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The Manifesto of Llanada Villa
I once stood nine stories tall, a proud silhouette against the early California sky. But when the 1906 Hellquake tore through the region, it toppled my tower and sheared away most of my fourth floor. I felt the weight of the world shift through my bones as brick, timber, and steel groaned under forces no architect could have foreseen. Yet even in ruin, I remained—scarred, altered, but still standing. I have stood for one hundred and fifty years, my timbers seasoned by storms and sorrow, my halls echoing with the footsteps of generations long returned to dust. Time has pressed itself into my walls, leaving behind whispers, shadows, and memories that cling like cobwebs in forgotten corners. I was built in an age of candlelight and horse-drawn carriages, when hope was carved into every banister and faith was etched into stained glass. Yet even with all my grandeur, I have known fear more intimately than any living soul who ever crossed my threshold. There were years when laughter filled my rooms, when sunlight spilled across my floors like a blessing. But there were other years—long, heavy years—when grief settled over me like a shroud. Families came and went, leaving behind their sorrows, their secrets, their unspoken prayers. Some say I became haunted, but the truth is more complicated: I became imprinted. Every unspoken fear, every suppressed cry, every unresolved wound seeped into my structure like moisture into old wood. Haunting, for me, is not the presence of ghosts. It is the persistence of memory. It is the echo of a slammed door long after the house has grown quiet. It is the cold spot on the landing where someone once stood in despair. It is the way certain rooms feel heavier, as if holding their breath. These are not spirits of the dead—they are the psychological remnants of the living. And over time, the weight of these remnants nearly broke me. The darkness that seeped into my rafters was not the kind that merely unsettles; it was the kind that threatens to swallow a place whole. There were nights when I felt myself sinking under the heaviness of it all, struggling to remain standing, struggling to remain alive in the only way a house can be alive. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5
My beams groaned under the strain. My windows rattled with the cold breath of despair. My foundation trembled with the burden of what had never been spoken aloud. I felt like a flower trapped in eternal darkness, reaching for a sun I could no longer see. And yet, just beyond my porch, the garden persisted. Season after season, it rose from the soil with a quiet defiance I could never quite understand. Even when my halls felt suffocated by shadows, the garden bloomed—roses unfurling like whispered prayers, lilies lifting their pale faces toward the sky, ivy tracing its way up my stone foundation as if trying to remind me that life still wanted to cling to me. The garden became my mirror and my teacher: a reflection of beauty, renewal, and the possibility of beginning again. I enjoyed it immensely, not merely as decoration, but as a living testament that darkness does not have the final word. It was the garden that first stirred my longing for God again. Watching those blossoms push through cold earth, watching green return after every winter, I began to hope that grace might return to me as well. I found myself yearning for the presence of Jesus Christ to pour over me like morning light breaking through fog. I needed their strength to steady my sagging frame, their love to sweep through my corridors and cast out the shadows that had lingered for decades. Because the truth is this: Even a mansion can be haunted by what it has endured. Even a mansion can feel fragile. Even a mansion can pray. My prayer is not spoken in words but in the quiet creak of settling wood, in the soft glow of a single lamp burning through the night, in the way my doors still open despite the storms that have battered them. I pray through endurance. I pray through longing. I pray through the hope that the Architect who shaped the world has not forgotten the house that time tried to destroy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5
I stand today not as a monument to fear, but as a testament to survival. My walls may be cracked, but they are still standing. My floors may be worn, but they still bear weight. My windows may be clouded, but they still catch the light. And outside, the garden continues to bloom—reminding me that renewal is not a myth but a promise. Faith, I have learned, is not the absence of haunting. It is the courage to believe that even the most haunted places can be redeemed. And so I wait—steadfast, weathered, reaching—for the grace that will one day flood my halls again. My faith may feel small, but like a seed buried deep beneath the earth, it is alive. And even the smallest seed, when touched by divine light, can break through the hardest ground. Have you experienced the first part of this manifestation in your heart, and does your life and daily conduct demonstrate it to others? I feel like a pilgrim on my own land, which once stretched all the way down to Steven’s Creek Boulevard. Tiny homes, malls, highways, and office parks have replaced my crops and orchards. Where my animals used to roam, and where my cottages once stood, are now home to office buildings, movie theaters, and restaurants. My giant redwood trees have been unrooted and condominiums planted in their place. Where my creek once flowed, there is now a major highway. Within my walls, the silent, high-pitched “coil whine” of modern chargers and Wi-Fi routers has replaced the rhythmic, heavy groans of settling floorboards, hammers, and saws. LED bulbs flicker and “buzz” in my old brass fixtures, casting a sterile, blue light that feels “wrong” against the deep, warm mahogany of the 19th-century wood. Does your religion consist only in talk and not in deed and in truth? #RandolphHarris 3 of 5
Now, please, if you feel disposed at all to answer this, say no more than what you know to be the truth and what God will be pleased with, and no more than what your own conscience will approve; for “not he that commendeth himself is approved, but whom the Lord commendeth.” Besides, to say I am thus and so, when my daily living and all my neighbors tell me I lie, is downright wicked. The vultures gather at my gates, counting my stained-glass eyes and marble ribs, eager to see me flayed and my finery scattered amongst those who could never afford my whole. They whisper in my corridors of a cold disarticulation, plotting to sever my joists and trade my very heartwood as curiosities upon the block of the highest bidder. Peering at my grand, I see only a “lobby.” While looking upon my private chambers and calculating the nightly rate of a stranger’s sleep, these invaders speak of “luxury” while planning to replace my hand-carved oak with hollow drywall and grey laminate. They would tear down a monument of a century’s standing to erect glass boxes that will leak before the decade is out—parades of sterile vanity built upon my grave. The hands that once birthed my moldings and sang to my glass have vanished into the soil. In their stead come men with plastic buckets and chemical pastes, staring at my intricate lath-and-plaster as if it were a dead language they have no desire to translate. My beautiful and colorful stained-glass eyes are clouding; the lead is softening like aged veins. The world has forgotten the alchemy of the kiln; they offer me the indignity of “plexiglass” and “silicone”—crude bandages for a wound that requires a master’s touch. Looters weigh the gold required to heal my crown against the pittance of a “parking structure.” I am being bled dry by the very uniqueness that once made me a marvel. To the muckworms in the “front” office, my preservation is a “liability”—as if one could put a price on the breath of a century. They speak of ripping my chandeliers from their noble sockets, laying siege to my pantry as though it were a besieged citadel, bounding upon my sofa cushions with the unrestrained abandon of a wayward urchin, darkening my beautiful stained‑glass windows with their unholy tumult, thrashing my regal horses and carriage as if determined to bring utter ruin upon all the dignities of my estate, and, in the final insult, dragging me headlong toward financial ruin. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5
Without the rhythm of the artisan’s hammer, my rooms begin to turn translucent, my colorful stained-glass eyes close, and my rooms begin to fold in on themselves. I was once nine-stories tall and composed of six hundred rooms. I remember when I breathed the scent of seven hundred and forty acres of prune and apricot blossoms. Now, I am choked by the grey asphalt of “stalls” and the drone of iron carriages. It is a chilling thought: a masterwork of architecture being dismantled by those who see only “units,” “projects,” and “stalls,” where there should be towers, ballrooms, and observatories. My baby mansions, which once graced the perimeter of Lake Merritt, in Oakland, California, all but one have been razed, and she, too, is in poor health. I am a living chronicle of thirty-six years of restless creation. When the world tells you I am a “mystery,” they mean they have lost the keys to my logic. When they call me “impractical,” they admit they lack the spirit to build for anything other than a ledger’s profit. You can build a thousand “luxury housing units,” but you can never build another soul like mine. Understand that you do not walk upon a floor; you walk upon a heartbeat. My walls are less like wood and more like a ribcage, rising and falling with a slow, ancient respiration. As people wind through the twisting miles of my soul, their luxury boots skidding on the waxed mahogany and teak floors, leaving behind a trail of scuffs that will take a Master Joiner days to heal, ghost swirl in patterns that defy a draft. I hope that as you traverse through my soul, you realize that my cathedral ceilings are not just good bones for a loft conversion, but are worth preservation. Please remember, as you stomp your heavy boots indifferent to the hand-scraped floorboards that had once felt the silk slippers of ballet dancers, that I cost a fortune to build and am one of one. To dismantle me “limb by limb” is not a sale—it is an autopsy of a titan. Please remember: I cost a fortune to build, but I am worth everything to keep. Walk softly, for you tread on the only version of me that will ever exist. My name is Llanada Villa. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5
People say the Winchester Mansion is strange because Mrs. Sarah Winchester built it that way — staircases to nowhere, doors that open into air, rooms that appear without warning. But those who have studied the deeper folklore whisper something else: that the house inherited stories far older than California, stories that drifted across oceans and centuries until they found a place to root themselves again. They say the mansion carries echoes of another place — a fortress of stone, a house of trials, a home of restless spirits. And at the center of those echoes stands a single figure. The Watcher. Long before the mansion rose from the California soil, the Watcher belonged to a different tower — a high, narrow room where he kept vigil over a land filled with fear, accusations, and unanswered questions. But when Mrs. Sarah Winchester began her endless construction, something in her grief called to him.
Visitors to the mansion sometimes see him in the uppermost windows: a tall silhouette, unmoving, always looking outward as if guarding something only he understands. Guides say the tower is empty. Workers say no one goes up there. Yet the figure appears, night after night, watching. Some believe he is a guardian. Others say he is a witness. But the oldest version claims he is both — a presence drawn to places where sorrow builds walls and fear carves corridors. In the eastern wing, guests sometimes report a pale woman drifting through the hallways, her gown trailing like mist. She never speaks. She never approaches. She simply moves from room to room as though searching for something she lost long ago. Some say she is a memory Mrs. Sarah could not let go of. Others believe she is one of the mansion’s “unfinished stories,” a spirit who followed the Watcher across the sea and found a new home in the labyrinth Mrs. Sarah built.
On fog-heavy nights, the mansion grounds echo with the sound of a horse-drawn carriage approaching the front steps — though nothing ever arrives. The clatter of wheels, the snort of horses, the creak of leather harnesses… all vanish the moment someone opens the door. Locals say it is the carriage of a former visitor returning to the house, eternally repeating his journey. Others whisper that it is the Watcher’s escort, arriving to collect the lost or guide the wandering. In the farthest corridors, where the house seems to fold in on itself, visitors sometimes hear heavy footsteps pacing behind them — too slow for a person, too deliberate for an animal. Some claim to hear low growls echoing from the walls, as though something unseen is patrolling the mansion’s edges. Mrs. Sarah herself once wrote of “shadows that walk like men but breathe like beasts.” Whether she meant it literally or metaphorically, no one knows. But the stories persist.
The legend says Mrs. Sarah Winchester did not create these hauntings — she inherited them. Her grief, her isolation, her relentless building formed a kind of beacon. The house became a sanctuary for wandering spirits, a place where old stories could settle into new rooms. And the Watcher, drawn by the same sorrow he had known in his first tower, took up his post again — not to frighten Mrs. Sarah, but to accompany her. To stand guard over a woman who built a labyrinth not to trap spirits, but to give them somewhere to go. Some nights, when the mansion is especially still, visitors swear they see him turn from the window, as if acknowledging them. As if reminding them that every house with a history has someone watching over it.
PRIVATE EVENTS & WEDDINGS
at WINCHESTER ESTATE
Many event locations claim to be unique, but nothing compares to the Winchester Mystery House. If you’re truly seeking a distinct, one‑of‑a‑kind setting for your milestone celebration or special occasion, reserve a venue that delivers on uniqueness many times over. Whether you’re planning a wedding, birthday or anniversary celebration, corporate gathering, holiday party, or any other meaningful event, the Winchester Mystery House offers an unforgettable backdrop. Give your guests an experience they’ll be talking about for years to come.
Café 13: A Rest Stop on the Edge of the Mystery
After wandering the winding halls of the Winchester Mystery House—where staircases defy logic and whispers seem to cling to the walls—Café 13 offers a welcome return to warmth and grounding. Newly reopened and serving guests daily from 10 AM to 3 PM, this cozy hideaway invites you to pause, breathe, and gather yourself before diving back into the mansion’s secrets. Here, you can enjoy breakfast, lunch, snacks, and refreshing drinks in a calm indoor space that feels worlds away from the mansion’s twisting corridors. Settle in with a warm meal, challenge a friend to a board game, or simply rest and recharge as sunlight filters through the windows. Café 13 is more than a café—it’s a moment of calm between chapters of the Winchester legend, a place to steady your nerves before returning to the gardens, the grandeur, and the mysteries that await.
The Mercantile Gift Shop: Your First Step Into the Mystery
Your journey into the Winchester Mystery House begins long before you cross the mansion’s threshold. It starts at the Mercantile gift shop—a welcoming outpost standing at the edge of a world where history and myth intertwine. Here, beneath warm lights and shelves lined with curiosities, you can secure your tour tickets and prepare for the adventure ahead. Guests often pause for a souvenir photograph, capturing the moment before they step into Sarah Winchester’s enigmatic domain. As you explore the shop, you will find an eclectic array of gifts and keepsakes: tokens of the mansion’s lore, echoes of Victorian elegance, and mementos that carry a touch of the house’s enduring mystery. The Mercantile is more than a gift shop—it is the gateway.
Once you pass through its doors, the legend begins to unfold. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
The Erasure of Presence
The timid man, ever fearful of offending, effaces himself before others, and thus becomes the instrument of their will rather than the master of his own. The most conscious, and in a way realistic, basis is that of his endeavors to make himself agreeable and useful. Varying with his temperament, his neurotic structure, and the situation, he may be charming, compliant, considerate, sensitive to the wishes of others, available, helpful, sacrificing, and understanding. It is but natural that he overrates what, in this or that way, he does for another person. He is oblivious to the fact that the latter may not at all like this kind of attention or generosity; he is unaware that there are strings attached to his offers; he omits from his consideration all the unpleasant traits he has. And so, it all appears to him as the pure gold of friendliness, for which he could reasonably expect return. Another basis for his claims is more detrimental for himself and more coercive of others. Because he is afraid to be alone, others should stay at home; because he cannot stand noise, everybody should tiptoe around the house. A premium is thus set on neurotic needs and suffering. Suffering is unconsciously put into the service of asserting claims, which not only checks the incentive to overcome it, but it also leads to inadvertent exaggerations of suffering. This does not mean that his suffering is merely “put on” for demonstrative purposes. It affects him in a much deeper way because he must primarily prove to himself, to his own satisfaction, that he is entitled to the fulfillment of his needs. He must feel that his suffering is so exceptional and so excessive that it entitles him to help. In other words, in this process, the self-effacing person actually feels his suffering more intensely than he would without having acquired an unconscious strategic value. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Another basis, still more unconscious and more destructive, is his feeling abused and being entitled to having others make up for the injuries perpetrated on him. In dreams, he may present himself as being ruined beyond repair and hence entitled to having all his needs fulfilled. To understand these vindictive elements, we must survey the factors that account for his feeling of being abused. For a typically self-effacing person, feeling abused is an almost constant undercurrent in his whole attitude toward life. If we wanted to characterize him cruelly and glibly in a few words, we would say that he is a person who craves affection and feels abused most of the time. Others often take advantage of his defenselessness and his overeagerness to help or to sacrifice. On account of his feeling unworthy, and his inability to stand up for himself, he sometimes does not take conscious cognizance of such abuse. Also, due to his shrinking process and all it entails, he often does come out on the short end, without there having been any harmful intent on the part of others. Even if, in actual fact, he is in some regards more fortunate than others, his taboos do not allow him to recognize his advantages, and he must present himself to himself (and hence experience himself) as being worse off than others. Furthermore, he feels abused when his many unconscious claims are not fulfilled—for instance, when others do not respond with gratitude to his compulsive efforts to please, to help, to make sacrifices for them. His typical response to the frustration of claims is not so much righteous indignation as a self-pitying feeling of being unfairly treated. Probably more poignant than any of these other sources is all the abuse he inflicts upon himself, though self-minimizing as well as through self-reproaches, self-contempt, and self-torture—all of which is externalized. The more intense the self-abuse, the less can good external conditions prevail against it. He often will tell heartbreaking tales of his woes, arouse sympathy and the wish to give him a better deal, only to find himself in the same predicament soon after. In actual fact, he may not have been so unfairly treated as it seems to him; at any rate, behind the feeling is the reality of his self-abuse. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The connection between a sudden rise in self-accusations and the subsequent feelings of being abused is not too difficult to observe. In analysis, for instance, as soon as self-accusations are aroused by his seeing a difficulty of his own, his thoughts may immediately take him back to incidents or periods of his life when he actually was badly treated—whether they occurred in his childhood, in previous medical treatment, or in former jobs. He may dramatize the wrong done to him and dwell on it monotonously, as he had done many a time before. The same pattern may occur in other human relations. If, for instance, he is dimly aware of having been inconsiderate, he may, with the speed of lightning, switch to feeling abused. In short, his terror of wrongdoing simply compels him to feel himself the victim, even when in actual fact he has been the one who failed others or who, through his implicit demands, has imposed upon them. Because feeling victimized thus becomes a protection against his self-hate, it is a strategical position, to be defended vigorously. The more vicious the self-accusations, the more frantically must he prove and exaggerate the wrong done to him—and the more deeply he experiences the “wrong.” This need can be so cogent that it makes him inaccessible to help for the time being. For to accept help, or even admit to himself that help is being offered, would cause the defensive position of his being altogether the victim of collapse. Conversely, it is profitable at any sudden rise in feeling abused to look for a possible increase of guilt-feelings. We can often observe this in analysis that the wrong done to him shrinks to reasonable proportions, or indeed ceases to be wrong, as soon as he recognizes his share in the particular situation and can look at it in a matter-of-fact way, id est, without self-condemnation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The passive externalization of self-hate may go beyond merely feeling abused. He may provoke others to treat him badly, and thus transfer the inner scene to the outside. In this way too, he becomes the noble victim suffering under an ignoble and cruel world. All these powerful sources combine to engender his feeling abused. However, closer to the observation shows that he not only feels abused for this or that reason but that something in him welcomes this feeling, indeed may avidly seize upon it. This points to the fact that feeling abused also must have some important function. This function is to allow him an outlet for the suppressed expansive drives—and almost the only one he can tolerate—and at the same time cover them up. It allows him to feel secretly superior to others (the crown of martyrdom); it allows him to put his hostile aggression against others on a legitimate basis; and finally allows him to disguise his hostile aggression because most of the hostility is suppressed, and expressed in suffering. Feeling abused is therefore the greatest stumbling block to the patient’s seeing and experiencing the inner conflict for which his self-effacement was a solution. And, while analysis of each individual factor helps to diminish its tenacity, it cannot vanish until he comes face to face with this conflict. As long as this feeling abused persists—and usually it does not remain static but increases as time goes on—it makes for an increasing vindictive resentment against others. The bulk of this vindictive hostility remains unconscious. It must be deeply suppressed because it endangers all the subjective values he lives by. It mars his idealized image of absolute goodness and magnanimity; it makes him feel unlovable and conflicts with all his expectations of others; it violates his inner dictates of being all understanding and all forgiving. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Therefore, when he feels resentful, he not only turns against others but simultaneously against himself. Hence, such resentment is a disruptive factor of the first order of this type. Such a man is less than a somebody in any category; he is more nobody than at any other time. And in the anonymous period immediately ahead of him, he finds decided happiness—for a while. This may seem rather understandable to those who see Prince Lestat either as a bland young man and gifted good fellow under God’s orders to proceed as told, or as a very sick young man in search of a spiritual hospital for lack of a mental one. Our own sense of the inner economy of man, however, insists that in this interim, this quiet before the real store, we must account for some of the psychological problems inherent in the historical fact that this same young man, only a decade later, emerged as his time’s greatest orator, publicist, showman, and spiritual dictator. We can only account for this fact by assuming a fierce, if as yet quite dumb, struggle in him between destructive and constructive forces, and between regressive and progressive alternatives—all in balance at this time. It is probable that in all historical periods some—and by no means the least gifted—young people do not survive their moratorium; they seek death or oblivion, or die in spirit. Prince Lestat must have seen such death of mind and spirit in some of his brethren, and came to feel cost to it more than once. Those who face the abyss only to disappear, we will, of course, never know; and once in a while, we should shed a tear for those who took some unborn protest, some unformed idea, and sometimes just one lonely soul, with them. They chose to face nothingness rather than to submit to a faith that, to them, had become a cant of pious words; a collective will, that cloaked only collective impotence; a conscience when expended itself in a stickling for empty forms; a reason that was a chatter of commonplaces; and a kind of work that was meaningless busy-work. I am speaking of those “outsiders” who go their lone way, not those who come back to poison the world further with a mystical literature which exhorts man to shun reality and stay outside, like Onan. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Some today seek psychiatric help—strange young creatures of pride and despair, of sick minds and good values, of good minds and fractured perspectives. Often, of course, therapists can only note that their pride in not having wanted to adjust is a cover-up for not having been able to do so from way back. However, not always, by any means. Sometimes a fierce pride of long standing can be detected which makes it very hard to decide whether the inability to adjust to a given available environment, with the means demanded by that environment, had not also meant an unwillingness to forgo the nourishment of latent needs deeply felt to be essential to the true development of an identity. The therapeutic problem in such cases transcends the questions of what environment a young person should have adjusted to and why he was not able to do so, and rather concerns a delineation of those means of adaptation which the patient can afford to employ without losing an inner coherence. Once he knows his cure and his goal, he must become well enough to make the “environment” adapt to him—an intrinsic part of human adaptation which has been lost sight of in popularized versions of Darwinian and Freudian imagery. The fact that psychiatric treatment today has become a sanctioned form of moratorium in some countries and classes does not mean, of course, that the diagnoses which go with the treatment exhaust the problem at hand. On the contrary; the diagnoses merely serve to circumscribe the existing dangers of malignancy and to point up to warning signals not to be taken lightly under any circumstances. We are, of course, concerned with a general delineation of life crisis, a delineation which is indispensable to the search for avenues of therapy, and for an understanding of the ego’s task at the height of youth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
