be slashed. However, no one should imagine that even their total and immediate elimination would actually solve the problem of rural poverty. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Yes, the rich World, if only for moral reasons, should drastically increase funds for humanitarian aid and disaster relief. However, feeing people during an emergency or digging out corpses and helping re-house displaced victims after an Earthquake or tsunami will not, in themselves, transform the economics of World. Also, people forget that the millions and billions of taxpayer dollars sent over seas every year is funded from American’s working. It is not really the governments money. Hard working Americans are actually paying for that. As a result, especially when America is in crises, it is leading to bankruptcy, people going hungry, not be able to pay their bills and it leaves America crumbling while the rest of the World seems to thrive. Yes, hunger must be addressed. Immediate, emergency aid must be provided for the World’s hungriest people. Among the benefits, it will save the brains of children from the effects of malnutrition—brains needed in a future in which knowledge assumes increasing importance. However, hit-and-run food supplies for the worst-off will not break the back of global poverty. The same goes for viruses and other country-ravaging diseases that are killing millions each year around the World. No one can be anything but horrified and heartsick at the immense human tragedy they represent. We must save every life we can. Yet stopping the spread of these viruses and diseases without making other fundamental changes will not break the cycle of rural destitution. Economic advance, as everyone by now should know, demands saving women from degradation and inequality. It demands that we reduce, if not wipe out, corruption—and that we do the best we can, for now, with what passes for education. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

However, all of these measures, even all of them together, will not ultimately liberate the billions of rural poor whose lives are severely limited by the Earth’s stingy response to their ending, bitterly hard, sweaty labor. For that stingy response is the core reason for core poverty. Subsistence-level poverty cannot be conquered unless peasants agriculture is replaced by more productive activities. Any other plan is illusory. There is an upper limit, even under the best of circumstances, to how much First Wave peasants can make the Earth produce with the tools they now use. There are limits, as well, to how much Second Wave mechanized agribusiness can produce without severely damaging the environment. (Once the cost of rehabilitation is included, the productivity is less than it seems.) For all practical purposes, however, there are no limits to what Third Wave knowledge-based agriculture can produce. And that is why we are the edge of the biggest change in rural life since our ancestors first began to till the soil. Umbrellas and automobiles are different. Not just because of size, function, and cost. However, for a reason we seldom stop to consider. A person can use an umbrella without buying another product. An automobile, by contrast, is useless without fuel, oil, repair services, spare parts, not to mention streets and roads. The humble umbrella, therefore, is a rugged individual, so to speak, delivering value to its user irrespective of any other products that work only when combined with others.  If someone somewhere were not transmitting images to it, the television set would stare blankly into the living room. Even the lowly closet hanger presupposes a rack or bar to hang it on. Each of these is part of a product system. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

It is precisely their systemic nature that is their main source of economic value. And just as “team players” must play by certain agreed-on rules, systemic products need standards to work. If all the wall sockets have only two slots, a three-pronged electrical plug does not help much. This distinction between stand-aloe and systemic products throws revealing light on an issue that is widening today’s information war all around the World. The French call it la guerre des norms—“the war over standards.” Battles over standards are raging in industries as diverse as medical technology, industrial pressure vessels, and camera. Some of the most explosive—and public—disputes are directly related to the ways in which data, information, knowledge, images, and entertainment are created and distributed. In essence a global battle over dollars and political power, its outcome will reach into millions of homes. It will radically shift power among the industrial giants of the World: companies like IMB, AT&T, Sony, and Siemens. And it will affect national economies. Nowhere is this battle more public than in the three-way fight to determine what kind of television the World will watch in the decades to come. What we do know is that television has a goal. The goal is often to immerse us, the viewers, in an experience, to convey the beauty and mystery of the subject’s art and its organic, naturalistic meaning, even if it is a fictional television show. However, on television, cut at an average of ten technical events per minute, the ceremonials are practically impossible to follow. They are as fuzzy as the natural surroundings from which they have emerged. We get no sense of the dance or rhythm of life. It passes in and out of the frame of the camera. We see only this piece of it or that one. The fine details of the costumes blur like the tiny seeds of the flower. We cannot smell the foods they are eating, nor participate in the conversations they are having. We cannot feel the coldness of the air.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Our exposure comes in ten-second pieces, at most. Whatever understanding we develop comes from Luke Fetherston’s words, which describe what we cannot actually see or intuit. The information is virtually total. Aura is utterly destroyed. Time is fractured. The sensory information is lost. The context is deleted. The gestalt of intuition experience is cracked. The details are gone. The mood is impossible to convey. The Process is invisible, as is the source. No magic. Not enough is conveyed to develop any feeling od caring about what might happen to these people because the heart of their belief remains invisible, despite the attempt to convey it to me. This is not say I do not care what happens. However, I cared before I saw these scenes. If these scenes had been my total exposure to these cultures, they would only have confirmed the uselessness of trying to sustain cultures that obviously do not fit the World today. Okay. We get it. Conflict. Rules. Arguments. Laws. Right and wrong. Rip-off. Rights. Entrenched interest. Brutality. Lack of due process. Oppressors. Oppressed. Heroes. Downtrodden. It all comes flooding through. Now we start to care, now we get drawn in. What want to know will Joel ever recover? We see why Mr. Foxworth is so stern. We see why Mrs. Foxworth is trapped in a cage. Here in America, if corporations fail to provide what “we want,” then they die. We can tour a graveyard of headstones, carved with the names of the corporations that had not kept up with Americans’ changing needs. This was proof that we the people control the corporations, not vice versa. Corporate manipulation was a fiction. Planners say it would be nice if we all lived in apartments, but most people prefer to live in their own single-family houses. And American business, sparked by the profit motive, is providing them. The same with mass transit. People prefer their own cars, manufactured by big business, providing what people want. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

Naturally, television has been used more successfully for the latter cultural forms than the former. Also naturally, the American population develops more of a feeling for products and a life-style suitable to business than it does for a sensitive, subtle and beautiful way of mind that theoretically offers an alternative. The more people sit inside their television experience, the more fixed they become in the hard-edged reality that the medium can convey. If science is just for curiosity’s sake, which is what theoretical men believe, it is nonsense, and immoral nonsense, from the viewpoint of practical men. The World loses it proportions. Only Swift has rivalled Aristophanes in picturing the comedy of science. His description of a woman’s breast seen through a microscope shows what science means, not in order to denigrate science but to make clear the harsh disproportion between the World most men cling to and the one inhibited by theoretical men. What Aristophanes satirizes is the exterior of science, how the scientist appears to the nonscientist. He can only hint at the dignity of what the scientist does. His Socrates is not individualized; he is not the Socrates we know. He is a member of the species philosopher, student of nature, particularly of astronomy. The first known member of this species was Thales. He was the first man to have seen the cause of, and to predict, an eclipse of the sun. This means he figure out that the Heavens move in regular ways that accord with mathematical reasoning. He was able to reason from visible effects to invisible causes and speculate about the intelligible order of nature as a whole. He at that moment became aware that his mind was in accord with the principles of nature, that he was the microcosm. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

This moment contains many elements: satisfaction at having solved a problem; pleasure in using his faculties; fulness of pride, more complete than that of any conqueror, for he surveys and possesses all; certitude drawn from within himself, requiring no authorities; self-sufficiency, not depending, for the fulfillment of what is highest in himself, on other men or opinions or on accidents such as birth or election to power, on anything that can be taken from him; a happiness that has no admixture of illusion or hope but is full of actuality. However, perhaps most important for Thales was seeing that the poetic or mythical accounts of eclipses are false. They are not, as men believed prior to the advent of science, a sign from the gods. Eclipses are beyond the power of the gods. They belong to nature. One need not fear the gods. The theoretical experience is one of liberation, not only negatively—freeing the think from fear of the gods. They belong to nature. One need not fear the gods. The theoretical experience is one of liberation, not only negatively-freeing the thinker from fear of the gods—but also positively, simultaneously a discovery of the best way of life. Maimonides describes the experience of the philosophic use of reason as follow: “This then will be a key permitting one to enter places the gates to which were locked. And when these gates are opened and these places are entered into, the soul will find rest therein, the eyes will be delighted, and the bodies will be eased of their toil and of their labor.” What had previously been checked in man’s soul comes into full play. Freedom from the myths and their insistence that piety is best permits man to see that knowing is best, the end for which everything else is done, the only end that without self-contradiction can be said to be final. The important theoretical experience leads necessarily toward the first principles of all things and includes an awareness of the good. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Man as man, regardless of nation, birth, or wealth, is capable of this experience. And it is the only thing men surely have spiritually in common: the demonstrations of science come from within man, and they are the same for all men. When I think the Pythagorean theorem, I know that what is in me at that moment is precisely the same as what is within anyone else who is thinking that theorem. Every other supposedly common experience is at best ambiguous. Some of this experience still remains within the contemporary natural science, and it has a fugitive existence within the humanities. The unity of it all is hardly anywhere to be found or appreciated because philosophy hardly exists today. However, it was always understood by philosophers, because they share the experience and are able to recognize it in others. This sense of community is more important for them than any disagreements about the final things. Philosophy is not a doctrine but a way of life, so the philosophers, for all the differences in their teachings, have more in common with one another than with anyone else, even their own followers. Plato saw this in Parmenides, Aristotle in Plato, Bacon in Aristotle, Descartes in Bacon, Locke in Descartes and Newton, and so on. The tiny band of men who participate fully in this way of life are the soul of the university. This is true in historical fact as well as in principle. Universities came to be where men were inspired by the philosophers’ teachings and examples. Philosophy and its demonstration of the rational contemplative life, made possible and, more or less consciously, animated scholarship and the individual sciences. When those examples lost their vitality or were overwhelmed by men who had no experience of the, the universities decay or were destroyed. This, strictly, is barbarism and darkness. I do not mean that philosophers were ordinarily present in universities any more than prophets or saints are ordinarily present in houses of worship. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

However, if the faith disappears, if the experiences reported by the prophets and saints become unbelievable or matters of indifference, the temple is no longer a temple, no matter how much activity of various kinds goes on in it. It gradually withers and at best remains a monument, the inner life of which is alien to the tourists who pass idly through it. Although the comparison is not entirely appropriate, the university is also informed by the spirit, which very few men can fully share, of men who are absent, but it must preserve respect for them. It can admit almost anyone, but only if one looks up to and can have an inkling of the dignity of what is going on in it. It is itself always in danger of losing contact with its animating principle, of representing something it no longer possesses. Although it may seem wildly implausible that this group of rare individuals should be the center of what really counts for the university, this was recognized in the universities until only yesterday. It was, for example, well known in the nineteenth-century. German university, which was the last great model for the American university. However bad universities, and perhaps the greatest abhorred them. One cannot imagine Socrates as a professor, for reasons that are worthy of our attention. However, Socrates is of the essence of the university. It exists to preserve and further what he represents. In effect, it hardly does so anymore. However, more important is the fact that as a result of Enlightenment, philosophers and philosophy came to inhabit the universities exclusively, abandoning their old habits and haunts. There they have become vulnerable in new ways and thus risk extinction. The classical philosophers would not, for very good reasons, have taken this risk. Understanding these reasons is invaluable for our peculiar predicament. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

As our interventions have become more searching, they have also become more costly and more hazardous. Thus, today it is not unusual to find a fragile elder who walked into the hospital, [and became] slightly confused, dehydrated, and somewhat the worse for wear on the third hospital day because his first 48 hours in the hospital were spent undergoing a staggering series of exhausting diagnostic studies in various laboratories or in the radiology suite. None of this is surprising to anyone familiar with American medicine, which is notorious for its character “aggressiveness.” The question is, why? There are three interrelated reasons, all relevant to the imposition of machinery. The first has to do with the American character, which is so congenial to the sovereignty of technology. The once seemingly limitless lands gave rise to a spirit that anything was possible if only the natural environment could be conquered. Disease could also be conquered, but only aggressively ferreting it our diagnostically and just as aggressively treating it, preferably by taking something out rather than adding something to increase resistance. How could a people which has a revolution once in four years, which has contrived the Bowie Knife and the revolver which insists in sending out yachts and horses and body to outsail outrun, outfight and checkmate all the rest of creation; how could such a people be content with any but “heroic” practice? What wonder that the stars and stipes wave over doses of ninety grams of sulphate of quinine and that American eagle screams with delight to see three drachms [180 grains] of calomel given at the single mouthful? Medicine may have been hindered by doctors placing undue reliance upon the powers of nature in curing disease. Some specifically blame Hippocrates and his tradition for this lapse. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Dr. Benjamin Rush, for example, had considerable success in curing patients of yellow fever by prescribing large quantities of mercury and performing purges and bloodletting. (His success was probably due to the fact that patients either had mild cases of yellow fever or did not have it at all.) In any event, Rush was particularly enthusiastic about bleeding patients, perhaps because he believed that the body contained about twenty-five pints of blood, which is more than twice the average actual amount. He advised other doctors to continue bleeding a patient until four-fifths of the body’s blood was removed. Although Rush was not in attendance during George Washington’s final days, Washington was bled seven times on the night he died, which, no doubt, had something to do with why he died. All of this occurred, mind you, 153 years after Harvey discovered that blood circulates throughout the body. Putting side the question of the available medical knowledge of the day, Rush was a powerful advocate of action—indeed, gave additional evidence of his aggressive nature by being one of the singers of the Declaration of Independence. He persuaded both doctors and patients tht American diseases were tougher than European diseases and required tougher treatment. “Desperate diseases require desperate remedies” was a phrase repeated many times in American medical journals in the nineteenth century. The Americans, who considered European methods to be mild and passive—one might even say effeminate—met the challenge by eagerly succumbing to the influence of Rush: they accepted the imperatives to intervene, to mistrust nature, to use the most aggressive therapies available. The idea was to conquer both a continent and the diseases its weather and poisonous flora and fauna inflicted. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

