Advancing Psychological Education for All
Handsome he was, majestic even, as everyone said, and full of that smoldering power as only performers of magic possessed, long years ago. Oh, it was such a pain to lose him. It seemed of consequence of the entire Earth. Across the table, I reached for my lemonade with a shaking hand and took a … Continue reading
There has been a lot of talks about communism in modern America and many people fear it, while others do not understand it and promote the dangerous ideology. Many of the local news airwaves have been overtaken by communist leaders. In fact, people that proport that they are journalists, are actually uneducated activists. Communism is … Continue reading
With many people driving cars that are flashy and very expensive, carjacking is a subject of concern. Need was not the only factor implicated in carjacking. Some carjackers indicated that they were influenced by the appeal of targets that represented effortless or unique opportunities (exempli gratia, isolated or weak victims, vehicles with exceptionally desirable options, rare vehicles). Here, risks were so low or potential rewards so great that, even in the absence of substantive internal or external situational inducements, they decided to commit a carjacking. Such opportunities were simply too good to pass up. Po-Po (short of “Piss Off the PO lice”) described just such an opportunity-driven incident. She and her brother had spent the day successfully pickpocketing individuals at the Golden 1 Center, in Sacramento. On their way out, she noticed an easy target, an isolated woman walking to her car, preoccupied with the lock on her car door. Po-Po: “It was a fancy little car. I don’t know too much about names of cars, I just know what I like. A little sporty little car like a Mercedes Benz like car. It was black and it was shiny and it looked good. I just had to joy ride it. She was a white lady. It looked like she worked for [a news station] or somebody. We just already pick pocket[ed] people in the arena, but f*ck. So we just walked down stairs and [I] said, ‘You want to steal a car? Come on dude, let me get this car.’ I didn’t have a gun on me. I just made her think I had a gun. I had a stick and I just ran up there to her and told her, ‘Don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t do nothing. Give me the keys and ease your a** away from the car.’ I said, ‘You make one sound I’m going to blow your mother*cker head off and I’m not playing with you!’ I said, ‘Just go on around the car, just scoot on around the car.’ Threw the keys to my little brother and told him go on and open the door. And she stood around there at the building like she waiting on the bus until we zoomed off. We got away real slow and easy.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Likewise, Kow, and older carjacker and sometimes street robber, was on his way to a friend’s house to complete a potentially lucrative drug deal when he happened on an easy situation—a man sitting in a parked car, talking to someone on a pay phone at 2A.M. INT: “What drew you to this guy? What were you doing? Why did you decide to do this guy?” KOW: “Man, it ain’t be no, ‘What you be doing?,’ [it’s] just the thought that cross your mind be like, you need whatever it is you see, so you get it, you just get it. I was going to do something totally different [a drug deal] but along the way something totally different popped up so I just take it as it comes. I was like, ‘Whew! Get that.’ I don’t know man, your mind is a hell of a thing. On our way to this other thing. It just something that just hit you, you know what I’m saying? Plus, [he looked like] a b*tch. I don’t know, it’s just something, he look like a b*tch, just like we could whip him, like a b*tch, you know what I’m saying. Easy.” Not all irresistible opportunities were driven solely by the prospect of monetary gain. In a city the size of Sacramento, offender run into one another all the time, at restaurants, malls, movie theaters and night-clubs. As a result, individuals with shared histories often encounter unique chances for retaliation or personal satisfaction. Goldie emphasized how such opportunities could pop up at a moment’s notice. While cruising the north side of Sacramento, he spotted an individual who had sexually assaulted one of his girlfriends. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Goldie: “I did it on the humbug [spontaneously]. I peeped this dude, [saw that] he [was] pulling up at the liquor store. I’m tripping [excited] you know what I’m saying, [as I’m] walking there [towards the target]. You know, peep him out, you dig? He [was] reaching in the door to open the door. His handle outside must have been broke cause he had to reach in [the window] to open the door. And I just came around you know what I’m saying. [I] put it [the gun] to his head, ‘You want to give me them keys, brother?’ He’s like, ‘No, I’m not givin’ you these keys.’ I’m like, ‘You gonna give me them keys, brother. It’s simple as that!’ Man, he’s like, ‘Take these, motherfu*ker, f*ck you and this car. F*ck you!’ I’m like, ‘Man, just go on and get your a** home.’ [Then I] kicked him in his a**, you know what I’m saying, and I was like, ‘F*ck that, as a matter of fact get on your knees. Get on your knees, mother*cker…’ Then I seen this old lady right, that I know from around this neighborhood. I was like ‘F*ck!,’ jumped on in the car [and] rolled by. I wanted to hit him but she was just standing there, just looking. That’s the only thing what made me don’t shoot him, know what I’m saying? ‘Cause he’s f*cking with one of my little gals. ‘Cause he f*cked one of my little gals. Well, she was saying that he didn’t really f*ck her, you know, he too the p***y, you know what I’m saying? He got killed the next week so I didn’t have to worry about him. Motherf*ckers said they found him dead in the basement in a vacant home. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
That the apostle after Pentecost recognized and dealt with the denizens of the invisible World is evident both from the Acts of the Apostles and from references in the Epistles. During their three years’ training by the Lord, the disciples were being prepared for Pentecost and the exposure to the supernatural World resulting from the coming of the Holy Spirit. They had watched Jesus deal with the wicked spirits of Satan, and had themselves learned to deal with them too. So the power of the Holy spirit could be safely given at Pentecost to men who already knew the workings of the foe. We see how quickly Peter recognized Satan’s work in Ananias (Acts 5.3), and how unclean spirits came out at his presence even as they had with his Lord (Acts 5.16). Philip likewise found the evil hosts subservient to the word of his testimony (Acts 8.7) as he proclaimed Christ to the people. And Paul definitely knew the power of the name of the risen Lord (Acts 19.11) in dealing with the powers of evil. It is therefore clear from Christian Bible history that the manifestation of the power of God invariably meant active dealing with the satanic hosts; that the manifestation of the power of God at Pentecost, and through the apostles’ subsequent ministry, meant an aggressive attitude toward the powers of darkness. We can therefore conclude that growth and maturation of the Church at the end of the New Testament dispensation will require the same recognition and the same attitude toward these satanic hosts—with the same co-witness of the Holy Spirit to the authority of the name of Jesus—as was fond in the early Church. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The Church of Christ will reach its high-water mark when it is able to recognize and deal with demon possession: when it knows how to “bind the strong man” by prayer and “command” the spirits of evil in the name of Christ, thus delivering men and women from their power. We want a theology which beats in rhythm with the pulse of modern life. Christian symbols must speak to and be understood by humans in present existential situation. Questions should spring from the depth and not the surface of existence, for we employ ontology. If one wants to know, one cannot escape ontology. Ontology removes us from those theologians who shun philosophy of any kind or who attempt to theologize in purely biblical categories. Ontology injects into our system a refreshing intellectual vigor and an antibody against narrowness. The result has unquestionably made a great contribution to the revival of metaphysical thinking within Protestant circles in our day. Since we represent the here and now existential situation, things tend to be vibrant, demanding, and so tends to steal the spotlight from the theological symbols which have already been on the stage for several thousand years. For us the Bible is not the unique source. The theological source, adequately understood, includes the history of the church, of religion, and of culture, for these are the areas in which revelation is received and expressed. Both Protestants and Catholics alike can profit from this enrichment of the wellsprings of theology in order to avoid the impoverishment of a narrow biblicism or of a cramped clerical view of the history of salvation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The goal is to restore to theology its oft neglected historical perspective with an amplitude that surpasses the commonly accepted notion of tradition. If the Christian Bible is not directly employed, its influence is present in every part of the system. The goal is to produce mountains of information about what it the Bible meant to the people at the time it was produced by trying to make it more relevant in modern examples. The theological norm is the New Being in Jesus as the Christ as our ultimate concern. Ultimate concern appears to be not just an accessory gadget, but the mainspring of the system. The moment or act in which one is grasped by the holy is a thunderstorm at night, when the lightning throws a blinding clarity over all things, leaving them in complete darkness the next moment. Reality is seen as something new. Its ground has become visible in an ecstatic experience, called “faith.” Faith is equated with the ultimate concern: Faith is a total and centered act of the personal self, the act of unconditional, infinite and infinite passion. Some people feel like they do not belong no matter where they go’ somehow, as always, they are left in the cold, alone, by themselves. And no matter how much they try to be themselves and have friends, and be alive; each time, their friends depart, go their own way, achieve their goal, and one is left alone. It may have always been that was since one was a child. Some kids play alone in the backyard, planting flowers and trees, or making patterns and designs with things they find in the backyard. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