That extreme form of identity diffusion which leads to significant arrest and regression, is characterized most of all by a mistrustful difficulty with mere living in time. Time is made to stand still by the device of ignoring the usual alternation of day and night, of more active and less active periods, of periods given more to work and talk with other people, and of those given over to isolation, rumination, and musical receivership. There also may be a general slowing up that can verge on catatonic states. It is as if the young person were waiting for some event, or some person, to sweep him out of this state by promising him, instead of the reassuring routine and practice of most men’s time, a vast utopian view that would make the very disposition of time worthwhile. Unless recruited outright, however, by an ideological movement in need of needy youths, such an individual cannot sustain rigidly regimenting time; we will see what he did with this utopia. There is, of course, also a torturous self-consciousness, characterized at one time by shame over what one is already sure one is, and at another time by doubt as to what one may become. A person with this self-consciousness often cannot work, not because he is not gifted and adept, but because his standards preclude any approach that does not lead to being outstanding; while at the same time, these standards do not permit him to compete, to defeat others. He thus is excluded from apprenticeships and discipleship which define duties, sanction competition and, as it were, provide a status of moratorium. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Most of all, this kind of person must shy away from intimacy. Any physical closeness, with either gender, arouses at the same time both an impulse to merge with the other person and a fear of losing autonomy and any individuation. In fact, there is a sense of bisexual diffusion which makes a young person unsure about how to touch another personal sexually or affectionately. The contrast between the exalted sexual fusion and his autoerotic dreams and the complete sense of isolation in the presence of the other gender is catastrophic. Here again, whatever sexual moratorium the society’s mores offer most young people in a given setting cannot be shared by the patient, whether it is determined abstinence, sexual play without genital encounter, or genital engagement without affection or responsibility. In adolescence, a compulsive person may attempt to free himself with maneuvers expressing a wish to “get away” with things and yet find himself unable to get away even with the wish. For a while, such a young person learns evasion from others, his preconscious conscience does not let him really get away with anything, and he goes through his identity crisis habitually ashamed, apologetic, and afraid to be seen; or else, in an “overcompensatory” manner, he evinces a defiant kind of autonomy which may find sanction and ritual in the shameless defiance of gangs. The rise of gangs in the 200s and beyond is tied to rapid inflation and the turbulence it created in family life. Gangs reflect deeper social issues such as poverty, immigration, and crime. Many gangs operate like proto-organizations, offering roles, income, sometimes housing, and a sense of purpose. Members of gangs are sometimes given “criminal assignments” and quotas for illegal activities, functioning almost like a workplace for the excluded. Gangs offer camaraderie, masculine identity, a sense of belonging, a structured hierarchy, and are the social world for young men and women who lack family stability or community recognition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
However, gangs are not merely groups of unruly youths—they are viewed as dangerous, destabilizing forces that threaten public order, civil life, and the fragile social fabric of rapidly growing cities. Gangs usually quickly stake their claims to control city life, usually through violence. Gangs are dangerous because they act as private militias, enforcing their will through force. Gangs are dangerous because they also replace legitimate authority with criminal governance, weakening trust in institutions. Some gangs are tied to political movements or use violence to influence elections and public life. And they are dangerous because they amplify existing social problems, turning hardship into organized criminality. Approximately 40-60 percent of homicides in the United States of America are gang-related. Aggravated assaults account for 39.4% of all gang‑related incidents. (Aggravated assault is the category most associated with non‑fatal gunshot wounds and serious injuries.) Weapons were used in 80.4% of gang‑related incidents, meaning most assaults have the potential to cause serious injury. Most people who end up in gangs describe a life where no one protected them, no one listened to them, no one believed in them, and no one saw their pain. Gang members are children and sometimes elderly, whom society has forgotten, wandering the streets unclaimed by any hearth. However, inside the gang, individuality disappears again. The gang makes you visible to outsiders but invisible as a person. Inside the group, you are replaceable, you are valued only for usefulness, your emotions are liabilities, your pain is mocked or punished, and your individuality is swallowed by the collective. This is what is known as the subsuming of the self into the will of the band. Also known as self‑effacement under coercive group identity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Violence becomes the only language that gets attention. When someone feels invisible, they often learn that kindness is ignored, vulnerability is punished, achievement is dismissed, but violence gets a reaction. So the gang member becomes visible only when they are dangerous. This is why so many describe violence as “the only time anyone noticed me.” It is tragic, but it is psychologically consistent. The invisibility becomes existential. It is chronic dehumanization—a sense that your life has no weight outside the group. And the group exploits that invisibility. When someone believes they do not matter, they take risks others would not, they accept violence as normal, they sacrifice themselves for the group, and they stop imagining a future. This is why gangs are so dangerous—not just to others, but to their own members. A person who feels invisible is easier to control. People join gangs because they feel invisible, and gangs keep them by making them invisible in a different way. One invisibility is born of neglect. The other is born of control. Both are forms of erasure. The man who distrusts his own impulse becomes a shadow among men, moving only as others move him. Doubt is the brother of shame. Whereas shame is dependent on the consciousness of being upright and exposed, doubt has much to do with a consciousness of having a front and a back—and especially a “behind.” Shame fears being seen; doubt fears being seen through. Shame flushes the face; doubt hollows the spine. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The self‑effacing person lives at the intersection of these two invisibilities. Neglect teaches him that his presence carries no weight; control teaches him that his will carries no authority. He learns to shrink himself not only to avoid punishment but to avoid the humiliation of being noticed at all. In such a man, the inner voice grows faint, then foreign, then suspect. He begins to regard his own impulses as intruders, as if his very desires were plotting against him. Thus, he moves through the world as a figure half‑present, half‑absent—visible enough to be used, invisible enough to be ignored. His gestures are borrowed, his convictions second‑hand, his courage deferred. He becomes, in the 19th‑century sense, a “creature of circumstance,” shaped not by his own nature but by the pressures that surround him. And yet the tragedy is not merely that he is unseen by others. It is that he no longer sees himself. Despite this pervasive suppression of resentment, reproaches will occasionally be expressed in mitigated form. Only when he feels driven to despair will the locked gates break open and a flood of violent accusations rush out. Though these may express accurately what he feels deep down, he usually discards them on the grounds of having been too upset to say what he means. However, his most characteristic way of expressing vindictive resentment is again through suffering. Rage can be absorbed in increased suffering from whatever psychosomatic symptoms he has, or from feeling prostrate or dressed. If in analysis, such a patient’s vindictiveness is around, he will not be outright angry, but his condition will be impaired. He will come with increased complaints, and indicate that analysis seems to make him worse instead of better. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The analyst may know what has hit the patient in the previous session and may try to bring it to the patient’s awareness. However, the patient is not interested in seeing a connection that might relieve his suffering. He simply re-emphasizes his complaints, if he must make sure that the analyst gets the full impact of how bad the depression was. Without knowing it, he is out to make the analyst feel guilty for having made him suffer. This is often an exact replica of what happens in the domestic scene. Suffering thus acquires another function: that of absorbing rage and making others feel guilty, which is the only effective way of getting back at them. All of those factors lend a curious ambivalence to his attitude toward people: a surface prevalence of “naïve” optimistic trust and an undercurrent of just as indiscriminate suspiciousness and resentment. The inner tension created by an increased vindictiveness can be enormous. And the puzzle often is not that he has this or that emotional upset, but that he manages to keep a fair equilibrium. Whether he can do it, and for how long, depends partly upon the intensity of the inner tension and partly upon circumstances. With this helplessness and dependence upon others, the latter are more important for him than for other neurotic types. An environment is favorable for him that does not tax him beyond what, with his inhibitions, he can do, and that affords such a measure of satisfaction as, according to his structure, he needs and can allow himself. Provided his neurosis is not too severe, he can derive satisfaction from leading a life dedicated to others or to a cause; a life in which he can lose himself by being useful and helpful, and where he feels wanted and fulfilled. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
However, even under the very best inner and outer conditions, his life rests on a precarious foundation. It can be threatened by a change in the external situation. The people he takes care of may die or no longer need him. The cause for which he has worked may fail, or lose its significance for him. Such losses, which a healthy person can weather, may bring him to the verge of a “breakdown,” with all his anxiety and feelings of futility coming into the foreground. There are just too many factors in his avowed hostility against self and others that may give rise to a greater inner tension than he can bear. Or, in other words, the chances of his feelings abused are too great to make any situation safe for him. We call all self-images, even those of a highly idealistic nature, which are diametrically opposed to the dominant values of an individual’s upbringings parts of a negative identity—meaning an identity which he has been warned not to become, which he can become only with a divided heart, but which he nevertheless finds himself compelled to become, protesting his wholeheartedness. Obviously, such rebellion can serve high adventure, and when joined to a great collective trend of rebellion, can rejuvenate as it repudiates. In miliginant cases, however, the search for a negative identity soon exhausts social resources; in fact, no rebellious movement, not even a self-responding delinquent gang, would consider taking such an individual as a member. For he rebels and surrenders on the spur of the moment, and cannot be relied on to be honestly asocial unto death. When such young people become patients, they illustrate the depth of regression which can ensue from an identity-crisis, either because the identity-elements they were offered as children were not coherent—so that one may speak of a defect in this connection—or because they face a perplexing set of present circumstances which amounts to an acute state of ideological undernourishment. The dramatic characteristic of work with such patients is their tendency to make intense and yet contradictory demands of the psychotherapist. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
In this, the patient truly regresses; for either openly or covertly, they expect from the therapist the kind of omniscience an infant attributes to his mother when he seems to assume that she should have prevented the table from hitting him, or at any rate from being hard and sharp; or that she should be able to hold him firmly and to let him go freely at the same time, that is, at a time when he himself does not know which he wants. However, even the paradoxical form which the patient’s demands, to his own chagrin, can take concerns his very essence as an individual. He wants to have the right to act like nobody, and yet to be treated as quite a somebody; he wants to fuse with the therapist in order to derive from him everything the parents were or are not; yet he is afraid to be devoured by an identification with the therapist. The outstanding quality of these patients is totalism, a to be or not to be which makes every matter of differences a matter of mutually exclusive essence; every error or oversight, eternal treason. This is called the “rock bottom” attitude, and is explained as the sign of a perverted and precocious integrity, an attempt to find that immutable bedrock on which the struggle for a new existence can safely begin and be assured of a future. The patient desperately demands that the psychotherapist become for him as immediate and as close, as exclusive and as circumspect, as generous and as self-denying, a counterplayer as only a mother of an infant can be. It is clear that these patients want to be reborn in identity and to have another chance at becoming once-born, but this time on their own terms. Needless to say, we can offer the patient nothing but our willingness to jointly face the odds that are the lot of all of us. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Where so-called schizophrenic process takes over, the rock bottom attitude is expressed in a strange evolutionary imagery. Total feeling becomes dehumanized, and eventually even de-mammalized. These patients can feel like a crab or a shellfish or a mollusk, or even abandoned what life and movement on the lowest animal level, and become a lonely, twisted tree on the ledge of a stormy rock, or the rock, or just the ledge in nowhere. At no other time in life can severe regression play with nothingness and appear in such a systematized form, and yet be, as it were, experimental, an adventure in reaching inner rock bottom to find something firm to stand on. Here, the therapist cannot be optimistic enough about the possibility of making contact with the patient’s untapped inner resources; on the other hand, it is also true that he cannot be pessimistic enough in sustained apprehension that a mishap might cause the patient to remain at the rock bottom, and deplete the energy available for his reemergence. Other patients cling to a make-believe order of compulsive scrupulosity and obsessive rumination. They insist on what seems like almost mock order for the world of man, a caricature of logic and consistency; Prince Lestat is a classic example of this. The eyes of such young people are often lifeless and out of contact; then they suddenly scan your face for its sincerity or even its mere presence; these patients, who, according to popular judgment, could be said to be “not quite there” most of the time, are all too suddenly and flamingly there. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
They can appear as remote, as lifeless, as impenetrable, as they say they feel; and yet, there are those moments of mutual recognition when they do seem to trust themselves and you, and when their smile can be as totally present and rewarding as only an infant’s first smiles can be as totally present and rewarding as only an infant’s first smiles of seeming recognition. However, at this point, the struggle just begins—as indeed, does the infant’s. As we have seen, the origins of any institutional order lie in the typification of one’s own and others’ performances. This implies that one shares with others specific goals and interlocking phases of performance, and, further, that not only specific actions but also forms action are typified. The typification of forms of action requires that these have an objective sense, which in turn requires a linguistic objectification. That is, there will be a vocabulary referring to these forms of action (such as “nephew-thrashing,” which will belong to a much larger linguistic structuring kinship and its various rights and obligations). In principle, then, an action and its sense can be apprehended apart from individual performances of its and the variable subjective process associated with them. Both self and other can be apprehended as performers of objective, generally known actions—motions of the body and habits of the will that are recurrent and repeatable by any actor of the appropriate type. This is the tragedy of the diminished self: to be reduced to a set of predictable gestures, to be known only by one’s functions, never by one’s depths. In such a state, a man becomes interchangeable, a figure whose movements could be carried out by anyone, whose inner life leaves no imprint on the world. The soul recovers itself in the moment it dares to act from within, and not from custom. Healing is not the polishing of one’s outward motions but the restoration of inward authorship. It is the slow reclamation of impulse, the quiet return of a voice that had long been silenced by shame, doubt, or the mechanical demands of survival. For the man who has lived as a shadow—performing the same gestures any other could perform—healing is the first moment he realizes that his actions need not be inherited, imitated, or imposed. They can be his own. And in that moment, the self ceases to be a role and becomes again a presence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Disenchantment of the World
Migrants to America are certainly relevant for the money market, but that does not make them economic enterprises. The import of religious or political ideas for economic institutions does not thereby transform these ideas into economic factors: the question concerns their “economic relevance.” A struggle for the means of political rule is taking place in America between Democrats and Republicans, each attempting to appropriate the financial and military means that in feudal society were relatively dispersed. California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is trying to usurp power from President Trump. However, national units are historical ultimates that can be integrated into more comprehensive and harmonious wholes. If Democrats take power, at best, there will be strong socialist nation-states energetically exploiting weaker states. The nation and national interests are controlled by the President, and at the same time, this constitutes America’s ultimate value. For Democrats, capitalism is irrational; this irrationality of capitalism results from a contradiction between the rational technological advances of the productive forces and the fetters of private property, private profit, and unmanaged market competition. For Republicans, on the other hand, modern capitalism is not “irrational”; indeed, its institutions appear to them to be the very embodiment of rationality. As a type of bureaucracy, the large corporations are rivaled only by the state bureaucracy in promoting rational efficiency, continuity of operation, speed, precision, and calculation of results. And all this goes on within institutions that are rationally managed, and in which combined and specialized functions occupy the center of attention. #RandolphHarris 1 of 31
The whole structure is dynamic, and by its anonymity compels modern man to become a specialized expert, a “professional” man qualified for the accomplishment of a special career within pre-scheduled channels. Man is thus prepared for his absorption in the clattering process of the bureaucratic machinery. For Republicans, there is nothing attractive in socialism, and it is not even a possibility. In their eyes, socialism would merely reincorporate into the economic order an institution that was abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and became the 13th Amendment to the United States of America’s Constitution in 1865. While Republicans do not deny that there is a class struggle in America, they do not see it as the central dynamic of this nation. Further, socialization of the means of production would merely subject autonomous economic life to the bureaucratic management of the state. The state would indeed become total, and would be a shackle upon the liberal individual, and socialism would thus lead to a further serfdom. The achievements of bourgeois capitalism are wiping out archaic survivals, the idiocy of rule life, and various spooks of the mind. Republicans deplore Democrats and see them as a routine creature, lacking in heroism, human spontaneity, and inventiveness: “The Puritan willed to be the vocational man that we have to be.” The principle of rationalization is the most general element in the Republicans’ philosophy of history. The urge towards such a comprehensive and meaningful interpretation of the universe is ascribed to groups of intellectuals, religious prophets and teachers, self-actualized Christians and philosophers, jurists, experimental artists, and students. #RandolphHarris 2 of 31
“Rationalization,” socially and historically differentiated, thus comes to have a variety of meanings. In this sense, it is a masterful contribution to the sociology of knowledge. Man is in a period of enlightenment. His philosophy has construed man’s history as a unilinear progress towards moral perfection or cumulative technological rationalization. In this, there is a more concise notation and establishment of the well-tempered scale; harmonious tonal music and the standardization of the quartet of woodwinds and string instruments are the core of the symphony orchestra. These are seen as progressive rationalizations. This process of rationalization is punctured, however, by certain discontinuities of history. Hardened institutional fabrics may thus disintegrate, and routine forms of life prove insufficient for mastering a growing state of tension, stress, or suffering. This is where we need to introduce a balancing conception for bureaucracy: the concept of charisma. Charisma, meaning literally “gift of grace.” We need leaders who are followed by those who are in distress and who need to follow the leader because they believe him to be extraordinarily qualified. The founders of world religions and the prophets, as well as military and political heroes, are the archetypes of the charismatic leader. Miracles and revelations, heroic feats of valor, and baffling success are characteristic marks of their stature. Failure is their ruin. Although social dynamics result from many social forces, we nevertheless place great emphasis on the rise of charismatic leaders in the Republican Party. #RandolphHarris 3 of 31