So, from the outset, American medicine was attracted to new technologies. Far from being “neutral,” technology was to be the weapon with which disease and illness would be vanquished. The weapons were not long in coming. The most significant of the early medical technologies was the stethoscope, invented (one might almost say discovered) by the French physician Rene-Theophile-Hyacinthe Laennec in 1816. The circumstances surround the invention are worth mentioning. Working at the Necker Hospital in Paris, Laennec was examining a young woman with a puzzling heart disorder. He tried to use percussion and palpation (pressing the hand upon the body in hope of detecting internal abnormalities), but the patient’s obesity made this ineffective. He next considered auscultation (placing his ear on the patient’s chest to hear the heart beat), but the patient’s youth and gender discouraged him. Laennec then remembered that sound traveling through solid bodies is amplified. He rolled some sheets of paper into a cylinder, placed one end on the patient’s chest and the other to his ear. Voila! The sounds he heard were clear and distinct. “From this moment,” he later wrote, “I imagined that the circumstance might furnish means for enabling us to ascertain the character, not only of the action of the heart, but of every species of sound produced by the motion of all the thoracic viscera.” Laennec worked to improve the instrument, eventually using a rounded piece of wood, and called it a “stethoscope,” from the Greek word for “chest” and “I view.” For all its simplicity, Laennec’s invention proved extraordinarily useful, particularly in the accuracy with which it helped to diagnose lung diseases like tuberculosis. Chest diseases of many kinds were no longer concealed: the physician with a stethoscope could, as it were, conduct an autopsy on the patient while the patient was still alive. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

However, it should not be supposed that all doctors or patients were enthusiastic about the instrument. Patients were often frightened at the sight of a stethoscope, assuming that its presence implied imminent surgery, since, at the time, only surgeons used instruments, not physicians. Doctors had several objections, ranging from the trivial to the significant. Among the trivial was the inconvenience of carrying the stethoscope, a problem some doctors solved by carrying it, crosswise, inside their top hats. This was not without its occasional embarrassment—an Edinburgh medical student was accused of possessing a dangerous weapon when his stethoscope fell out of his hate during a snowball fight. A somewhat less trivial objection raised by doctors was that if they used an instrument they would be mistaken for surgeons, who were then considered mere craftsmen. The distinction between physicians and surgeons was unmistakable then, and entirely favorable to physicians, whose intellect, knowledge, and insight were profoundly admired. It is perhaps to be expected that Oliver Wendell Holmes, professors of anatomy at Harvard and always a skeptic about aggressiveness in medicine, raised objections about the overzealous use of the stethoscope; he did so, in characteristic fashion, by writing a comic ballad, “The Stethoscope Song,” in which a physician makes several false diagnoses because insects have nested in his stethoscope. Now, changing directions a bit. Is there anything special about proteins? The main advantage of proteins that they are familiar: a lot is known about them, and may tools exist for working with them. Yet proteins have disadvantages as well. Just because this design work is starting with proteins—soft, squishy molecules that are only marginally suitable for nanotechnology—does not mean it will stay within those limits. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

DeGrado points out, “The fundamental goal of our work in de novo design is to be able to take the next step and get entirely away from protein systems.” An early example is the work of Wallace Carothers of Du Pont, who used a de novo approach to studying the nature of proteins: Rather than trying to cut up proteins, he tried to build up things starting with amino acids and other similar monomers. In 1935, he succeeded in making nylon. DeGardo explains; “There is a deep philosophical belief at Du Pont in the ability of people to make molecules de novo that will do useful things. And there is a fair degree of commitment from the management that following that path will lead to products: not directly, and not always predictably, but they know that they need to support the basic science. I think ultimately we have a better chance at doing some really exciting things by de novo design, because our repertory should be much greater than that of nature. Think about the ability to fly: One could breed better carrier pigeons or one could design airplanes.” The biology community, however, leans more toward ornithology than toward aerospace engineering. DeGardo’s experience is that “a lot of biologists feel that is you are not working with the real thing [natural proteins], you are not studying biology, so they do not totally accept what we are doing. On the other hand, they recognize it as good chemistry.” “Wo be unto them that shall perver the ways of the Lord after this manner, for they shall perish except they repent. Behold, I speak with boldness, having authority from God; and I fear not what man can do; for perfect love casteth out all fear,” report Moroni 8.16. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Cresleigh Homes

“I love to sit in a chair and look out the window and do nothing” – Ingrid Bergman

When you’re enjoying a home like ours at #PlumasRanch (Residence 2, specifically), it’s easy to just chill all afternoon! 😀

This smartly designed home offers a generous an ideal layout with 2,372 square feet, an open great room, dining room and kitchen, two bedrooms with a shared bath, and a separate owner’s suite with private bath and walk-in closet.

And our homes come with an All Ready Connected system, so it’s easy to set up our included Google Home Hub, sit back, and relax! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-2/

Home interperts Heaven. A Cresleigh Home is Heaven for those of us on Earth.

#CresleighMeadows
#CresleighHomes

Adjust to this Onslaught of Energy and Assimilate it

The miles of twisting hallways at the Winchester Mansion are made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. Mrs. Winchester traveled through her house in a roundabout fashion, supposedly to confuse any mischievous ghosts that might be following her. The early 1880s saw a revival of Satanic related activity across the United States of America and Canada. Many of the reports found in the archives of the Winchester Estate have proved to be based in fact. In July of 1883, a dozen churches in the Bay Area were defaced with Satanic slogans. Mrs. Winchester feared this was the work of evil spirits. In the same month, two teenagers were charged in Santa Clara Valley of with grave robbing and theft of religious objects from an Anglican church. In January 1884, bodies were snatched from a historic cemetery called Mission Santa Clara de Asis, apparently for ritualistic use. Satan-cultists were blamed. The Oakland Tribune reported that the crimes were being perpetrated by marauding outlaw gangs of nihilistic adolescents who reputedly were into Satanic rituals involving grave robbings, vandalism, blood drinking, and animal sacrifice. Mrs. Winchester feared that the evil spirits may had been, instead of venting aggressive and antisocial feelings, actually trying to raise demons in a literal sense. Mrs. Winchester figure these must have been evil spirits because “many conventional people do not follow through on deviant impulses because they have a stake in society, and therefore a vested interest in conformity.” At least in her World they did so she could not conceive of human beings doing such irrational things. However, not everyone considers the worship of Satan irrational. For some, their adoption of Satan as a hero, is a symbolic assault on parental authority and the citadel of social acceptability. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

As a way to keep herself safe from vandals, looters, and other criminals or spirits, Mrs. Mrs. Winchester kept added wings and floors to have mansion and making oddities to confuse any mischievous ghosts. After traversing an interminable labyrinth of rooms and hallways, a ghost would lose her and become fearful that it was being led into a trap. The theory is that the less stake someone one has in society, the less one would have to lose by freeing one’s inner demon. Mrs. Winchester said, “When someone is abused, alienated, and shows early propensities for violence, well when you put that kind of hostility into a cauldron, mix in the eye of a newt and blood of a bat, stir in some pixie dust you have the recipe for summoning a demon. In fact, the demons haunting my family and putting this blood curse on my money used to be an ancient race of god-men who, by practicing back magic, had lost their foothold on the World and were expelled into another dimension. There they wait, just beyond the realm of time and space, ready to be summoned to take back the Earth. Man is just a short step away from insanity and the most depraved forms of bestiality.” Mrs. Winchester certainly was a lady of mystery, at the time of her death, the unrelenting construction had rambled over six acres. The sprawling mansion contained 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, six kitchens. The living room also contained such arcane bits of furniture as an Egyptian sarcophagus, and a coffee table made of ivory. In the den, a wall of shelves lined with books on every esoteric subject imaginable—from the fairies to social reality—was, in reality, a secret passage that opened into an adjoining sleeping chamber decorated with solid gold ceremonial masks. The entire mansion, in fact, was honeycombed with secret passages. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

The fortunate visitor might even be taken down the staircase behind the fireplace, and up to the Blue Séance room. The Satanic High Priest generally came down at midnight to serenade them with songs from the 1740s, the period that the Mansion was set up to evoke. Passers-by heard ghostly music at this hour, supposedly legions of demons and spirits relaxed and danced in The Great Ball Room. Early in her residence, Mrs. Winchester planned a grand reception and sent hundreds of gold-engraved invitations to all the prominent valley residents. A sumptuous midnight was the main feature, the table was set with a $30,000 solid-gold sinner service. The banquet was to be the main feature supported by a famous orchestra for added entertainment. With the orchestra and servants at expectant attention, the lady waited until past midnight. Not One Guest Appeared! The next day, the Oakland Tribune reported that guest complained that when they arrived to have dinner with Mrs. Winchester, that these strange people in unusual clothes told them that Mrs. Winchester died in 1922, and the was the first year of tours starting in 1923. The guest were deeply offended and thought Mrs. Winchester played a cruel joke on them, and they could not for the life of them figure out what happened to her sea green mansion with the nine story tower, and left in a huff. For sixteen years, passersby, hurrying through an evening fog, heard strange chants coming from inside the then green mansion. Often the mansion would change size and color, eventually people grew to understand that Winchester Mansion and its grounds were a time warp. Mrs. Winchester’s working day, like that of a vampire, was from dusk to dawn. She held séances almost every night in the hours when most people were asleep and at their peak of psychic receptivity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

Mrs. Winchester’s music was a form of ritual magic, and its vibratory frequencies were setting in motion forces that would result in a Worldwide takeover of the ideals of Victorian Architecture and Romanticism. Certain frequencies transmitted on the ether effect the human subconscious and control behavior, much in the same way elephants can be made to march by the playing of certain circus tunes. However, the effects can be more than psychological. It was believed it could affect the weather, and blames her focusing too much on the front of the house for the 1906 Earthquake. It is possible for a believer to experience severe demon influence or obsession if one persistently yields to demonic temptation and sin. It is thought that evil spirits could not indwell the redeemed body together with the Holy Spirit. However, Christians too can become demon possessed. Such cases are rarely seen in the United States of America. However, in lands where demon-energized idolatry has flourished unchecked by the gospel for ages, new believers who were delivered from demon possession have been know to become repossessed when they return to their old idols. The testimonies of numerous missionaries in pagan areas support this evidence. Missionaries from all over the Bay Area Valley, who question the theory that true believers cannot become demon-possessed, claim to have witnessed cases of repossession among converts from ancient idolatrous cultures in America, China, and India. Also, among Indigenous Americans who live in servile fear and abject bondage to Satan and demons. Mrs. Winchester’s doctor said that when someone is involved in an established cult, it often results in demonic oppression or subjection that will sometimes affect even the third or fourth generation. The family members who become believers can be affected and need of deliverance even if they have not dealt in the occult. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

Believers who persist in flagrant sin may be driven be demons into emotional instability, insanity, or even suicide. Severe demon influence can produce enslavement and subjection even if it does stop short of actual possession. Believers need to heed the warning: Be composed! Be on your guard! Your accuser, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion in search of someone to devour. Surely experience has given them warnings enough. The monthly meeting of the Imperial Institute usually took place on the 15th at the Winchester Mansion. With but two exceptions the seats of the Thirteen Immortals were occupied. The lecturer of the evening was a distinguished god from ancient Egypt, Ra. He said he cast a spell on the Winchester Mansion where nothing would ever happen in a single time only: everything would happen again, and again, and still again—monotonously. That evening during the meeting, a woman stepped forward, she had been having mental and psychic disturbances. In the course of the conversation an amulet was found in her possession. At first the woman refused to part with it because she was convinced that if she did so she would die within a few days. At least this is what the magic charmer told her in the Blue Séance Room. Finally, however, she handed it over and she was shocked on opening it to find a piece of paper with the words, “My soul belongs to the devil.” It turned out that this woman had tuberculosis, and that she had subsequently been healed by a magic charmer. Nevertheless, she parted with the amulet for good. Afterwards her old disease reappeared, yet through putting her trust in Christ and becoming a Christian she was willing to leave her future in God’s hands. In disowning the demonic, the former Satanist will lose all it has gained for one. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

On Friday night’s is usually when Mrs. Winchester had her telepathy developing circle and Midnight meditation. There Mrs. Winchester and her guest learned characters, deities, gods, spells, incantations, skills, and traditions that were firmly embedded in actual occultism, demonology, sorcery, necromancy and magic. This crash course in sorcery was actually thought to be real rituals. The complete and reliable history of the human and divine—the divine revelations, and the influence of godly or pious men are found in the Scriptural monuments of the old Hebrew in the Holy Scriptures. The Bible is justly styled the Holy Scripture, because it contains the knows of the saints, while at the same time, it units and harmonizes word and deed, doctrine and action. It points out the true relation of the man to the Omnipotent—it affords the most direct reference to the great truths of the spiritual and intellectual; it treats the origin of the universe and its laws, through which all things have to be brought to light—of the anterior and posterior history of humankind—of his future destiny and how to attain it; of living and visible agent which all things have to be brough to light—of the anterior and posterior history of mankind—of his future destiny and how to attain it; of the living and visible agents which God employs in the great work of redemption, and, finally, of the most exalted of al beings—of the World’s Saviour, who was an universal expression in his own person, and who exhibited all divine power and action in one person, while all his forerunners were endowed only with single powers and perfection; who revealed to fallen man the highest and purest ends of his life and the means of his purification and restoration. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

We find among the notes of Mrs. Winchester, on Magic—the steps necessary to solve the mysteries of somnambulism and second-sight, and the infinitely multiplied operations by which unusual occurrences are produced. In one instance at the Winchester Mansion, it was one individual and his presence; in the latter it was not the individual upon which magic depended, but upon mankind in general, and upon the great future. There, the light of man was made to shine by skillful actions, produced by the lowest arts; here, shone a pure, unclouded, quiet life, vitalized by the warm breath of the Almighty, a light shining into the future, and upon this light depended all life and action. To Mrs. Winchester’s seer not only the fate of single individuals stand revealed, but the fate of nations, yea, of mankind, which in the end must be reconciled to God by the unfolding of magical art, as often happened under the old dispensation, by instinctive somnambulistic influences. If we examine the history of the old covenant, we shall find that this remarkable people stood solitary and alone like a pillar of fire amid heathen darkness. There are deep mysteries in the Winchester Mansion, which may be applied to the welfare of man, but which, on account of the perverseness of humanity and to guard against their abuse, have been hidden from the great mass of human beings. God endowed Mrs. Winchester with exalted talents, powers and virtues that, with a rational use of her, man may protect himself from danger when no other help is at hand and save himself simply by uttering the words of the living God. One night when heathens, robbers, and hostile troops approached the Winchester Mansion, Mrs. Winchester and her spiritual friends stood in a circle and chanted, “And all these Thy servants shall come down unto me, and bow themselves unto me, saying, Get thee out, and all the people that follow thee, and after that I will go out. The power of Divs now flows through this flesh and through this Nexion of Infernal Power, the very gateway to counter creation! Through this abysmal slow of spiritual might I will be made kunda! I am now Zohak who is Ahriman in the flesh. I am the infernal power of Arezura Incarnate! May the Blacked Fire of my Sol ignite all of creation to reveal that which is unknow so that this age of enslavement shall come to an end. I stir the powers of the Divs within to unlock the doors to my transformation! I stir the powers of the Divs within to empower my work upon the Path of Smoke for the glory of unlimited Possibility!” The group disbursed into thin air. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7


Winchester Mystery House

For centuries-antique European castles to architecturally significant Victorian homes have become time-honored national landmarks. These historic properties are as beautiful and bizarre as the owners they attract.