One may remain alone, and play by oneself, build something, grow something, or paint with paint or draw crayon pictures—they would be all right; one would feel strong and better; night, silence, these would not bother one at all. However, some may have felt like they never belonged in their own family, even though they turned to them so very much. But every family needs an individual to look down on to make themselves feel better. They all need someone to talk about and make fun or, someone to depress and ruin. The goal is to create something in the aloneness, then one will be all right, and will not really be alone and will not really suffer, for in being alone, you can grow. Faith is ultimate concern and infinite passion. Consequently its all-consuming urgency requires that it be an act of total personality. Faith is not a special faculty nor is it a special function of man’s being. Faith involves the whole person, and thus it is the integrating factor which gives unity and direction to all man’s other concerns. In the fact of faith every nerve of man’s body, every striving of man’s soul, every function of man’s spirit participates. An infinite passion is all-pervading, and no area of man’s being can escape it: one’s body, for ultimate concern is passionate concern; one’s unconscious strivings, for they relate to the symbolic expression of faith; one’s conscious life, for faith concentrates man’s activities upon the object of ultimate concern. Because faith is such a centered act, its identification with any one function leads to what is called intellectualistic, voluntaristic, or emotionalistic distortion of faith. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Since faith cannot spring from any of man’s spiritual functions, but implies a power which unites and transcends all of them, faith has a receptive character, its mere passivity in relation to the divine Spirit. This accords with the basic theology truth that in relation to God everything is by God. Man’s spiritual functions cannot attain the ultimate, although they tend toward it, but the ultimate can grasp all of these functions and raise them beyond themselves by the creation of faith. Although faith is in man, it is not from man. The passive character of faith has to be grasped. Faith is the state of being grasped by the ultimate concern. In contrast to this, faith healing is a psychological phenomenon of autosuggestion which emphasizes an act of intensive concentration and self-determination. However, nothing could be farther from the receptive character of genuine religious faith, the state of being grasped by the Spirit. Once a person has been grasped by the power of the ultimate, one possesses an absolute certainty of the fact which springs from an immediate awareness of it. In ecstasy, anxiety, an even in despair, one is as certain of the experience of the holy as one is of one’s own self. In fact, it is the self in its self-transcending quality. All this, of course, is on the subjective side of faith, for objectively there is always room for doubt about the content of faith. We may not grasp anything in depth of our uncertainty, but that we are grasped by something ultimate, which keeps us in its grasp and from which we may strive in vain to escape, remains absolutely certain. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Advances in science and technology have been so extraordinary since World War II they hardly need elaboration. If nothing had occurred but the invention of the computer and the discovery of DNA, the postwar period might still go down as the most revolutionary in scientific history. However, in fact, much more has happened. We have not only improved our technologies, we have begun to operate at deeper and deeper levels of nature, so that instead of dealing with gross chunks of matter, we can now create a layer of material so incredibly thin that the electrons in it are effectively moving in only two dimensions. We can etch lines that are only 20 billionths of a mete wide. We will soon be able to assemble things one atom at a time. This is not “progress,” but upheaval. The U.S. Nation Academy of Engineering in 1989 listed what it considered the ten most important engineering achievements of the previous twenty-five years. It began the list with the Apollo moon landing, which it ranked in history with the building of the Egyptian pyramids. Next came the development of satellites, micro-processors, lasers, the jumbo jet, genetically engineered products, and other breakthroughs. Since the beginning of the 1950s, when the new wealth-creation system began sprouting in the United States of America, humans, for the first time in history, opened the pathway to the stars, identified the biological program of life, and invented intellectual tools as important as writing. This is an astonishing set of achievements in what amounts to a single generation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Nor is it only scientific or technological knowledge that has made, or is about to make, remarkable strides. In everything from organization theory to music, from the study of ecosystems to our understanding of the brain, in linguistics and learning theory, in studies of nonequilibrium, chaos, and dissipative structures, the knowledge base is being revolutionized. And even as this occurs, competing researchers in fields like neural networks and artificial intelligence are providing new knowledge about knowledge itself. These transformative advances, seemingly remote from the Worlds of diplomacy and politics, are in fact inescapably linked to today’s geopolitical eruptions. Knowledge is the “K-Factor” in global power struggles. Consider, for example, the implications of the knowledge factor for Soviet power Today’s historic powershift, as we have seen, has made two of the most basic sources of power—violence and wealth—increasingly dependent on the third source: knowledge. Because of the spread of knowledge-based technology and the relatively free circulation of ideas, the United States of America, Europe, and Japan have been able to leave the socialist nations in the dust economically. However, the same technology made possible a vast leap in military power as well. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
A fighter airplane today is the equivalent of a computer with wings. Its effectiveness depends almost entirely on the knowledge packed into its avionics and weaponry—and into its pilot’s brain. In 1982, Soviet military planners suffered a collective case of ulcers when eighty Soviet-built MiG fighters, flown by the Syrians, were destroyed by Israeli pilots, who lost not a single plane. Soviet-built tanks also did badly against Israeli armor. Even though the U.S.S.R. had brilliant military scientists, and nukes enough to incinerate the World, it could not keep place in the race toward super-high-technology conventional weapons or in the dash for strategic defense systems. The growing sophistication of information-based conventional weapons (which, in fact, are not conventional at all) threatened Soviet superiority on the ground in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the extremely knowledge-intensive Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) threatened to negate the vale of Soviet long-range missiles. Critics of SDI complained that it would never work. However, the very possibility alarmed Moscow. If SDI could, in fact, block all Soviet nuclear missiles before they hit the United State of America, they were useless. That would also mean that the United States of America could launch a first-strike nuclear attack without fear of retaliation. If, on the other hand, as is more reasonable, SDI was only fractionally effective, blocking some but not all warheads, it would leave Soviet war panners wondering which fraction of U.S.A. missiles would survive. In either case, SDI raised the ante, and made theoretical Soviet use of nuclear weapons, never very likely, even riskier for Moscow. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
On the ground and in space, then, the Soviets confronted a double threat. Faced with these sobering realities, plus its own economic decline, Moscow rationally concluded that it could no longer protect its Eastern European perimeter militarily, except at an unacceptable and skyrocketing cost. For both economic and military reasons, therefore, a reduction of its imperial commitments became necessary. In the end, what did in the Soviets was not arms or economics, but the K-factor—the new knowledge on which both military strength and economic power are increasingly dependent. The same K-factor helps explain the fragmentation of “developing countries” and the rise of three distinct groupings among them. For example, once the most advanced economies began to shift to computer and information-based technologies, yielding higher value-added products, they transferred many of the old muscle-based, less information-intensive operations to countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and now to Thailand and other places. As Europe, Japan, and the United States of America moved to Third Wave tasks to another tier of nations. This speeded their industrialization and they left the other LDCs behind. (Many of these “newly industrialized economies,” or NIEs, in turn, are now racing to pawn off Second Wave processes on still poorer, more economically backward countries—along with the accompanying pollution and other disadvantages—while they, in turn, try to make the transition to more knowledge-intensive production.) The different speeds of economic development have separated the LDCs from one another. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
And as far the inter-capitalist rivalry among Europe, Japan, and the United States of America, the fabulous success of the U.S.A. postwar policy, which promoted the rebuilding of both the European and Japanese economies, helped both of them restore their shattered industrial structures. This meant the chance for a fresh start and the opportunity to replace old prewar machines with the shiniest new technology, while the United States of America, whose plants had not been bombed into rubble, still needed to amortize its existing industrial base. For a variety of reasons, including a future-oriented culture and the regional economic stimulation resulting from the Vietnam War, and, of course, because of the tremendous hard work and creativity of its postwar generation, Japan leaped ahead. Its eyes always focused on the 21st century, it culture always emphasizing the importance of education, business intelligence, and knowledge in general. Japan seized on the computer and all its derivatives in electronics and information technology with an almost erotic passion. The economic results as Japan transited from the old to the new system of wealth creation were stunning—but they threw Japan into inevitable competition with the United States of America. In turn, a terrified Europe launched its drive for economic and political integration, after years of dawdling. At every step, the new knowledge-based system of wealth creation has been either a majority contributor, or a primary cause of, the great historical shift of power now reshaping our World. There are global implications. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
A memory of a very recent past. Several years ago, amid heated debates about the undervalued yuan and China’s currency manipulation, one of America’s major TV channels interviewed an owner-manager of a stocks-making company. He was bitterly complaining that he would not keep afloat if yuan did not appreciate and Chinese-made socks continued to sell for some 65 cents a pair. I understood his feelings. However, the more I listened to his talk, the more I felt that he was not on the right track: The yuan appreciation, perhaps, might somewhat ease his pain for a certain period of time, but, unfortunately, could not provide a solution. According to various estimates, the yuan is currently undervalued by 40-60 percent. Even if a miracle happens and its exchange rate goes up 60 percent right away, cost differentials between China and the United States of America will remain significant, as the average wage of a Chinese worker in the manufacturing industries is currently less than one-seventh that of his U.S.A. colleague (and the socks-producing industry is hardly an exception). The mentality has to change. Time has come to realize the U.S.A.—based markers of socks for everyday use are no longer in a position to compete with their Chinese counterparts—be it at their domestic market or anywhere else. Furthermore, it is hardly relevant and desirable for America to force its consumers to pay more for their everyday-wear socks—not least because for many of them global competition exerts strong downward pressure on wages. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