Republican movements are enthusiastic, and in such extraordinary enthusiasms, class and status barriers sometimes give way to fraternization and exuberant community sentiments. Charismatic heroes and prophets are thus viewed as truly revolutionary forces in history. Bureaucracy and other institutions, especially those of the household, are seen as routines of workaday life; charisma is welcomed in all institutional routines, those of tradition and those subject to rational management. This holds for the economic order. Stefan George, as well as Jeremiah, Napoleon, as well as Jesus Christ, a raving berserk warrior of Arabia, as well as the founder of Mormonism—all these are typified as charismatic leaders, for they have in common the fact that people obey them because of faith in their personally extraordinary qualities. A genuinely charismatic situation is direct and interpersonal. In contrast to the everyday life of institutions, with the personalized and spontaneous nature of charismatic leadership, one may readily discern the spiritual gifts as an exercise from God. Many Christians believe these gifts are signs of miracles and continue to call them “charismatic.” Early Latter-day Saints, believing in the Book of Mormon message that the “day of miracles” had not ceased, were charismatic: they sought for and expressed the gifts of the Spirit in a variety of ways. However, the Saints soon learned that not all charismatic displays came from God. The Lord also clarified that those ordained to “watch over the Church” would have the gift to discern whether the exercise of certain gifts was from God. Church leaders continued to counsel with each other and the Saints about the purpose and proper use of spiritual gifts. #RandolphHarris 4 of 31
The charismatic leader is in continuity with the concept of “genius” as it was applied since the Renaissance to artistic and intellectual leaders. This applies not only to men of ideas but ideal men. There arise from time to time men who bear to the moral condition of their age much the same relations as men of genius bear to its intellectual condition. They anticipate the moral standard of a later age, cast abroad conceptions of disinterested virtue, of philanthropy, or of self-denial that seem to have no relation to the spirit of their time, inculcate duties, and suggest motives of action that appear to most men altogether chimerical. Yet the magnetism of their perfections tells powerfully upon their contemporaries. An enthusiasm is kindled, a group of adherents is formed, and many are emancipated from the moral condition of their age. Yet the full effects of such a movement are but transient. The first enthusiasm dies away, surrounding circumstances with conceptions that are alien to its nature, dislocated, and distorted, till its first features have almost disappeared. The moral teaching, being unsuited to the time, becomes inoperative until its appropriate civilization has dawned, or at most it faintly and imperfectly filters through an accumulation of strict and rigid doctrines, and thus accelerates in some measure the arrival of the condition it requires. We are interested in the genius as an extraordinary man who transcends the bounds of everyday routines; and in this, we mean the routinization of charisma. #RandolphHarris 5 of 31
The history of cultures, civilizations, and technologies is the history of such consolidations, while it is only in periods of marked transition that the innovators appear: those too privileged in outlook to remain bound to the prevailing system; too honest or too conflicted not to see the simple truths of existence hidden behind the complexity of daily “necessities”; and too full of pity to overlook “the poor” who have been left out. As therapists and ideologists, we understand the uppermost and the lowest fringe better because of our therapeutic ideology. Thus, we often take for granted the vast middle which, for reasons of its own, maintains us. Yet, insofar as we aspire to contribute to “normal psychology,” we must learn to understand cultural and technological consolidation, for it, ever again, inhabits the earth. And always with it comes a new definition of adulthood, without which any question of identity is a self-indulgent luxury. The problem of adulthood is how to take care of those to whom one finds oneself committed as one emerges from the identity period, and to whom one now owes their identity. Another question is what the “typical” adult of any era’s consolidation is able and willing to renounce for himself and demand of others, for the sake of a style of cultural balance and, perhaps, perfection. Judging from the way of Sokrates, the philosopher, in his Apologia, exposed the fabric of Athenian consolidation, it was probably not only for himself that, at the very end, he pronounced death to be the only cure for the condition of living. #RandolphHarris 6 of 31
Dr. Freud revealed for the mercantile and early industrial period what havoc the hypocritical morality was wreaking, not only in his era, but in all human history. In doing so, he founded what Philipp Rieff has described as the therapeutic orientation, which goes far beyond the clinical cure of isolated symptoms. However, we cannot know what technological conformity does to man unless we know what it does for him. The ubiquitous increase in mere number, of course, at first transforms many erstwhile problems of quality into matters of mere quantitative management. If the majority of young people, therefore, can go along with their parents in a kind of fraternal identification, it is because they jointly leave it to technology and science to carry the burden of providing a self-perpetuating and self-accelerating way of life. This would make it plausible that the young are even expected to develop new values-as-you-go. However, the fact is that the values associated with indefinite progress, just because it strains orientation as well as imagination, are often tied to unbelievably old-fashioned ideas. Thus, technological expansion can be seen as the due reward of generations of hard-working Americans. No need is felt to limit expansionist ideals, as long as—together with technical discipline—old-fashioned decencies and existing political machineries survive, with all their hometown oratory. #RandolphHarris 7 of 31
There is always hope (a hope which has become an important part of an implicit American ideology) regarding any possible built-in evil in the very nature of supermachines, appropriate brakes and corrections will be invented in the nick of time, without any undue investment of strenuous new principles. And while they “work,” the supermachines organization, and associations provide a sufficiently “great,” or at any rate adjustable, identity for all those who feel actively engaged in and by them. Thus, also, that major part of the youth which sees no reason to oppose the United States of America’s global war on terrorism, which started in 2001, is animated by a combination of world-war patriotism, anticommunism, obedience to the draft and military discipline, and finally by the unshakable solidarity, the highest feeling among men, which comes from having renounced the same pleasures, facing the same dangers, and having to obey the same obnoxious orders. However, there is a new element in all this which comes from the technological ideology and makes a soldier an expert whose armament is mechanized and whose fidelity is an almost impersonal technical compliance with a policy or strategy which puts a certain target into the range of one of the admirable weapons at hand. No doubt certain “character structures” fit such a world view better than others, and yet, overall, each generation is prepared to participate in several consolidated attitudes in one lifetime. #RandolphHarris 8 of 31
However, a new ethics catches up with progress; one senses the danger that the danger that limits of technological expansion and national assertion may not be determined by known facts and ethical considerations or, in short, by a certainty of identity, but by a willful and playful testing of the range and the limit of the supermachinery which thus takes over much of man’s conscience. This could become affluent slavery for all involved, and this seems to be what the new “humanist” youth is trying to stop by putting its existence “on the line” and insisting on a modicum of a self-sustaining quality of life. However, the men of 1905, tortured by contradictions, really did give birth, by their very negation and death, to a value that will henceforth be imperative, which they brought to light in the belief that they were only announcing its advent. They ostensibly placed, above themselves and their executioners, that supreme and painful good which we have already found at the origins of rebellion. “How can we speak of terrorist activity without taking part in it?” exclaims the student Kaliayev. His companions, united ever since 1903, in the Organization for Combat of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, under the direction of Aze and later of Boris Savinkov, all live up to the standard of this admirable statement. They are men of the highest principles: the last in the history of rebellion, to refuse no part of their drama. If their loves were dedicated to the terror, “if they had faith in it,” as Pokotilov says, they never ceased to be torn asunder by it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 31
History offers few examples of fanatics who have suffered from scruples, even in action. However, the men of 1905 were always prey to doubts. The greatest homage we can pay them is to say that we would not be able, in 2026, to ask them one question that they had not already asked and that, in their life or by their death, they had not partially answered. They quickly passed into the realms of history, however. When Kaliayev, for example, in 1903, decided to take part with Savinkov in terrorist activity, he was twenty-six years old. Two years later, the “Poet,” as he was called, was hanged. It was a short career. However, to anyone who examines with a little feeling the history of that period, Kaliayev, in his breathtaking career, displays the most significant aspect of terrorism. Sazonov, Schweitzer, Pokptilov, Voinarosvsky, and most of the other anarchists likewise burst upon the scene of Russian history and poised there for a moment, dedicated to destruction, as the swift and unforgettable witness to an increasingly agonized protest. Almost all are atheists. “I remember,” wrote Boris Voinarovsky, who died in throwing a bomb at Admiral Dubassov, “that even before going to high school I preached atheism to one of my childhood friends. Only one question embarrassed me. Where did my ideas come from? For I had not the least conception of eternity.” Kaliayev himself believed in God. A few moments before an attempted assassination, which failed, Savinkov saw him in the street, standing in front of an ikon, holding the bomb in one hand, and making the sign of the cross with the other. However, he repudiated religion. In his cell, before his execution, he refused its consolations. #RandolphHarris 10 of 31
The need for secrecy compelled them to live in solitude. They did not know, except perhaps in the abstract, the profound joy experienced by the man of action in contact with a large section of humanity. However, the bond that untied them replaced every other attachment in their minds. “Chivalry!” writes Sazonov, and comments on it thus: “Our chivalry was permeated with such a degree of feeling that the word brother in one way conveyed with sufficient clarity the essence of our relations with one another.” From prison, Sazonov writes to his friends: “For my part, the indispensable condition of happiness is to keep forever the knowledge of my perfect solidarity with you.” As for Voinarovsky, he confesses that to a woman he loved who wished to detain him, he made the following remark, which he recognized as “slightly comic” but which, according to him, proves his state of mind: “I should curse you if I arrived late for my comrades.” This little group of men and women, lost among the Russian masses, bound only to one another, chose the role of executioner, to which they were in no way destined. They lived in the same paradox, combining in themselves respect for human life in general and contempt for their own lives—to the point of nostalgia for the supreme sacrifice. For Dora Brilliant, the anarchist program was of no importance; terrorist action was primarily embellished by the sacrifice it demanded from the terrorist. #RandolphHarris 11 of 31
“But,” says Savinkov, “terror weighed on her like a cross.” Kaliayev himself is ready to sacrifice his life at any moment. “Even better than that, he passionately desired to make this sacrifice.” During the preparations for the attempts on Plehve, he started his intention of throwing himself under the horses’ hoofs and perishing with the Minister. With Voinarovsky also the desire for sacrifice coincides with the attraction of death. After his arrest, he writes to his parents: “How many times during my adolescence the idea came to me to kill myself!” At the same time, these executioners who risked their own lives so completely, made attempts on the lives of others only after the most scrupulous examination of conscience. The first attempt on the Grand Duke Sergei failed because Kaliayev, with the full approval of his comrades, refused to kill the children who were riding in the Grand Duke’s carriage. Of Rachel Louriee, another terrorist, Savinkov writes: “She had faith in terrorist action, she considered it an honor and a duty to take part in it, but blood upset her no less than it did Dora.” The same Savinkov was opposed to an attempt on Admiral Dubassov in the Peter-Moscow express because “if there were the least mistake, the explosion could take place in the car and kill strangers.” Later Savinkov, “in the name of terrorist conscience,” will deny with indignation having made a child of sixteen take part in an attempted assassination. #RandolphHarris 12 of 31
At the moment of escaping from a Czarist prison, he decides to shoot any officers who might attempt to prevent his flight, but to kill himself rather than turn his revolver on an ordinary soldier. It is the same with Voinarovksy, who does not hesitate to kill men, but who confesses that he has never hunted, “finding the occupation barbarous,” and who declares in his turn: “If Dubassov is accompanied by his wife, I shall not throw the bomb.” Such a degree of self-abnegation, accompanied by such profound consideration for the lives of others, allows the supposition that these fastidious assassins lived out the rebel destiny in its most contradictory form. It is possible to believe that they, too, while recognizing the inevitability of violence, nevertheless, admitted to themselves that it is unjustifiable. Necessary and inexcusable—that is how murder appeared to them. Mediocre minds, confronted with this terrible problem, can take refuge by ignoring one of the terms of the dilemma. They are content, in the name of formal principles, to find all direct violence inexcusable and then to sanction that diffuse form of violence which takes place on the scale of world history. Or they will console themselves, in the name of history, with the thought that violence is necessary, and will add murder to murder, to the point of making of history nothing but a continuous violation of everything in man which protests injustice. This defines the two aspects of contemporary nihilism: the bourgeois and the revolutionary. However, the extremists, with whom we are concerned, forgot nothing. From their earliest days, they were incapable of justifying what they nevertheless found necessary, and conceived the idea of offering themselves as a justification and of replying by personal sacrifice to the question they asked themselves. For them, as for all rebels before them, murder is identified with suicide. A life is paid for by another life, and from these two sacrifices springs the promise of value. #RandolphHarris 13 of 31
Kaliayev, Voinarovsky, and the others believed in the equal value of human lives. Therefore, they do not value any idea above human life, though they kill for the sake of ideas. They live on the plane of their idea. They justify it, finally, by incarnating it to the point of death. We are again confronted with a concept of rebellion which, if not religious, is at least metaphysical. Other men to come, consumed with the same devouring faith as these, will find their methods sentimental and refuse to admit that any one life is the equivalent of any other. Even if they call it history, they will then put an abstract idea above human life, to which they have submitted in advance, and to which they will also decide, quite arbitrarily, to submit everyone else. The problem of rebellion will no longer be resolved by arithmetic, but by estimating probabilities. Confronted with the possibility that the idea may be realized in the future, human life can be everything or nothing. The greater the faith that the estimator places in this final realization, the less the value of human life. At the ultimate limit, it is no longer worth anything at all. Strength and weakness are extreme opposites—or so they seem. Yet, life experience demonstrates the paradoxical nature of the polarity that in weakness is strength and in strength is weakness. This polarity is like two sides of the same coin: Slice a coin in half, and each slice still has both sides. #RandolphHarris 14 of 31
Controlling and dictating manipulators, however, denying this reality, futilely try to divide and conquer their weakness, destroying in the process their genuine strength. Genuine strength, on one side, is to endure, to persevere, and to survive. Its qualities are adequacy, self-esteem, and self-reliance. On the other side, a genuine weakness is to be vulnerable, to be open-minded, and to be interdependent. Its qualities are trust, honesty, and cooperation. Inordinately fearful of helplessness, hurt, and humiliation, manipulators try to recreate themselves into invulnerable fortresses, totally self-contained. Never certain of their success, however, they try to disarm others, negating the power in everyone else. Not trusting others, they cannot acknowledge or tolerate strength in anyone but themselves. Self-accusations are taken as being a bluff or a fraud. They are not always directly thrust at self for some concrete matter. More often, a neurotic person feels a resulting vague uneasiness on his score—doubts which are not attached to anything and are dormant at times, and at others consciously tormenting. Sometimes he becomes aware only of the fear with which he reacts to his self-accusation, the fear of being found out: if people knew him better, they would see that he was no good. At the next performance, his incompetence will show. People will realize that he merely managed to show off, with no solid knowledge behind his “front.” Again, what exactly might be “found out” at closer contact, or in any test situation, remains vague. This self-reproach too, however, is not plucked from thin air. It refers to the total of existing unconscious pretenses—pretenses of love, of fairness, of interest, of knowledge, of modesty. And the frequency of this self-accusation corresponds to the frequency of pretense in each neurosis. Its destructive nature shows that it is merely producing feelings of guilt and fear rather than contributing to a constructive search for existing unconscious pretenses. #RandolphHarris 15 of 31
In a sharp contrast, a healthy conscience can be reflected upon. The person can formulate its component taboos, ideals, and ethical precepts in words. This accessibility to consciousness is important for the resolution of moral conflicts. If a person is faced with a decision, it can be made along moral lines much more readily when the person’s ideals can be clearly stated. When I say that a healthy conscience is conscious, I do not mean the person is always thinking about his or her moral standards. Most of the time, the healthy conscience will be unconscious; the person will conform to the conscience automatically. However, when the person does not feel guilt, he or she will be able to determine what aspects of the conscience have been violated; and when some conflict must be resolved, the person will make the relevant moral aspects explicit, so that the decision will be made after due consideration of the moral issues at stake. The gospel of Jesus Christ cannot be any philosophy without the advanced forms of prayer which have been called ultraspiritual. The Spirit is guided by the light of reason alone, and admirably, so far as it goes, but that is not far enough. This is because all the thinking in the world will, in the end, only yields a conclusion, which is another thought. However, there is such a thing as the “Metaphysics of Truth,” which is reasoning—disciplined, chastened, and checked by the highest possible mystic experience. A beginner may certainly aid his search for knowledge through wide reading and, possibly, through attendance at suitable lectures. #RandolphHarris 16 of 31
Some very fine works have been written by philosophers and prophets of all ages. These writings may bring into his life a little emotional inspiration, intellectual guidance, and the power of will to help his struggle through the years of long and unavoidable endeavour, and they can, to that extent, act the part of a teacher and guide. If put under the proper restricting limits—erudition, education, and even scholarship offer a useful contribution. At last, he can meet with an expression of truth that has a recognizable face. Each time we read such truths, it comes with liberating freshness and becomes a stimulant to aspirations. The degree of its power to help us is conditioned only by its writer’s ability to catch its heart and convey his perception. It is better to look twice at some assertions. Sometimes it is wiser to look beneath the words themselves and scrutinize the character of the writer himself. The final realization of truth is not found in any documents however sacred and however worthy of men’s highest regard they are held to be. Just as the man who stands on the summit of a Himalayan Mountain does not need the testimony of an altitude meter to tell him that he really has ascended to a loftier level than that of the plains, so the man who enters his spiritual being does not need reason’s proof, someone else’s say-so, or scripture’s test to tell him so. There are many who read through such writings only to fasten on those paragraphs which agree with their own belief. #RandolphHarris 17 of 31
Hero narratives test the circumstances under which societies are willing to tolerate, even condone, transgressions of accepted norms. For instance, heroic actions frequently involve violence (committing suffering or preventing violence). Since violence is not normally condoned as a form of social interaction, such violence needs to be legitimized by presenting an ethically defensible motivation for the use of violence, such as defending innocent persons. More than just presenting the hero as the center of attention, typical hero narratives also use various forms of intensification through suspense, communication of increased danger, or heightened antagonism. The classic hero moves from departure through initiation, trials, transformation, and return. The journey narrative often includes an adventure narrative which increases suspense: the incursion of contingency in ordinary life and the hero’s strategies in mastering such incursions in the borderlands of civilization, combining heroism with masculinity and frequently also devotion to the nation state. Throughout the history of the award-winning Sacramento Fire Department, tradition has been the backbone of their operations. The paramilitary style that they have learned as rookies has proven itself repeatedly at countless emergencies. They have become experts at it, and it has proven its worth. Like military operations, successful firefighting relies on quick decisions and a coordinated attack. This type of success is not possible through group discussions or team meetings: it is only effective with swift actions and multiple resources. #RandolphHarris 18 of 31
Additionally, the Sacramento Fire Department adds unparalleled protective equipment that can withstand the harsh environment of fire. Protecting of protecting the firefighters, paramedics, and EMTs from their surroundings, they work in harms way to accomplish their missions. As with the Titanic, the reason they are great is the very reason for their demise: “We are told to expect the iceberg, but not to fear or question it. We will work alongside the iceberg but feel that it cannot hurt us. The iceberg is simply no match for the engineering and knowledge that humans have developed, and we will be fine.” This “no fear” starts very early in their careers. Much like icebergs to ship, emergencies pose real hazards to responders. They are expected to reduce the risk as much as is feasible, but their task is to ultimately save lives and property and then stabilize an incident. Some incidents exceed the capabilities of first-arriving units, but safe actions build the foundation for effective actions and, ultimately, a positive incident outcome. “Shortly after midnight, a major blaze broke out in a building on Broadway. Mr. X was the night watchman of the building. As he was cleaning, he noticed the smoke and immediately sounded the alarm. The building was very quickly engulfed in flames. The structure was built in 1869 and was built of wood, about 100 feet by 50 feet. Fortunately, it was roofed with an iron roof, which inhibited sparks from showering the entire neighborhood. After the iron roof collapsed, all danger was considered past. The loss in the plant was confined to the main building thanks to hard work. #RandolphHarris 19 of 31