Recently, a Medium informed our staff that two spirit children were playing hide and go seek in this hallway leading up to The Witches Cap on the third floor. Come explore this hallway for yourself on the Walk With Spirits tour this weekend! https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/

The Fixed is Better than the Evolutionary

They appeared as though out of nowhere, or so it must have seemed to the countless pedestrians who came across the black-clad missionaries hawking their books and pamphlets on the streets of major U.S. cities. They were members of The Process, Church of the Final Judgment. Their message was one of Apocalyptic prophecy infused with an odd theology of Christian/Satanic reconciliation. Of their origins, intentions and activities, there has been much dispute and allegation. One thing, however, remains certain: The Process has left an indelible watermark upon the post-psychedelic era, and have become a part of that era’s urban folklore. The Process is characterized as a cult that never quite got off the ground and which experienced a major theological and organizational schism from the mid-1970s. Some allude that their existence is a sort of modern Thuggee or Satanic underground, in which the Process is a central organizing factor. There used to be and still may be a family residence for The Process house in the Haight-Ashbury region of San Francisco, California. There was rumored to be a lot of dark goings-on within. The Process was allegedly part of a vast cryptocracy of serial murders who supposedly had links with the police and judicial establishment, thereby evading responsibility for their cultic crimes. However, The Process nor its founders were every personally accused of these crimes—but there is an overall impression that they are guilty nonetheless. The Process is known for having “chant sessions,” “midnight meditations,” and other activities. They at one time and still may have The Process coffee house in Chicago. The Process discusses how soulless technology and bureaucracy has imposed on our lives. Ecology had not yet become the catch slogan yuppie materialists, yahoo politicians and quarterly stockholder reports. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

Much like now, people felt constricted under the thumb of a debased age in which advertising slogans supplanted poetry, contractual agreements replaced love, and televangelism masqueraded as spirituality. Unlike the alien and decadent garb of the Guru cults from the East, The Process had a distinctly Westerly, neo-Gothic exterior: Neatly-trimmed shoulder-length hair and equally neat beards, all set-off by tailored magician’s capes with matching black uniforms. My earliest memories of The Process are associated with bitter subzero nights, accompanied by a group of friends as we hurried down deserted back streets on Chicago’s North side, a section of the city where some of the last remaining cobblestones had not yet been covered with asphalt. The glitter of stars could still be seen in the night sky as the mercury vapor lamps had not yet been installed there. Process headquarters was a four-story Victorian house that also doubled as living quarters for the majordomos of the Chicago chapter. We entered that bitter chill Winter night past the yellow exterior porch lights and encountered several young men in black uniforms with black caps who stood talking to a small group of people in conventional clothes. A tall thin man with a neat fringe of beard greeted us cheerfully with the salutation, “As It Is.” I rejoindered, “So Be It.” I asked him about the coffee house some other Processians told me about, and he directed us toward a back room, where we would find a staircase leading to the coffee house in the basement. Were descended the narrow, curving stairs to a room in the basement where some music emanated from. “As It Is,” hailed an attractive, petite woman with an upper-class British accent. “So Be It,” we replied. She seated us at a table and gave us menus. We ordered tea and listened to the recorded folk music of John Renbourn and Pentangle. It seemed the perfect accompaniment to the setting. The coffee house was low ceilinged, with curtains hanging on the ground-level windows. Second-hand tables, chairs and benches comprised the sparse décor. A candle burned in the center of each table. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

Several days earlier I had run into a pretty young woman with an English accent dressed in Process garb on Wabash Avenue Downtown Chicago. She handed me a leaflet listing the group’s activities and invited us to the group’s coffee house. Later that day I stopped by at a psychedelic head shop where I was hawking my poster art. One of the workers was familiar with the Process and showed me the Fear issue. The colors and graphics were very eye-catching and impressively put-together, and I pored over its contents. At the coffee house we experienced no hard-sell proselytizing, in fact we were all a bit disappointed until it was announced that the “Sabbath assembly” was to begin in several minutes on the top floor of the house. Anticipating the adventure of it, we climbed the narrow stairs to the unfinished attic of the building, the roof-beams and wooden rafters rising sharply to the roof’s steep peak. A could dozen people were already seated in a semi-circle on floor cushions. At the center of the circle was a low round table upon which a black and red altar cloth hung down to the floor in neat folds. In front of the windows hung a back curtain with a red Goat of Mendes in its center. To its left was a large gong. To one side of the altar was a steel container of water, to the other side a steel container with a burning pyre. Standing in front of the goat’s head symbol was a man wearing a tabard, a ceremonial device such as a Catholic or Anglican priest might wear. In the center of the tabard was a symbol of a sort of omega confirmation. We were to learn later that this man was called the Sacrifist. At the entrance of the room stood another man dressed in an ankle-length black robe underneath a tabard. On the center of it was the Process Symbol of Four P’s, which formed a swastika-like device. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

This celebrant was known as the Evangelist. The Sacrifist carried a red-leather bound book at his side and the Evangelist a similar one of black. By the early 1970s, the decline of the counterculture and the use of hallucinogens led to a waning popular interest in the occult. Spiritual realization and wicca groups lost membership as people once more became fixated on material goals. The “me” generation, forerunners of the yuppies, came into prominence. For a while, groups like the Church of Satan, which exhorted egotism and a pragmatic, selfish brand of ritual magic, thrived, but by 1975, interest in all magical groups dropped as the economy took an upturn and people got what they wanted through more practical means. Around the Zarathustrian doctrine, which it resists it, the question grows and grows, till the West Iranian religion develops the myth of Zurvan, Time Unbonded in reply. We only know it from a later version, but its original content is unmistakable. Zurvan arises out of the primal sleep, as it seems, and sacrifices murmuring (the song of the generation of the gods, of which we know through Herodotus, is presumably meant), for a thousand years, to obtain the son, Ahura Mazdah, who would create Heaven and Earth. It would be beside the point to ask to whom he is sacrificing: similarly without recipient, the primeval Indian gods also sacrifice (or sacrifice themselves) that out of them may arise the World. After all the vain sacrifice, Zurvan is overcome by doubt: “What avails sacrifice? Perhaps being is not?” Then arose two in the womb: the Wise Lord from the sacrifice, from the doubt the Wicked Spirit. But Zurvan is obviously “fluid” deity. Evil arises in him through his Fall. He does not choose, he doubts. Doubt is unchoice, indecision. Out of it arises evil. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

We must note that the Wicked Spirit, Angra Mainyu, the well-known Ahriman, is here not the son of Ahura Mazdah, but his brother; Ahura Mazdah, Ormuzd, is, however, no longer a primal god, he enters at the beginning into being, and now precisely as the Only-good One. Thus here too the twins stand in radical antithesis to one another, but here, in contradistinction to the twin-myth of the Avesta, the antithesis of the one to the other is not explicitly stated, nor is the coming World-process between the two of them announced; we hear nothing of good and evil and their mutual relationship; we merely watch the appearance of the protagonists in the nascent cosmic conflict. Yet by what is recounted of the primal god himself we are led not less deep than there, and perhaps deeper, into the sphere of the question what good and evil are. There is was deception and truth, deception in sense of being deceptive, truth in the sense of being true, which confronted one another; here doubt of being is the evil, the good is “knowledge,” belief in being, against which Zurvan transgresses. Here it is ultimately a question of fidelity and infidelity to being. However, some within the Zurvan community could not tolerate the notion of a divine Fall. Of these, some supposed that the time-god had gone astray as to being at a particular moment, but that from the beginning something bad, either bad thinking or a corruption of the essence, had been admixed into him, and from this evil made its start; these are evidently reverting to the Avestic doctrine, though a modified form. However, others said Zurvan brought forth both, in order to mingle good with evil, from which it is clearly inferred that only through the gradated abundance of such inter-mixtures can the full manifoldness of things arise; here the fundament of the Iranian tradition is abandoned: good and evil are no longer irreconcilable principia, but utilizable qualities, before whose utilisability the question of an absolute worth and worthlessness vanishes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

The fundament of another tradition is adopted, when in the opinion of a third of these sects Ahriman is an outcast angel who was cursed for his disobedience. About that, so end the report in this connection, much can be said. However, there is a fragment of the Avesta which runs: “All good thoughts, all good words, all good deed, I do consciously. All evil thoughts, all evil words, all evil deeds, I do unconsciously.” From here a path leads to the psychological problem of evil, as it first evolved in early Christendom. The character of the experience Socrates represents is important because it is the soul of the university. The rich drama of Socrates, the early philosopher, who came to the attention of the city because he was a philosopher, presents all the questions of freedom of thought from all the angles, without any kind of doctrinairism, and hence provides us with a fresh view of the importance and also of the difficulties of such freedom. From the Republic, which really takes seriously only the demands of knowledge, to the Laws, which gives full attention to the competing demands of political life, Socrates as perfecter and as dissolver of the community reveals all the facets of his activity. The difficulty he and the other philosophers contend with from the law is not to be confounded with society’s prejudice against outsiders, dissenters or nonconformists but is, at least apparently, a result of an essential opposition between the two highest claims of a man’s loyalty—his community and his reason. That opposition can only be overcome if the state is rational, as in Hegel, of if reason is abandoned, as in Nietzsche. However that may be, we have a record, unparalleled in its detail and depth, of this first appearance of philosophy, and we can apprehend the natural, or at least primitive, responses to it, prior to philosophy’s effect on the World. This provides a view of the beginning at a time when we may be witnessing the end, partly because we no longer know that beginning. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

The poetry written about Socrates by Plato and Xenophon is already in the defensive mode, a rehabilitation of the condemned man. The first statement of the city’s reaction to Socrates is made by Aristophanes. What luck Socrates had! Not only did he command the pens of Plato and Xenophon; he also was the central figure of the greatest work of the consummate genius of the comedy. The Clouds often arouses indignation in those who care little for Socrates but think serious matters are not laughing matters. Socrates’ fate and Aristophanes’ possible contribution to it trouble them. However, Socrates was probably not of their persuasion. He laughed and joked on the day of his death. He and Aristophanes share a certain levity. Aristophanes does present a ridiculous Socrates and takes the point of view of the vulgar, to whom Socrates does look ridiculous. However, Aristophanes also ridicules the vulgar. Reading him we, indeed, laugh at the wise as do the unwise, but we also laugh at the unwise as to the wise. Above all we laugh at the anger of the unwise against the wise. The Socrates of The Clouds is a man who despises what other people care about and cares about what they despise. He spends his life investigating nature, worrying about gnats and stars, denying the existence of the gods because they are not to be found in nature. His maps have only a tiny dot where Athens looms large to its citizens. Law and convention (nomos) mean nothing to him, because they are not natural but manmade. His companions are pale-faced young men totally devoid of common sense. In this academy, which has established itself in the free atmosphere of Athens, these eccentrics carry on their activities without appearing to be other than harmless cranks. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

They are poor, without any fixed means of support. Socrates receives gifts and apparently countenances minor thefts, literally to keep body and soul together. There is no morality, but they are not vicious people, because their only concern is their studies. Socrates is utterly indifferent to honor or luxury. Aristophanes recaptures for us the absurdity of a grown man who spends his time thinking about gnats’ anuses. We have been too persuaded of the utility of science to perceive how far the scientist’s perspective is from that of a gentleman, how shocking and petty the scientist’s interests appear to a man who is concerned with war and peace, justice, freedom and glory. Aside from the occasional surfacing of an adolescent outlaw group, such as the Black Magic Cult in Northglenn, or a similar cult of high schoolers in Lake County, Illinois, in 1972, and a flurry of rumors of Satanic cattle sacrifices in the Midwest, all was quiet on the Satanic front. As we stood in front of the goat’s head altar at The Process house, slowly our eyes adjusted to the light of white and red candles. After a moment of hushed silence, the two began to chant: “Contact reaching to the stars through the spirit of Christ; knowledge of the Universe, He is the way of life.” Sacrifist: “The Final Reckoning.” Evangelist: “An End a New Beginning.” Sacrifist: “Christ and Satan joined!” Evangelist: “The Lamb and the Goat.” Together: “Pure Love, descended from the Pinnacle of Heaven, united with Pure Hatred raised from the Depths of Hell.” Sacrifist: “Repayment of the Debt.” Evangelist: “Fulfillment of the Promise.” Sacrifist: “All Conflicts are Resolved.” Evangelists: “An End and a New Beginning.” Sacrifist: “The End of Hell and the Beginning of Heaven.” Evangelists: “The End of Darkness and the Beginning of Light.” Sacrifist: “The End of War and the Beginning of Peace.” Evangelist: “The Hatred and the Beginning of Love.” Sacrifist: “The End is Now. The Beginning is yet to come.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

After the pronouncements, we read a series of positive and up-tempo hymns from books that had been passed around. Another Processian got up and read Process material concerning the Gods Jehovah, Lucifer, Satan and Christ, and their respective roles in the Universe. Another Processian strummed a guitar in accompaniment. At the conclusion, the Sacrifist rung the gong. The Evangelist began reciting and was followed by more singing. The gong sounded again and the Sacrifist spoke: “All those Initiates who wish to rededicate their lives on the service of Christ and the three great Gods of the Universe, come forward and kneel before me.” A woman got up from the circle and knelt before the Sacrifist, and the Sacrifist continued: “In the name of the Lord Christ, and in the name of the Lord Satan, I accept you as an initiate of The Process, Church of the Final Judgment. As It Is.” The kneeling initiate countered: “So Be It.” My friends and I discussed our experience at Process headquarters could only agree that it was pleasant, but we had not yet drawn any hard conclusions. In the following months I noticed the presence of biker-types at the coffee hose, who seem to be employed as bodyguards for the headquarters. Little of a theological nature was discussed at the coffee house, and occasionally a Processian would play guitar and sing Process-inspired songs, much of it beautifully melodic. In the Spring the Victorian headquarters on Demming Place was set aside as living quarters for full-time members and was thereafter closed to the general public. Public activities were moved to a newly acquired lost above a store in Chicago’s Old Town District on North Wall Street. Old Town, like Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury, was the countercultural headquarters. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Focusing on the nation, problems arise when a politician appears to have little chance of reflection. The problem becomes even more acute with a lame duck. From the point of view of the public, a Politian facing an end of career can be dangerous because of the increased temptation to seek private goals rather than maintain a pattern of cooperation with the electorate for the attainment of mutually rewarding goals. Since the turnover of political leaders is a necessary part of democratic control, the problem must be solved another way. Here, political parties are useful because they can be held accountable by the public for the acts of their elected members. The voters and the parties are in a long-term relationship, and this gives the parties an incentive to select candidates who will not abuse their responsibilities. And if a leader is discovered giving in to temptation, the voters can take this into account in evaluating the other candidates of the same party in the next election. The punishment of the Republican party by the electorate after Watergate shows that parties are indeed held responsible for the defections of their leaders, which is something many politicians should keep in mind. In general, the institutional solutions to turnover need to involve accountability beyond the individual’s term in a particular position. In an organizational or business setting, the best way to secure this accountability would be to keep track not only of the person’s success in that position, but also the state in which the position was left to the next occupant. For example, if an executive sought a quick gain by double-crossing a colleague just before transferring to a new plant, this fact should be taken into account in evaluating that executive’s performance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