One more example from the recent past. In the mid-2000s, U.S.A. bedroom furniture makers formed the American Furniture Manufacturer Committee for Legal Trade and began to press the government to give them protection from Chinese exports, insisting that they threatened “our way of life, our culture and the competitiveness of American in the World.” Really confusing. So high and passionate wording was obviously in contradiction with the harsh reality, namely the racket to buy protection. Chinese makers paid cash to their American competitors who had the right to as the U.S.A. Ministry Commerce to review important duties. References to values and culture are hardly relevant. It rather resembles the World depicted in The Godfather by Mario Puzo. Essentially, there is no more economic rationale of U.S.A. and other Wester-based factories to produce goods belonging to the first and also, increasingly, the second segment. This is the golden rule of the globalized economy. In a sense, they do not have the right to produce them (it is not about a legal right, of course, but about the right stemming from economic common sense, and maybe even about the moral right if you assume that producers have to serve the society—do they not?), because Chinese and other Third World factories can provide the same customer value at a lower price (to repeat—even if the yuan becomes 1.5 times or even twice as heavy as it is now). Consequently, Western governments basically do not have the “right” to protect such producers by higher tariffs and other means, because it will have the vast majority of their countries’ households. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
If you play by the rules of the globalized economy, the only genuine solution for a Western-based manufacturer can be a shift to the third or the fourth segment: product differentiation. Trying to compete with Chinese-made products on price is mostly meaningless. In today’s World, whether a Western-based factory has the “right” and rationale to continue operating, depends on its ability to produce differentiated products—preferably those that are in demand internationally because the domestic market may be too small. If you want to continue makings socks in the United States of America, try to make them character goods, think of a peculiar design attractive for particular groups of customers, bet on special features like high durability, sweat-absorbing ability, or whatever. It is advisable to shift from regular socks as a mass product to high-grade socks as a fashion item and to do your best to establish the brand. (This may be why so many people support labor from people who have immigrated illegally. It tends to be less expensive, they want to stay in business, and the labor tends to be more affordable, but it may displace American workers and reduce their wages.) If you want to produce bedroom furniture, develop strong attractive American brands, popular not only in the United States of America but also around the World and capable of competing with internationally recognized Italian, French, Spanish, or Swedish makers. Otherwise you are doomed to lose, and the yuan appreciation will not be of help. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
The emergence of China as a major competitor brings about a deep polarization in the global manufacturing industry, creating three groups of winners and one group of losers. The winners are Chinese domestic companies, Western multinationals using China as a production platform, and Western non-multinationals making differentiated, especially high-end products and increasing their exports to rapidly expanding markets in China and other developing countries. The losers are numerous unrecognizable non-multinational companies in the West making mass products: largely, but not only, small and medium-size firms. The key issue is how the latter can address the challenge and what policy can help them to succeed. The first option is to pursue aggressive product differentiation. To switch to the fourth segment, establishing a position as a high-end goods marker. If you are a domestic market-oriented company, development of external markets is indispensable to expand the range of customers. (I still think there is a market for trucks and cars without all the computers and windows you can roll up and down by hand and doors you have to individually lock, but everyone is focused on high-end only.) However, it is more easily said that done. Many Western businesses are simply unprepared for it both psychologically—lacking the will and persistence to work hard to achieve the goal—and organizationally: most of all due to the shortage of capable human resources, both at the managerial and the shop-floor level. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Yes, the developed West has to make a very, very big step forward in human capacity building to train people capable of transforming its struggling companies and industries. The shift from mass to differentiated, especially high-end products making is usually a difficult and risky thing. You have to find or newly create your group of customers and appeal to them so that they become found of your brand name. You have to persuade people to pay more for every unit of your product than they did before. The number of buyers in your home country will inevitably become smaller, so you will have to expand or newly create your customer base overseas, including remote Third World countries whose markets are most dynamic. Most likely, you will have to make a tremendous effort and to bear a lot of expense to introduce more advanced technologies and more state-of-the-art equipment, to employ more high-skilled workers, to develop various products promotion channels, and so on—and you will have to do all this while you still remain in terra incognita, not knowing whether your potential customer will react in a beneficial way or not. The high-end product niches are usually already occupied by World-famous brand markers, which will make your mission even more challenging. Presumably, product differentiation, especially a shift to the fourth, high-end products segment, can be handled only by a small portion of Western companies, and those who fail to access the limited market space will be squeezed out or, for the best, will have to struggle to make ends meat. The process has already started. A narrow circle of successful Western factories are differentiating their products and establishing a strong global position—largely (but not only) in the high-end products segment, while most domestic producers, especially small and medium are either washed out or clutching to a straw. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The overall number of manufacturers is falling. Take Japan, famous for its strong manufacturing base. On the one hand, a cohort of small and medium-size domestic manufacturers is successfully capturing or even monopolizing important niches of the global market due to their outstanding technological capabilities, vigorous quality control, dynamic innovation, and persistent market development in various parts of the World. Nippon Ceramic is the World leader in the production of infrared sensors for security systems. Teibo manufacturers about half of the World’s fiber pen nibs, praised by NASA for their ability to write in space. Nakashima Propeller controls that lion’s share of the global market for supersize screws for ships, and JAMCO for the lavatories for passenger planes. On the other hand, the overall number of manufacturing companies is decreasing, including companies belonging to the famous manufacturing clusters, like Ota Ward in Tokyo or Higashi-Osaka (Easter Osaka) in the Osaka Prefecture. Traditionally, clusters of this kind generated strong synergy effects stemming from regular intercompany interactions and networking, and contributed a lot to the country’s competitiveness in manufacturing. However, as much as 40 percent of the companies in those cluster areas closed down almost 40 years ago. Lots of manufacturers are frustrated. For instance, Japanese mold models (prototypes that produce objects) makers who were World leaders some 10 or even 5 years ago, are now facing strong competition from Chinese and Korean rivals, which appears to be very difficult if not impossible to overcome. In real life, more and more small entrepreneurs and their employees are left with no choice but to retreat and accept low-paid jobs in the service sector or even to shift (back?) to such traditional occupations as fishing to earn their living. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Upon thinking things over, I was pretty sure that the parlor maid, Elsa, was far too sensible and hard-boiled a young woman to risk tampering with poisons. She has a hard head and would take care of herself. Ersula, on the other hand was made of more dangerous stuff—unbalanced, carried away by impulse and definitely … Continue reading
We must not pull away from our children. We must keep trying, keep reaching, keep praying, keep listening. Many of the offenders we spoke to indicated that their carjackings were guided by the power of immediate situational inducements. Such inducements could be internal (exempli gratia, money, drugs, the avoidance of drug withdrawal, need to display a certain status level, desire for revenge, jealousy)or external (objective or subjective strains, such as pressure from family members to put food on the table, the need to have a vehicle for use in a subsequent crime). Situational inducements could be intensely compelling, pressing offenders to engage in carjacking even under unfavorable circumstances, where the risk of arrest, injury, or death was high or the potential reward was low. Here, the individuals’ increased desperation caused them to target a vehicle or victim they would not otherwise consider (such as a substandard car, or one occupied by several passengers), initiate an offense at a time or location that was inherently more hazardous (exempli gratia, day-time, at a busy intersection), or attempt a carjacking with no planning whatsoever. Internal situational inducements usually were linked to the immediate need for cash. Most street offenders (including carjackers) are notoriously poor planners. They lead cash-intensive lifestyles in which money is spent as quickly as it is obtained (due to routine drug use, street gambling, acquisition of the latest fashions, heavy partying). As a result, they rapidly run out of money, creating pressing fiscal crises, which the produce other internal situational inducements such as the need to feed oneself or to avoid drug withdrawal. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