“Because of the southwesterly breeze, a house situated just north of the building caught flame. The home was destroyed. The furniture of the home was removed, but in such a battered and broken condition, it was mostly all a loss. The loss of the home was estimated at around $900,000.00, most of which was covered by insurance. The person who lived next door, his house also caught fire as well and required an evacuation of the premises. Firefighters explained that, ‘copious floods of water from fire hoses prevented the flying sparks from gaining a hold on the dry roof, and the owner is very thankful he got off with only a scorching.’ The fire department was quick to respond to the scene. When the engine arrived, the heat was so intense that bystanders stopped in their tracks. According to the fire chief, ‘it seemed for a few moments as if the bystanders would get well scorched, but the trembling audience were quickly evacuated. We also were beginning to get scorched by the intense heat.’ But the fire department was on hand and in a good time and though the building was beyond help when we arrived, it was generally conceded that we performed a good service in saving other buildings in the vicinity. The loss of the building was nearly two million dollars. There was no insurance on the building. The only part of it left standing was the brick chimney. Another great loss was the 25 sets of carpenter’s tools that would have to be replaced at nearly $5,000.00 per set. Nearly 40 men who worked there were thrown temporarily out of work.” Fire training continues to become safer but people often wonder, “How do you know if the porch is going to collapse on you? Is your lieutenant aware of what just happened? How do you address your concerns to him?” #RandolphHarris 20 of 31
If you see a fire truck stopped in the street without the lights on, be very careful. Sometimes there is an emergency, and you should not pass the fire truck. It might be a good idea to safely turn around and go another way because if you hit someone and they happen to die, you could be charged with manslaughter. Sometimes fire firefighters are getting back into their vehicle, and if you pass the apparatus, you may collide with a firefighter who is on foot. Also, be sure to look at their signals; sometimes emergency vehicles are in motion, albeit slowly, and drivers try to pass them, and this could lead to a dangerous situation. Also, if you are in an intersection when you see an emergency vehicle, continue through the intersection. Drive to the right as soon as it is safe and stop. Obey any direction, order, or signal given by a law enforcement officer or a firefighter. Even if they conflict with existing signs, signals, or laws, follow their orders. When their siren or flashing lights are on, it is against the law to follow within 300 feet of any fire engine, law enforcement vehicle, ambulance, or other emergency vehicle. If you drive to the scene of a fire, collision, or other disaster, you can be arrested. When you do this, you are getting in the way of firefighters, ambulance crews, or other rescue and emergency personnel. The concept of professional courage does not always mean being as tough as nails, either. It also suggests a willingness to listen to other people’s problems, to go to bat for them in a tough situation, and it means knowing just how far they can go. It also means being willing to tell the boss when he or she is wrong. #RandolphHarris 21 of 31
California is the third most expensive state in the nation. A single person making an income above $100,000 is now considered low-income in five counties in California. This distinction now applies to individuals living in Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, and Marin counties. In 37 percent of counties, a family of four living on a six-figure income is now considered low-income. In fact, Governor Gavin Newsom of Democratic controlled California, brags about being the world’s “fifth largest economy,” but it also facing a $12 billion deficit, looking to cut $747 million for state worker’s pay, pushing to keep medical insurance for illegal immigrants, but wants to cut medical for anyone who has assets over $2,000 and the state has the largest homeless population in the nation. If they are all officially counted, California has approximately 4 million homeless people. The highest home prices in the nation, the highest taxes, and the most unfriendly business regulations known to man. The average home price in California is nearly $1,000,000.00 USD, while the average salary is $96,036.00, meaning that most Californians cannot even afford to buy a home. California is having an affordability crisis. In 2025, many people in California saw their bills increase by an estimated $500 a month. This includes items such as food, automobile insurance, homeowners’ insurance, and electricity. In fact, more than 3 million people in California are facing household hardship, and more than 300,000 of them are facing eviction soon. This comes at a time when California is having a shortage of affordable housing. This is caused by nearly half a century-old laws that discourage home sales and encourage higher rents. #RandolphHarris 22 of 31
Meanwhile, China, where we are sending all our jobs and money, has more than 50 ghost cities, with 65 million vacant homes. Ghost cities are regions will housing has been overdeveloped to the point that these places are uninhabited. Because California is so hostile towards people and businesses, more than 360 companies have fled the state since 2020. Businesses like Chevron, SpaceX, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard are among the names on that list. Also, more than 500,000 people a year are abandoning California because it is too expensive to live in, Gavin Newsom has criminalized homelessness and actually started arresting people without homes, crime is out of control, and they are losing their jobs due to companies relocating. More than 100 companies have announced layoffs in California for 2025. Intel is cutting 15,000 jobs, PayPal 2,500, and Meta has terminated 4,000 employees. California also has the highest unemployment rate in the country at 5.4 percent, while the national average is 4.1 percent. The California crisis created by Democrats is driving up home prices and mortgages, and rents all over the nation and the world, making living unaffordable for all, and advocates say the crisis is far from over. Accordingly, California has more than 3.5 million illegal immigrants. Having the Southern American boarder open and not having American farmland protected, not producing beef, poultry, fish, fruit, produce and dairy in America, and without American goods and services being our number one manufactured and selling items, America has created a dangerous and significantly elevated risks to national security, national economic security, and national public health. Some people may believe that these claims are overstated, but by not routinely monitoring Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CEVs) or other security-relevant alerts, such as the end-of-life of machinery is how the Oroville Dam Crisis occurred in 2017. #RandolphHarris 23 of 31
Other crises that have occurred due to neglect of critical infrastructure are the 2025 Palisades fires because Southern California ran out of water, when they are located next to an ocean and they could have simply created desalination plants to help with the water shortage. The water is so plentiful that it is currently eroding land and causing homes to fall into the sea. Desalination has been identified as one technology that will help solve California’s water scarcity problem. Desalination is a cost-effective technology that can transform an abundance of salt water into a reliable supply of potable, fresh water, which is a great way to fight climate change and have enough water for our region’s water requirements. Ras Al Khair, Saudi Arabia, is producing 1,036,000 meters (273,682,192) per day of desalinated water. As we see gangs fighting with federal law enforcement, states and cities refusing to honor federal laws, and politicians showing an utter disregard for the Constitution of the United States of America, anarchy is becoming increasingly common. Anarchism is a cluster of doctrines and attitudes centered on the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary. Derived from the Greek root anarchos, meaning “without authority,” anarchism, anarchist, and anarchy are used to express both approval and disapproval. The anarchist denies man-made laws, regards property as a means of tyranny, and believes that crimes is merely the product of property and authority. #RandolphHarris 24 of 31
However, the anarchist would argue that their denial of constitutions and governments leads not to “no justice” but to the real justice inherent in the free development of human sociality—the natural inclination, when unfettered by laws, to live according to the principles and practice of mutual aid. Anarchism is also a form of treason. Treason, the crime of betraying a nation or a sovereign by acts considered dangerous to security. In English law, treason includes the levying of war against the government and the giving of aid and comfort to the monarch’s enemies. In the United States of America, treason was defined restrictively by the framers of the Constitution. Treason against the United States of America “shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them aid and comfort,” which is something that many politicians are currently guilty of. The American government should know all exploitable vulnerabilities and fix them before the situation becomes a crisis. Failure to take such mitigating actions is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. The American government must understand that significant time and resources must be invested in America. They must also encourage corporations to plan for both mitigating safety vulnerabilities in the short term and eliminating them in the long term. For instance, a company might begin by reaching out to the federal, state, or local government and requesting tax incentives to provide security to dangerous communities, to help the government repair bridges and potholes. #RandolphHarris 25 of 31
America needs an approach to eliminate safety vulnerabilities in American cities. There needs to be a road map by the end of 2025, outlining a prioritized approach to eliminate crisis situations in America. There is enough money to send aid to foreign nations, but the American government does not have enough money to care for its infrastructure, provide adequate resources, or end the affordable housing crisis. Nor is there enough money to fund other national critical functions (NCFs). These bad practices of putting America and Americans last are considered exceptionally risky, particularly to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. As a result, the American automobile trade deficit with Japan was $39 billion. The maximum percentage of your gross income that you should earmark for a monthly mortgage payment is calculated at 28 percent, and no more than 36 percent of your gross income to all debts, including mortgage. If you take 28 percent of the median household income per home in Sacramento County, homeowners can only afford a mortgage of $2,070.23 per month. And if you take 36 percent of their gross income to all debts, including mortgage, they should be devoting no more than $2,661.72 a month to these debts. The Mortgage lenders at Cresleigh Homes must be using some kind of sorcery to get buyers into these expensive homes. To afford one of these homes using traditional guidelines, a household would need to gross $11,280.24 per month or $135,362.88 per year, but the median household in Sacramento County is grossing $7,393.67 or $88,724.00, and that typically means two to four people in the home are working and contributing to the mortgage. #RandolphHarris 26 of 31
Home prices in Sacramento County are rivaling the Bay Area. Historically, homes in the Bay Area have been more expensive because they have higher-paying jobs, a larger population, and the Bay Area is a tourist destination. Contributing to the housing affordability crisis is Gavin Newsom, who has been lavishing illegal immigrants with taxpayer-funded resources and cash aid. The State of California has a budget deficit of $12 billion because Governor Gavin Newsom granted 700,000 illegal immigrants free health care, which costs taxpayers $3 billion annually. At the same time, Newsom cut vital programs for veterans, school children, the disabled, and the homeless. Additionally, Newsom seems to be uneducated about economics and is proposing to fast-track his plan to build a $20 billion water tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which would eliminate environmental reviews and limit avenues for legal challenges. Gavin Newsom only cares about the environment when his policies allow him to raise taxes and restrict freedoms. To further highlight this illustration, Mexico has been causing one of America’s worst environmental disasters. Fifty million gallons a day of industrial chemicals, untreated sewage, and trash flow from Tijuana, Mexico, into southern San Diego County daily. This toxic waste has been turning up on Imperial Beach and is causing the miles of white sands to become polluted and the ocean breeze to smell of poop, which has been sickening residents and wildlife and costing San Diego millions in the form of lost tourism and health problems. The problem has been going on for more than a century. #RandolphHarris 27 of 31
However, Mexico’s pollution of California has become a severe public health crisis as the population of Tijuana has drastically increased in recent years, and the waste treatment plants are no longer usable. Some of the beaches in San Diego have been closed for more than three years, and evidence suggests that even breathing the air may be harmful, as toxic particles in the water can become airborne. Yet, even though Gavin Newsom has been governor for six years, he has not rushed into action to stop this very preventable environmental disaster. Why? Because he is not getting kickbacks from China and Mexico, not being gifted mansions and cars, and he cannot tax the struggling California taxpayers to clean up this mess. Simply, it is not profitable for him. Gavin Newsom has been a total tyrant with no regard for taxpayers and no mind for business, and he should be impeached as soon as possible. He has criminalized poverty, increased taxes, increased taxes on gas, and insurance rates so high that people are struggling to survive. In addition to Gavin Newsom’s increased gas prices starting on 1 July 2025, the war between Iran and Israel is going to further exacerbate the prices of gas and cause more inflation and economic hardship for people in California. While everyone is making war over America and who belongs here and who she belongs to, so many people forget about the people who are Indigenous to this land. Open borders have allowed hundreds of thousands of cartel operatives to infiltrate reservations across the United States of America and use the isolated lands as havens to traffic fentanyl pills and other drugs into the country without protection from federal authorities. #RandolphHarris 28 of 31
Drug cartels have been threatening the health and safety of Native American communities. The trafficking of dangerous and illegal drugs into their territories is leading to a second genocide. The overdose rate for Indigenous people is 42 percent higher than the national average. A recent bust on Montana’s Blackfeet Nation’s Tribal Reservation resulted in the seizure of more than 700,000 fentanyl pills, which was the largest bust in Montana history. Recently, the Blackfeet Nation had to declare a state of emergency after facing 17 overdoses in just one week. There are only 6.8 million Native Americans left in the world, which is 2 percent of the American population. We should be doing more to protect these proud and honorable people; they should not want for anything. People rush and give away resources to illegal immigrants, but totally disregard the Indigenous people of this land, as their race silently fades away into extinction. We must secure our borders and increase federal funding to Native American tribes so we can save this precious population. Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom has given billions of taxpayer dollars away to illegal immigrants and protected them from law enforcement, while arresting law-abiding Americans because they cannot afford to pay rent or mortgage, and the homeless shelters are unsafe, overcrowded, and have restrictions on who is allowed inside. He has also totally ignored the cartel problems on American lands. Clean air, water, land, and preserving our heritage are extremely important. We cannot just allow criminals to kill off the people who are native to this land and do nothing about it. Wars have been started over governments that tax citizens without representation. Taxation without representation is what led to the American Revolution.#RandolphHarris 29 of 31
If Gavin Newsom is not stopped, next he will euthanize the poor and sterilize the disabled. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, California has the highest car theft rate in the United States of America. Violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people have overtaken cities. Wars and fires are breaking out on the streets. This monster is unfit to be governor and must never be allowed to be President of America! Stop Gavin Newsom now! Save California and impeach this unreasonable man. Meanwhile, with President Trump, we are seeing crime rates sharply decrease. He is restoring law and order, starting in Washington D.C., and he just signed the “HALT Fentanyl Act” into law, which permanently classifies the narcotic as a “Schedule I drug” under the “Controlled Substances Act.” Also, President Trump recently secured $10 trillion in investments for the United States of America. Additionally, in May of 2025, the United States of America collected a record $100 billion in tariff revenue, and that number will increase to $300 billion by the end of 2025. Also, President Trump has just sealed a $550 billion deal with Japan. This means Japan will invest $550 billion in the United States of America. Furthermore, President Trump has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for making Iran and Israel cease fire. As you can see, President Trump is creating solutions and remediating problems to protect America and the American people, while Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is making life hard on American citizens and causing economic hardship, and totally ignoring Mexico’s polluting beaches in San Diego. If elected president for an unprecedented third term, to make housing more affordable and to offset the cost of homeowners’ insurance and auto insurance, President Trump plans to abolish property taxes. #RandolphHarris 28 of 31
Much like the land crisis in Las Vegas, we could also run out of land to farm and will not be able to grow or cultivate our own food. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. Also, country of origin labeling is very important so Americans can know where their food is coming from and can support American farmers and ranchers. As money flows, it influences further investment. Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. And in the future, there may be food wars. Also, to ensure that we have farmland and buildable land for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrate to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a population that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in America, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. #RandolphHarris 29 of 31
When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in America which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the national debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by sending more money overseas. Buying American-made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards on pollution. American companies must be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human mind to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. #RandolphHarris 30 of 31
As you can see, President Donald Trump and his pledge to “Make America Great Again” is exactly what America needs to save the country and the American people. And yes, diversity is important, so you can see why it is also important to preserve blonde hair and blue eyes, as the people with these characteristics are becoming a minority in America. We must think before we can understand the soul’s existence; we must understand before we can realize it. The earliest beginnings of thought, as apart from instinct, when it was itself still but a lurking tendency, belong far back in primeval time. The human intellect as we find it today, so rich and developed an instrument for the consciousness of the ego, did not arrive at this fulness without a series of graduated stages. We have had plenty of scientific thinking, business thinking, and political thinking long enough, but we have had very little inspired thinking. That is the world’s need. The intellect is cradled in selfishness but runs the evolutionary track into reason, where it will one day finish at the winning-post of selflessness. As a reminder, parents, please teach your children to love America and be patriotic citizens, and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. Also, to make sure they have all the resources required, please donate to the Sacramento Fire Department to help improve our national security. “Oh, thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand between their loved home and the war’s desolation! Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause is just, and this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’ And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” #RandolphHarris 31 of 31
According to locals, over a century ago, the land that houses The Winchester Mansion had been vacant forever. Then, sometime in the early afternoon of Saturday, March 13, 1886, Sheriff Angel Camilio began getting reports that a massive castle made of wood had suddenly appeared. Gables rose, towers peaked into the sky as the mansion mushroomed into a labyrinth overnight.
The house’s sudden manifestation had been both disconcerting and fascinating to the community. Some felt dark curses flowing from the estate, and things moving around in the darkness. Others saw a fairytale castle glimmering in the spring sunlight. Perhaps this is why there are no records of construction, no blueprints, and no permits filed with the county. Come and see what secrets this so-called, “Winchester Mystery House” may hold.
Experience an unforgettable journey back to the time of kings and queens with this entry ticket for The Winchester Mansion in Santa Clara, California, which was the residence of Heiress Sarah L. Winchester. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After the tour, there will be time to enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal at Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, which once spanned 740 acres, all the way down to Stevens Creek Boulevard; wander through the miles of hallways in the world’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available for purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Harris Plumbing, Heating, Air, & Electric has been in business for 30 years. How many businesses can say that? We take pride in everything we do – no matter how big or small the service call might be. We’re here to help your home be as safe and comfortable as possible for you and your family. We take that responsibility very seriously as a company. Harris will ensure you have the information you need to decide what to do next, whatever your home is facing. We’ll perform a diagnosis and detail what issues are present before starting any work. This gives you a personalized quote and service plan specific to your home’s needs, not some random quote based on the best guess. The only way we can do our best work is to make sure we handle the issues at hand. https://www.callharrisnow.com/about-us/
Ah, yes. The BMW 3 Series. Happy 50th birthday to the most iconic BMW ever! It is really hard to decide on a BMW model. However, the 3 series is a favorite of everyone. All the upper-class suburban families had one in the 1980s and 1990s; everyone from teenagers and housewives to executives and diplomats. Now that they are larger in size, but still sporty and luxurious, the audience has grown tremendously. These are very stylish and reliable cars, which is why BMW continues to dominate the luxury car space.
With its top ranking in Consumer Reports’ Auto Brand Report Card and consistent market share growth, BMW has demonstrated its ability to produce high-performing, reliable vehicles that meet consumer demands. BMW stands out due to its focus on driving dynamics and engineering excellence. While other luxury brands prioritize comfort and opulence, BMW is known for creating cars that are fun to drive and offer a unique connection between the driver and the machine. This is why BMW is known as the Ultimate Driving Machine. https://www.brianharrisbmw.com/
Randolph Harris San Francisco Taxation & Mergers
Building strong and lasting client relationships is crucial for a successful legal career. Many lawyers mistakenly believe that mastering legal skills alone ensures success, but law is fundamentally a service industry—our job is to solve problems through the time we sell. To build long-term relationships, attorneys must focus on three core elements: knowing their clients, understanding how their legal issues fit into a larger context, and consistently delivering exceptional service.
Randy advises clients with regard to business transition, taxable and tax-deferred mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, restructuring, integrated tax planning, federal and state tax controversy resolution, and real estate transactions. Trust is the cornerstone of any client relationship. Ultimately, my clients feel they are in capable hands with someone who genuinely understands their problems and goals. https://www.jmbm.com/l-randolph-harris.html
Millhaven Homes luxury construction is our specialty. We are second to none in our ability to sacred places of hidden wishes that our clients desire. We believe that building your custom home or undertaking a major remodeling project should be an exciting and rewarding experience. Through our fully transparent process, you remain in control of every detail, from custom design selections to sustainable building materials and smart home technology integration.