Cooperation Theory has implications for individual choice as well as for the design of institutions. Speaking personally, one of my biggest surprises in working on this project has been the value of provocability. I came to this project believing one should be slow to anger. The results of the Prisoner’s Dilemma indicates that it is actually better to respond quickly to a provocation. It turns out that if one waits to respond to uncalled for defections, there is a risk of sending the wrong signal. The longer defections are allowed to go unchallenged, the more likely it is that the other player will draw the conclusion that defection can pay. And the more strongly this patterned is established, the harder it will be to break it. The implication is that it is better to be provocable sooner, rather than later. The success of TIT FOR TAT certainly illustrates this point. By responding right away, it gives the quickest possible feedback that a defection will not pay. The response to potential violations of arms control agreements illustrates this point. Russian has occasionally taken step which appear to be designed to probe the limits of its agreement with the United States of America. The sooner the United States of America detects and responds to these Russian probes, the better. Waiting for them to accumulate only risks the need for a response so large as to evoke yet more trouble. The speed of response depends upon the time required to detect a given choice by the other players. The shorter this time is, the more stable cooperation can be. A rapid detection means that the next move in the interaction comes quickly, thereby increasing the shadow of the future as represented by the parameter. For this reason, the only arms control agreement which can be stable are those whose violations can be detected soon enough. The critical requirement is that violations can be detected before they can accumulate to such an extent that the victim’s provocability is no longer enough to prevent the challenger from having an incentive to defect. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

The results concerning the value of provocability are complemented by the theoretical analysis of what it takes for a nice rule to be collectively stable. In order for a nice rule to be able to resist invasion, the rule must be provocable by the very first direction of the other individual. Theoretically, the response need not come immediately, and it need not occur with certainty, but it must have a real probability of coming eventually. The important thing is that the other individual does not wind up having an incentive to defect. Of course, provocability has a danger. The danger is that is the other individual does try a defection, retaliation will lead to further retaliation, and the conflict will degenerate into an unending strong of mutual defections. This can certainly be a serious problem. For example, in many cultures blood feuds between clans can continue to undimished for years and even generations (Black-Michaud 1975). This continuation of the conflict is due to the echo effect: each side responds to the other’s last defection with a new defection of its own. One solution is to find a central authority to police both sides, imposing a rule of law. Unfortunately this solution is often not available. And even when there is a rule of law, the costs of using the courts for routine affairs such as enforcement of business contracts can be prohibitive. When the use of a central authority is impossible or too expensive, the best method is to rely on a strategy which will be self-policing. Such a self-policing strategy must be provocable, but the response must not be too great lest it lead to an unending echo of defections. For example, suppose that Russia (then the Soviet Union) in conjunction with the other Warsaw Pact countries undertakes a partial mobilization of its armed forces throughout Eastern Europe. This mobilization would give the Soviets an added advantage if conventional war were to break out. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

A useful response from NATO would be to increase its own state of alter. If additional troops moved from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe, NATO should respond with additional troops moved from the United States of America. It is also recommended that this type of response be automatic so that it can be made clear t the Soviets that such increases in NATO readiness are standard procedure and take place only after Soviet mobilizations. It is also recommended that the response be limited, say one American division moved for every three Soviet divisions mobilized. In effect, this would help limit the echo effects. Limited provocability is a useful feature of a strategy designed to achieve stable cooperation. While TIT FOR TAT responds with an amount of defection exactly equal to the other’s defection, in many circumstances the stability of cooperation would be enhanced if the response were slightly less than the provocation. Otherwise, it would be all too easy to get into a rut of unending responses to each other’s last defection. There are several ways for an echo effect to be controlled. One way is for the individual who first defected to realize that the other’s response need not call for yet another defection. For example, the Soviets might realize that NATO’s mobilization was merely a response to their own, and hence need not be regarded as threatening. Of course the Soviets might not see it that way, even if the NATO response was automatic and predictable. Therefore, it is also useful if the NATO response is somewhat less than proportional to the Soviet mobilization. Then if the Soviet response is also somewhat less than the NATO mobilization, the escalation of preparations can become stabilized, and then possibly reversed for a return to normal. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

Fortunately, friendship is not necessary for cooperation to evolve. As the trench warfare example demonstrates, even antagonists can learn to develop cooperation based upon reciprocity. The requirement for the relationship is not friendship, but durability. The good thing about international relations is that the major powers can be quite certain they will be interacting with each other year after year. Their relationship may not always be mutually rewarding, but it is durable. Therefore, next year’s interactions should cast a large shadow on this year’s choices, and cooperation has a good chance to evolve eventually. Foresight is not necessary either, as the biological examples demonstrate. However, without foresight, the evolutionary process can take a very long time. Fortunately, humans do have foresight and use it to speed up what would otherwise be a blind process of evolution. The individuals who were able to use the result of the first round in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, including the value of reciprocity, to anticipate what would work well on the second round end up gaining foresight. Foresight pays off with substantially more rewarding results. The result for the second round of negotiations is typically more sophisticated than the first. Cooperation based upon reciprocity was firmly established. The various attempts at exploitation of the unsophisticated entries of the first round all failed in the environment of the second round, demonstrating that the reciprocity of strategies like TIT FOR TAT is extraordinarily robust. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that people can use the surrogate experience of these rules to learn the value of reciprocity for their own Prisoner’s Dilemma interactions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Once the word gets out that reciprocity works, it becomes the thing to do. If you expect others to reciprocate your defections as well as your cooperations, you will be wise to avoid trying to start any trouble. Moreover, you will be wise to defect after someone else defects, showing that you will not be exploited. Thus you too will be wise to use a strategy based upon reciprocity. So will everyone else. In this manner the appreciation of the value of reciprocity becomes self-reinforcing. Once it gets going, it gets stronger and stronger. This is the essence of the ratchet effect which was established in a past reports: once cooperation based upon reciprocity gets established in a population, it cannot be overcome even by a cluster of individuals who try to exploit the others. The establishment of stable cooperation can take a long time if it is based upon blind forces of evolution, or it can happen rather quickly if its operations can be appreciated by intelligent individuals. The empirical and theoretical results of these reports might help people see more clearly the opportunities for reciprocity latent in their World. Knowing the concepts that accounted for the results of the two rounds of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and knowing the reasons and conditions for the success of reciprocity, might provide some additional foresight. We might come to see more clearly that there is a lesson in the fact that TIT FOR TAT succeeds without doing better than anyone with whom it interacts. It succeeds by eliciting cooperation from others, not by defeating them. We are used to thinking about competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such as football or chess. However, the World is rarely like that. In a vast range of situations mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutual defection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but in eliciting their cooperation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Today, the most important problems facing humanity are in the arena of international relations, where independent, egoistic nations face each other in a state of near anarchy. Many of these problems take the form of an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Examples can include arms races, nuclear proliferation, crisis bargaining, and military escalation. Of course, a realistic understanding of these problems would have to take into account many factors not incorporated into the simple Prisoner’s Dilemma formulation, such as ideology, bureaucratic policies, commitments, coalitions, mediation, and leadership. Nevertheless, we can use all the insights we can get. From the ancient Greeks to contemporary scholarship all political theory addresses one fundamental question: How can the human race, whether for selfish or more cosmopolitan ends, understand and control the seemingly blind forces of history? In the contemporary World this question has become especially acute because of the development of nuclear weapons. The advice to players of the Prisoner’s Dilemma might serve as good advice to national leaders as well: do not be envious, do not be the first to defect, reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and do not be too clever. Likewise, techniques we have discussed for promoting cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma might also be useful in promoting cooperation in international politics. The core of the problem of how to achieve rewards from cooperation is that trial and error in learning is slow and painful. The conditions may all be favorable for long-run developments, but we may not have the time to wait for blind processes to move us slowly toward mutually rewarding strategies based upon reciprocity. Perhaps if we understand the process better, we can use our foresight to speed up the evolution of cooperation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Though HAGOTH, with program that could detect if someone over the phone was being dishonest, has virtually disappeared, its idea survives—for example, in the machines called “lie detectors.” In American these are taken very seriously by police officers, lawyers, and corporate executive who ever more frequently insist that their employees be subjected to lie-detector tests. As for intelligence tests, they not only survive but flourish, and have been supplemented by vocational aptitude tests, creativity test, mental-health tests, tests that base attractions on pleasures of the flesh, and even material compatibility tests. One would think that two people who have lived together for a number of years would have noticed for themselves whether they get along or not. However, in Technopoly, these subjective forms of knowledge have no official status, and must be confirmed by tests administered by experts. Individual judgments, after all, are notoriously unreliable, filled with ambiguity and plagued by doubt. Tests and machines are not. Philosophers may agonize over the questions “What is truth?” “What is intelligence?” “What is the good life?” However, in Technopoly there is no need for such intellectual struggle. Machines eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity. They work swiftly, they are standardized, and the provide us with numbers that you can see and calculate with. They tell us that when eight green lights go on someone is speaking the truth. That is all there is to it. They tell us that a score of 136 means more brains than a score of 104. This is Technopoly’s version of magic. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

What is significant about magic is that it directs our attention to the wrong place. And by doing so, evokes in us a sense of wonder rather than understanding. In Technopoly, we are surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them. Which means we become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies. In considering here the ideological biases of medical technology, let us begin with a few relevant facts. Although the U.S.A. and England have equivalent life-expectancy rates, American doctors perform six times ad many cardiac bypass operations per capita as English doctors do. American doctors perform more diagnostic tests than doctors do in France, Germany, or England. An American woman has two to three times the chance of having a hysterectomy as her counterpart in Europe; 60 percent of the hysterectomies performed in America are done on women under the age of forty-four. American doctors do more prostate surgery per capita than do doctors anywhere in Europe, and the United States of America leads the industrialized World in the rate of cesarean-section operations—50 to 200 percent higher than in most other countries. When American doctors decide to forgo surgery in favor of treatment by drugs, they give higher dosages than doctors elsewhere. They prescribe about twice as many antibiotics as do doctors in the United Kingdom and commonly prescribe antibiotics when bacteria are likely to be present, whereas European doctors tend to prescribe antibiotics only if they know that the infection is caused by bacteria and is also serious. American doctors use far more X-rays per patient than doctors in other countries. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

In one review of the extent of X-ray use, a radiologist discovered cases in which fifty t one hundred X-rays had been taken of a single patient when five would have been sufficient. Other surveys have shown that, for almost one-third of the patients, the X-ray could have been omitted or deferred on the basis of available clinical data. We have been able to use basic principles to design and build a simple molecule that folds up the way we want it to. This is really the first real example of a design protein structure, designed from scratch, not by taking an already existing structure and tinkering with it. Although scientists do the work, the work itself is really a form of engineering. The process makes this clear: After you have made it, the next step is to find out whether our protein did what you expected it to do. Did it fold? Did it pass ions across bilayers [such as cell membranes]? Does it have a catalytic function [speeding specific chemical reactions]? And that is tested using the appropriate experiment. More than likely, it will not have done what you wanted it to do, so you have to find out why. Now, a good design has in it a contingency plan for failure and helps you learn from mistakes. Rather than designing a structure that would take a year or more to analyze, you design it so that it can be assayed for given function or structure in a matter of days. Many groups are pursuing design today, including academic researchers like Jane and Dave Richardson at the Duke University, Bruce Erickson at the University of North Carolina, and Tom Blundell, Robin Leatherbarrow, and Alan Fersht in Britain. The successes have stated to roll in. Japan, however, is unique in having an organization devoted exclusively to such projects: the Protein Engineering Research Institute (PERI) in Osaka. In 1990, PERI announced the successful designs and construction of de novo protein several times larger than any built before. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

Extra-intelligence can squeeze untold billions of fat and waste out of the economy. It potentially represents an enormous leap forward—the substitution of brainpower and imagination not merely for capital, energy, and resources, but for brutalizing labor as well. However, whether extra-intelligence produces a “better” way of life will depend partly on the social and political intelligence that guides its overall development. The more automated and extra-intelligent our networks become, the more human decision-making is hidden from view, and the more dependent we all become on preprogrammed events based on concepts and assumptions that few understand and that are sometimes not even willingly disclosed. Before long the power of computers will leap forward because f parallel processing, artificial intelligence, and other studding innovations. Speech recognition and automatic translation will, no doubt, come into wide use, along with high-definition visual displays ad concert-class sounds. The same networks now routinely carry voice, data, imagines, cable, Internet, and other information in other forms. All this raises profound philosophical questions. Some see in all this the coming monopolization of knowledge. The moment of truth comes when the matter of the ownership and control of the new information banks…[strikes] with a vengeance. This is the specter of a global private monopoly of information. That fear is now far too simple. The issue is not whether one giant global private monopoly will control all information—which seems highly unlikely—but who will control the endless conversations and reconversions of it made possible by extra-intelligence, as data, information, and knowledge flow through the nervous system of the super-symbolic economy. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