The sale of stolen vehicles and parts can be a lucrative endeavor. Experienced carjackers sometimes stripped the vehicles themselves (in an abandoned alley or remote lot) and sold the items on the street corner or delivered them to a chop shop owner with whom they had a working relationship. Of particular value were “portable” after-market items, such as gold or silver plated rims, hub caps, and expensive stereo components. Across our 28 respondents, profits from carjacking per offense ranged anywhere from $200 to $5,000, with the average running at $1,750. The cash obtained from carjacking served to alleviate ever emergent financial needs. Little Rag, a diminutive teen-aged gang-banger, indicated that without cash the prospect of heroin withdrawal loomed ahead. INT: So, why did you do that? Why did you jack that car? Little Rag: For real? ‘Cause it’s the high, it’s the way I live. I was broke. I was fiending [needed drugs]. I had to get off my scene real quick [wanted to get back on my feet]. I sold crack but I’d fallen off [ran out of money] and I had to go and get another lick [tempting crime target] or something to get back on the top. I blow it on weed, clothes, shoes, sh*t like that. Yeah, I truly f*ck money up.” The need for drugs was a frequent topic in our discussion with carjackers. Even the youngest offenders had built up such tolerances to drugs like heroin and crack that they required fixes on a daily basis. Many were involved in drug dealing and had fallen into a well known trap; using their own supply. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Whether they sold for themselves or in the service of someone else, the need for cash to replenish the supply or feed the habit was a powerful internal motivator. L-Dawg, a young drug dealer from the north side of Sacramento also had developed a strong addiction to heroin. Only two days before this interview with us, he had taken a car from a man leaving a local night club. L-Dawg: “I didn’t have no money and I was sick and due some heroin so I knew I had to do something I was at my auntie’s house [and] my stomach started cramping. I just had to kill this sickness, ‘cause I can’t stay sick. If I’d stayed sick I would [have to] do something worse. The worse I get sick, to me, the worse I’m going to do. That’s how I feel. If I’ve got to wait on it a long time, the worse the crime may be. If it hadn’t been him then I probably would have done a robbery. One way or another I was going to get some money to take me off this sickness. I just seen him and I got it.” External situational inducements could be just as compelling. Pressures from friends, family, other criminal acquaintances, or even the threat of injury or death were capable of pushing offenders to carjacking. For example, C-Low described an incident that occurred while he was with a friend in New Orleans. The two were waiting in the reception room of a neighborhood dentist when a group of men hostile to C-Low’s friend walked into the office. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
C-Low: “They knew him. I didn’t know them. It was something about some fake dope. I think it was some heroin. He got caught. We weren’t strapped [armed] at the time. We booked out. We left. We just left ‘cause he know this person’s gonna be strapped, and I didn’t know this. So my partner was like, “Man, just burn out man, just leave.” So we was leaving and they was coming up behind us [and started] popping [shooting] at us just like that, popping at my partner, just started shooting at him, so my partner he was wounded. We had no car or nothing so we were running through and the guy was popping at us. So, there was a lady getting out of her car, and he stole it. We had to take her car because we had no ride. She like a nurse of something. It was a nice little brand new car. Brand new, not kind you sort of sport off in like. She saw I was running. She heard the gun shots. I know she heard them, but she didn’t see the guy that was shooting at us though. She had the keys in her hand. She was getting out her car, locking her door, yeah. She had her purse and everything. [My partner] just came on her blind side, just grabbed her, hit her. She just looked like she was shocked, she was in a state of shock. She was really scared. And [we] took her car and we left. We could’ve got her purse and everything, but we were just trying to get away from the scene ‘cause we had no strap and they were all shooting at us. We just burnt on out of there. Got away. But then [later that day] he got caught though…somebody snitched on him and they told them [the police] that he had the car. He gave me the car but he for caught for it, they couldn’t find the car ‘casue I’d taken it to the chop shop. I sold the car for like twenty-seven hundred bucks and about 2 ounces of weed.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Similarly, Nicole, a seasoned car thief and sometimes carjacker described a harrowing spur-of-the-moment episode. She and a friend had been following a young couple from the drive-in, casually discussing the prospect of rubbering them, when her partner suddenly stopped their vehicle, jumped out and initiated a carjacking without warning. Nicole was instantly drawn into abetting her partner in the commission of the offense. Nicole: “My partner just jumped out of the car. He jumped out of the car and right then when I seen him with the gun I [realized] what was happening. I had to move. Once he got the guy out of the car he told me, ‘Come get the car.’ The girl was already out of the car screaming, ‘Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me!’ She was afraid because [she could see] I was high. You do things [when] you high. She’s running so I’m in the car waiting on him. He’s saying, ‘Run b*tch and don’t look back.’ She just started running…across the parking lot. [At] the same time he made the guy get up and run, ‘[Racial expletive] you don something, you look back, I’m gonna kill your mother*cking a**.’ As he got up and ran he shot him any ways.” It is increasingly clear that we must teach the gospel to our families personally, live those teaching in our homes, or run the risk of discovering too late that a Primary teacher or priesthood adviser or seminary instructor could not do for our children what we would do for them. Family councils have always been needed. They are, in fact, eternal. We belonged to a family council in the premortal existence, when we lived with our Heavenly parents as their spirit children. Everyone ought to be involved in helping to create proactive solutions and in setting their own goals. As families collaborate in making decisions, individuals will thrive, and the family will become more unified as a whole. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
People are hungry to be their own authorities in basic life matters, and, spurred by my own expression in these matters, they wanted it all the more, meaning they had to leave me to my own, too. If not filled with the substance of life-realized in depth, the vacuum of “being will gain so much power that our people will collapse inwardly in the clutter of their own psychic debris. How striking it is to contrast all this with the calm authority of Christ. He needed n rubric of adjuration, nor other formula of exorcism, and no prolonged preparation of Himself before dealing with a spirit-possessed individual. “He cast out the spirits by a word.” “With authority and power He commandeth…and they obey Him,” was the wondering testimony of the awestruck people. It was the testimony, also, of the seventy sent forth by Him to use the authority of His name. They found that the spirits were subject to them, even as they were to the Lord (Luke 10.17-20). “They obey Him,” said the people. “They”—the evil spirits whom the people knew to be real identities, governed by Beelzebub, their prince (Matt. 12.24-27). The complete mastery of Jesus over the demons compelled the religious leaders to find some way of explaining His authority over them. And so by that subtle influence of Satan with which all who have had insight into his devices are familiar, they cunningly accuse the Lord of having satanic power Himself, saying, “He casteth out demons through Beelzebub, the prince of the demons.” This reference to Satan and his position as a prince was left uncontradicted by the Lord. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
In the face of Satan’s lie, Jesus simply declared the truth that He cast out demons “by the finger of God,” and the fact that Satan’s kingdom would soon fall were he to act against himself and dislodge his emissaries from their place of retreat in human bodies. That Satan does apparently fight against himself is sometimes true; but when he does so, it is only for the purpose of covering up some scheme—for greater advantage to his kingdom. There is a difference between theology and philosophy. Several reasons force this issue to the foreground. The theological circle is drawn by ultimate concern about being, but the study of being has traditionally been the preserve of the philosopher. Moreover, the existential analysis performed by the theologian answers must be couched in ontological terms. Philosophy and theology cannot pass like ships in the night. After at least two thousand years of thought dedicated to the solution of this problem, it is not easy to offer a new solution. Nevertheless, it must be attempted in every generation as long as theology exists, for the question of the relation of philosophy and theology is the question of nature of theology itself. Theology was already been defined. Philosophy is defined as that cognitive endeavor in which the question of being is asked. Or, philosophy is the attempt to answer the most general questions about the nature of reality and human existence. Or again, philosophy is that cognitive approach to reality in which reality as such is the object. When we compare philosophy with theology, we find that they simultaneously diverge and converge. They diverge in many ways. Although both as the question be being, philosophy seeks to know the structure of being, while theology is concerned with being as it determines out being. The philosopher is detached in one’s research; the theologian is involved, committed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
The philosophical source is the whole of reality, both subjective and objective logos, but the theological source is the logos contained in a particular event and received by the church. Although philosophy and theology both answer the question of being, the philosophy and theology both answer the question of being, the philosophical content is cosmological, descriptive of the Universe, while the theological content is soteriological, healing the disruption of the cosmos. The philosopher’s answer is abstract; the theologian’s is concrete. To sum up: religion deals existentially with the meaning of being; philosophy deals theoretically with the structure of being. The above divergencies, however, are balanced by a number of similarities which they share. Most important of all, thy both have being as their common object. They also converge in tht every creative philosopher is motived by a hidden ultimate concern and in that every theologian, in order to remain open to the ultimate, must be detached from the existential situation. The philosopher cannot avoid existential decisions, and the theologian cannot avoid ontological concepts. In a word, theology is basically existential and philosophy is basically theoretical, but each participates to a certain extent in the characteristics of the other. The distinction between philosophy and theology is not unambiguous. They are basically divergent, but partially convergent. They are not separated, and they are not identical, but they are correlated. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