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Void of Faceless Faces, of Soundless Voices Lying Outside History
Identity in America is a formation highly dependent on the cultural conditions of a sedentary, middle-class society. However, the revolutionary minds of the middle-class of the nineteenth century: Jesus Christ, by telling us to love each other and not to sin; Dr. Darwin, by making man’s very humanity relative to his animal ancestry; Marx, by exposing the middle-class mind itself as class bound; and Dr. Freud, by making our ideals and our very consciousness relative to an unconscious mental life have all determined what chances we fruitfully take with it. Since then, there have been national wars, political revolutions, and moral rebellions that have shaken the traditional foundations of all human identity. If we wish to find witnesses to a radically different awareness of the relation of positive and negative identity, we only must change our historical perspective and look at the most marginalized writers in America today. For what if there is nothing in the hopes of generations past nor in the accessible resources of the contemporary community which would help to overcome the negative image held up to a member of a marginalized population by the “compact majority”? Then, so it seems, the creative individual must accept the negative identity as the very baseline of the recovery. And so, we have in our American writers, who have been marginalized in this country, the almost ritualized affirmation of inaudibility, invisibility, namelessness, facelessness—a void of faceless faces, of soundless voices lying outside history. #RandolphHarris 1 of 30
However, the responsible writers who are marginalized in America continue to write and write strongly, for fiction even in acknowledging the depth of nothingness can contribute to something akin to a collective recovery. This is a universal trend among the exploited. It is no coincidence that one of the most telling autobiographic documents of India’s liberation as a nation also bears the “negative” title Autobiography of an Unknown Indian. No wonder that in young people not included in literary reflection, such deep-seated negative identities can be reabsorbed only by a turn to militancy, if not violence. A less well-known figure than Bakunin, still more mysterious, but more significant for our purpose, Nechaiev pushed nihilism to the farthest coherent point. His thought presents practically no contradiction. He appeared, about 1866, in revolutionary intellectual circles, and died, obscurely, in January 1882. In this short space of time, he never ceased to suborn the students around him, Bakunin himself, the revolutionary refugees, and finally the guards in his prison, whom he succeeded in persuading to take part in a crazy conspiracy. When he first appears, he is already quite sure of what he thinks. If Bakunin was fascinated by him to the point of consenting to entrust him with imaginary authority, it is because he recognized in that implacable figure the type of human being that he recommended and what he, in a certain manner, would have been if he had been able to silence his heart. Nechaiev was not content with saying that one must unite with “the savage of the world of bandits, the true and unique revolutionary environment of Russia,” nor with writing once more, like Bakunin, that henceforth politics would be religion and religion politics. He made himself the cruel high priest of a desperate revolution; his most recurrent dream was to found a homicidal order that would permit him to propagate and finally enthrone the sinister divinity that he had decided to serve. #RandolphHarris 2 of 30
He not only gave dissertations on universal destruction; his originality lay in coldly claiming, for those who dedicate themselves to the revolution, an “Everything is permitted” and in permitting himself everything. “The revolutionary is a man condemned in advance. He must have neither romantic relationships nor objects to engage his feelings. He should even cast off his own name. Every part of him should be concentrated in one single passion: the revolution.” If history is, in fact, independent of all principles and composed only of a struggle between revolution and counterrevolution, there is no way out but to espouse wholeheartedly one of the two and either die or be resurrected. Nechaiev pursues this logic to the bitter end. With him, for the first time, revolution is going to be explicitly separated from love and friendship. The consequences of an arbitrary psychology set in motion by Hegel’s method can be seen, for the first time, in of minds could be accomplished in love. He would not, however, give a place in the foreground of his analysis to this “phenomenon,” which, according to him, he found “had not the strength, the patience, nor the application of the negative.” He had chosen to demonstrate human minds in blind combat, dimly groping on the sands, like crabs that finally come to grips in a fight to the death, and voluntarily abandoned the equally legitimate image of beams of light painfully searching for one another in the night and finally focusing together in a blaze of illumination. #RandolphHarris 3 of 30
Those who love, friends or lovers know that love is not only a blinding flash but also a long and painful struggle in the darkness for the realization of definitive recognition and reconciliation. After all, if virtue in the course of history is recognized by the extent to which it gives proof of patience, real love is as patient as hatred. Moreover, the demand for justice is not the only justification throughout the centuries for revolutionary passion, which is sustained by a painful insistence on universal friendship, even—and above all—in defiance of an inimical heaven. Those who die for justice, throughout history, have always been called “brothers.” Violence, for every one of them, is directed only against the enemy, in the service of the community of the oppressed. However, if the revolution is the only positive value, it has the right to claim everything—even the denunciation and therefore the sacrifice of the friend. Henceforth, violence will be directed against one and all, in the service of an abstract idea. The accession to power of the possessed had to take place so that it could be said, once and for all, that the revolution was more important than the people it wanted to save, and that friendship, which until then had transformed defeats into the semblance of victories, must be sacrificed and postponed until the still invisible day of victory. Nechaiev’s originality thus lies in justifying the violence done to one’s brother. He decided, with Bakunin, on the terms of the Catechism. However, once the latter, in a fit of mental aberration, had given him the mission of representing Russia as a European Revolutionary Union, which existed only in his imagination, Nechaiev in effect came to Russia, founded his Society of the Ax, and himself defined its regulations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 30
There we find again the secret central committee, necessary, no doubt, to any military or political action, to whom everyone must swear absolute allegiance. However, Nechaiev does more than militarize the revolution from the moment when he admits that the leaders, to govern their subordinates, have the right to employ violence and lies. Nechaiev lies, to begin with, when he claims to be a delegate of a central committee that is still nonexistent and when, to enlist certain skeptics in the action that he proposes to undertake, he describes the committee as disposing of unlimited resources. He goes still further by distinguishing between categories of revolutionaries, with those of the first category (by which he means the leaders) reserving the right to consider the rest as “expendable capital.” All the leaders in history may have thought in these terms, but they never said so. Until Nechaiev, at any rate, no revolutionary leader had dared to make this guiding principle of his conduct. Up to his time, no revolution had put at the head of its table of laws the concept that man could be a chattel. Traditionally, recruiting relied on its appeal to courage and to the spirit of self-sacrifice. Nechaiev decided that the skeptics could be terrorized or blackmailed and the believers deceived. If they were urged on systematically to perform the most dangerous deeds, even pseudo-revolutionaries could still be used. As for the oppressed, since they were going to be saved once and for all, they could be oppressed still more. What they would lose, the oppressed of the future would gain. #RandolphHarris 5 of 30
Nechaiev states, in principle, that governments must be driven to take repressive measures, that the official representatives most hated by the population must never be touched, and that finally, the secret society must employ all its resources to increase the suffering and misery of the masses. Bravery consists of attacking the whole problem of human destiny and finding its solution using the dynamic slogan and the clinical principle. The dynamic slogan of transactional and script analysis is “Think sphincter.” Their clinical principle is to observe every movement of every muscle of every patient at every moment during a group meeting. And their existential motto is “Transactional analysts are healthy, happy, rich, and brave, and get to travel all over and meet the nicest people in the world, and the same when they are home treating patients.” Script analysis is then the answer to the problem of human destiny, and tells us (alas!) that our fates are predetermined for the most part, and that free will in this respect is for most people an illusion. For example, R. Allendy points out that for everyone who faces it, the decision to commit suicide is a lonely and agonizing, and autonomous one. Yet, whatever vicissitudes it goes through in each individual case, the “rate” of suicide remains relatively constant from year to year. The only way to make (Darwinian) sense of this is to consider human destiny to be the result of parental programming, and not of individual “autonomous” decision. #RandolphHarris 6 of 30
What, then, is the responsibility of the parents? Script programming is not their “fault,” any more than an inherited defect is, such as scoliosis or clubfoot, or an inherited talent for music or mathematics. They are merely passing on the dominants and recessives they got from their parents and grandparents. The script directives are being continually reshuffled, just as the genes are, by the fact that the child requires two parents. On the other hand, the script apparatus is much more flexible than the genetic apparatus and is continually being modified by outside influences, such as life experience and the injunctions inserted by other people. It is only rarely possible to predict when or how an outsider will say or do something that alters a person’s script. It may be a casual remark accidentally overheard at a carnival or in a corridor, or it may be the result of a formal relationship such as marriage, school, or psychotherapy. It is a common observation that spouses gradually influence each other’s attitudes toward life and people, and that these changes are reflected in the tonus of their facial muscles and their gestures, so that they come to look alike. A parent who wishes to change his script so that he will not lay on his children the same directives that were laid on him should first become familiar with the Parent ego state and the Parental voices he carries around in his head, and which the children learn to “cathect” by appropriate trigger behavior. Since the parent is older and presumably wiser in some ways than his offspring, it is his duty and responsibility to control his Parental behavior. Only if he brings his Parent under the control of his Adult can he accomplish this. Beyond that, he is just as much the product of his Parental upbringing as his children are. #RandolphHarris 7 of 30
One difficulty is that children represent facsimile and immortality. When his children respond the way he does, every parent is openly or secretly delighted, even when they follow his worst characteristics. If he wishes his children to adapt to the solar system and all its ramifications better than he himself did, this delight is what he must forgo under Adult control. There is a lot of conflict in adult relationships because of competition between spouses. In our culture, women have been made so insecure about the man-woman relationship that they often compete for reasons they themselves do not understand. A woman’s competitiveness may reflect this culturally induced sense of insecurity. It may be more difficult for her, as a female, to make the perfectly rational assumptions that some men make—that, after all, it is okay to let your wife be the dominant spouse in the relationship. Perhaps if the women’s equality movement achieves its potential for social change, women will be relieved of some of this insecurity. Many think that Women’s Lib takes the whole concept of women’s place in society and turns it upside down. A lot of the roles that are called into question are biological roles. However, a lot of others are strictly social roles. These are questions that a man has to deal with when he is married to a woman who is attempting to find her own real identity—her true self, and not her sociological self. It is extremely difficult for both partners in the marriage. #RandolphHarris 8 of 30
Of course, several couples are in transition, and that is always hard on the people who are caught up in it. Sometimes, there is something about Women’s Lib that can be threatening to a man. Some men think it may be a potential for a marriage breaking up because a woman might come to see that marriage is essentially a false relationship between a man and a woman. Or that a woman may decide to do something on her own. However, the women’s movement does not necessarily mean that marriage concepts are false. Yet, it does mean that there must be a greater sense of reality between the two people in the marriage. In other words, they must make more of a marriage than just leaning on the legality of it. Consider this: if a woman is always putting herself last in the marriage, she is depriving her husband of the opportunity of saving her soul. If she is always protective of him and always gets there first, he does not have a chance! I am talking now about people who always have a pressing need to do the giving and thereby cheat themselves of the pleasure of receiving—and cheat others of their chance to experience the pleasure of giving. Culturally, this translates into the gender stereotype of the woman giving pleasure to the man. And all of us tend to think that we must be responsible for our emotions. Nothing is further from the truth. How we feel is how we feel, and no one, least of all our marriage partners, has the right to make us accountable for those feelings. We are accountable only for what we do because of those feelings. #RandolphHarris 9 of 30
You are entitled to your feelings, and it can be dangerous to ignore them, for you and others around you. You are entitled, and your partner does not have the right to interpret or evaluate or judge your feelings. On the other hand, it is your responsibility to express your feelings and thoughts as clearly as you can. Making your partner guess is asking for trouble. And the more comfortable you are in expressing those feelings and the more comfortable your partner becomes in accepting the feeling as an honest reflection of where you stand at that moment, the easier it is to communicate. Besides, many should show their self-destructive character in their very contents. As an illustration, I should like to refer to three should, all of which operate in the condition of morbid dependency and which will be elaborated in that context: I should be big enough to mind absolutely nothing that is done to me; I should be able to make her love me; and I should sacrifice absolutely everything for “love”! The combination of these three shoulds is indeed bound to perpetuate the tortures of a morbid dependency. Another frequent demand of a person is that he assume full responsibility for his relatives, friends, pupils, employees, etcetera. He should be able to solve everyone’s problems to everyone’s satisfaction. This implies that anything that goes wrong is his fault. If a friend or relative is upset for any reason, complains, criticizes, is discontented, or wants something, such a person is forced to be the helpless victim who must feel guilty and set everything right. He is, to quote a patient, like the harassed manager of a Pink Flamingo summer hotel: the guests are always right. Whether or not any of the mishaps are his fault does not matter. #RandolphHarris 10 of 30
This process is well described in a French book The Witness. The main character and his brother are out boating; the boat leaks, a storm comes up, and they are capsized. Since his brother has a badly injured leg, he cannot swim in the violent water. He is doomed to drown. The hero tries to swim ashore, supporting his brother, but soon realizes that he cannot do it. The alternatives are that both drown or that the hero saves himself alone. Clearly realizing this, he decides to save himself. However, he feels as if he were a murderer, and this is so real to him that he is convinced everybody else will regard him as a murderer. If he operates on the premise that he should be responsible in any case, his reason is of no avail and cannot be effective. To be sure, this is an extreme situation. However, the hero’s emotional response illustrates exactly what people do feel when driven by this particular should. An individual can also impose tasks upon himself which are detrimental to his whole being. A classic example of this kind of should is to be found in Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov, in order to prove to his Napoleonic qualities, felt that he should be able to kill a human being. As Dostoevski shows us in unmistakable terms, despite Raskolnikov’s manifold resentments against the world, nothing was more distasteful to his sensitive soul than to kill. He had to beat himself into doing it. What he actually felt is expressed in a dream in which he sees a scrawny, underfed little mare forced by drunken peasants to try pull an impossibly heavy cartload. It is brutally and mercilessly whipped and finally beaten to death. Raskolnikov himself rushes to the mare in an upsurge of deep compassion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 30
This dream appeared at a time when Raskolnikov was engaged in a violent inner struggle. He felt both that he should be able to kill and that it was so utterly distasteful that he simply could not do it. In the dream, he realized the senseless cruelty with which he was beating himself into doing something that was impossible for him, as it was for the mare to pull the heavy cartload. And from the depth of his being emerged a profound compassion for himself over what he was beating himself up over, what he was doing to himself. Having thus experienced his true feelings, he felt more at one with himself after the dream and decided against the killing. However, this Napoleonic self soon afterward again got the upper hand, because at that time his real self was as helpless against it as the underfed mare was against the brutal peasants. The third factor which renders the shoulds self-destructive and which, more than others, accounts for their coerciveness, is the self-hate with which we may turn against ourselves when we violate them. Sometimes this connection is clear or can be established easily. A person has not been as all-knowing or all helpful as he feels he should be, and, as in the story The Witness, is filled with unreasoning self-reproaches. More often, he is not aware of such a violation but, seemingly out of the blue, feels low, uneasy, fatigued, anxious, or irritable. #RandolphHarris 12 of 30
Let us recall the example of the woman who was suddenly scared of the dog after having climbed to the mountain top. The sequence here was as follows: first, she experienced as a failure her sensible decision to give up the climbing—a failure in the light of a dictate telling her that she should manage everything (and which remained unconscious). Next followed her self-contempt, which likewise remained unconscious. Then came the response to her self-berating, in the form of feeling helpless and scared, the first of the emotional process that reached awareness. If she had not analyzed herself, the scare of the dog would have remained a puzzling incident, puzzling because it was disconnected from all that preceded it. In other instances, a person experiences in conscious awareness only the special ways in which he automatically protects himself from his self-hate, such as his special ways to allay anxiety (eating sprees, drinking or shopping sprees, etcetera), his feeling victimized by others (passive externalization), or irritable at others (active externalization). We all have ample opportunity to see from various viewpoints how these attempts at self-protection operate. We can usually find refuge from the world of action by taking to the world of books. Then, stress and turmoil left behind, and restfully ensconced in a chair or bed, pictured scenes may be enjoyed, or ideas received, which act like a holiday. Live in the atmosphere that great books bring, their truer and wider ideas, their finer, exalted ideals. Most men are not yet built to wait in the silence for the visitation of the spirit of truth. It must be described in words for them, by the intellect for their intellect. Conscience is acquired gradually through identification. Identification is the process of ascribing to oneself the characteristics of another (usually admired) person. As one identifies with and takes on more traits of the valued model, intrafamilial resemblances in behavior, values, gestures, attitudes, and morals are acquired. #RandolphHarris 13 of 30
Children come into the world with only the capacity to develop a conscience. They act by their momentary needs and feelings, and their parents are usually watching them closely, making moral judgments about their behavior. If they act in ways that violate the parents’ concepts of what is right, the parents will punish the children for behaving in that way. The parents appear huge, powerful, and admirable from the children’s standpoint; they want to become like the parents. To avoid punishment, to retain the parents’ love, and to acquire their wonderful attributes, children strive to become like them in many ways. They identify with their demands and expectations; these gradually become their expectations of themselves. In short, they come to forbid in themselves what their parents forbade. They come to demand of themselves what their parents demanded. They come to expect of themselves what their parents expected. In this manner, the conscience commences. We declare a bright and glorious view of God and man to all who will hear, a view revealed in illuminated by the restored light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We testify of God’s loving goodness and of his eternal respect for each of us, for us as individual children of God and for what each of us may become. God has a plan for the benefit and blessing of us, His children. Basic to that all-important plan is our free agency. The right of choice runs like a golden thread throughout the gospel for the blessing of His children. We all existed and had our identities and our agency, long before we came to this world. #RandolphHarris 14 of 30
One central function of emotions is to enable the formation, maintenance, and negotiation of attachments and relationships and thereby to structure social life. Emotions inform our choices of who to affiliate with, distance from, praise, blame, dominate, or submit to. Admiration, a social emotion that attracts us to exemplars and motivates us to promote the virtues possessed by them, might be conceived of as the most fitting emotional response to heroes. Adolescents describe how heroes help them to do good or be a better person. However, where a young person selects a hero with dubious moral standards, this relationship may result in “bad” behavior where the young person models their behavior on an unsuitable target. Young people describe how heroes protect them from physical and psychological harm. Specifically, heroes were described as offering emotional support, social support, instrumental support, resources to develop self-efficacy, social control, and physical protection from danger. However, young people also cautioned that someone might become over-reliant on a hero, asking for help rather than taking personal responsibility. Young people believe that heroes play a role in helping them to experiment with their own sense of self and develop greater clarity about their authentic sense of self. Heroes can represent a person’s ideal self-influencing career paths and life decisions. #RandolphHarris 15 of 30
Adolescents gravitate toward heroes while navigating challenges in their own lives. Many people look at the award-winning Sacramento Fire Department as heroes. The representations of heroes and heroines represent formal elements which are used to create an affective appeal and to encourage an audience to consider the individual in question as heroic. As heroes, people are enticed by the Sacramento Fire Department because they use various forms of intensification through suspense, communication of increased danger, or heightened antagonism. Particularly effective in the view of viewing the Sacramento Fire Department as heroes is the light, radiance, and reflection they produce. Firefighters, paramedics, and EMTs stand in the spotlight and are singled out by (quasi-) divine illumination. Ancient, medieval, or early modern heroes have shining armors or they are placed in a beam of light coming from the heavens. Napoleon in Antoine-Hean Gros’ oil painting La Bataille des Pyramides (1810) is both elevated above his generals by his rearing horse, and he is placed in the center of light. The Sacramento Fire Department has these big, fancy red trucks with chrome wheels, chrome fender wall trim, and all these beautiful lights. Then the heroes get out of the truck and rush to save you from danger. The ambulances are essentially red box trucks with chrome wheels, fancy lights, and when the back doors open, bright white light glares out, and there is technology and personnel there to save your life. #RandolphHarris 16 of 30
The elevation of these heroes is displayed with lens flares to combine an aura of light and mystery, which gives the characters almost divine attributes, especially in combination with the sirens. An excess of light both singles out the heroes and partially obscures the details of their bodies because it is too bright. This popular combination between radiance and partial blinding also produces the ambivalence that is characteristic of heroes: they inspire emulation, and yet they remain inimical. The inapproachability, produced by the light or distance, contributes to the sense of awe and wonder that the heroic image of the Sacramento Fire Department inspires. The classic aesthetic trope that evokes awe in the recipient is the sublime. From the eighteenth-century aesthetic theory onwards, especially under the influence of Burke and Kant, the sublime combines the experience of terror and pleasure, the paradoxical experience of feeling at once overwhelmed and exalted, fearful and fascinated, as we are when we see the vast expanse of the ocean or a towering mountain. The experience of the sublime offers a feeling of transcendence even in a secular context and it helps us to reach beyond ourselves. The hero or heroine themselves are the source of the sublime, but also the setting contributes to the affective arrangement: Sacramento Fire Department in action in large scale, terrifying surroundings (confronted with a wall of fire in a burning building), gain a type of grandeur that is much more difficult to achieve in, let us say, a cluttered sitting room with a flowery wallpaper and lace doilies on Rudolf I King of Germany furniture. All these forms of expression are aimed at drawing attention and appealing to an audience to evoke admiration, veneration, and, ideally, imitation. These wished-for responses are evoked not through rational argument but through the engagement of the responses. #RandolphHarris 17 of 30
If you see a fire truck stopped in the street without the lights on, be very careful. Sometimes there is an emergency, and you should not pass the fire truck. It might be a good idea to safely turn around and go another way because if you hit someone and they happen to die, you could be charged with manslaughter. Sometimes fire firefighters are getting back into their vehicle, and if you pass the apparatus, you may collide with a firefighter who is on foot. Also, be sure to look at their signals; sometimes emergency vehicles are in motion, albeit slowly, and drivers try to pass them, and this could lead to a dangerous situation. Also, if you are in an intersection when you see an emergency vehicle, continue through the intersection. Drive to the right as soon as it is safe and stop. Obey any direction, order, or signal given by a law enforcement officer or a firefighter. Even if they conflict with existing signs, signals, or laws, follow their orders. When their siren or flashing lights are on, it is against the law to follow within 300 feet of any fire engine, law enforcement vehicle, ambulance, or other emergency vehicle. If you drive to the scene of a fire, collision, or other disaster, you can be arrested. When you do this, you are getting in the way of firefighters, ambulance crews, or other rescue and emergency personnel. The concept of professional courage does not always mean being as tough as nails, either. It also suggests a willingness to listen to other people’s problems, to go to bat for them in a tough situation, and it means knowing just how far they can go. It also means being willing to tell the boss when he or she is wrong. #RandolphHarris 18 of 30
California is the third most expensive state in the nation. A single person making an income above $100,000 is now considered low-income in five counties in California. This distinction now applies to individuals living in Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, and Marin counties. In 37 percent of counties, a family of four living on a six-figure income is now considered low-income. In fact, Governor Gavin Newsom of Democratic controlled California, brags about being the world’s “fifth largest economy,” but it also facing a $12 billion deficit, looking to cut $747 million for state worker’s pay, pushing to keep medical insurance for illegal immigrants, but wants to cut medical for anyone who has assets over $2,000 and the state has the largest homeless population in the nation. If they are all officially counted, California has approximately 4 million homeless people. The highest home prices in the nation, the highest taxes, and the most unfriendly business regulations known to man. The average home price in California is nearly $1,000,000.00 USD, while the average salary is $96,036.00, meaning that most Californians cannot even afford to buy a home. California is having an affordability crisis. In 2025, many people in California saw their bills increase by an estimated $500 a month. This includes items such as food, automobile insurance, homeowners’ insurance, and electricity. In fact, more than 3 million people in California are facing household hardship, and more than 300,000 of them are facing eviction soon. This comes at a time when California is having a shortage of affordable housing. This is caused by nearly half a century-old laws that discourage home sales and encourage higher rents. #RandolphHarris 19 of 30