Baffling new issues about the uses and misuses of knowledge will arise to confront business and society as a whole. They will no longer simply reflect Bacon’s truth that knowledge is power, but the higher level of truth that, in the super-symbolic economy, it is knowledge about knowledge that counts most. I.T. and telecommunications, however, are not the only advanced technologies that can contribute to a real war on poverty. India has one of the most successful operational space programs running in the developing World, with capabilities to design, develop, fabricate and launch its own communications and remote sensing satellite. It is also planning to send a scientific payload to go around the moon using its own rocket. Once more, this may seem irrelevant to the less affluent—your land is subject to sudden flooding or you are among the thousands saved from drowning with the help of satellite-based disaster-warning systems and remote sensing technologies. Or if you are among the 100,000 patients of the Regional Cancer Center in Thiruvananthapuram who once had to travel extremely long distance, often more than one, and at high cost, for treatment or follow-up care. The RCC has now set up six peripheral centers. All six are teleclinics linked to the main facility by the Internet—and the number of necessary follow-up visits has fallen by more than 30 percent. The Indian Space Research Organization has also created satellite links between big, multi-specialty hospitals and eight remote healthy centers to allow the exchange of patients’ records, imagines and data from medical instruments, along with live video and audio contact. All this means that doctors in central locations can help guide medics in the remote rural villages. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

In biotechnology, India could generate $5 billion and up to a million new jobs in the coming five years. India’s Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority has agreed to allow insurance firms to put money into biotech, and the government has made it easier for foreign venture capitalist to invest. It is in this sector, as we will see shortly, that some of the most important tools for the reduction of poverty may well be found. And not just in India. Many of the advances we see in India are still either experimental or limited. They are patchy and not yet systemically integrated. However, as more pieces of the knowledge-based wealth system are laid in place and begin to interact and reinforce one another, their payoffs will increase combinatorially, if not exponentially, as happened in the past when different components of the industrial wealth system—social, institutional, political and culture—came together. India faces many of the same social, political and cultural challenges we find in China—corruption, infirmary, massive environmental problems, the need for institutional reinvention and generational conflict, to name a few. Externally, while China worries about Taiwan, India worries about a shaky, nuclear-armed Pakistan and the ever-bloody struggle against Muslim secessionists in Kashmir. What is more, and unlike China ate present, India faces caste conflict and intermittent murderous battles between Hindu and Muslim fanatics. Despite all this, India knows it cannot delay a fresh assault on poverty—and it cannot win that attack with smokestacks alone. It also cannot win so long as most of its population remains doomed to a low-productivity peasant existence, no matter how much small-scale “appropriate technology” is introduced. Neither a Second Wave strategy nor a First Wave strategy is enough. “Believest thou that there is no God? I say unto you, Nay, thou knowest that there is a God, but thou lovest that lucre more than Him,” reports Alma 11.24. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

Cresleigh Homes

When it comes to innovative, liveable design, our home at Mills Station (Residence 2) offers tons of options for customization!

In this home, you’ll find the Owner’s suite on the first floor (perfect for multi-generational living OR a home that can adapt along with you) and two additional bedrooms in the “pop-top” second story.

We’ve got everything you need and more in this home! Personalize this home with an array of popular finishes and fixtures! https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/

This beautiful new community showcases our Cresleigh Ranch collection. Don’t miss the final opportunity to purchase at Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch.

#CresleighHomes
#CresleighRanch

Find a Way to Have Your Own Mind

Everyone is God and the Devil, for together Satan and Christ inhabit everyone. Like Christ and Satan, many people are both metaphorically crucified and sent to hell. Anything that is not created out of the depths of loneliness is not a creation, only a production, and has no soul to sustain it. Many people who claim to be waiting for the second coming are not genuine, often they are just waiting for a chance to get on the second crucifixion. A few of them are already bargaining for the television rights lest they get caught with their pants down by an unknown contender making a surprise bid for the number one spot. What they fail to realize is that the twenty first-century savior is going to outfox them all by, yes, he is going t crucify himself, thus getting a jump on his competitors. Not only that, but his loyal followers will be standing there beside him, not just gawking or taking notes, but yes, sports lovers, actually crucifying themselves right along with their leader. And they stand, eyes wild. It is hard to see because the light is getting so bright, but it seems that each one of these men and women is armed with a golden hammer and a handful of plutonium spikes. They are standing in a circle around a tower, on the breast of a hill in the midst of a slum, and they are actually nailing themselves to the ground, fellow Americans, and some of them are nailing each other to the ground—let us have a slow motion replay of that last bit of actions—wonderful—and now it appears that these people are actually driving these spikes in rhythm and singing some sort of spiritual or worksong!—word just in from our computers indicates that the language they are singing in has never been spoke on Earth before—perhaps that is why they are singing it instead—and ladies and gentlemen, the modern messiah has just announced that as soon as he is sure these spikes have been driven deeply enough, he and his disciples will rise, that is right, folks, they are going to rise into the Heavens, and since they are so, well, attached to the Earth, they are going to drag it along behind them! #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Wow! Sounds like they have got their work cut out for them, eh? Lucky you can just sit in your armchair and wait for it to come on tv! They seem to be nearly ready for the Big Drag now…hard to tell what is actually happening from down here, though, what with all the blood and thunder and fire and screaming—maybe I will just step up the hill here a bit, and get a closer look…might be a little risky, but it is my job to get the truth, before it gets me. The Enlightenment thinkers understood themselves to be making a most daring innovation: according to Machiavelli, modern philosophy was to be politically effective, while Plato and Aristotle, and all the ancients who followed them since Socrates founded political philosophy were politically ineffective. Machiavelli follows Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, who ridicules Socrates for being unable to defend himself, to avert insults or slaps in the face. The vulnerability of the philosopher would seem to be the starting place for the new reflection and the renewal of philosophy. This may seem trivial to many today, but the entire philosophic tradition, ancient and modern, took the relation of mind to society as the most fruitful beginning point for understanding the human situation. Certainly the first philosophy of which we have a full account begins with the trial and execution of the philosopher. And Machiavelli, the inspirer of the great philosophical systems of modernity, starts from this vulnerability of reason within the political order and makes it his business to correct it. Some might say it was not concern with the fate of philosophers but the wish, In Bacon’s phrase, to ease man’s estate that motivated the modern thinkers. This, however, comes down to the same thing—a criticism of the ancient philosophers for their impotence, and a reflection on the relation of knowledge to civil society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The ancients were always praising virtue, but men were not made more virtuous as a result. Everywhere there were rotten regimes, tyrants persecuting peoples, rich exploiting the less affluent, computer hackers robbing people of their hard earn money through various means, nobles keeping down citizens men insufficiently protected by laws or arms, et cetera. Wise men saw clearly what was wrong in all this, but their wisdom did not generate power to do anything about it. The new philosophy claimed to have discovered the means to reform society and to secure the theoretical life. If the two purposes were not identical, they were intended to be complementary. It must be remembered that this was a dispute within philosophy and that there was an agreement among the parties to it about what philosophy is. The moderns looked to and disagreed with the Greek philosophers and their heirs, the Roman philosophers. However, they shared the view that philosophy, and with it what we call science, came to be in Greece and had never, so far as is known, come to be elsewhere. Philosophy is the rational account of the whole, or of nature. Nature is a notion that itself is of Greek origin and requisite to science. The principle of contradiction guided the discourse of all, and the moderns presented reasoned arguments against those of their predecessors with who they disagree. The moderns simply took over a large part of ancient astronomy and mathematics. And they, above all, agreed that the philosophic life is the highest life. Their quarrel is not like the difference between Moses and Socrates, or Jesus and Lucretius, where there is no common universe of discourse, but more like the differences between Newton and Einstein. It is a struggle for the struggle for the possession of rationalism by rationalists. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

This fact is lost sight of, partly because scholasticism, the use of Aristotle by the Roman Catholic Church, was the phantom of philosophy within the older order that was violently attacked by the modern philosophy. Another reason why the essential agreement between ancients and moderns is no longer clear is the modern science of intellectual history, which tends to see all differences of opinion as differences of “Worldview,” which blurs the distinction between disagreements founded on reason and those founded on faith. They very term Enlightenment is connected with Plato’s most powerful image about the relation between thinker and society, the cave. In the Republic, Socrates presents men as prisoners in a dark cave, bound and forced to look at a wall against which are projected images that they take to be the beings and that are for them the only reality. Freedom for man means escaping the bonds, civil society’s conventions, leaving the cave and going up to where the run illuminates the beings and seeing them as they really are. Contemplating them is at once freedom, truth and the greatest pleasure. Socrates’ presentation is meant to show that we begin from deceptions, or myths, but that it is possible to aspire to a nonconventional World, to nature, by the use of reason. The false opinions can be corrected, and their inner contradictions impel thoughtful men to seek the truth. Education is the movement from darkness to light. Rason projected on the beings about which at first we only darkly opine produces enlightenment. The moderns accepted that reason can comprehend the beings, that there is a light to which science aspires. The entire difference between ancients and moderns concerns the cave, or non-metaphorically, the relation between knowledge and civil society. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Socrates never suggests that, even in the unlikely event that philosophers should be kings and possess absolute wisdom, the nature of the cave could be altered or that a civil society, a people, a demos, could not make any but the happy few able to see the beings as they really are. They would guide the city reasonable, but in their absence the city would revert to unreason. Or to put it in another way, the unwise could not recognize the wise. Men like Bacon and Descartes, by contrast, thought that it was possible to make all men reasonable, to change what had always and everywhere been the case. Enlightenment meant to shine the light of being in the cave and forever to dim the images on the wall. Then there would be unity between the people and the philosopher. The whole issue turns on whether the cave is intractable, as Plato thought, or can be changed by a new kind of education, as the greatest philosophic figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth century taught. As Plato tells us, Socrates was charged with impiety, of not holding the same gods the city held, and he was found guilty. Plato always presents Socrates as the archetypical philosopher. The events of Socrates’ life, the problems he faced, represent what the philosopher as such must face. The Apology tells us that the political problem for the philosopher is the gods. It makes clear that the images on the wall of the cave about which me will not brook contradiction represent the gods. Socrates’ reaction to the accusation is not to assert the right of academic freedom to pursue investigations into the things in the Heavens and under the Earth. He accepts they city’s right to demand his belief. His defense, not very convincing, is that he is not a subversive. He asserts the great dignity of philosophy and tries as much as possible to reduce the gap between it and good citizenship. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

In other words, he temporizes or is insincere. His defense cannot be characterized as “intellectual honest” and is not quite to contemporary taste. He only wants to be left alone as much as possible, but is fully aware that a man who doubts what every good citizen is supposed to know and spends his life sitting around talking about virtue, rather than doing virtuous deeds, comes into conflict with the city. Characteristically, Socrates lives with the essential conflicts and illustrated them, rather than trying to abolish them. In the Republic he attempts to unite citizenship with philosophy. The only possible solution is for philosophers to rule, so there would be no opposition between the city’s commands and what philosophy requires, or between power and wisdom. However, this outline of a solution is ironic and impossible. It only serves to show what one must live with. The regime of philosopher-kings is usually ridiculed and regarded as totalitarian, but it contains much of what we really want. Practically everyone wants reason to rule, and no one thinks man like Socrates should be ruled by inferiors or have to adjust what he thinks to them. What the Republic actually traches is that none of this is possible and that our situation requires both much compromise and much intransigence, great risks and few hopes. The important thing is not speaking one’s own mind, but finding a way to have one’s own mind. Contrary to common opinion, it is Enlightenment that was intent on philosophers’ ruling, taking Socrates’ ironies seriously. If they did not have the title of king, their political schemes were, all the same, designed to be put into practice. And they were put into practice, not by begging princes to listen to them but by philosophy’s generating sufficient power to force princes to give way. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The rule of philosophy is recognized in the insistence that regimes be constructed to protect the rights of man. The anger we experience on reading Socrates’ censorship of the poets is unselfconscious, if we agree, as we willy-nilly do, that children must be taught the scientific method prior to any claims of the imagination on their belief or conduct. Enlightenment education really does what Socrates only tentatively proposes. Socrates, at least, tries to preserver poetry, whereas Enlightenment is almost indifferent to its fate. The fact that we think there should be poetry classes as well as education in reasoning helps us to miss the point: What happens to poetic imagination when the soul has been subjected to a rigorous discipline that resists poetry’s greatest charms? The Enlightenment thinkers were very clear on this point. There is no discontinuity in the tradition about it. They were simply solving the problem to the advantage of reason, as Socrates wished it could be solved but thought it could not. Enlightenment is Socrates respected and free to study what he wants, and thereby it is civil society reconstituted. In the Apology, Socrates, who lives in thousands fold poverty because he neither works nor has inherited, purposes with ultimate insolence that he be fed at public expense at city hall. However, what is the modern university, with its pay and tenure, other than a free lunch for philosophy and scientists? Moreover, the Enlightenment’s explicit effort to remove the religious passion from politics, resulting in distinctions like that between church and state, is motivated by the wish to prevent the highest principle in political life from being hostile to reason. This is the intention in the Republic of Socrates’ reform of the stories about the gods told by the poets. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Nothing that denies the principle of contradiction is allowed to be authoritative, for that is the reef against which Socrates foundered. However, Socrates did not think that church and state could be separated. He would have treated both terms as artificial. The gods are believed to be the founders of every city and are its most important beings. He would not have dared to banish them in defense of himself. The Enlightenment thinkers took on his case and carried on a way against the continuing threat to science posed by first causes that are irrational or beyond reason. The gradual but never perfect success of that war turns the desire to be reasonable into the right to be reasonable, into academic freedom. In the process, political life was rebuilt in ways that have proved intolerable to many statesmen and thinkers, and have gradually led to the reintroduction of religion and the irrational in new and often terrifying guises. This is what Socrates would have feared. However, here I am only indicating the unity of the tradition, that Enlightenment is an attempt to give political status to what Socrates represents. The academy and the university are the institutions that incorporate the Socratic spirit more or less well. Yet the existence of these institutions underlines at the same time how they differ from Socrates, who founded no institutions and had only friends. And these attacks on these institutions made first by Rousseau and then by Nietzsche are attacks on Socratic rationalism made in a Socratic spirit. The history of Western thought and learning can be encapsulated in the fate of Socrates, beginning with Plato defending him, passing through the Enlightenment institutionalizing him, and ending with Nietzsche accusing on him. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The cherishing, for two and a half millennia, of the memory of this man, who was put to death by the city for philosophizing, ends with his spiritual execution in the name of culture at the hands of the latest of great philosophers. Both city and culture are authorized by the sacred. The meditation on Socrates is the inspiring theme of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle, through Farabi and Maimonides, Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau and Hegel, to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Socrates is the complementary man whose enigmatic being leads to reflection of the nature of the knowers. Sometimes the problem of slowing down rather than promoting cooperation. An example is the prevention of collusive business practices by avoiding the very conditions which would promote cooperation. Unfortunately, the very ease with which cooperation can evolve even among egoists suggests that the prevention of collusion is not an easy task. Cooperation certainly does not require formal agreements or even face-to-face negotiations. The fact that cooperation based upon reciprocity can emerge and prove stable suggests that antitrust activities should pay more attention to preventing the conditions that foster collusion than to search for secret meetings among executives of competing firms. Consider, for example, the practice of the government selecting two companies for competitive development contracts for a new military airplane. Since aerospace companies specialize to some degree in planes for either Air Force or the Nav, there is a tendency for firms with the same specialty to face each other in the final competition. This frequency of interaction between two given companies makes tacit collusion relatively easy to achieve. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