There is no necessary conflict between them, and if philosophers and theologians clash, it is because one or the other has left one’s proper domain. Nor is there any possible synthesis between them in the sense of a Christian philosophy, for they simple do not share a common basis. Philosophy and theology in principle are essentially distinct, but in actual life they overlap. Their unity is emphasis by their mutual immanence as an actually, though fragmentarily, fulfilled eschatology. Their perfect, eschatological unity would be had when the philosophical analysis of the structure of being-in-itself would be untied with a theological expression of the meaning of being for us. However, even then there is a qualitative difference for unity does not exclude definitory distinction. However, leaving behind these abstruse formulations, there is an imaginary boundary. The boundary only divides philosophy and theology; it is also the point of contact. But the fact that metaphysics is directed towards being and its universal characteristics does not imply that it has no existential roots. It certainly has them, for the philosopher is human being, and in very philosophical school human interests and passions are a driving force. No philosophy is without an ultimate concern in its background, whether this is acknowledged or denied. This makes the philosopher a theologian, always implicitly and sometimes explicitly. From a winter of loneliness and solitude, friendlessness and suffering, a spring will arrive which promises the beginning of real meaning. One will begin search, and accept the meaning and price of growth and learning. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
In recent years, corporations have adopted many new and innovative ways, often called shark repellents, to prevent outside investors from taking over the company. Without commenting on the efficiency or even morality of these ploys, we present a new and as yet untested variety of poison pill and ask you to consider how to overcome it. The target company is Piper’s Pickled Peppers. Although now publicly held, the old family ties remains, as the five-member board of directors is completely controlled by five of the founder’s grandchildren. The founder recognized the possibility of conflict between his grandchildren as well as the threat of outsiders. To guard against both family squabbles and outsider attacks, he first required that the board of director election be staggered. This trick means that even someone who owns 100 percent of the shares cannot replace the entire board—rather, only the members had a staggered five-year term. An outsider could hope to get at most one seat a year. Taken at face value, it appeared that it would take someone three ears to get a majority and control the company. If a hostile party wrested control of the shares, the founder was worried that his idea of staggered terms would be subject to change. A second provision was therefore added. The procedure for board election could be changed only by the board itself. Any board member could make a proposal without the need for a seconder. However, there was a major catch. The proposer would be required to vote for one’s own proposal. The voting would then proceed in clockwise order around the boardroom table. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
To pass, a proposal needed at least 50 percent of the total board (absences were counted as votes against). Given that there were only five members, that meant at least 3 out of 5. Here is the rub. If one’s proposal failed, any person who made a proposal to change either the membership of the board or the rules by how that membership was determined would be deprived of one’s position on the board and one’s stock holdings. The holdings would be distributed evenly among the remaining members of the board. In addition, any board member who voted for a proposal that failed would also lose one’s seat on the board and one’s holdings. For a while this provision proved successful in fending off hostile bidders. However, then Sea Shells by the Sea Shore Ltd. Bought 51 percent of the shares in a hostile takeover attempt. Sea Shells voted herself one seat on the board at the annual election. However, it did not appear that loss of control was imminent, as she was one lone voice against four. At their first board meeting, Sea Shella proposed a radical restructuring on the board membership. This was the first such proposal that the board had ever voted on. Not only did the Sea Shells proposal pass, amazingly, it passed unanimously! As a result, Sea Shells got to immediately replace the entire board. The former directors were given a lead parachute (which is still better than nothing) and then were shown the door. How did she do it? Hint: It was pretty devious. Backward reasoning is the key. First, work on a scheme to get the resolution to pass, and then you can worry about unanimity. To ensure that the Sea Shells proposal passes, start at the end and make sure that the final two voters have an incentive to vote for the proposal. This will be enough to pass the resolution, since Sea Shella starts the process with a first yes vote. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Many proposals do the trick. Here is one of them. Sea Shells’ restructuring proposal has the following three cases: If the proposal passes unanimously, then Sea Shells chooses an entirely new board. Each board member replaced is given a small compensation. If the proposal passes 4 to 1, then the person voting against is removed from the board, and no compensation is made. If the proposal passes with a vote of 3 to 2, the Sea Shells transfers the entirety of its 51 percent share of Peter’s Pickled Peppers to the other two yes voters in equal proportion. The two no voters are removed from the board with no compensation. At this point, backward reasoning finishes the story. Imagine that the vote comes down to the wire: the last voter is faced with a 2-2 count. If he votes yes, it passes and he gets 25.5 percent of the company’s stock. If it fails, Sea Shells’ assets (and the other yes-voter’s shares) are distributed evenly among the three remaining members, so he gets (51 + 12.25)/3 = 21.1 percent of the company’s stock. He’ll say yes. Everyone can thereby use backward reasoning to predict that if it comes down to a 2-2 tie-breaking vote, Sea Shells will win when the final vote is cast. Now look at the fourth voter’s dilemma. When it is his turn to vote, there are either: 1 yes vote (by Sea Shells), 2 yes votes, or 3 yes votes. If there are three yes votes, the proposal has already passed. The fourth voter would prefer to get something over nothing, and therefore votes yes. If there are two yes votes, he can predict that the final voter will vote yes even if he votes no. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The fourth voter cannot stop the proposal from passing. Hence again, if one sees only one yes vote, then one would be willing to bring the vote to a 2-2 tie. One can safely predict that the final voter will vote yes, and the two of them will make out very nicely indeed. The first two Piper’s board member are now in a true pickle. They can predict that even if they both vote no, the last two will go against them and the proposal will pass. Given that they cannot stop it from passing, it is better to go along and get something. This case demonstrates the power of backward reasoning. Of course it helps to be devious too. When it comes to businesses strategies, many Chinese companies are targeting the high-end products segment. The probability is high that by the end of this decade people around the World will come to know well a group of at least a dozen Chinese producers of nonelectrical and electrical machinery, electronic goods, apparel products, and so on, with internationally recognized brands, respected for high quality and originality of their sophisticated products. And even in the high-end sector the Chinese may also exploit their cost advantage. The emergence and expansion of such a cohort will be fostered by several driving forces. To begin with, China money is at work. Many Chinese firms have earned a great deal selling low-end goods, and are now heavily investing in products’ upgrading and technological innovation. Quite often they get significant financial support from the government. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
With a lot of cash at hand, they are beginning to attract the best talent from around the World: designers, researchers, engineers, and managers. The trend will gain strength. At the same time, the pool of high-skilled Chinese cadres, ready for high-end jobs, is widening too—both due to improvements in the educational system and the increase in the number of Chinese choosing to return home after studying and/or working in the West. To speed up production upgrading, Chinese firms are using their new financial strength to purchase parts, components, machinery, and equipment manufactured by the World’s best producers. The machine tools industry provides a valuable example of China’s drive toward the high end. In 2009, China became the largest producer of machine tools in the World. Until recently, however, it produced rather simple and inexpensive machines, while the high-end segment was dominated by German, Japanese, Italian, Swiss, and other makers from industrially developed countries. Having a sharp technological edge, the latter commanded high prices for their products. However, since mid-2000s thing have begun to change. In 2004, one of the leading Chinese makers, Shenyang Machine Tool Group (SMTCL), acquired Germany’s Schiess AG, which announced bankruptcy earlier that same year. Within a short time, European designers and engineers noticeably improved SMTCL’s products. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
The company rapidly increased the number of Japanese-made parts and components installed. It started to establish the image of a globally oriented producers of advanced precision machine tools, working hard to overcome users’ mistrust rooted in the concerns about made-in-China’s poor quality. Currently it supplies flat-bed CNC machining center and other products to customers in the United States of America, Canada, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, India, South Africa, and so on. The most famous examples of Chinese companies knocking at the higher-end segment door are the 2Hs—Huawei and Haier. Huawei, with Worldwide revenues of $105.1 billion, is the World’s second-largest network and telecom equipment supplier in the World after Ericsson, serves 31 out of 50 of the largest telecom operators around the globe. Haier, with a value of $16.3 billion, has become a World-famous producer of a range of household appliances, from air-conditioners to TVs. It commands the World’s largest market share in white goods. In it ranked first in three categories: refrigeration appliances, home laundry, and electrical wine cooler/chiller appliances. Having developed an array of original products, it is successfully competing in the medium and high-end market segments in the United States of America, Europe, and many developing countries, emphasizing stylishness and modernity, functionality, reliability, and the use of the very latest technologies—all this in combination with affordable prices. The Haier advertisement catches your eye when you stroll through the famous Ginza-4 Crossing in Tokyo, in the very center of Japan’s most lush area. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Few peacetime power shifts have been as dramatic as those Soviet bloc. Suddenly, immense power, centralized in Moscow for nearly half a century, shifted back to Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, and Berlin. In a few brief spectacular months the “East” splintered. A second shift has accompanied the breakup of the so-called South. The LDCs, or “less developed countries,” have never been able to form a truly united front vis-à-vis the industrialized World, despite efforts beginning as long as the Bandung conference in Indonesia in1955. In the 1970s, the United Nations rang with rhetoric about the common needs of “the South.” Programs of “South-South” technological exchange and other forms of cooperation were launched. Campaigns were begun to shift the terms of trade between the North and the South. Power did shift. However, not in the way the spokesmen for a united South had hoped. What happened instead has been the division of the LDCs into distinct groupings with very different needs. One consists of desperately poor countries still mostly dependent on First Wave peasant labor. Another group includes countries—like Brazil, India, and China—that are actually important Second Wave or industrial powers, but saddled with vast populations still scrabbling for subsistence from preindustrial agriculture. Lastly, there are nations like Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea, which have virtually completed industrialization and are moving swiftly into Third Wave high technology. If power in the East Block has splintered, so, too, has power in the so-called South. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The third immense shift of power has been the emergence of Japan and Europe into rivals of the United States of America, leading to hyper-competition as each fights to dominate the 21st century. The so-called West, too, is now splitting apart. While politicians, diplomats, and the press still treat these powers shifts as distinctly separate phenomena, there is a deep connection among all three. The global structure that reflected the dominance of the Second Wave industrial powers has been shattered like a crystal sphere under the blow of a sledgehammer. Naturally, such vast historical developments spring from many roots, and no single explanation can completely account for them. To reduce history to any single force of factor is to ignore complexity, chance, the role of individuals, and many other variables. However, by the same token, to regard history as a succession of patternless or unrelated accidents is equally reductionist. The future patterns of global power can only be glimpsed if, instead of looking at each major shift of power as an isolate event, we identify the common forces running through them. And, in fact, we find that all three of these epochal power shifts are closely linked to the decline of industrialism and the rise of the new knowledge-driven economy. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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In the early hours. Three or four o’clock, the entire World of the undead was in my mansion or so it seemed, all the rooms were filled with spirits talking in whisper to one another. I thought it was so cold inside, it could snow. My confidence was swiftly eroding. I looked down at my … Continue reading
We live in a World where many look on the marketplace as a ruthless arena where the buyer must beware, where no one is obligated to do more than the law requires, and where fraud is not fraud unless you can prove it in court. However, as American citizens, we must have a higher standard. … Continue reading
In mortality we have the certain of death and the burden of sin. As the cell door slams shut behind a person who faces the prospect of having to spend 5 to 25 years withing that same four walls, what thoughts and feelings go through their mind and heart? The overall picture that emerges from … Continue reading
In was December. The air was ripe with the promise of the new year. The estate was full of life and sound. After the years of supernatural violence and denunciation, it seemed the demons had set their sights elsewhere and, for a while, we were at peace. There were, of course, the usual shadows lurking … Continue reading
We tend to live as though money, lots of money, is a necessity for the lives we choose to live. Some people wander from their faith because of the love of money. “For the love of money, people will steal from their mother. For the love of money people will rob their own brother. For the love of money people can’t even walk the streets because they never know who in the World they’re gonna beat,” those are the lyrics from the song “For the Love of My,” by the O’jays, and they are most certainly true. The decision to commit robbery, then, is motivated by a perceived need for cash. Why does this need express itself as robbery? Presumably the offenders have other means of obtaining money. Why do they choose robbery over legal work? Why do they decide to commit robbery rather than borrow money from friends or relatives? Most important, why do they select robbery to the exclusion of other income-generating crimes? That the decision to commit robbery typically emerges in the course of illicit street action suggests that legitimate employment is not a realistic solution. Typically, the offenders’ need for cash is so pressing and immediate that legal work, as a viable money-making strategy, is untenable: Payment and effort are separated in space and time and these offenders will not, or cannot, wait. Moreover, the jobs realistically available to them—almost all of whom were unskilled and poorly educated—pay wages that fall far short of the funds required to support a cash-intensive lifestyle. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
“Education-wise, I fell late on the education. I just think it’s too late for that. They say it’s never too late, but I’m too far gone for that…I’ve thought about [getting a job], but I’m too far gone I guess…I done seen more money come out of [doing stick-ups] than I see working.” Legitimate employment also was perceived to be overly restrictive. Working a normal job requires one to take orders, conform to a schedule, minimize informal peer interaction, show up sober and alert, and limits one’s freedom of movement for a given period of time. The “conspicuous display of independence” is a bedrock value on which street-corner culture rests. To be seen as cool, one must do as one pleases. This ethos clearly conflicts with the demands of legitimate employment. Indeed, robbery appealed to a number of offenders precisely because it allowed them to flaunt their independence and escape from the rigors of legal work. This is not to say that every offender summarily dismissed the prospects of gainful employment. If someone gave them a “good-job”—the emphasis on being goo–twenty-five of the 75 unemployed respondents claimed they would stop robbing. “My desire is to be gainfully employed in the right kind of job…If I had a union job making $20 or $25 [an hour], something that I could really take care of my family with, I think that I could become cool with that. Years ago I worked at one of the [local] car factories; I really wanted to be in there. It was the kind of job I’d been looking for. Unfortunately, as soon as I got in there they had a big lay off.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Others alleged that, while a job may not eliminate their offending altogether, it might well slow them down: “[If a job were to stop me from committing robberies], it would have to be a straight up good paying job. I ain’t talkin’ about no $12 an hour…I’m talkin’ like $20 to $21 an hour, something like that. But as far as $10 or $12 an hour, no! I would have to get like $20 to $21 an hour, full-time. Now something like that, I would probably quit doing it [robbery]. I would be working, making money, I don’t think I would do it [robbery] no more…I don’t think I would quit [offending] altogether. It would probably slow down and then eventually I’ll stop. I think [my offending] would slow down.” Even if the offenders were able to land a high-paying job, it is doubtful they would keep it for long. The relentless pursuit of street action—especially hard drug use—has a powerful tendency to undermine any commitment to conventional activities. Life as party ensnares street-culture participants, enticing them moment. Though functional in lightening the burdensome present, gambling, drinking, and drugging—for those on the street—become the proverbial “padlock on the exit door,” and fertilize the foreground in which the decision to rob becomes rooted. In theory, the offenders could have borrowed cash from a friend or relatively rather than resorting to crime. In practice, this as not feasible. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Unemployment, unskilled, and uneducated persons caught in the throes of chronically self-defeating behavior cannot, and often do not, expect to solve their fiscal troubles by borrowing. Borrowing is a short-term solution, and loans granted must be rapid. This itself could trigger robberies. As one offender explained, “I have people that will loan me money, [but] they will loan me money because of the work [robbery] that I do; they know they gonna get their money [back] one way or another.” Asking for money also was perceived by a number of offenders to be emasculating. Given their belief that men should be self-sufficient, the mere prospect of borrowing was repugnant: “I don’t like always asking my girl for nothing because I want to et her keep her own money…I’m gonna go out here and get some money.” The possibility of borrowing may be moot for the vast majority of offenders anyway. Most had long ago exhausted the patience and goodwill of helpful others; not even their closet friends or family members were willing to proofer additional cash: “I can’t borrow the money. Who gonna loan me some money? Ain’t nobody gonna loan me no money. Sh*t, [I use] drugs and they know [that] and I rob and everything else. Ain’t nobody gonna loan me no money. If they give you some money, they just give it to you; they know you ain’t giving it back.” When confronted with an immediate need for money, then, the offender perceived themselves as having little hope of securing csh quickly and legally. However, this does not explain why the respondents decided to do robbery rather than some other crime. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Most of the offenders had committed a wide range of income-generating offenses in the past, and some continued to be quite versatile. Why, then, robbery? For many, this question was irrelevant; robbery was their “main line” and alternative crimes were not considered when the pressing need for cash arose: “I have never been able to steal, even when I was little and they would tell me jut to be the watch-out man…Sh*t, I watch out, everybody gets busted. I can’t steal, but give me the pistol and I’ll go get some money…[Robbery is] just something I just got attached to.” Some of the offenders who favored robbery over other crimes maintained that it was safer than burglary or dope dealing: “I feel more safer doing a robbery because doing a burglary, I got a fear of breaking into somebody’s house not knowing who might be up in there. I got that fear about house burglary…On robbery I can select my victims, I can select my place of business. I can watch and see who all work up in there or I can rob a person and pull them around in the alley or push them up in a doorway and rob them. You don’t got [that] fear of who…in that bedroom or somewhere in another part of the house.” A couple of offenders reported steering clear of dope selling because their strong craving for drugs made it took difficult for them to resist their own merchandise. Being one’s own best customer is a sure formula for disaster. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The following respondent seemed to understand well about why being one’s own customer is a bad idea: “A dope fiend can’t be selling dop because he be his best customer. I couldn’t sell dope [nowadays]. I could sell a little weed or something cause I don’t smoke too much of it. But selling rock [cocaine] or heroin, I couldn’t do that cause I mess around and smoke it myself. [I would] smoke it all up! Now you see what G-Eazy and Snoop D are talking about in their respective songs, “I Wanna Rock.” Without doubt, some of the offenders were prepared to commit crimes other than robbery; in dire straits one cannot afford to be choosy. More often than not, robbery emerged as the “most proximate and performable” offenses available. The Universe of money-making crimes from which these offenders realistically could pick was limited. By and large, they did not hold jobs that would allow them to violate even a low-level position of financial trust. Nor did they possess the technical know-how to commit lucrative commercial break-ins, or the interpersonal skills needed to perpetrate successful frauds. Even street-corner dope dealing was unavailable to many; most lacked the financial wherewithal to purchase baseline inventories—inventories many offenders would undoubtedly have smoked up. The bottom line is that the offenders, when faced with a pressing need for cash, tend to resort to robbery because they know of no other course of action, legal or illegal, that offenders as quick and easy a way out of their financial difficulties. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The clothing industry is one of the best ways to conceal drug dealing. Speaking of the clothing industry, China does not lead in manufacturing production and exports all across the board. Also, the range of its exports lead is narrower than the range of production lead because in many industries the increments in production are absorbed by the rapidly expanding domestic market. Besides, the rise in exports is supported by a dynamic growth of the imports of production inputs: intermediate products and equipment. Depending on China’s position versus other major producers and exporters, all manufacturing industries can be divided into three groups. Group One Industries: China is the top producers and top exporter. This group of industries consists of two major pillars. The first one is the office and telecommunications equipment sector, along with electrical machinery. The second is a variety of light industry goods: textiles and clothing, footwear, toys and games, travel goods, furniture, travel items and so on. In the 2000s, these sectors’ production in China increased dramatically, while in the West and other major producing nations, mainly Asian, it grew at a slow pace, stagnated, or declined. As a result, China established itself as the number one producer and exporter, often running far ahead of the follower. Office and telecom equipment, electrical machinery—the most vivid example is the office and telecommunication equipment sector. It consists of two big blocs. The first one is electronic data processing (EDP) and office equipment; the second is telecommunication and sound-recording/reproducing apparatus and equipment. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
EDP equipment means computers, printers, computer peripheral equipment, and software. Sound-recording and reproducing equipment includes TVs and various audio-video products. The data about production of the four key items belonging to this sector (LED TVs, drones, wearable electronics, powerbanks, cloud servers, telecom infrastructure, video products, mobile phones, and personal computers, and digital cameras indicating that China underwent a fundamental and abrupt change. Within two decades, China has become cemented as the World leader in producing these electronics with a global output of 40 percent. It is the World’s most extensive electronics manufacturing ecosystem with a labor force of electrical goods workers close to 150 million. The shares of North America and Europe in the production of all electronics plummeted. Therefore, when you shop for electronics and cars, please try to buy American made products so we do not continue to lose jobs and operate at a deficit. It is a very serious matter. East Asian countries have also drastically increased production of their parts, components, and materials, which in great part were exported to China, where final products were assembled. This is one of the major reasons why East Asian preserves the dynamism of its manufacturing industries. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Also, it goes without saying that China’s dramatic upswing to the number one position (as both a producer and an exporter) was largely the result of the production activities of multinational companies. However, in this regard, too, East Asian, not Western multinationals took the lead. The data on exports indicates that China’s shares have been rising at an enormous speed. In another important development, along with the office and telecommunication equipment sector, China established itself as the leading producer and exporter of electrical machinery (including home electric appliances). Its electrical machinery exports was US$898.96 billion in 2021. Electrical equipment manufacturing in the USA in 2023 is $49.2 billion. The market size of the electrical equipment manufacturing industry in America is expected to increase by 5.2 percent in this same year. In the production of textiles, in 2021, approximately 24 billion units of apparel had been produced in China. The U.S.A. industry is the third largest exporter of textile-related products in the World with value of $34 billion in 2021. As of 2022, China’s textile and garment export total is up to around $316 billion and their retail up to $672 billion. China has been ranked as the World’s largest manufacture since 2010. In 2020, China topped the ranking of the largest machine tool producing countries Worldwide. With machine tool production to the value of about $24 billion, China’s market share increased to 31 percent from 29 percent the year before. China’s motor vehicle production was reported at 27,020, 615 units in 2022. The United States of America comes in second with 9.17 million units, and Germany comes in 6th with 3.31 million. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The steel industry is one of the most important in the World, not just in terms of direct value and job creation, but also because it is intrinsic to several other major trillion dollar industries such as the construction sector. Iron is used in the production of steel, which in turn is over 1,000 times stronger than iron. Steel is one of the smokestack industries and one of the oldest alloys in the World, with steel knives being dated back to the 11th century BC. The most commonly used metal in the World, total steel production in 2021 amounted to 1,951 million tonnes. The biggest steel producing country is currently China, which produces 60 percent of the World’s steel. Whereas the United States of America accounts for only 4 percent of steel produced in the World, but is reported to have some of the best quality steel known to man. Ethylene glycol is a useful industrial compound found in many consumer products. Examples include antifreeze, hydraulic brake fluids, some stamp pad inks, ballpoint pens, solvents, paints, plastics, films, and cosmetics. It can also be a pharmaceutical vehicle. In 2021, China was the country with the highest ethylene glycol (EG) capacity was 51.54 mtpa in 2021 and is expected to achieve an AAGR of more than 7 percent during 2021-2026. In the same year, the USA came to 40 mtpa. China’s production of the four major plastics (polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, and polyvinyl chloride) accounts for 32 percent of global plastic material production, making it the World’s plastic leader by far. The total Worldwide production of plastics in 2021 amounted to some 391 million metric tons. The United States of American produces about 10 percent of the global plastic production. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Overall, today’s China is leading in both production and exports of a wide and widening range of final goods, especially electronic/electrical products and light industry consumer items. It has also joined the ranks of major producers and exporters of electronic components. China exports much more than it imports. China’s annual trade surplus, one of the irritants that prompted President Trump to hike tariffs, has reached a record $878 billion. $404.1 billion of that surplus comes from China’s trade with the United States of America. Overall USA trade deficit with China grew 8.3 percent annually to $382.9 billion. Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have become big net importers. China’s imports for 2021 was $3,091.26 billion, an increase of 30.17 from 2021. Forecasters expect Chinese export growth to weaken as the possibility of recession in Western economies increases. We now face the ultimate political power shift. We can redesign democracy for the 21st century—or descend into a new Dark Age. One path moves power from the state toward the individual. The other threatens to shrink the individual to zero. Nothing in the foreseeable future is about to take the gun out of the hands of the state. Nothing will prevent the state from siphoning wealth into its hands and disposing of it for its own power-enhancing purposes. What is likely to change, as we have already begun to see, is the state’s ability to control knowledge. The new economy thrives on freer expression, better feedback between rulers and ruled, more popular participation in decision-making. It can produce a less bureaucratic, more decentralized and responsive government. It can create a greater independence for the individual, a power shift away from the state—not its “withering away” but its humanization. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Yet any new alliance of democratic groups will face three giant forces now racing toward convergence in the Worldwide crusade that could, if we are not careful, sweep us into a new Dark Age. Organized religion, in one form or another, had a virtual monopoly on the production and distribution of abstract knowledge in the pre-smokestack era, the time before the Enlightenment, before the birth of democracy in the West. Today, forces are at work seeking to restore that monopoly control of the mind. The resurgence of religio-politics around the World may seem to have little to do with the rise of the computer and the new economy. But it does. The knowledge-based wealth-creation system, of which the computer is the symbol, rings down the curtain on three centuries during which the industrial nations dominated the Earth. Within the smokestack nations, this period was marked by a war for the mind between the forces of religion, aligned with the power elites of the agrarian age, and secular forces that fought for industrial “modernism” and mass democracy. By the middle of the industrial era, these secular forces had managed to subdue organized religion, weakening its hold on the schools, on morality and on the state itself. However, a demon has moved in to become the opioid of the masses. The TV news media has choke hold on schools, no morality, and on the state. They focus on school shootings to promote violence on school campuses to make people unsafe and as a means of stripping the 2nd Amendment rights from the people, which may be very important in the foreseeable future. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The media also wants people to be less moral, and not fear God so that violence in the streets will continue, making it easy for them to find things to report and compete with highly rated television shows like SWAT starring Mr. Shemar Moore. The made also has a choke hold on the state as it steals, leaks, and distorts government documents and takes control of election coverage where it commits voter fraud that goes unrecognized because no one investigates these criminal broadcasting systems. Also, the TV news media wants to take a fatalistic look on the World by doing nothing but presenting doom and gloom, and with its fatalistic outlook, people feel like the World is ending and all hope is lost. Because of the corrupt TV news media, the three great religions of the West, where industrialism had triumphed, have all seen their social, moral, and political power diminish. It is, however, precisely at this moment that the computer actually started changing the way wealth is produced. The technology that has most radically undermined the blue-collar, factory-based economy have moved more rapidly out of the laboratories and a few corporate and government installations, and into general use. Coinciding with this revolutionary development, most advanced in the United States of America, have arose the hippie movement, which launched a savage attack on the cultural premises of the industrial age, including its secularism. With the patchouli oil, lack of deodorant, and drug smoke came a bitter technophobia , hate of politics and religion, and widespread interest in musty cults and “free love.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The movement looked at industrial society, hated what it saw, and urged a return to some haloed, mythical parts. The hippies reject the cutter cooker homes with clean lines, and family values They year for a return to preindustrial culture. This was the seed from which sprang today’s sprawling, burgeoning New Age movement, with its lack of regard for law and order. The signs of crisis in the old industrial society are everywhere. Life itself has been threatened. Urban systems, healthy systems, housing systems, banking systems, the automotive industry and education systems, all have plunged into crisis. Our greatest corporations have been forced to restructure. Our labor unions have declined. Our communities are torn apart by financial and mora conflict, devastated by drugs, crime, family breakup, and other agonies. The rejection of traditional Christianity, in a country founded on Christianity, upset the breakup of the familiar World, Christian fundamentalists have also began a counterattack on secularism that has taken the form of highly effective political action. Here, again, is a violent rejection of the messy, painful present and a search for absolutist certainties of the past. However, around the World, many people have followed in the footsteps of American colonialism, and today are in frenzy. However, they would not be if industrial civilization in America were not itself in a moral and social crisis, no longer offering a very attractive model for emulation by the rest of the World. Indeed, the industrial states, now torn apart internally, no longer seem a invincible as they one had. Now hostage-taker, terrorists, and petroleum sheiks were able to jerk them around, seemingly at will. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The problem is that America has lost professionalism, religious foundations, family values, pride in their country. The uprise of feminism has promoted single parent homes, and has influenced men to transition into women because paternal dominance has been incorrectly labeled as deviant and accused of being responsible for all the ills in society. As the dominance of America has ended in production, its reigning philosophy has been attacked from within and without, from many sides at once, to the point that the United States of America’s Constitution has been thrown in the trash, along with the flag, Christianity and national pride. The flames have grown stronger as Christian farms are stolen, cattle mutilated, and Americans are being beaten and their cars and homes stoned by radicals whose ideas and social models were shaped by deviant subcultures and foreign ideas. This destructive model of rebellion has ripped across the United States of America, and destroyed peaceful, traditional suburban communities because rejects want revenge, no matter the cost, even if it requires breaking the law. What is happening is a sky-darkening attack on the ideas of the Enlightenment which helped usher in the most prosperous era in American history—the smokestack era, also known as the industrial age. Fanatics are breeding lazy and uneducated children who are committed to controlling the by popularizing entitlement, greed, theft, and the party life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Tolerance of diversity is the first commandment of the demassified society, including tolerance of the intolerant—up to a point. Because somethings are just not normal, nor are they acceptable. However, it is okay to be unique and love life, life your country, your family and God. We should not try to impose control on people who are seen as normal. What is not compatible with being America is to be at war with your people and your religion, your employ, your neighbor, your friends, law enforcement, nor the government. People need to go back to doing their jobs, following the rules and doing what is expected of them. In America, peace and respect and cleanliness is what is considered normal. Have you notice since we have outsourced our jobs and criticized the uniform style of the McMansion that the beautiful streets have become laces with crime and tent cities? This new lazy, live out loud, party generation has created a lethal combination of toxicity on the American way of life. They are determined to size power over the state, the country, your mind, private property, privacy, and own rule over every aspect of human life. They are also determined to roll back freedoms that make democracy possible and make being young and beautiful a sin They are the agents of a new Dark Age. The characteristics of these wicked spirits are, and how they able to dwell in the bodies and minds of human beings, as well as their power to interfere with, mislead and deceive even servants of God has amounted to such astronomical proportions that study groups have set up to monitor them due to the fact the there is some kind of ritual abuse going on. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Evil spirits are generally looked upon as “influences,” and not as intelligent beings. They have a desire of a dwelling place to rest, they possess great wickedness, much power of rage, and act as a combination of the maddest and most wicked persons in existence, but all their evil is done with the fullest intelligence and purpose. They know what they do, they know it is evil, terribly evil, and they will to do it. They do it with rage, and with the full swing of malice, enmity and hatred. They act with fury and bestiality like an enraged bull, as if they had no intelligence. And yet with full intelligence they carry on their work, showing the wickedness of their wickedness. They act from an absolutely depraved nature, with diabolical fury, and with an undeviating perseverance. They act with determination, persistency, and with skillful methods, forcing themselves upon mankind, upon the Church, upon America, and still more upon the spiritual man. The history of religion and of Christianity is an immense reservoir of religious experience, and in this sense it is content and, therefore, the source of theology. However, experience as event is the medium. The event is a revelatory event, id est, “the manifestation of the ultimate ground and meaning of human existence. It is a matter of ultimate concern. The theologian must share in the revelator character of one’s source, for we can speak of it only if it has become revelation for us, if we have experienced it existentially. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The awareness of the ultimate, of being-itself, is inherent in the Christian message. Humans seek a reality to overcome the estrangement of existence, a reality of reconciliation and reunion, of creativity, of meaning, and hope. This reality is the New Being, and it is manifest in Jesus as the Christ. Therefore, the material norm of this systematic theology is the New Being in Jesus as the Christ as our ultimate concern. The Bible is far too general, and a more concrete norm is required—for example, Luther’s justification by faith. Hence, one can say that the norm is derived from the Bible, and then governs the use of the Bible. The question of the canonicity of the biblical books clearly shows that the Bible is a source, not a norm. The norm results from an encounter between the church and the biblical message. Consequently, the norm is provided in church history, and every era consciously and unconsciously contributes to its formation. Because the church does not live in a vacuum, the norm is conditioned by the particular religio-cultural environment in which it is produced. The norm is also dependent upon the theological medium, for it is born in and nurtured by the collective experience of the church. However, at the same time it is the criterion of this experience. In brief, the norm is derived from the Bible, produced in the church, conditioned by culture, and vivified by experience. Therefore, I will not participate in the gaiety around me when in my heart I know you are alone. I do not know the meaning of joy when I see the sadness in your eyes. I speak but the words embrace a darkness that no bright sun can invade. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
My footstep are weighted with not knowing. You move with a willingness and enter swiftly the dark clouds, the rainy nights and the setting suns. You merge easily with distant stars. I refuse to submit. I continue to live in conflict, stumbling, not knowing the way. I wonder if the darkness in me touches you and increases your suffering. For me, there is no substitute—only the pain fully expresses my love. I know that when the time comes, I will go with you into the unknow, not quietly but strongly protesting the injustice with every fiber of my being. The inevitable truth about gambling is that one person’s gain must be another person’s loss. This it is especially important to evaluate a gamble from the other side’s perspective before accepting. For if they are willing to gamble, they expect to win, which means they expect you to lose. Someone must be wrong, but who? The method of correlation explains the contents of the Christian faith through existential questions and theological answers in mutual interdependence. Revelation contains answers, but they are meaningful only if correlated with questions about the whole of human existence. And man can never get the ultimate answer to one’s own questions unless he seeks it in the revelatory events. The fact that man is able to ask the question of this existence reflect his essential unity with the infinite. The fact that he must ask it reflects his existential estrangement from it. Consequently, the procedure of the theologian is first to analyze the existential situation. One examines the cultural creations in which man expresses his interpretation of existence: philosophy, sociology, depth psychology, the novel, drama, poetry, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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