Meanwhile, China, where we are sending all our jobs and money, has more than 50 ghost cities, with 65 million vacant homes. Ghost cities are regions will housing has been overdeveloped to the point that these places are uninhabited. Because California is so hostile towards people and businesses, more than 360 companies have fled the state since 2020. Businesses like Chevron, SpaceX, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard are among the names on that list. Also, more than 500,000 people a year are abandoning California because it is too expensive to live in, Gavin Newsom has criminalized homelessness and actually started arresting people without homes, crime is out of control, and they are losing their jobs due to companies relocating. More than 100 companies have announced layoffs in California for 2025. Intel is cutting 15,000 jobs, PayPal 2,500, and Meta has terminated 4,000 employees. California also has the highest unemployment rate in the country at 5.4 percent, while the national average is 4.1 percent. The California crisis created by Democrats is driving up home prices and mortgages, and rents all over the nation and the world, making living unaffordable for all, and advocates say the crisis is far from over. Accordingly, California has more than 3.5 million illegal immigrants. Having the Southern American boarder open and not having American farmland protected, not producing beef, poultry, fish, fruit, produce and dairy in America, and without American goods and services being our number one manufactured and selling items, America has created a dangerous and significantly elevated risks to national security, national economic security, and national public health. Some people may believe that these claims are overstated, but by not routinely monitoring Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CEVs) or other security-relevant alerts, such as the end-of-life of machinery is how the Oroville Dam Crisis occurred in 2017. #RandolphHarris 20 of 30
Other crises that have occurred due to neglect of critical infrastructure are the 2025 Palisades fires because Southern California ran out of water, when they are located next to an ocean and they could have simply created desalination plants to help with the water shortage. The water is so plentiful that it is currently eroding land and causing homes to fall into the sea. Desalination has been identified as one technology that will help solve California’s water scarcity problem. Desalination is a cost-effective technology that can transform an abundance of salt water into a reliable supply of potable, fresh water, which is a great way to fight climate change and have enough water for our region’s water requirements. Ras Al Khair, Saudi Arabia, is producing 1,036,000 meters (273,682,192) per day of desalinated water. As we see gangs fighting with federal law enforcement, states and cities refusing to honor federal laws, and politicians showing an utter disregard for the Constitution of the United States of America, anarchy is becoming increasingly common. Anarchism is a cluster of doctrines and attitudes centered on the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary. Derived from the Greek root anarchos, meaning “without authority,” anarchism, anarchist, and anarchy are used to express both approval and disapproval. The anarchist denies man-made laws, regards property as a means of tyranny, and believes that crimes is merely the product of property and authority. #RandolphHarris 21 of 30
However, the anarchist would argue that their denial of constitutions and governments leads not to “no justice” but to the real justice inherent in the free development of human sociality—the natural inclination, when unfettered by laws, to live according to the principles and practice of mutual aid. Anarchism is also a form of treason. Treason, the crime of betraying a nation or a sovereign by acts considered dangerous to security. In English law, treason includes the levying of war against the government and the giving of aid and comfort to the monarch’s enemies. In the United States of America, treason was defined restrictively by the framers of the Constitution. Treason against the United States of America “shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them aid and comfort,” which is something that many politicians are currently guilty of. The American government should know all exploitable vulnerabilities and fix them before the situation becomes a crisis. Failure to take such mitigating actions is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. The American government must understand that significant time and resources must be invested in America. They must also encourage corporations to plan for both mitigating safety vulnerabilities in the short term and eliminating them in the long term. For instance, a company might begin by reaching out to the federal, state, or local government and requesting tax incentives to provide security to dangerous communities, to help the government repair bridges and potholes. #RandolphHarris 22 of 30
America needs an approach to eliminate safety vulnerabilities in American cities. There needs to be a road map by the end of 2025, outlining a prioritized approach to eliminate crisis situations in America. There is enough money to send aid to foreign nations, but the American government does not have enough money to care for its infrastructure, provide adequate resources, or end the affordable housing crisis. Nor is there enough money to fund other national critical functions (NCFs). These bad practices of putting America and Americans last are considered exceptionally risky, particularly to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. As a result, the American automobile trade deficit with Japan was $39 billion. The maximum percentage of your gross income that you should earmark for a monthly mortgage payment is calculated at 28 percent, and no more than 36 percent of your gross income to all debts, including mortgage. If you take 28 percent of the median household income per home in Sacramento County, homeowners can only afford a mortgage of $2,070.23 per month. And if you take 36 percent of their gross income to all debts, including mortgage, they should be devoting no more than $2,661.72 a month to these debts. Mortgage lenders must be using some kind of sorcery to get buyers into these expensive homes. To afford one of these homes using traditional guidelines, a household would need to gross $11,280.24 per month or $135,362.88 per year, but the median household in Sacramento County is grossing $7,393.67 or $88,724.00, and that typically means two to four people in the home are working and contributing to the mortgage. #RandolphHarris 23 of 30
Home prices in Sacramento County are rivaling the Bay Area. Historically, homes in the Bay Area have been more expensive because they have higher-paying jobs, a larger population, and the Bay Area is a tourist destination. Contributing to the housing affordability crisis is Gavin Newsom, who has been lavishing illegal immigrants with taxpayer-funded resources and cash aid. The State of California has a budget deficit of $12 billion because Governor Gavin Newsom granted 700,000 illegal immigrants free health care, which costs taxpayers $3 billion annually. At the same time, Newsom cut vital programs for veterans, school children, the disabled, and the homeless. Additionally, Newsom seems to be uneducated about economics and is proposing to fast-track his plan to build a $20 billion water tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which would eliminate environmental reviews and limit avenues for legal challenges. Gavin Newsom only cares about the environment when his policies allow him to raise taxes and restrict freedoms. To further highlight this illustration, Mexico has been causing one of America’s worst environmental disasters. Fifty million gallons a day of industrial chemicals, untreated sewage, and trash flow from Tijuana, Mexico, into southern San Diego County daily. This toxic waste has been turning up on Imperial Beach and is causing the miles of white sands to become polluted and the ocean breeze to smell of poop, which has been sickening residents and wildlife and costing San Diego millions in the form of lost tourism and health problems. The problem has been going on for more than a century. #RandolphHarris 24 of 30
However, Mexico’s pollution of California has become a severe public health crisis as the population of Tijuana has drastically increased in recent years, and the waste treatment plants are no longer usable. Some of the beaches in San Diego have been closed for more than three years, and evidence suggests that even breathing the air may be harmful, as toxic particles in the water can become airborne. Yet, even though Gavin Newsom has been governor for six years, he has not rushed into action to stop this very preventable environmental disaster. Why? Because he is not getting kickbacks from China and Mexico, not being gifted mansions and cars, and he cannot tax the struggling California taxpayers to clean up this mess. Simply, it is not profitable for him. Gavin Newsom has been a total tyrant with no regard for taxpayers and no mind for business, and he should be impeached as soon as possible. He has criminalized poverty, increased taxes, increased taxes on gas, and insurance rates so high that people are struggling to survive. In addition to Gavin Newsom’s increased gas prices starting on 1 July 2025, the war between Iran and Israel is going to further exacerbate the prices of gas and cause more inflation and economic hardship for people in California. While everyone is making war over America and who belongs here and who she belongs to, so many people forget about the people who are Indigenous to this land. Open borders have allowed hundreds of thousands of cartel operatives to infiltrate reservations across the United States of America and use the isolated lands as havens to traffic fentanyl pills and other drugs into the country without protection from federal authorities. #RandolphHarris 25 of 30
Drug cartels have been threatening the health and safety of Native American communities. The trafficking of dangerous and illegal drugs into their territories is leading to a second genocide. The overdose rate for Indigenous people is 42 percent higher than the national average. A recent bust on Montana’s Blackfeet Nation’s Tribal Reservation resulted in the seizure of more than 700,000 fentanyl pills, which was the largest bust in Montana history. Recently, the Blackfeet Nation had to declare a state of emergency after facing 17 overdoses in just one week. There are only 6.8 million Native Americans left in the world, which is 2 percent of the American population. We should be doing more to protect these proud and honorable people; they should not want for anything. People rush and give away resources to illegal immigrants, but totally disregard the Indigenous people of this land, as their race silently fades away into extinction. We must secure our borders and increase federal funding to Native American tribes so we can save this precious population. Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom has given billions of taxpayer dollars away to illegal immigrants and protected them from law enforcement, while arresting law-abiding Americans because they cannot afford to pay rent or mortgage, and the homeless shelters are unsafe, overcrowded, and have restrictions on who is allowed inside. He has also totally ignored the cartel problems on American lands. Clean air, water, land, and preserving our heritage are extremely important. #RandolphHarris 26 of 30
We cannot just allow criminals to kill off the people who are native to this land and do nothing about it. Wars have been started over governments that tax citizens without representation. Taxation without representation is what led to the American Revolution. If Gavin Newsom is not stopped, next he will euthanize the poor and sterilize the disabled. Gavin Newsom has wars and fires breaking out on the streets, but goes out of his way to arrest people who have no place to live. This monster is unfit to be governor and must never be allowed to be President of America! Stop Gavin Newsom now! Save California and impeach this unreasonable man. Meanwhile, with President Trump, we are seeing crime rates sharply decrease. President Trump just signed the “HALT Fentanyl Act” into law, which permanently classifies the narcotic as a “Schedule I drug” under the “Controlled Substances Act.” Also, President Trump recently secured $10 trillion in investments for the United States of America. Additionally, in May of 2025, the United States of America collected a record $100 billion in tariff revenue, and that number will increase to $300 billion by the end of 2025. Also, President Trump has just sealed a $550 billion deal with Japan. This means Japan will invest $550 billion in the United States of America. Furthermore, President Trump has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for making Iran and Israel cease fire. As you can see, President Trump is creating solutions and remediating problems to protect America and the American people, while Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, is making life hard on American citizens and causing economic hardship, and totally ignoring Mexico’s polluting beaches in San Diego. If elected president for an unprecedented third term, to make housing more affordable and to offset the cost of homeowners’ insurance and auto insurance, President Trump plans to abolish property taxes. #RandolphHarris 27 of 30
Much like the land crisis in Las Vegas, we could also run out of land to farm and will not be able to grow or cultivate our own food. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. Also, country of origin labeling is very important so Americans can know where their food is coming from and can support American farmers and ranchers. As money flows, it influences further investment. Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. And in the future, there may be food wars. Also, to ensure that we have farmland and buildable land for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrate to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a population that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in America, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. #RandolphHarris 28 of 30
When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in America which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the national debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by sending more money overseas. Buying American-made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards on pollution. American companies must be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human mind to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. #RandolphHarris 29 of 30
As you can see, President Donald Trump and his pledge to “Make America Great Again” is exactly what America needs to save the country and the American people. And yes, diversity is important, so you can see why it is also important to preserve blonde hair and blue eyes, as the people with these characteristics are becoming a minority in America. We must think before we can understand the soul’s existence; we must understand before we can realize it. The earliest beginnings of thought, as apart from instinct, when it was itself still but a lurking tendency, belong far back in primeval time. The human intellect as we find it today, so rich and developed an instrument for the consciousness of the ego, did not arrive at this fulness without a series of graduated stages. We have had plenty of scientific thinking, business thinking, and political thinking long enough, but we have had very little inspired thinking. That is the world’s need. The intellect is cradled in selfishness but runs the evolutionary track into reason, where it will one day finish at the winning-post of selflessness. As a reminder, parents, please teach your children to love America and be patriotic citizens, and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. Also, to make sure they have all the resources required, please donate to the Sacramento Fire Department to help improve our national security. “Oh, thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand between their loved home and the war’s desolation! Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause is just, and this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’ And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” #RandolphHarris 30 of 30
President Donald J. Trump is keeping his promise to secure our borders and make America safe again. In July, Border Patrol reported just 4,399 apprehensions along our southern border—a new monthly record. That is an average of only 141 per day across nearly 2,000 miles. For the third month in a row, not a single illegal immigrant has been released into the United States. This is not just progress—it is a total reversal. Under the last administration, more than 300,000 illegal immigrants attempted to cross the border in a single month. The results speak for themselves. For the first time in at least five decades, the United States is on track to see negative net migration. Stopping illegal immigrants from entering our communities creates safer neighborhoods, protects taxpayer resources, and ensures more jobs and opportunities for American citizens. After 4 years of record-breaking illegal entries, this is the turnaround our Nation needs. President Trump will never stop fighting to end this invasion once and for all. He is working every day to secure our borders and restore the rule of law. Illegal immigrants who commit heinous crimes are being deported, loopholes are being closed, and sanctuary policies are being dismantled for good. Under the Trump Administration, America is safer and stronger than ever before. To learn more, visit www.WhiteHouse.gov.
According to locals, over a century ago, the land that houses The Winchester Mansion had been vacant forever. Then, sometime in the early afternoon of Saturday, March 13, 1886, Sheriff Angel Camilio began getting reports that a massive castle made of wood had suddenly appeared. Gables rose, towers peaked into the sky as the mansion mushroomed into a labyrinth overnight. The house’s sudden manifestation had been both disconcerting and fascinating to the community. Some felt dark curses flowing from the estate, and things moving around in the darkness. Others saw a fairytale castle glimmering in the spring sunlight. Perhaps this is why there are no records of construction, no blueprints, and no permits filed with the county. Come and see what secrets this so-called, “Winchester Mystery House” may hold.
Experience an unforgettable journey back to the time of kings and queens with this entry ticket for The Winchester Mansion in Santa Clara, California, which was the residence of Heiress Sarah L. Winchester. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After the tour, there will be time to enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal at Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, which once spanned 740 acres, all the way down to Stevens Creek Boulevard; wander through the miles of hallways in the world’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available for purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Harris Plumbing, Heating, Air, & Electric has been in business for 30 years. How many businesses can say that? We take pride in everything we do – no matter how big or small the service call might be. We’re here to help your home be as safe and comfortable as possible for you and your family. We take that responsibility very seriously as a company. Harris will ensure you have the information you need to decide what to do next, whatever your home is facing. We’ll perform a diagnosis and detail what issues are present before starting any work. This gives you a personalized quote and service plan specific to your home’s needs, not some random quote based on the best guess. The only way we can do our best work is to make sure we handle the issues at hand. https://www.callharrisnow.com/about-us/
Ah, yes. The BMW 3 Series. Happy 50th birthday to the most iconic BMW ever! It is really hard to decide on a BMW model. However, the 3 series is a favorite of everyone. All the upper-class suburban families had one in the 1980s and 1990s; everyone from teenagers and housewives to executives and diplomats. Now that they are larger in size, but still sporty and luxurious, the audience has grown tremendously. These are very stylish and reliable cars, which is why BMW continues to dominate the luxury car space.
With its top ranking in Consumer Reports’ Auto Brand Report Card and consistent market share growth, BMW has demonstrated its ability to produce high-performing, reliable vehicles that meet consumer demands. BMW stands out due to its focus on driving dynamics and engineering excellence. While other luxury brands prioritize comfort and opulence, BMW is known for creating cars that are fun to drive and offer a unique connection between the driver and the machine. This is why BMW is known as the Ultimate Driving Machine. https://www.brianharrisbmw.com/
Randolph Harris San Francisco Taxation & Mergers
Building strong and lasting client relationships is crucial for a successful legal career. Many lawyers mistakenly believe that mastering legal skills alone ensures success, but law is fundamentally a service industry—our job is to solve problems through the time we sell. To build long-term relationships, attorneys must focus on three core elements: knowing their clients, understanding how their legal issues fit into a larger context, and consistently delivering exceptional service.
Randy advises clients with regard to business transition, taxable and tax deferred mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, restructuring, integrated tax planning, federal and state tax controversy resolution, and real estate transactions. Trust is the cornerstone of any client relationship. Ultimately, my clients feel they are in capable hands with someone who genuinely understands their problems and goals. https://www.jmbm.com/l-randolph-harris.html
Millhaven Homes luxury construction is our specialty. We are second to none in our ability to sacred places of hidden wishes that our clients desire. We believe that building your custom home or undertaking a major remodeling project should be an exciting and rewarding experience. Through our fully transparent process, you remain in control of every detail, from custom design selections to sustainable building materials and smart home technology integration.
Millhaven Homes offers Design + Build services for luxury homes in various styles and locations in Utah. See their portfolio of projects, services, development, and contact information. https://millhavenhomes.com/portfolio/
Don’t You Dare Ever Lay a Hand on Me Again!
After man has studied comparative religion, comparative metaphysics, and comparative mysticism, taking the East as well as the West in his stride, he is better fitted to come to right conclusions about truth, God, reality, the soul, and life’s purpose. As we bind ourselves to act as covenant disciples, our relationship with the Father and Son is enriched, our joy enhanced, and our eternal perspective expanded. We have a Heavenly Farther, who loves us as His children. His love for us is perfect. Jesus Christ and His mission illustrate God’s love for us. As John wrote, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” In our quest to understand what we do not know, we might sometimes rely on our familiar mortal experienced, or things we do know. For example, we can learn somewhat of God the Father through our own parenthood and mortal family. However, we should be careful in applying these comparisons too far in our attempt to understand our Heavenly Father. The attributers of God the Father transcend any less-than-perfect attributes of a fallen man. God the Father is the perfect Father. He is perfectly loving, kind, patient, and understanding and is perfectly glorious. We can trust Him perfectly. The love of Christ reflects the love of God the Father and is a representation of that love. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Reciprocity is a moral virtue. We ought to be disposed, as a matter of moral obligation, to return good in proportion to the good we receive, and to make reparation for the harm we have done. Moreover, reciprocity is a fundamental virtue. Its requirements have presumptive priority over many competing considerations, and that priority makes reciprocity a crucial consideration for a wide variety of important moral problems. Specifically, reciprocity fixes the outline of our nonvoluntary social obligations—the obligations we acquire during social life, but acquire without regard to our invitation, consent, or acceptance. Leading examples include some of our obligations to our families, to future generations, and to obey the law. We should talk about these matters, not in any spirit of animosity—of which the world is sadly too full-but in a spirit of mutual enlightenment, as of brothers calmly consulting to assist each other towards the elimination of mistakes. We must discuss these questions in the detached manner of the philosopher, and keep out those angry emotions and acrimonious words which often escape partisans in theological discussions. It is not at all hard for anyone with enough brains to state a case for being good and then to state a case of equal strength for being bad. Logical argument alone cannot provide a final test of the truth of any case. For this, we must go also to impersonal feeling, mystical intuition, and not least, practical life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
The recognition that the synthetic view is the only right viewpoint will initiate a new epoch in the world of thought. For every argument that is set up and defended, there is always a possibility to set up another argument whereby it is contradicted or destroyed. The only qualification of this seemingly hopeless position is that we approach nearer truth as the contradictions lessen. A dialogue where both seek to learn, is what ought to take place, not a polemic where each listens only to himself! The region of logical intellect offers no durable abiding place for the questing human mind. Every argument can be met by another of equal force, every opinion cancelled by another of equal weight; nor is there any end to the process except escape from this region altogether. However, the escape should be on to a higher region, to that of genuine intuition, and not to a lower one like that of superstition belief. The futility of a solely logical attempt to solve problems concerning the human being, and his nature, relations, and activities, is shown by the many cases where men of equal intellectual capacity and academic status offer conflicting interpretations of the same fact or arrive at opposite conclusions from the same premises. Too often a study is made from a single angle only and neglects all the others. The result is a narrowed, limited understanding which leaves out factors that may be much more important. Each one omitted is, by implication, denied. A philosophical view takes as many aspects as possible into account to get nearer the full truth. #RandolpHarris 3 of 23