To make tacit collusion more difficult, the government should seek methods of reducing specialization or compensating for its effects. Paris of companies which shared a specialization would then expect to interact less often in the final competitions. This would cause later interactions between them to be worth relatively less, reducing the shadow of the future. If the nest expected interaction is sufficiently far off, reciprocal cooperation in the form of tacit collusion cases to be a stable policy. The potential for attaining cooperation without formal agreements has its bright side in other contexts. For example, it means that cooperation on the control of the arms race does not have to be sought entirely through the formal mechanism of negotiated treaties. Arms control could also evolve tacitly. Certainly, the fact that the United States of America and Russia know that they will both be dealing with each other for a very long time should help establish the necessary conditions. The leaders may not like each other, but neither did the soldiers in World War I who learned to live and let live. Occasionally a political leader gets the idea that cooperation with another major power should not be sought because a better plan would be to drive them into bankruptcy. This is an extraordinarily risky enterprise because the target need not limit its response to the withholding of normal cooperation, but would also have a strong incentive to escalate the conflict before it was irreversibly weakened. Japan’s despairing gamble at Pearl Harbor, for example, was a response to power American economic sanctions aimed at stopping Japanese intervention in China. Rather than give up what it regarded as a vital sphere, Japan decided to attack America before becoming even further weakened. Japan understood that American was much more powerful, but decided that the cumulative effects of the sanctions made it better to attack rather than to wait for the situation to get even more desperate. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Trying to drive someone bankrupt changes the time perspective of the participants by placing the future of the interaction very much in doubt. And without the shadow of the future, cooperation becomes impossible to sustain. Thus, the role of time perspectives is critical in the maintenance of cooperation. When the interaction is likely to continue for a long time, and the players care enough about their future together, the conditions are ripe for the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship. When the conditions are right, the players can come to cooperate with each other through trial-and-error learning about possibilities for mutual rewards, through imitation of other successful players, or even through a blind process of selection of the more successful strategies with a weeding out of the less successful ones. Whether the players trust each other or not is less important in the long run than whether the conditions are ripe for them to build a stable pattern of cooperation with each other. Just as the future is important for the establishment of the conditions for cooperation, the past is important for the monitoring of actual behavior. It is essential that they players are able to observe and respond to each other’s prior choices. Without this ability to use the past, defections could not be punished, and the incentive to cooperate would disappear. Fortunately, the ability to monitor the prior behavior of the other player does not have to be perfect. When dealing with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, people sometimes assume perfect knowledge of the other individual. In many settings, however, an individual may occasionally misperceive the choice made by the other. A defection may go undetected, or a cooperation may be misinterpreted as a defection. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The role of time perspective has important implications for the design of institutions. In large organizations, such as business corporations and governmental bureaucracies, executives are often transferred from one position to another approximately every two years. This gives executive a strong incentive to do well in the short run, regardless of the consequences for the organization in the long run. They know that soon they will be in some other position, and the consequences of their choices in the previous post are not likely to be attributed to them after they have left their position. This gives two executives a mutual incentive to defect when either of their terms is drawing to an end. The result of rapid turnover could therefore be a lessening of cooperation within the organization. Economics of the past, whether agricultural or industrial, were built around long-lasting structures. In place of these, we are laying the electronic basis for an accelerative kaleidoscopic economy capable of instantly reshuffling itself into new patterns without blowing itself apart. The new extra-intelligence is part of the necessary adaptive equipment. In the confusing new flux, businesses can use extra-intelligence to launch surprise attacks on entirely fresh territory, which means that companies can no longer be sure where the next competitive push will come from. The classic blitzkrieg—much analyzed in the network literature—was Merrill Lynch’s launch of its Cash Management Account in 1977, an early use of information technology for a strategic, as distinct from merely administrative, purpose. The Cash Management Account, or CMA, was a new financial product that combined four previously separate services for the customer: a checking account, a deposit account, a credit card, and a securities account. The customer could move money back and forth among these at will. There was no float and the checking account paid interest. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

The integration of these previously disparate products into a single offering was made possible only by Merrill Lynch’s sophisticate computer technology electronic networks. In twelve months, Merrill sucked in $5 billion of customer fund and by 1984, according to consultant Peter Keen, $70 billion had flooded into Merrill Lynch’s hands. Keen calls it a “preemptive strike” against the banks, which saw vast sums withdrawn by customers who preferred the CMA to an ordinary bank checking account. A securities house, not subject to ban regulations and not regarded as a bank, devastated the bank. Since then, many banks and other financial institutions have offered similar packages, but Merrill has a several-year head start on them. The strange new hybrid patterns of competition—which reflect a restructuring of markets as a result of extra-intelligence—are seen in the move of retailers like Japan’s Seibu Saison group into the financial services business. A Seibu subsidiary is planning to install electronic cash dispensers in railroad stations. British Petroleum, having set up its own internal bank, sells banking services to outsiders. Extra-intelligent networks help explain the widespread push for deregulation of industry, and they suggest that existing government regulations will prove less and less effective. For existing regulations are based on categories and divisions among industries that no longer exist in the age of extra-intelligence. Should banking regulations apply to nonbanks? What, after all, is a bank these days? By linking actual operations across company lines, by making it possible for companies to compete in fields once regarded as alien, extra-intelligent networks break up the old specialization, the old institutional division of labor. In their place come new constellations and cluster of companies, densely interrelated not merely by money but by shared information. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Ironically, it is the disruption cased by this drastic restructuring of the economy around knowledge that explains many of today’s breakdowns and inefficiencies—the misplaced bills, the computer errors, the inadequate service, the sense that nothing works properly. The old smokestack economy is disintegrating; the new super-symbolic economy is still being built, and the electronic infrastructure on which it depends is still in a primitive stage of development. Information is the most fluid of resources, and fluidity is the hallmark of an economy in which the production and distribution of food, energy, goods, and services increasingly depend on symbolic exchange. What emerges is an economy that itself looks more like a nervous system than anything else, and which runs according to rules no one has as yet formulated coherently. Indeed, the unprecedented rise of extra-intelligence raises profound, sometimes chilling questions for society as a whole, quite different from those raised by earlier communications revolutions. The World media today focus on the striking changes wrought by the outsourcing of jobs to India from the United States of America and elsewhere. Indeed, the story of I.T. jobs flowing to Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurgaon, and Jaipur has made front-page headlines around the World. By 2021, India was earning $157 billion a year by manning call centers, writing software, performing back-office work, accounting and even financial analysis for American and other foreign firms. And India’s projected revenue from firms being outsourced to that nation is $245 billion by 2022. But the charge that outsourcing takes jobs away from Americans overlooks a reserves effect. For instance, Bangalore Central, a new shopping mall offering such imported brands as Levi’s, Polo, Lacoste and Jockey. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

The outsourcing boom—insourcing from India’s point of view—is unlikely to continue at its present pace of growth, but it has helped create a segment of nouveaux riches who are young, middle-class, focused on “now” and very witty, too much so for their elders. The 2004 election in India resurrected the Congress Party, whose roots in quasi-socialism led it to view development conventionally as a matter of factories and smokestacks rather than the transition to a knowledge-based wealth system. However, even longtime holdouts are coming around, including Communists, who are theoretically farther to the let than the Congress Party. A reporter not long ago chided the Communist chief minister of the state of West Bengal, where Calcutta is located, pointing out that “your party helped protect the advent of computers.” The chief minister’s response: “That was in the 1970s—that was foolish, foolish. It stated when they were going to introduce computers in bans and [insurance companies]. Their employees protested and we supported it. Nowadays they have understood…We have entered a century where industries will be talent-based.” Now even Calcutta, once the World symbol of urban misery, has reached out and attracted IMB. Article after article has pictured India’s talented young I.T. workers as a greedy, socially irresponsible, yuppiesque middle class. Less attention has been paid to the fact that, because of computers over 8 million people in the state of Karnataka can now, for the equivalent of thirty cents, get a printout of land records securing their property from takeover by corrupt, farm-grabbing landlords.  On a wider scale, a consortium of Indian and U.S. corporations, along with the World Bank, and the Indian government set up Internet kiosks in five thousand Karnataka villages that allow rural residents access to banking, education and government services. Karnataka is held up as a model for the rest of the nation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

An enterprising company made available a machine called HAGOTH, of which it might be said, this was Technopoly’s most ambitions hour. The machine cost $1,5000, the baragen of the century, for it was able to reveal to its owner whether someone talking on the telephone was telling the truth. It did this by measuring the “stress content” of a human voice as indicated by its oscillations. You connected HAGOTH to your telephone and, in the course of conversation, asked your caller some key questions, such as “Where did you go last Saturday night?” HAGOTH had sixteen lights—eight green and eight red—and when the caller replied, HAGOTH went to work. Red lights went on when there was much stress in the voice, green lights when there was little. As an advertisement for HAGOTH said, “Green indicates no stress, hence truthfulness.” In other words, according to HAGOTH, it is not possible to speak the truth in a quivering voice or to lie in a steady one—an idea that would doubtless amuse Richard Nixon. At the very least, we must say that HAGOTH’s definition of truthfulness was peculiar, but so precise and exquisitely technical as to command any bureaucrat’s admiration. The same may be said of the definition of intelligence as expressed in a standard-brand intelligence test. In fact, an intelligence test works exactly like HAGOTH. You connect a pencil to the fingers of a young person and address some key questions to one; from the replies a computer can calculate exactly how much intelligence exists in the young person’s brain. HAGOTH has mercifully disappeared from the market, for what reason I do not know. Perhaps it was sexist or culturally biased or, worse, could not measure oscillations accurately enough. When it comes to machinery, what Technopoly insists upon most is accuracy. The idea embedded in the machine is largely ignored, no matter how peculiar. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Some may wonder, how can protein engineering build molecular machines? Proteins can self-assemble into working molecular machines, objects that do something, such as cutting and splicing other molecules or making muscles contract. They also join with other molecules to form huge assemblies like the ribosome (about the size of a washing machine, in our simulation view). Ribosomes—programmable machines for manufacturing proteins—are nature’s closet approach to a molecular assembler. The genetic-engineering industry is chiefly in the business of reprogramming natural nanomachines, the ribosomes, to make new proteins is termed protein engineering. Since biomolecules already form such complex devices, it is easy to see that advanced protein engineering could be used to build first-generation nanomachines. Making proteins is easier than designing them. Protein chemists began by studying proteins found in nature, but have only recently moved on to the problem of engineering new ones. These are called de novo proteins, meaning completely new, made from scratch. Designing proteins is difficult because of the way they are constructed. A characteristic of proteins is that their activities depend on their three-dimensional structures. These activities may range from hormonal action to a function in digestion or in metabolism. Whatever their function in digestion or in metabolism. Whatever their function, it is always essential to have a definite three-dimensional shape or structure. This three-dimensional structure forms when a chain folds to form a compact molecular object. To get a feel for how tough it is to predict the natural folding of a protein chain, picture a straight piece of cord with hundreds of magnets and sticky knots along its length. In this state, it is easy to make and easy to understand. Now pick it up, put it in a glass jar, and shake it for a long time. Could you predict its final shape? Certainly not: it is a tangled mess. One might call this effort at predation “the sticky-cord-folding problem”; protein chemists call theirs “the protein-folding problem.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Given the correct conditions, a protein chain always folds into one special shape, but that shape is hard to predict from just the straightened structure. Protein designers, though, face the different job of first determining a desired final shape, and then figuring out what linear sequence of amino acids to use to make that shape. Without solving the classic protein-folding problem, they have begun to solve the protein-design problem. Now many people wonder why so much pleasures of the flesh and so much skin is shown on television? Well, it is because lust is better television than satisfaction. Ebullience and anxiety are better than tranquility. On the other hand, anger is better than anxiety. Jealousy is better television than acceptance. All of these work more easily than love. Passionate love is more communicable than brotherly and sisterly love. Competition is inherently more televisable than cooperation as it involves drama, winning, wanting and loss. Cooperation offers no conflict and becomes boring. Materialism, acquisitiveness and ambition, all highly focused attitudes, work better than spirituality, nonseeking, openness and yielding. The medium cannot deal with ambiguity, subtlety and diversity. Doing is also easier to convey than being. Activity will always be chosen over inactivity. When dealing with tribal peoples, objective events such as hunting, building, fighting or dancing are easier to convey through television than subjective details of qualities of experience, ways of mind, alternative perceptions. The latter qualities, which form the heart of life for tribal people, are dropped out in favor of the former. Lound is easier to televise than soft. Close is easer than distant. Large is easier than small. Too large is harder than medium. The narrow is easier than the wide. Therefore, television is not an accurately display of live, culture, people, or civilization, and it does not really teach a lot of values one wants their kids to follow. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Therefore, do not let the news teach you how to profile situations or people, nor let them teach you how to predict future events. Local news tends to be fake. They are just trying to get ratings and they can keep their thoughts and prayers to themselves. Who knows what they are thinking and praying about besides a way to strike fear into people and spread ignorance in the community.  Like the God of Heaven, man makes in himself the choice between good and evil, both of which, like Him, he bears within himself. Between God and man, however, stand the primal spirits, they too choosing, but in pure paradox. They neither contain nor confront a duplicity, each possesses only himself in the most extreme differentiation; the other one, the other thing, he only has as his absolute computer; such is the situation in which he chooses himself, his own kind and the work commensurate wit it. Choosing, each acknowledges himself. The evil chooses and acknowledges himself, not however merely as created thus and not otherwise, but precisely as the evil, and for his followers he does not merely posit that after death they shall abide with him, but that it is just the worst existence which shall fall to their lot (in this doctrines there is no distinction of category between bad and evil: the bad is precisely that which cases evil, and in the last analysis there is no other evil than that which it causes.) He desires evil as such; and thereby he fulfills the will of the highest god, who brought forth him and his twin: only through mastering unmitigated evil does existence attain to transfiguration. Here the most harassing of questions remains unasked: how can the God of Heavens, the primal being, have contained and encompassed evil? “And they hearkened not unto the voice of the Lord, because of their wicked combinations; wherefore, there began to be wars and contentions in all the land, and also may famines and pestilences, insomuch that there was a great destruction such and one as never had been known upon the face of the Earth; and all this came to pass in the days of Shiblom. And the people began to repent of their iniquity; and inasmuch as they did the Lord did have mercy on them, reports Ether 10.7-8. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19


Cresleigh Homes

Imagine late night talks, in the summer, around a table like the one in this backyard, with a nice cold beverage.