The Truth is found intellectually not at one end of a pair of opposite alternatives, not by making a choice between two concepts only, but by grinding and synthesizing the interplay of forces and experiences which must be considered. His conclusions are not hastily and impulsively reached. They follow the gathering of sufficient evidence, which means sufficient to give both sides of the case. He gives careful thought to it before he gives an opinion about it. He may go so far even as to put himself in the receptive mood which would make it possible for him to see a variant teaching in the light with which its followers see it. (One can, perhaps.) He may try to understand and sympathize with a viewpoint that may or may not have much to recommend it. However, if he should permit himself to respond thus, he would have to return from this standpoint anyway, for his critical intellect would, upon resuming renewed activity, ask insistent questions. The time comes when the seeker must sift out all the doctrines he has received and let those go which lack reasonableness, the sound of truth, the lofty tone of impersonality. And even after he has sieved away the ideas born of narrowness, pettiness, bigotry, prejudice, and false sentimentality, he has still to choose those which he can usefully work with. He will collect his ideas not from books alone, but also from various other sources, orthodox and unorthodox, conventional and off-beat. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Looking around in society or in one’s clinical practice, it is not difficult to find examples of every character in the Cinderella story, from Cinderella herself, and her immediate family, through the ineffectual Prince and the King, and even down to the jolly, whiskered coachman who never said a word and who started out life as a rat. There are also shoe-fitters who Come To Find Out that what looks like a sow’s ear is really a silk purse. While the therapist can listen to the patient and search around in his head for a fairy tale which many match what he hears, or leaf through Stith Thompson’s motif-index when he gets home, a simpler way is to ask the patient himself to tell his life story as a fairy tale. An example of this was Drusilla, who was not a patient, but obliged during a seminar on fairy tales. An ancestor of Drusilla’s, many generations back, invented a widely used device, so that his name is still a household word. The story starts with Drusilla’s mother Vanessa, who was a descendant of this patriarch. Vanessa’s father died when she was quite young and she went to live in the home of her great-uncle, Charles. Charles lived on a large ranch near Los Angeles, complete with swimming pool, tennis courts, private lake, and even a golf course. Vanessa grew up in these surroundings and met people from many countries. She was not too happy, however, and when she was seventeen, she eloped with a man from the Philippines, named John Ryan. Their two daughters, Drusilla, and her sister Eldora, were raised on a plantation there. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Drusilla was her father’s favorite. Eldora was something of a tomboy and became very athletic, an expert horsewoman, archer, and golfer. Her father used to beat her, but he never laid a hand on Drusilla. One day when Eldora was about eighteen, her father wanted to punish her. By this time, Eldora was as tall as he was and much stronger. As he advanced on her, she cowered, as she had always done, but suddenly Drusilla observed a strange transformation. Eldora drew herself up, flexed her muscles, and said to her father, “Don’t you dare ever lay a hand on me again.” She looked him fiercely in the eye and her father in his turn now cowered and backed away. Shortly after this, Vanessa divorced him and went with her two children to live on Uncle Charles’ estate. Drusilla in her turn now lived on her great-uncle’s ranch and met a man from a faraway country, whom she married. By him, she had two children. However, she always liked to make things so she became a weaver, and finally a teacher of weaving. It was because of her interest in weaving that she came to the seminar on fairy tales. Drusilla was asked to tell her story in the form of a fairy tale, using the script analyst’s language of frogs, princes, princesses, winners and losers, witches and ogres. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Here is the way she told it: “Once upon a time, there was a king who conquered many lands, which his oldest son inherited. The kingdom was passed on from generation to generation. Since the oldest son inherited the kingdom, the younger sons got very little. One of the poor younger sons had a daughter Vanessa, but he died while on a hunt. Vanessa’s uncle, the king, then took her to live with him at the palace and there she met a prince from a strange and faraway land. The prince took her away from the kingdom to his own kingdom by the sea, where many unique flowers and forests grew. After a while, however, she found that her prince, John Ryan, was really a frog. John Ryan was equally surprised when he discovered that the beautiful bride whom he had married because he thought she was a princess turned out to be a witch. John Ryan and Vanessa had two daughters. The oldest, Eldora, was a frog like her father and he did not like her at all and used to scold her and beat her when she was little. The younger daughter, Drusilla, was a princess, and Manuel treated her like one. One day, a fairy came to Eldora and said to her, ‘I will protect you. If your father ever tries to beat you again, you must tell him to stop.’ So the next time John Ryan tried to beat Eldora, she suddenly felt very strong and told him that he must never beat her again. John Ryan was very indignant and thought it was his wife Vanessa who has caused Eldora to turn on him, so Vanessa moved away. She and her two daughters left faraway kingdom and went back to the kingdom of Uncle Charles where the two girls lived happily unto one day a prince came and fell in love with Drusilla. They were married with great pomp and had two beautiful daughters and Drusilla lived happily ever after, raising her children and weaving beautiful tapestries.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Everybody at the seminar thought that was a fine story. Material objects are an integral part of one’s self-concept, regardless of the orientation of one’s society to socialism or materialism. Thus, your records, your car, some favorite items of clothing, such as an old pair of work pants or a woolly sweater (or Linus’s security blanket), are part of your self. So much are they a part of the self that we hesitate to lean them out, in the same way that we might hesitate to lean our identity to another person. Should your record get damaged, or your car dented, you would be just as upset as if you yourself were wounded. We maintain these objects of self as though they were the self. The list of objects perceived by people as part of the self can be limitless: a camera, pots and pans, home or room, a favorite pen, a violin or saxophone, a guitar, a special book, a special collection of art, or ceramic rhinoceroses, tools, a ring, a watch, a diary, a boat, or a TV. The body is not always an integral part of the self-concept, even though for most people there is probably no more certain object in the self-concept. Plato, for example, describes Socrates’ pleasure at the impending loss of his body. (He was sentenced to death for corrupting the youth.) Socrates sees himself as freed from the heavy burden of the physical self. He sees his “real” self as his soul, which will be freer to function unencumbered by the body. Yet, of course, for most human beings, the body is the central aspect of the self-concept. “How do I look?” we ask our spouse or our roommate or date. We ask asking about our physical appearance. We are worrying over the physical body even more during the present unisex period of our society’s development. Whereas indications from early research indicated more attention paid to the concept of the body by women, this seems to be evening out as, for example, men seek their hair styles rather than barbers. In the twenty-first century, it would require a great commitment to another, more abstract style of life for a person not to see the body as an important part of the self-concept. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
One of the significant differences between the manipulator and the actualizer lies in the way each approached the dimension of time. Past, present, and future exist for both, of course. However, each uses these three aspects of the flow of time in vastly different ways. For the manipulator, past events—real or imagined—conveniently provide excuses for failures. The future (since in one sense it never really arrives) is where manipulators can base their promises. As for the present-oriented manipulators, they talk a lot about what they are doing and may seem to be busy, but in fact they seldom accomplish much of anything. From our studies of the time-orientation of manipulators, we have come to the following conclusions: The past-oriented manipulator is characterized by guilt, regret, remorse, blaming and resentments. He or she never lets go of past hurts, never wipes the slate clean of unhappy memories. Listen to the manipulator, and you will hear such things as: “I feel so bad about what happened to my dad. Life has no meaning for me now.” “If only my parents had encouraged me to stay in college, I’d have my degree now. It’s too late to go back, and it’s all their fault.” “If my wife had only stopped nagging, or if only my husband had paid more attention to me, our marriage would have lasted.” “My boss is completely unreasonable! How does he expect me to do a good job for him?” #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The future-oriented manipulators continually live in a world that does not yet exist. Their days are filled with idealized goals, high expectations, elaborate plans, grandiose predictions—and nagging fears. They are obsessive worriers who project their hopes and anxieties into the future. “Someday I’ll get going and return to school. I’ve got too many responsibilities now.” “You wait and see, I’ll be working here long after those guys are gone.” “I’m so worried about what is going to happen, I just can’t do anything right.” “I promise to do better next time.” Manipulators who are present-oriented are individuals whose past does not contribute to the present in any meaningful way and who have no future goals tied to present activity. They keep feverishly busy, but all their activity is a way to avoid facing themselves. They would say: “I’ve got so many responsibilities right now, I just don’t have time to think.” “I have three children and a spouse to care for, and I don’t have time for myself.” “I’ve made a list of all the things I’m doing today.” Actualizing person, on the other hand, are primarily time-competent. They are concerned with living fully in the present, but use the past and future to make the present more meaningful. They understand that memory and anticipation are acts in the present. The focus, therefore, of the actualizing individual is on the present with and future as background. Past, present, and future are, to the actualizing individual, a gestalt—a whole. It is impossible to see both figures at the same time. One must choose. The actualizer accepts the unchangeable particulars of the past and the indefiniteness of the future, and focuses on the part over which he or she has most power: the reality of the present. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Many unmarried women are deeply ashamed of having a lover, although in their conscious thinking, they are quite unconventional. In the case of such a woman, it is of importance to ascertain first whether her pride is hurt by the lover. If so, has the shame to do with his not being sufficiently glamorous or devoted? With her allowing him to treat her badly? With her being dependent on him? Or does the shame pertain to the fact of having a lover at all, regardless of his status and personality? If so, is it for her a matter of prestige to be married? Is the situation of having a lover, but remaining single, a proof of being unworthy and unattractive? Or should she be above desires for pleasures of the flesh, like a vestal virgin? Often the very same incident may elicit either reaction—that of shame or that of humiliation—the one or the other prevailing. A man is rejected by a girl; he can either feel humiliated by her and react with a, “Who does she think she is?” or her can feel ashamed that his charm or his virility seems not to be compelling. A comment made in a discussion falls flat; he can either feel humiliated by “these darned fools who do not understand me,” or he can feel ashamed of his own awkwardness. Somebody takes advantage of him’ he can either feel humiliated by the exploiter or ashamed of himself for not having asserted his own interests. His children are not brilliant or popular; he can feel humiliated by this fact, and take it out on them, or her can feel with shame that in some way or other, he has failed them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
These observations point to the necessity of reorientating our thinking. We are inclined to put too great an emphasis on the actual situation, and to think that it determines or reactions. If he is caught in a lie, we are inclined, for instance, to regard it as “natural” for a person to react with shame. However, then, the next fellow does not feel that way at all; instead, he feels humiliated by the one who found him out and turns against him. Our reactions are thus determined not merely by the situation but even more by our own neurotic needs. More specifically, the same principle operates in the reaction of shame or humiliation as in the transformation of values. In aggressive expansive types, reactions of shame can be strikingly absent. Even the minute scrutiny of the analytical searchlight may not detect any traces at the beginning. These people who either live so much in the imagination that in their own mind they are without blemish, or they have so covered themselves with a protective layer of militant rightness that everything they do, eo ipso, is right. Injuries to their price can come only from the outside. Any questioning of their motivations, any uncovering of a handicap is felt as an insult. They can but suspect malicious intent in any person who does this to them. In self-effacing types, reactions of humiliation are by far overshadowed by feelings of shame. On the surface, they are subdued and preoccupied with an anxious concern to measure up to their shoulds. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
However, for reasons to be discussed later, they focus rather on their failure to be the ultimate of perfection and hence feel easily ashamed. The analyst can therefore, from the prevalence of one or the other reaction, draw tentative conclusions as to relevant trends in the underlying structure. One of Hegel’s commentators, Alexandre Kojeve, of left-wing tendencies it is true, but orthodox in his opinion on this point, notes Hegel’s hostility to the moralists and remarks that his only axiom is to live according to the manners and customers of one’s nation. A maxim of social conformity of which Hegel, in fact, gave the most cynical proofs. Kojeve adds, however, that this conformity is legitimate only to the extent that the customs of the nation correspond to the spirit of the times—in other words, to the extent that they are solidly established and can resist revolutionary criticism and attacks. However, who will determine their solidity and who will judge their validity? For a hundred years, the capitalist regimes of the West have withstood violent assaults. Should they for that reason be considered legitimate? Inversely, should those who were faithful to the Weimar Republic have abandoned it and pledged themselves to Mr. Hitler in 1933 because the former collapsed when attacked by the latter? Should the Spanish Republic have been betrayed at the exact moment when General Franco’s forces triumphed? These are conclusions that traditional reactionary thought would have justified within its own perspectives. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
The novelty, of which the consequences are incalculable, lies in the fact that revolutionary thought has assimilated them. The suppression of every moral value and of all principles and their replacement by the fact, as provisional but actual king, could only lead, as we have plainly seen, to political cynicism, whether it be fact as envisioned by the individual or, more serious still, fact envisioned by the State. The political movements, or ideologies, inspired by Hegel are all untied in the ostensible abandonment of virtue. Hegel could not, in fact, prevent those who had read him, with feelings of anguish which were far from methodical in a Europe that was already torn asunder by injustice, from finding themselves precipitated into a world without innocence and without principles—into the very world of which Hegel says that it is a sin, since it is separated from the spirit. Hegel, of course, permits the forgiveness of sins at the end of history. Until then, however, every human activity is sinful. “Therefore, only the absence of activity is innocent, the existence of a stone and not even the existence of a child.” Thus, even innocence of stones is unknown to us. Without innocence there are no human relations and no reason. Without reason, there is nothing but naked force, the master and slave waiting for reason one day to prevail. Between master and slave, even suffering is solitary, joy is without foundation, and both are underserved. Then how can one live, how endure life when friendship is reserved for the end of time? The only escape is to create order with the use of weapons. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
“Kill or enslave!”—those who have really considered only the first part of the dilemma. From it they have derived a philosophy of scorn and despair and have deemed themselves slaves and nothing but slaves, bound by death to the absolute Master and by the whip to their terrestrial masters. This philosophy of the guilty conscience has merely taught them that every slave is enslaved only by his own consent, and can be liberated only by an act of protest which coincides with death. Answering the challenge, the most courageous among them have completely identified themselves with this act of protest and have dedicated themselves to death. After all, to say that negation is a positive act justified in advance every kind of negation and predicted the cry of Bakunin and Nechaive: “Our mission is to destroy, not to construct.” A nihilist for Hegel was only a skeptic who had no escape but contradiction or philosophic suicide. However, he himself gave birth to another type of nihilist, who, making boredom into a principle of action, identified suicide with philosophic murder. It was at this point that the terrorists were born who deiced that it was necessary to kill and die in order to exist, because mankind and history could achieve their creation only by sacrifice and murder. The magnificent idea that all idealism is chimerical if it is not paid for by risking one’s life was to be developed to the fullest possible extent by young men who were not engaged in expounding the concept from the safe distance of a university chair before dying in their beds, but among the tumult of falling bombs and even on the gallows. By doing this and even by their errors they corrected their master and demonstrated, contrary to his teaching, that one kind of aristocracy, at least, is superior to the hideous aristocracy of success exalted by Hegel: The aristocracy of sacrifice. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
California is the third most expensive state in the nation. A single person making an income above $100,000 is now consider low-income in five counties in California. This distinction now applies to individuals living in Santa Cruze, Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, and Marin counties. In 37 percent of counties, a family of four living on a six-figure income is now considered low-income. In fact, Governor Gavin Newsom of Democratic controlled California, brags about being the world’s “fifth largest economy,” but it also facing a $12 billion deficit, looking to cut $747 million for state worker’s pay, pushing to keep medical insurance for illegal immigrants, but wants to cut medical for anyone who has assets over $2,000 and the state has the largest homeless population in the nation. If they are all officially counted, California has approximately 4 million homeless people. The highest home prices in the nation, the highest taxes and the most unfriendly business regulations known to man. The average home price in California is nearly $1,000,000.00 USD, while the average salary is $96,036.00, meaning that most Californians cannot even afford to buy a home. California is having an affordability crisis. In 2025, many people in California saw their bills increase by an estimated $500 a month. This includes things like food, automobile insurance, homeowner’s insurance, electricity. In fact, more than 3 million people in California are facing household hardship, and more than 300,000 of them are facing eviction soon. This comes at a time when California is having a shortage of affordable housing. This is caused by nearly half a century’s old laws that discourage homes sales and encourage higher rents. Meanwhile, China, where we are sending all of our jobs and money has more than 50 ghost cities. Ghost cities are regions will housing has been overdeveloped to the point that these places are uninhabited. Because California is so hostile towards people and businesses, more than 360 companies have fled the state since 2020. Businesses like Chevron, SpaceX, Oracle, and Hewlett Packard are amongst the names on that list. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Also, more than 500,000 people a year are abandoning California because it is too expensive to live in, Gavin Newsom has criminalized homelessness and actually started arresting people without homes, crime is out of control, and they are losing their jobs due to companies relocating. More than 100 companies have announced layoffs in California for 2025. Intel is cutting 15,000 jobs, PayPal 2,500 and Meta has terminated 4,000 employees. The California crisis created by Democrats is driving up home prices and mortgages and rents all over the nation and the world, making living unaffordable for all, and advocates say the crisis is far from over. Accordingly, California has more than 3.5 million illegal immigrants. Having the Southern American boarder open and not having American farmland protected, not producing beef, poultry, fish, fruit, produce and dairy in America, and without American goods and services being our number one manufactured and selling items, America has created a dangerous and significantly elevated risks to national security, national economic security, and national public health. Some people may believe that these claims are overstated, but by not routinely monitoring Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CEVs) or other security relevant alerts, such as end-of-life of machinery is how the Oroville Dam Crisis occurred in 2017. Other crises that have occurred due to neglect of critical infrastructure is the 2025 Palisades fires because Southern California ran out of water, when they are located next to an ocean and they could have simply created desalinating plants to help with the water shortage. The water is so plentiful that it is currently eroding land and causing homes to fall into the sea. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
The American government should know all exploitable vulnerabilities and fix them prior to the situation becoming a crisis. Failure to take such mitigating actions is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. The American government must understand that significant time and resources must be invested in America. They must also encourage corporations to plan for both mitigating safety vulnerabilities in the short term and eliminating them in the long term. For instance, a company might begin by reaching out to the federal, state or local government and requesting tax incentives to provide security to dangerous communities, to help the government repair bridges and potholes. America needs an approach to eliminate safety vulnerabilities in American cities. There needs to be a road map by the end of 2025, outlining a prioritized approach to eliminate crisis situations in America. There is enough money to send aid to foreign nations, but the American government does not have enough money to care their infrastructure, provide adequate resources, nor end the affordable housing crisis. Nor is there enough money to fund other national critical functions (NCFs). These bad practices of putting America and Americans last is considered exceptionally risky, particularly to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The maximum percentage of your gross income that you should earmark for a monthly mortgage payment is calculated at 28 percent, and no more than 36 percent of your gross income to all debts, including mortgage. If you take 28 percent of the median household income per home in Sacramento County, homeowners can only afford a mortgage of $2,070.23 per month. And if you take 36 percent of their gross income to all debts, including mortgage, they should be devoting no more than $2,661.72 a month to these debts. Mortgage lenders must be using some kind of sorcery to get buyers into these expensive homes. To afford one of these homes using traditional guidelines, a household would need to gross $11,280.24 per month or $135,362.88 per year, but the median household in Sacramento County is grossing $7,393.67 or $88,724.00 and that typically means two to four people in the home are working and contributing to the mortgage. Prices in Sacramento County are actually rivaling the Bay Area, and the Bay Aera is so expensive because they have more higher paying jobs and is a tourist destination. And with the State of California being in a budget deficit of $12 billion, Governor Gavin Newsom Granted 700,000 illegal immigrants free health care at a cost to taxpayers of $3 billion annually, while cutting vital programs for veterans, school children, the disabled and the homeless, and is proposing to fast-track his plan to build a $20 billion water tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta by eliminating environmental reviews and limit avenues for legal challenges. Gavin Newsom only cares about the environment when his policies allow him to raise taxes and restrict freedoms. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
In fact, Mexico has been causing one of America’s worst environmental disasters. Fifty million gallons a day of industrial chemicals, untreated sewage, and trash flow from Tijuana, Mexico, into southern San Diego County daily. This toxic waste has been turning up on Imperial Beach, and is causing the miles of white sands to become polluted and the ocean breeze to smell of poop, which has been sickening residents and wildlife and costing San Diego millions in the form of lost tourism and health problems. The problem has been going on for more than a century. However, it has become a public health crisis as the population of Tijuana has drastically increased, in recent years, and the waste treatment plants have no longer usable. The beach has been closed for more than three years, and evidence suggests that even breathing the air may be harmful, as toxic particles in the water can become airborne. Yet, even though Gavin Newsom has been governor for six years, he has not rushed into action to stop this very preventable environmental disaster. Why? Because he is not getting kickbacks from China and Mexico, not being gifted mansions and cars, and he cannot tax the struggling California taxpayers to clean up this mess. Simply, it is not profitable for him. Gavin Newsom has been a total tyrant with no regard for taxpayers and does not have a mind for business and should be impeached as soon as possible. He has criminalized poverty, increased taxes, increased tax on gas, and insurance rates so high that people are struggling to survive. In addition to Gavin Newsom’s increased gas prices starting 1 July 2025, the war between Iran and Israel is going to further exacerbate the prices of gas and cause more inflation and economic hardship for people in California. Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom has also given billions of taxpayer dollars away to illegal immigrants and protected them from law enforcement, while arresting law abiding Americans because they cannot afford to pay rent or mortgage and the homeless shelters are unsafe, overcrowded and have restrictions on who is allowed inside. Wars have been started over governments who tax citizens without representation. Taxation without representation is what led to the American Revolution. If Gavin Newsom is not stopped, next he will euthanize the poor and sterilize the disabled. Gavin Newsom has wars and fires breaking out on the streets, but goes out of his way to arrest people who have no place to live. This monster is unfit to be governor and must never be allowed to be President of America! Stop Gavin Newsom now! Save California and impeach this unreasonable man. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Meanwhile, with President Trump, we are seeing crime rates sharply decrease, and he recently secured $10 trillion in investments. Additionally, in May of 2025 the United States of America collected a record $22.3 billion in tariff revenue. President Trump has also been nominated for a Noble Peace Prize for making Iran and Israel crease fire. If elected president for an unprecedented third term, to make housing more affordable and to offset the cost of homeowner’s insurance and auto insurance, President Trump plans to abolish property taxes. Much like the land crisis in Las Vegas, we could also run out of land to farm and will not be able to grow or cultivate our own food. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. Also, country of origin labeling is very important so Americans can know where their food is coming from and have the ability to support American farmers and ranchers. As money flows, it influences further investment. Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. And in the future, there may be food wars. Also, to ensure that we have farmland and buildable land for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a population that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards on pollution. American companies must be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
As you can see, President Donald Trump and his pledge to “Make America Great Again,” is exactly what America needs to save the country and the American people. And yes, diversity is important, so you can see why it is also important to preserve blonde hair and blue eyes as the people with these characteristics are becoming a minority in America. We must think before we can understand the soul’s existence; we must understand before we can realize it. The earliest beginnings of thought, as apart from instinct, when it was itself still but a lurking tendency, belong far back in primeval time. The human intellect as we find it today, so rich and developed an instrument for the consciousness of the ego, did not arrived at this fulness without a series of graduated stages. We have had plenty of scientific thinking, business thinking, and political thinking long enough, but we have had very little inspired thinking. That is the world’s need. The intellect is cradled in selfishness but runs the evolutionary track into reason where it will one day finish at the winning-post of selflessness. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. “Oh, thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand between their loved home and the war’s desolation! Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, and this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’ And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Experience an unforgettable journey back to the time of kings and queens with this entry ticket for The Winchester Mansion in Santa Clara, California which was the residence of Heiress Sarah L. Winchester. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After tour, there will be time enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
We wish to express our gratitude to our families, ancestors, spirits, and friends and to our many associates and clients, whose lives touched our lives and whose ideas helped us to grow. We would also like to thank our employees and care takers for putting the technical ideas of this estate into conversational style, and we are, of course, extremely thank to all of our patrons for helping to keep the legacy of the Winchester Family alive. The Winchester Mystery House is full of surprises. What was your favorite, “Oooh!” moment during your visit at the mansion? (And for those of you who still have to check it off your bucket list… we will hopefully see you soon.) https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Harris Plumbing, Heating, Air, & Electric has been in business for 30 years. How many businesses can say that? We take pride in everything we do – no matter how big or small the service call might be. We’re here to help your home be as safe and comfortable as possible for you and your family. We take that responsibility very seriously as a company. Harris will ensure you have the information you need to decide what to do next, whatever your home is facing. We’ll perform a diagnosis and detail what issues are present before starting any work. This gives you a personalized quote and service plan specific to your home’s needs – not some random quote based on the best guess. The only way we can do our best work is to make sure we handle the issues at hand. https://www.callharrisnow.com/about-us/
BMW continues to dominate the luxury car space. With its top ranking in Consumer Reports’ Auto Brand Report Card and consistent market share growth, BMW has demonstrated its ability to produce high-performing, reliable vehicles that meet consumer demands.
BMW stands out due to its focus on driving dynamics and engineering excellence. While other luxury brands prioritize comfort and opulence, BMW is known for creating cars that are fun to drive and offer a unique connection between the driver and the machine. https://www.brianharrisbmw.com/
Randolph Harris San Francisco Taxation & Mergers
Randy advises clients with regard to business transition, taxable and tax deferred mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, restructuring, integrated tax planning, federal and state tax controversy resolution, and real estate transactions. https://www.jmbm.com/l-randolph-harris.html
Ascent at Montelena
11977 Cobble Brook Drive, Rancho Cordova, California 95742
4 Home Design(s) Available
Experience modern designs and affordability in our upcoming new homes for sale. Ascent at Montelena in Rancho Cordova is near major employers and premier shopping.
- $625,990 Starting From
- 3-7 Bedrooms
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https://www.pulte.com/homes/california/sacramento/rancho-cordova/ascent-at-montelena-210916
I’ve Got a Secret!