When you’re the largest home in the neighborhood, you’ve got the space to spread out…both indoors and outdoors!

#Havenwood Residence 4 offers a covered porch along with the patio, so you’ll have plenty of room to entertain in the sunshine.

Be a part of the highly anticipated Havenwood masterplan, this highly coveted Lincoln, California neighborhood has much to offer.

It’s thoughtfully designed to promote connected communities, active lifestyles, saftey and peace and quite.

Homesite 75 is ready for new owners! If you’re in the market to make moves to an incredible community, contact us: (916) 409-5595 Havenwood@Cresleigh.com

Residents will appreciate access to prestigious schools. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-four/

#CresleighHomes
#Havenwood

Love Does Not Exists Only in Rare Fleeting Moments

Overpopulated and over-proselytized, The Earth’s land which houses the generation’s of oscillating cities and suburbs began to erode as quickly as quickly as the illusion has. The green lawns and pavement echo with love’s demise. The discarded remains of “youthquake” were now street-smart hustlers. Those left behind after the COVID pandemic can only anesthetize themselves from the World’s mourning and especially, the confusion at hand. The whitewashing euphoria of a pre-tyrannical America turned into an interment camp left behind faces that were convoluted, masked, and void of expression. All that remained was paranoia, phobia and frustration. Hate became the first turned-on revelation. The masses continued to recruit mask police to make sure everyone had on a mask, even if it was dirty and had been worn several times. Men, women, and children were starving in the street. Minds and bodies have become maimed as we watched a much larger scaled model of 9/11. Now someone had to have an answer. The remnants of those evaporated souls awaited remedy by a savior. In the coming years, saviors appeared to supply the demand: pimps, pushers, scientologists, yang, yin, payday loans. Well dressed, Jesuses in silk suits, draped in gold jewelry and driving brand new BMWs and Cadillac Escalades. The Process Church of the Final Judgment. The witches from “Charmed,” who claimed “In love there is no wrong.” Anyone who posed an answer to a perennial question was God-for-a-day. The preachers pontificated, “To all who would know, I am the truth and I speak the truth. In all humility I tell you that I am the greatest an in the World and it does not trouble me in the least. I am going to attack everything you believe in, everything you cling to and put this New Man in you. I am going to shed light on your dark truths.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

The preachers when on to announce, “Love does not exist, but only in rare feeling moments. Therefore, wives, cleave unto your husbands and honor his wishes. For love is something you become after there is no more you. This takes complete sacrifice of the personality, mind, body, heart and soul to Jesus Christ. You must give up everything you want for yourself. All these weaklings who are not clinging to God for support are just putting off their own crucifixions. And you must be reborn in Jesus Christ. Amen.” The COVID pandemic presciently brought on this apocalyptic conundrum, regeneration for the price of self-sacrifice. Manson would have called it, “losing the ego” or “cease to exist.” Baptists translate it as being reborn. Either way, breaking oneself down to be built up again was not hard for the lost souls of Hate and Socialism. They were already broken. However, for many, the vaccine and masks took on the role of God, and to a degree, many were convinced they were. The vaccine and these masks secured themselves as a legend, a cure all. They took getting a vaccine and using a mask as a request from God Himself. These tools began to seduce the nation’s press. There was something strange about people walking around with their faces covered, and making galactic claims about the vaccine. These tools, however, answered the prayers emanating from the deathbeat of Americana. They became quit the perfect garden variety God in a materialist World turned upside-down. The vaccines and masks became the World’s universal savior as they eased most everyone’s inner torment, but the COVID measures also fostered their isolation. Many people were too full of dope and alcohol to know what was good anyone, as the Churches had shutdown, but the liquor stores and neighborhood pushers were still open for business. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

The cities started to drain the people of their souls and financial resources with these empty slogans of “flattening the curve” and convincing them that the President would support them with “$2,000 a month stimulus checks until the pandemic was over,” and “cancel student load dept.” Yet, many Americans are left homeless, farms have gone bankrupt, cattle are starving, people had to decide to buy fuel for their cars so they could get to work or food to put on the table, as their heads got more wrinkled and their hair turned grey waiting for theses unfulfilled promises. The original intention of the reformed academies and universities was to provide a publicly respectable place—and a means of support—for theoretical men, of whom at best there are only  few in any nation, to meet, exchange their thoughts and train young persons in the ways of science. The academies and universities were to be engines in the progress of science. The right that reformers attempted to establish was for scientists to be unhindered in the use of their reason, in the areas in which they are competent, to solve the problems posed by nature. Reason and competence are to be underlined here. “Intellectual honesty,” “commitment” and that kind of thing have nothing to do with the university, belong in the arenas of religious and political struggle, only get in the way of the university’s activity, and open it to suspicion and criticism of which it has no need. Freedom of thought and freedom of speech were proposed in theory, and in the practice of serious political reformers, in order to encourage the still voice of reason in a World that had always been comminated by fanaticisms and interests. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

How freedom of thought and speech came to mean the special encouragement and protection of fanaticism and interests is another of those miracles connected with the decay of the ideal of the rational political order. The authors of The Federalist hoped their scheme of government would result in the preponderance of reason and rational men in the United States of America. They were not particularly concerned with protecting eccentric or mad opinions or life-styles. Such protection, which we now often regard as the Founders’ central intention, is only an incidental result of the protection of reason, and it loses plausibility if reason is rejected. These authors did not respect the many religious sects or desire diversity for its own sake. The existence of many sects was permitted only to prevent the emergence of a single dominant one. The moment of the Enlightenment’s success seems also to have been the beginning of its decay. The obscuring of its intention as a result of its democratization is symptomatic of the inner difficulties of its project. That project entailed freedom for the rare theoretical men to engage in rational inquiry in rational inquiry in the small number of disciplines that treat the first principles of all things. This requires an atmosphere where the voice of reason is not drowned by the loud voices of the various “commitments” prevailing in political life. Knowledge is the goal; competence and reason are required of those who pursue it. The disciplines are philosophy, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and the science of man, meaning a political science that discerns the nature of man and the end of government. This is the academy. Dependent on it are a number of applied sciences—particularly engineering, medicine and law—that are lower in dignity and derivative in knowledge, but produce the fruits of science that benefit the unscientific and make them respectful of science. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Thus the advantage of the knowers, who want to pursue knowledge, and that of those who do not know, those who want to pursue their well-being, are served simultaneously, establishing a harmony between them. And thus the age-old gulf separating the wise from those who hold power is bridged, and the problem of the wise in civil society is solved. The project was unity reflecting the unity of the intelligible order of nature, its parts organized according to the order of the parts of the whole, joined together finally in a survey of the articulated whole made by the culminating science-philosophy. This project has lost its unity and is in crisis. Reason is unable to establish its unity, to decide what should be in it, to divide up the intellectual labor. It floats without compass or rudder. If the university is indeed the product of the Enlightenment and is its visible presence in modern democracy, and if Enlightenment was a political project that undertook to alter the age-old character of the relation between wisdom and power, knowledge and society, it might be suspected that the crisis of knowledge that has become politically useful—id est, the crisis of university—and the crisis of liberal democracy, the political order dependent on knowledge, have something to do with the new relationship between the two promoted by Enlightenment. I have included among the Enlightenment philosophers men like Machiavelli, Bacon, Montaigne, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, and Locke, along with the eighteenth-century thinkers like Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire, whose teachings are usually held to constitute the Enlightenment, because these latter were quite explicit about their debt to the originators of what the Enlightenment was in large measure only popularizing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

The men of the Enlightenment proper were the first whose teachings were addressed not only, or primarily, to other philosophers or potential philosophers of the same rank, and who were concerned not only with those who understand but also with changing the opinions of mankind at large. Enlightenment was the first philosophically inspired “movement,” a theoretical school that is a political force at the same time. The very word Enlightenment conveys this mixture of elements, as does Marxism, whereas Platonism and Epicureanism refer strictly to theories—which may have had this or that effect but whose essence is only theoretical. Although Plato and Aristotle had political philosophies, there is no regime to which one can point as a Platonic or an Aristotelian regime, in the sense that either thinker had founded the movement or party that actually established the regime. However, Enlightenment is certainly responsible for liberal democracy, as is Marxism for communism. Intellectual historians have frequently been too impressed by these recent events in philosophy and politics to recognize how recent they are, that they constitute a new phenomenon in both domains, and that what is most profound and interesting about Enlightenment is its radical and self-conscious break with the philosophical tradition in the mode and degree of its political activity. The scale of the electronic war rises when whole industries mobilize to do battle. Rather than individual firms, industry-wide groups are taking collective action. Such industry-wide networks are especially notable in Japan, where their formation is strongly encouraged by the ubiquitous Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Thus MITI is prodding the petroleum industry to complete a net that will link refiners, oil tank facilities, and retailers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

Industry-wide Value Added Networks have already appeared in fields as disparate as frozen foods, eyeglasses, and sporting goods. Similar industry-wide nets are springing up elsewhere. In Australia two competing Value Added Networks, Woolcom and a service offered by Talman Pty., Ltd., for wool brokers and exporters, are vying for business and looking ahead to link-ups with Tradegate, an international trade net, and EXIT, an export clearance system. In the United States of America a major drive is under way to complete a network that will tie together not only textile manufacturers like Burlington, but apparel makers and the giant retailers like Wal-Mart and K Mart. To stoke up support for this effort, business leaders like Roger Millikin, chairman of Millikin & Company, make speeches, hold seminars, fund studies, and preach the network gospel. A key problem in the industry has been slow response time. Clothing fashions change swiftly, so the industry wants to compress the time between order and delivery from weeks to days by installing an electronic network that runs from the textile mill to the retail checkout counter. By speeding response, huge cuts in inventory become possible. The electronic system allows retailers to order smaller batches and replace the fast-sellers more frequently as styles and consumer tastes change, instead of sitting on slow-moving merchandise. Milliken cites the experience of one department store chain that was able to sell 25 percent more slacks while, at the same time, carrying 25 percent fewer slacks in its inventory. Indeed, with the system only partly in place, results have been dramatic. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

The campaign began in 1986. By 1989, according to Arthur Andersen & Company, more than seventy-five retailers had invested an estimated $3.6 billion in the system, called Quick Response, and had already benefited to the tine of $9.6 billion. In fact, Millikin and many others believe so many more billions can be saved that electronic intelligence can serve as a weapon in international trade wars. If efficiency can be raised enough, and rapidly enough, the reasoning goes, the American textile and apparel industries would be able to compete more effectively against affordable labor imports. As individual companies and entire industries race to position themselves for the future by building their own special-purpose networks, other giants are racing to lay in place global multipurpose networks that will carry message for anyone. What we are seeing, therefore, is the emergence of several types or layers of electronic networks: private nets primarily designed for the employees of a single firm; EDI hookups between individual companies and their customers and/or vendors; and industry-wide networks. To these, however, must now be added generic networks—so-called common carriers—which are needed to connect these lower-level networks to one another and to transport messages for everyone else. The volume of messages and data now surging through this neural system is so huge that an even larger-scale battle has erupted among big companies who wish to dominate this common carrier service. Giants like British Telecom, AT&T, and Japan’s KDD are racing to expand their capacity and speed up data flows. To complicate matters, large companies that have their own global nets sell services to outsiders and compete with the common carriers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

Thus Toyota, for example, and IBM fight for business that might otherwise go to one of the old telephone companies. General Electric operates a network in more than 180 countries, and Benetton, based in Italy, relies on GE to connect 90 percent of its employees. What is forming under our eyes, therefore, the entirely new, multilayered system, the economy’s infrastructure of the 21st century. Meanwhile, a short man with a friendly face and a helmet of long silver hair falling over his ears climbed a few steps onto the stage, clipped a microphone to his gray Nehru jacket, and began speaking in a voice so soft and gentle that one strained to hear it even over the loudspeakers as he called up slide after slide in his presentation. We were in New Delhi in 2003 at a conference entitled “India—Giant or Pygmy?” Although his name is little known outside India, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, son of an impoverished boatbuilder, is a Muslim in a predominately Hindu nation and the former chief scientist/engineer behind India’s satellite, missile and nuclear programs. He is also president of India. Kalam does not govern the nation—politicians do that. However, he is a widely admired symbol of up-from-poverty success and a commitment to interreligious harmony. He is also coauthor of India 2020—a Vision for the New Millennium. Kalam’s priority project, when we spoke with him later in the residential palace, was connectivity. Now among technologies but among villages—tiny, remote villages distant from one another. Kalam has developed a program to slow urbanization by linking villages physically, electronically, economically—and in terms of access to knowledge. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Counter to the belief that advanced technologies do nothing for the poor, it is the knowledge economy and the technologies associated with it that have awakened India from a half century of postcolonial slumber, helping to life more than 100 millions Indians out of poverty and placing it, according to some estimates, only ten or fifteen years behind China. That lag, according to some, may be offset by three advantages that India brings to the race. First, the wide prevalence of English makes contact and communication with the Anglophone World easier. Second, India is less export-dependent than China, thus less vulnerable to currency and other risks. And third, its less authoritarian, relatively open society is more likely to promote innovation. The growth of the developing World is causing new struggles for the control of knowledge and communication, struggles that are shifting power among people, companies, industries, sectors, and countries. Yet the “neuralization” of the economy has scarcely begun and new players enter the power game every day. They include credit card companies, the great Japanese trading houses, equipment manufacturers, and many others. Crucial to this emerging system is the plastic card in the consumer’s wallet. Whether it is an automatic teller machine card, a conventional credit card, or a “smart” debit card, the card is a network’s link to the individual. That link can, in principle, be expanded vastly. As everyone from banks and oil companies to local merchants moves more deeply into the electronic age…as the cards themselves become smarter, carrying and conveying vast amounts of information…and as money itself becomes “super-symbolic,” no longer pegged to either metal or paper…the card provides the missing link in the emerging neural system. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

Whoever controls the card—bankers or their rivals—has a priceless channel into the home and daily life. Thus we see a push to link individual customers to the specialized networks. In Japan, JCB. Co., a credit card firm, together with NTT Data Communications, is launching a card women can use at their hairdressers’. It hopes to connect 35,000 hairdressers with 10 million card-carrying customers in a two-year period. The long-rage dream of the World’s network builders is a single integrated loop, running from the customer (who will electronically tell business what goods or services to make)…to the producer…through what remains of distribution intermediary firms…to the retailer or the electronic home shopping service…to the ATM or the credit card payment system…and ultimately back into the home of the consumer. Any company or industrial group that can seize control of the main steps in this cycle will wield decisive economic power—and hence considerable political power as well. However, seizing it will depend less on capital than on brains—intelligence embedded in computers, software, and electronic networks. In order for cooperation to get started in the first place, one more condition is required. The problem is that in a World of unconditional defection, a single individual who offers cooperation cannot prosper unless others are around who will reciprocate. On the other hand, cooperation can emerge from small clusters of discriminating individuals as long as these individuals have even a small proportion of their interactions with each other. So there must be some clustering of individuals who use strategies with two properties: the strategies will be the first to cooperate, and they will discriminate between those who respond to the cooperation and those who do not. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

Television is not a great way to get people to cooperate. Verbal information is easier to convey than sensory information since television can deliver words with little information loss. If the former is confined to two operative sense of television, sensory information is easier to convey than intuitive information. Intuitive information, which has no form at all, can barely be sent or received. Feelings of conflict, and their embodiment in actions, work better on television than feelings of agreement and their embodiment in calm and unity. Conflict is outward, agreement is inward, and so the former is more visible than the latter. This is often why President visit states they are seeking votes from. Not only to show they care, but also so the crowd can not only hear, but feel the message they are sending out, and ask questions or make comments. It is a great way to get people to cooperate. The conditions for the evolution of cooperation tell what is necessary, but do not, by themselves, tell what strategies will be most successful. For this question, there is evidence in favor of the robust success for the simplest of all discriminating strategies: TIT FOR TAT. By cooperating on the first move, and then doing whatever the other individual did on the previous move, TIT FOR TAT managed to do well with a wide variety of more or less sophisticated decision rules. It also usually a win when it comes to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. TIT FOR TAT again is the most successful rule, indicating that it can do well with good and bad rules alike. “Do unto others as you would have then do unto you,” reports Luke 6.31. TIT FOR TAT is close to the “Golden Rule,” which simply means to treat others the way we want them to treat us, but it also goes a step further that we must learn to watch and gauge their behavior so we are not taken advantage of. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

TIT FOR TAT’s robust success is due to being nice, provocable, forgiving, and clear. Its niceness means that it is never the first to defect, and this property precents it from getting into unnecessary trouble. Its retaliation discourages the other side from persisting whenever defection is tired. Its forgiveness helps restore mutual cooperation. And its clarity makes its behavioral pattern easy to recognize; and once recognized, it is easy to perceive that the best way of dealing with TIT FOR TAT is to cooperate with it. However, this contradicts what was said earlier. Despite its robust success, TIT FOR TAT cannot be called the ideal strategy to play in the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. For one thing, TIT FOR TAT and other nice rules require for their effectiveness that the shadow of the future be sufficiently great. However, even then there is no ideal strategy independent of the strategies used by the others. In some extreme environments, even TIT FOR TAT would do poorly—as would be the case if there were not enough others who would ever reciprocate its initial cooperative choice. And TIT FOR TAT does have its strategic weakness as well. For example, if the other individual defect once, TIT FOR TAT will always respond with a defection, and then if the other party does the same in response, the result would be an unending echo of alternating defections. In this sense, TIT FOR TAT is not forgiving enough. However, another problem is that TIT FOR TAT is too forgiving to those rules which are totally unresponsive, such as a completely random rule. What can be said for TIT FOR TAT is that it does indeed perform well in a wide variety of settings where the other players are all using more or less sophisticated strategies which themselves are designed to do well. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

If a nice strategy, such as TIT FOR TAT, does eventually come to be adopted by virtually everyone, then individuals using this nice strategy can afford to be generous in dealing with any others. In fact, a population of nice rules can also protect itself from clusters of individuals using any other strategy just as well as they can protect themselves against single individuals. These results give a chronological picture for the evolution of cooperation. Cooperation can begin with small clusters. It can thrive with rules that are, nice, provocable, and somewhat forgiving. And once established in a population, individuals using such discriminating strategies can protect themselves from invasion. The overall level of cooperation tends to go up and not down. In other words, the machinery for the evolution of cooperation contains a rachet. The operation of this ratchet was seen in the development of the norm of reciprocity in the United States of America’s Congress. In the early days of the republic, members of Congress were known for their deceit and treachery. They were quite unscrupulous and frequently lied to each other. Yet, over the years, cooperative patterns of behavior emerged and proved stable. These patterns were based upon the norm of reciprocity. Many other institutions have developed stable patters of cooperation based upon similar norms. Diamond markets, for example, are famous for the way their members exchanged millions of dollars worth of good with only a verbal pledge and a handshake. The key factors is that the participants know they will be dealing with each other again and again. Therefore any attempts to exploit the situation will simply not pay. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

A wonderful illustration of this principle is provided in the memoirs of Ron Luciano, a baseball umpire who sometimes had his “bad days.” “Over a period of time I learned to trust certain catchers so much that I actually let them umpire for me on the bad days. The bad days usually followed the good nights. On those days there wasn’t much I could do but take two aspirins and call as little as possible. If someone I trusted was catching…I’d tell them, ‘Look, it’s a bad day. You’d better take it for me. If it’s a strike, hold you glove in place for an extra second. It it’s a ball, throw it right back. And please, don’t yell.” This reliance on the catcher could work because if Luciano ever suspected that he was being taken advantage of, he would have many opportunities to retaliate. “No one I worked with ever took advantage of the situation, and hitter ever figure out what I was doing. And only once, when Ed Herrman was calling the pitches, did a pitcher ever complain about a call. I smiled; I laughed; but I didn’t say a word. I was tempted, though, I was really tempted.” Ordinary business transactions are also based upon the idea that a continuing relation allows cooperation to develop without the assistance of a central authority. Even though the courts do provide a central authority for the resolution of business disputes, this authority is usually not invoked. A common business attitude is expressed by a purchasing agent who said that “if something comes up, you get the other man on the telephone and deal with the problem. You don’t real legalistic contract clauses at each other if you ever want to do business again.” This attitude is so ell established that when a large manufacturer of packaging materials inspected its records, it found that it had failed to create legally binding contracts in two-thirds of the orders from its customers. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

The fairness of the transactions is guaranteed not by the threat of a legal suit, but rather by the anticipation of mutually rewarding transactions in the future. It is precisely when this anticipation of future interaction breaks down that an external authority is invoked. Perhaps the most common type of business contracts case fought all the way to the appellate courts is an action for a wrongful termination of a dealer’s franchise by a parent company. This pattern of conflict makes sense because once a franchise is ended, there is no prospect for further mutually rewarding transactions between the franchiser and the parent company. Cooperation ends, and costly court battles are often the result. In other contexts, mutually rewarding relations become so commonplace that the separate identities of the participants can become blurred. For example, Lloyd’s of London began as a small group of independent insurance brokers. Since the insurance of ship and its cargo would be a large undertaking for one dealer, several brokers frequently made trades with each other to pool their risks. The frequency of the interactions was so great that the underwriters gradually developed into a federated organization with a formal structure of its own. The importance of future interactions can provide a guide to the design of institutions. To help promote cooperation among members of an organization, relationships should be structured so that there are frequent and durable interactions among specific individuals. Corporations and bureaucracies are often structured in just this way. As nowhere else in the early literature of the human race preserved to us, good and evil as principia are here brought together and put asunder. They came forth from a primary initial community, as “twins.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

From what seed and womb they steam is not told us, but another time we hear that the highest god, Ahura Mazdah, the “Wise Lord,” is the father of the benignant spirit. So the two primal opposites proceeded from him. Of a mother by whose participation the contradiction could be explained we learn nothing. The god indeed surrounds himself with good powers, makes them battle with the evil ones and will make them conquer the latter, but the opposite he is warring against was manifestly encompassed by himself and he put it out from himself into the begin of the principia. It is as thought he had first to discard evil in order to be able to subdue it. If, with the confrontation of the twins, creation which is effected through them is commence, then the god before creation is the not-yet-good one; but in the creation the god become good strives with that which he has cast out from himself. Thus understood, God’s primal act is a decision within himself, a primal choice, therefore, between still companionate good and evil, which prepares and makes possible their elected actions: The self-choice of good, which first renders it effectual and factual good, and the self-choice of evil, which renders it effectual and factual evil. However, the primal choice is not directed towards creation, the latter being done for the sake of the “turning point” at the end of the struggles. Created man is ordained into the struggle for salvation as one who is himself called upon to choose between good and evil. Since the Wise Lord, creating by His spirit made man’s life incarnate, the power of decision was entrusted to man. With a choice his daena, his self, embarked upon the Earthly path; but ever anew must he, confronted by fresh interminglings of deception and truth, divide, and decide. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

One must be assisted from above: “because the better path does not stand open to the choice,” says Zarathustra, “I come to you all that we may live according to the truth”; his task is “to place men before the choice” and show them the right path, so that, as the verse concerning the twins concludes, they may of their own decision accede to the Wise Lord with works of truth. Those who do so assist him “to bring this existence to transfiguration.” “And the chief judge stood before them, and smote them again, and said unto them: If ye have the power of God deliver yourselves from these bands, and then we will believe that the Lord will destroy this people according to your words,” reports Alma 14.24. When Catholic priests use spirits, wafers, and incantations to embody spiritual ideas, they acknowledge the mystery and the metaphor being used. However, experts of Technopoly acknowledge no such overtones or nuisances when they use forms, standardized tests, polls, and other machinery to give technical reality to ideas about intelligence, creativity, sensitivity, emotional imbalance, social deviance, or political opinion. They would have us believe that technology can plainly reveal the true nature of some human condition or belief because the score, statistic, or taxonomy has given it technical form. There is no denying that the technicalization of terms and problems is a serious form of information control. Institutions can make decisions on the basis of scores and statistics, and there certainly may be occasions where there is no reasonable alternative. However, unless such decisions are made with profound skepticism—that is, acknowledged as being made for administrative convenience—they are delusionary. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

In Technopoly, the delusion is sanctified by our granting inordinate prestige to experts who are armed with sophisticated technical machinery. All professionals are conspiracies against the laity. We can go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologist, some sociologist, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin “social deviance,” which is a statistical concept, and they call evil “psychopathology,” which is a medical concept, which alludes to the idea that sin (social deviance) and psychopathology (evil) can be corrected with medication. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts. As the power of traditional social institutions to organize perceptions and judgment declines, bureaucracies, expertise, and technical machinery become the principal means by which Technopoly hopes to control information and thereby provide itself with intelligibility and order. We will talk about why this cannot work, and the pain and balderdash that are the consequence in future reports. Now, some may be wonder, how far can proximal probes take us? Proximal probes have advantages as a tool for developing nanotechnology, but also weakness. Today, their working tips are rough and irregular. To make stable bonds form, John Foster’s group used a pulse of electricity, but the results proved hard to control. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

The “IMB” spelled out by Donald Eigler’s group when he made the World’s smallest logo with xenon atoms, it was very precise, but stable only at temperatures near absolute zero—such patterns vanish at room temperature because they are not based on stable chemical bonds. Building structures that are both table and precise is still a challenge. To form stable bonds in precise patterns is the next big challenge. John Foster says, “We’re exploring a concept which we call ‘molecular herding,’ using the STM to ‘herd’ molecules the way my Shetland sheep dog would hard sheep…Our ultimate goal with molecular herding is to make one particular molecule move to another particular one, and then essentially force them together. If you could put two molecules that might be small parts of a nanomachine on the surface, then this kind of herding would allow you to hual one of them up to the other. Instead of requiring random motion of a liquid and specific chemical lock-and-key interactions to give you exactly what you want in brining two molecules together [as in chemical and biochemical approaches], you could drive that rection on a local level with the STM. You could use the STM to put things where you want them to be.” Proximal-probe instruments may be a big help in building the first generation of nanomachines, but they have a basic limit: Each instrument is huge on a molecular scale, and each could bond only one molecular piece at a time. To make anything large—say, large enough to see with the unassisted eye—would take an absurdly long time. A device of this sort could add one piece per second, but even a pinhead contains more atoms than the number of seconds since the formation of Earth. Building a Pocket Library this would be a long-term project. How can such slow systems ever build anything big? Rabbits and dandelions contain structures put together one molecular piece at a time, yet they grow to reproduce quickly. How? They build in parallel, with many billions of molecular machines working at once. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

To gain the benefits of such enormous parallelism, researchers can either use proximal probes to build a better, next-generation technology, or use a different approach from the start. The techniques of chemistry and biomolecular engineering already have enormous parallelism and already build precise molecular structures. Their methods, however, are less direct than the still hypothetical proximal probe—based molecule-positioners. They use molecular building blocks shaped to fit together spontaneously, in a process of self-assembly. David Biegelsen, a physicist who works with STMs at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, put it this way at the nanotechnology conference: “Clearly, assembly using STMs and other variants will have to be tried. But biological systems are an existence proof that assembly and self-assembly can be done. I don’t see why one should try to deviate from something that already exists.” A huge technology bas for molecular construction already exists. Tools originally developed by biochemists and biotechnologist to deal with molecular machines found in nature can be redirected to make new molecular machines. The expertise built up by chemists in more than a century of steady progress will be crucial in molecular design and construction. Both disciplines routinely handle molecules by the billions and get them to form patterns by self-assembly. Biochemists, in particular, can begin by copying designs from nature. Molecular building-block strategies could work together with proximal-probe strategies, or could replace them, jumping directly to the construction of large numbers of molecular machines. Either way, protein molecules are likely to play a central role, as they do in nature. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

Cresleigh Homes

When you’re the largest home in the neighborhood, you’ve got the space to spread out…both indoors and outdoors!

#Havenwood Residence 4 offers a covered porch along with the patio, so you’ll have plenty of room to entertain in the sunshine.

Homesite 75 is ready for new owners! If you’re in the market to make moves to an incredible community, contact us via the link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-four/


#CresleighHomes
#Havenwood