According to Dr. Freud, “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” Many of us know the story of Cinderella, and those who do understand she struggled with being a victim of abuse and manipulation, and all most losing the man she loved to her abusers. There are many interesting features in the story of Cinderella. First, the cast is much larger than it appears at first sight. In order of appearance, the persons are as follows: Father, Stepmother, Daughter A, Daughter B, Cinderella, (Mother), Godmother, (Coachman, Footmen), (People at the ball), Prince, King, (Queen), (Guards), A Gentleman, Two Lords. This comprises nine principal characters, a few silent parts, and one-liners, and lots of extras. The most interesting thing about the cast is that almost all of them are crooked. Another feature is the clarity of the switches, which is common to most stories intended for children. Cinderella starts out as an O.K. person, the becomes first a Victim, later a teasing Persecutor, and finally a Rescuer. The stepmother and her daughters are changed from Persecutors into Victims, much more so in the German “Ashenputtel” version, where the two stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to make the slipper fit. The story also introduces the other two classical roles, as found in the “Alcoholic” game. The connection in this case is played by the godmother, who supplies Cinderella with what she needs, while the Patsies are the lord who were chosen to marry the wicked sisters. #RandolphHarris 1 of 28
Let us now consider the scripts of the people involved. It takes a little time to realize how many of the characters have their scripts revealed in this apparently simple tale. 1. Cinderella. She has a happy childhood, but then must suffer until a certain event happens. The crucial scenes, however, are times structured: she can enjoy herself as much as she pleases until the stroke of midnight, and then she must return to her former state. Cinderella apparently avoided the temptation to play, “Ain’t it Awful,” even with her father, and is simply a melancholy, forlorn figure until the action begins with the ball. Then she plays, “Try and Catch Me” with the Prunce, and later, with a scripty smile, “I’ve Got a Secret” with her sisters. The climax comes with a smashing game of, “Now She Tells Us,” as Cinderella, with a teasing laugh, gets the payoff for the winning script. 2. Father. Father’s script calls for him to lose his first wife and then cast off his daughter and marry a bossy (and presumably frigid) woman who will make him and her suffer. However, he has a trick up his sleeve, as we shall soon see. 3. Stepmother. She has a loser’s script. She, too, plays, “Now She Tells Me,” seducing the fathers into marrying her and then revealing her true, wicked self immediately after the wedding. She lives through her daughters, and hopes to get a princely payoff for them from her mean behavior, but ends up the loser. #RandolphHarris 2 of 28
The Stepsisters. Their counterscripts are based on their mother’s precept, “Take care of yourself first and do not give a sucker an even break,” but the outcome is based on the injunction “Do not succeed.” Since that is also the script injunction for their mother, it was evidently transmitted from their grandparents. They play a hard game of “Schlemiel,” first getting Cinderella (or Cinderarse, as they called her) thoroughly messed up, and then apologizing and obtaining her forgiveness. Godmother. She is the most interesting of all the characters. What were her motives in outfitting Cinderella for the ball? Why did she not just have a nice talk with her and comfort her, instead of sending her out into all the glitter? The situation was that stepmother and stepsisters were gone for the evening, and only Cinderella and her father were left in the house. Why was godmother so anxious to get rid of Cinderella? What was going on “back at the ranch,” where godmother and father were alone for the evening, while everyone else was away at the ball? Her telling Cinderella not to stay after midnight was a good way to insure that she would be then first to get home. This avoided the risk of the other females finding godmother there, since Cinderella’s approach gave her waring to take off in good time. From a cynical point of view, the whole story sounds like a setup to allow father and godmother to spend the evening together. #RandolphHarris 3 of 28
The Prince. The Prince was a jerk, and no doubt got what he deserved after he was married. He lets the girl get away twice in a row without getting any clue as to her identity. Then, he is unable to catch her in a foot race, even though she is limping along with only one shoe. Instead of finding her himself, he sends a friend to do the job for him. Finally, he marries this girl of dubious upbringing and questionable family less than a week after he meets her. Despite the superficial impression that he wins her, all this points to a loser’s script. 7. The King. The King has an eye for the girls, and is a bit of a blabbermouth. Nor does he protect his son from his own impulsiveness. 8. The Gentleman. He is the straightest of all the characters in the story. Instead of being sloppy or supercilious, and laughing at Cinderella, as her sisters were going to do, he gets his job done with a fine sense of justice. Nor does he run off with Cinderella himself, as a lesser man might have done, but brings her safely to his employer. He is honest, efficient, and conscientious. 9. The two lords, of course, are patsies to allow themselves to be married off to two very uncool girls, whom they know nothing about, having only met them on their wedding day. The important thing is that all these characters can be picked out in real life. Here, for example, is the story of Cinderella. #RandolphHarris 4 of 28
Ella’s parents got divorced when she was little, and she stayed with her mother. Shortly afterward, her father remarried. He had two daughters by his second wife, who was jealous of Ella when she came to visit, and begrudged the money her father sent for her support. A few years later, her mother also remarried, and then Ella had to go live with her father because her mother and new stepfather were more interested in drinking than in taking care of her. Ella was not at all happy in her new home because her stepmother made it clear that she did not like her, and her father did little to protect her. She always had the last choice in everything, and her sisters teased her. She grew up very shy and had few dates when she was a teenager, while her sister led an active social life in which she was not invited to share. Ella had one advantage, however. She knew something the other did not know. Her father had a mistress, a divorcee named Linda, with a majestic and ultra exclusive BMW Speed Top automobile, who wore very expensive hippie-type necklaces. Ella and Linda secretly became good friends, and used to have long talks about their problems with dad. In fact, Linda gave Ella advice about many different things, and was like a godmother to her. She was particularly concerned because Ella did not have much of a social life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 28
One afternoon Linda said: “Your mother is away, and your sisters are going out on dates, so why do you not go out, too? It is no fun sitting at home all by yourself. I will lend you my car and some clothes, and you can go to the Rock-and-Roll Ballroom where there are lots of boys you can meet. Come over to my place about six and we will eat and I will fix you up.” Ella figured Linda and her father were going to spend the evening together, and she agreed. Linda thought Ella looked very nice all dressed up. “Do not hurry back,” she said, as she handed Ella the keys to her beautiful car. At the dance, Ella met a nice boy named Roland, and started to go out with him. However, a poor guitar-player friend of his was much more interested in Ella than he was, and soon she was going out secretly with Prince, the guitar-player. She did not want Prince to call at her house because she knew her mother would not approve of his unkempt appearance, so Roland would come pick her up with his date and then they would meet Prince and the four of them would go somewhere together. Meanwhile, her father and stepmother and sisters thought she was dating Roland, and Ella and he had lots of fun over that. Prince was not poor. He came from a well-to-do family and had a good education, but he wanted to make it on his own as an entertainer. He began to get more and more famous. #RandolphHarris 6 of 28
After he was well known, he and Ella decided to tell her family the real story before they found out from someone else. It came as a complete surprise to her siters, who adored Prince’s records, and they were very jealous when Ella announced that she had won such a rich prize for a husband. However, she did not bear them any grudge for their ill-treatment, and often got them free tickets to Prince’s concerts. She even introduced them to some of his square friends. As followers of Jesus Christ, we should live peacefully with others who do not share our values or accept the teachings upon which they are based. In the concluding days of His mortal ministry, Jesus gave His disciples what He called, “a new commandment,” reports John 13.34. Repeated three times, that commandment was simple but difficult: “Love one another, as I have loved you,” reports John 15.12. The teaching to love one another had been a central teaching of the Savior’s ministry. One which Cinderella did master. The second great commandment was “love thy neighbour as thyself,” reports Matthew 22.39. Jesus even taught, “Love your enemies,” reports Matthew 5.44. However, the commandment to love others as He had loved His flock was to His disciples—and is to us—a challenge that was unique. Love is the very essence of the gospel and Jesus Christ is our Exemplar. His life was a legacy of love. Cinderella certain understood the gospel and practiced it in her life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 28
Why is it so difficult to have Christlike love for one another? It is difficult because we must live among those who do not share our beliefs and values and covenant obligations. In His great Intercessory Prayer, offered just before His Crucifixion, Jesus Christ prayed for His followers: “I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world,” reports John 17.14. Then, to the Father He pleaded, “I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil,” reports John 17.15. We are to live in the World but not be of the world. We must live in the world because, as Jesus Christ taught in a parable, His kingdom is ” like leaven,” whose function is to raise the whole mass by its influence (see Luke 13.21; Matthew 13.33; see also 1 Corinthians 5.6-8). If they associate only with those who share their values, His followers cannot do that. However, the important message is not to be influenced by people whose way are not godly. Therefore, if you are not strong enough to withstand peer pressure, stay away from those who might lead you astray from the ways of the Lord. If we love Him, the Savior taught the we will Keep his commandments (see John14.15). Even as we seek to be meek and to avoid contention, we must not compromise or dilute out commitment to the truths we understand. We must not surrender our positions or our values. Jesus Christ and the covenants we have made inevitably cast us as combatants in the eternal contest between truth and error. There is no middle ground in that contest. #RandolphHarris 8 of 28
Hegel affirms that in so far as death is the common ground of man and animal, it is by accepting death and even by inviting it that the former differentiates himself from the latter. At the heart of this primordial struggle for recognition, man is thus identified with violent death. The mystic slogan “Die and become what you are” is taken up once more by Hegel, But, “Become what you are” gives place to “Become what you so far are not.” This primitive and passionate desire for recognition, which is confused with the will to exist, can be satisfied only by a recognition of all by all, which will mark the termination of history. The existence that Hegelian consciousness seeks to obtain is born in the hard-won glory of collective approval. It is not beside the point to note that, in the thought which will inspire our revolutions, the supreme good does not coincide with existence, but with an arbitrary facsimile. The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power. It is, in its essence, imperialist. We are far from the gentle savage of the eighteenth century and from the Social Contact. In the sound and fury of the passing centuries, each separate consciousness, to ensure its own existence, must henceforth desire the death of others. Moreover, this relentless tragedy is absurd, since, in the event of one consciousness being bestowed, the victorious consciousness is not recognized as such, in that it cannot be victorious in the eyes of something that no longer exists. In fact, it is there the philosophy of appearances reaches its limits. #RandolphHarris 9 of 28
No human reality would therefore have been engendered, if, thanks to a propensity that can be considered fortunate for Hegel’s system, there had not existed, from the beginning of time, two kinds of consciousness, one of which has not the courage to renounce life and is therefore willing to recognize the other kind of consciousness without being recognized itself in return. It consents, in short, to being considered as an object. This type of consciousness, which, to preserve its animal existence, renounces independent life, is the consciousness of the slave. The type of consciousness which by being recognized achieves independence is that of the master. They are distinguished one from the other at the moment when they clash and when one submits to the other. The dilemma at this stage is not to be free or to die, but to kill or to enslave. This dilemma will resound throughout the course of history, though at this moment its absurdity has not yet been resolved. In contrast, a core relationship is contact between two individuals who express and reveal themselves to each other openly and honestly, appreciating and accepting each other as they truly are and trusting in the abilities and goodwill of each other. A core relationship can be longstanding—a husband and wife, a parent and child, close friends, business partners—or it can be briefer and more casual—a clerk at the supermarket and a customer, co-workers, parents of children who play together. Any possible encounter between two people can have the characteristic of a core relationship. #RandolphHarris 10 of 28
Have you ever met someone, had a conversation, then moved on, probably never to see that person again, but you felt good about yourself and about that person? Felt that you had received something wonderful and had given something wonderful? If so, you have had a core-to-core relationship, however brief, with another individual. One or both of you revealed yourselves honestly and openly, appreciated and accepted each other as you truly are, and trusted each other’s abilities and goodwill. By comparison, superficial relationships can be found as readily in longstanding contacts—such as with husbands and wives, parents, and children—as in more casual interactions. The characteristics of superficial relationships are unawareness, control, deception, distrust, criticism, and petty competitiveness. Manipulators take a lot of time and expend a great deal of energy on superficial relationships. They cultivate them, make them happen. And when they go home at night, they are too tired even to be civil to those they should be closest to, their families. We believe that core-to-core relationships do not always take time and energy, but that they do take the willingness to be aware, honest, trusting, accepting, and appreciative. The enhancement of self and others in such relationships is beyond measure. When all is said and done, the home is the ideal forum for teaching the gospel of Jesus Christ. The scripture speak of the role of parents—that it is their duty to teach their children, “the doctrine of repentance, faith in Christ the Son of the living God, and of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 68.25. #RandolphHarris 11 of 28
The success of the gospel cannot—and should not—be attributed solely to its undeniable capacity to titillate the imagination. It also signals the existence of a widespread need for information, an understandable and almost insatiable public curiosity about the varies of expression, a subject, which recently is being locked away in a shroud by public censorship. With the public abandonment of prescribed rules based on a theological concept of virtue and sin, everyone is now forced to seek out the gospel or to fashion a private set of moral and ethical values which, it is hoped, will sustain him over the years. If unable to achieve an effectively life by basing his conduct on the commandments of the Word, he must sift through words by millions in newspapers, magazines, and books, seeking some insight into his own nature. He must learn to distinguish fact from fiction, blueprint from daydream, reason from rationalization. This is difficult to do when society no longer honors God and His choice land of America. This brings into play a fundamental paradox. The pleasure of being alive depends to a considerable degree on an individual’s ability to include both the unknown and to have the security of the known to give him the confidence he needs to try something different than he has attempted in the past. We want precise understanding and exact description of every science and do not abandon our demand even when the more delicate matter of a method of spiritual illumination is in question. “The humility which can say, “I do not know” is a first step to the confidence which can day, “This is a fact.” If they begin to question, deeply question, then even the simplest statement brings them into difficulties whose existence, previously, they had never suspected. #RandolphHarris 12 of 28
Men learn best because they concentrate best in a quiet, unruffled atmosphere. This requires a secluded site, tall buildings, and high enclosing walls, peaceful laws, and tree-bordered walks. Most Western people dislike abstract generalities: They prefer concrete facts. They believe in first appearances rather than in second views. Against such a tendency truth must struggle bravely for survival. If Westerns were more balanced, they would realize they could keep their facts and their first views—nobody asks them to disregard the practical and the apparent—but they could also have the abstract and the long view, thus achieving balance, and with it, truth. The dept and width of his research must equal the depth and width of his reflection. Where are the answers to men’s questions? He must elicit them for himself one by one. There is little harm in putting into the mind ideas above its level. At worst, they may bore it, but at best they might expand it. Quite often, when a truth or a judgment is carried to extremes, it loses some, or much, or all its validity. If we have sought for truth in directions which have yielded negative results, it is time to take a new direction. A man whose cultural rise has depended upon self-education alone deserves praise and admiration for his effort. Nevertheless, he would have done better to seek also a formal education. This would complete and elevate what he has learnt by himself by providing him with higher standards, competent instruction, and well-tested knowledge or by affording personal help with questions, uncertainty, and problems. #RandolphHarris 13 of 28
He must be frank with himself and know what he does not understand and what he does and not accept mere opinion for solid fact. It may be hard, a rough stony obstructed path, for the common man to find his way into philosophy, but the tension is well worthwhile. He must expand his mind, but there are moments of relief, of joyful discovery, or encouraging perception. Before you can get clear expression of meaning, you must get a clear mind. You must nurture a tendency toward sharply defined thoughts and exactitude of understanding. You must give definite shape to the inchoate ideas which float through your mind like clouds, and thus arrive at complete possession of your subject. Wherever they are shown to be out of harmony with the facts of life, ee will not consciously refuse to readjust his views. If such questions have never entered their minds, it is hardly likely that the answers completely will. Correct thinking may annihilate superstitions and uncover deceptions, but unbalanced thinking may create new ones. The mind needs a long training in truthful thinking into which the ego does not obtrude itself before the hidden reality begins to respond. This uprooting of old familiar but fallacious beliefs discourages some person but encourages others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 28
Public safety and emergency preparedness is essential. The award-winning Sacramento Fire Department must have sufficient trained personnel available to respond to a fire at any hour of the day, every day of the year. Staffing issues affect all fire departments—career departments, combination departments, and other essential departments. It is especially important to ensure that enough responders are always available, particularly during the day. In the past, when many worked in or near the communities where they lived the fire department’s response time was not an issue. Today, however, many people have super commutes and work longer hours, so the number of people available to respond during the day may be limited. Many fire departments, however, have full-time fire fighters during daytime hours to ensure sufficient personnel are available to respond to an incident. In 1992, Congress created the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation to lead a nationwide effort to remember the U.S. fallen fire fighters. In the years since then, this foundation has expanded its programs to sponsor the annual National Fallen Firefighters Memorial Weekend, offer support programs for family members and other survivors, award scholarships to fire service members’ survivors, and work to prevent line-of-duty injuries and deaths. Safety is the highest priority. Ensuring a safe working environment for the members of the fire service is undertaken by several professional organizations and various regulation, standards, and procedures. #RandolphHarris 15 of 28
Effective organization requires both leaders and followers. In the Sacramento Fire Department, fast and effective decision making requires leadership and teamwork. When fighting a fire, there can be no hesitation about who is leading and who is following. Rank takes away guesswork about who oversees what, so leaders and other team members can do their jobs. In fact, it is there the philosophy of appearances reaches its limits. The disciplined exercise of the Sacramento Fire Department’s exercise of customers and courtesies is a clear indicator of the morale and leadership of that organization. It also indicates their ability to function under stress as a team of professionals bound by a warrior ethos and mutual respect. “Being with the Sacramento Fire Department has changed my life. I’m a little more committed to helping people. It’s good being in the fire department, it makes you more responsible. I really never thought I would be a family person, but I am now. A lot has to do with the fire department. You’re always training, so your mind is steadily working. It’s not like a dead end. You’ve always got to move forward and take one day at a time. If an accident happens, we have to respond to it, make sure everybody is all right, and do everything we can. If people are upset, you try to calm them down. The job makes you take charge of things. #RandolphHarris 16 of 28
“This one guy I know was disturbed because his lieutenant had gotten killed, and he felt guilty about it. He asked me what did I do to get over it. My heart went out to him. I told him I really did not do anything, but my family was behind me, and the guys that I work with were behind me 100 percent. But I got the impression that his guys kind of dogged him and blamed him, like he didn’t wait and he didn’t do enough to save the lieutenant. He was totally upset. I told him that in my case I felt I did everything I could, but there wasn’t much I could have done. So I told him he shouldn’t take that weight on himself. When the guys you work with don’t believe in you, that could be a problem. Being a survivor, I don’t know if God was telling me to ‘change your life, young man.’ I have changed, I’ve mellowed. He’s been excellent to me, God has. That’s why I’m here now.” The ordinary man makes a hasty judgement of the matter, or follows his personal wishes, but truth requires a deep well-considered examination. If the capacity to comprehend philosophy is not inborn, then it can be slowly acquired by anyone who thinks it worth the effort. If so many seekers do not find truth pure and unadulterated, but only its impure adulterated variety, it is because their way has been blocked by self-serving partisans interested only in triumph for their own group, position, or argument, their own prejudice, attraction, or bias. Discovery of truth requires not only a willingness to take in the facts which serve one side of a case, but also to refrain from ignoring or belittling those which serve the other side. It is not in an atmosphere of favouritism or hostility that truth appears, but in a deep calm bereft of egoistic urges. This is why some sort of preparation for it is necessary, some kind of training. #RandolphHarris 17 of 28
If you see a fire truck stopped in the street without the lights on, be very careful. Sometimes there is an emergency and you should not pass the fire truck. It might be a good idea to safely turn around and go another way because if you hit someone and they happen to die, you could be charged with manslaughter. Sometimes fire fighters are getting back into their vehicle and if you pass the apparatus, you may collide with a firefighter who is on foot. Also, be sure to look at their signals, sometimes emergency vehicles are in motions, albeit, slowly, and drivers try to pass them, and this could lead to a dangerous situation. Also, if you are in an intersection when you see an emergency vehicle, continue through the intersection. Drive to the right as soon as it is safe and stop. Obey any direction, order, or signal given by a law enforcement officer, or a firefighter. Even if they conflict with existing signs, signals, or laws, follow their orders. When their siren or flashing lights are on, it is against the law to follow within 300 feet of any fire engine, law enforcement vehicle, ambulance, or other emergency vehicle. If you drive to the scene of a fire, collision, or other disaster, you can be arrested. When you do this, you are getting in the way of firefighters, ambulance crews, or other rescue and emergency personnel. The concept of professional courage does not always mean being as tough as nails, either. It also suggests a willingness to listen to other peoples’ problems, to go to bat for them in a tough situation and it means knowing just how far they can go. It also means being willing to tell the boss when he or she is wrong. #RandolphHarris 18 of 28
California is the third most expensive state in the nation. A single person making an income above $100,000 is now consider low-income in five counties in California. This distinction now applies to individuals living in Santa Cruze, Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, and Marin counties. In 37 percent of counties, a family of four living on a six-figure income is now considered low-income. In fact, Governor Gavin Newsom of Democratic controlled California, brags about being the world’s “fifth largest economy,” but it also facing a $12 billion deficit, looking to cut $747 million for state worker’s pay, pushing to keep medical insurance for illegal immigrants, but wants to cut medical for anyone who has assets over $2,000 and the state has the largest homeless population in the nation. If they are all officially counted, California has approximately 4 million homeless people. The highest home prices in the nation, the highest taxes and the most unfriendly business regulations known to man. The average home price in California is nearly $1,000,000.00 USD, while the average salary is $96,036.00, meaning that most Californians cannot even afford to buy a home. California is having an affordability crisis. In 2025, many people in California saw their bills increase by an estimated $500 a month. This includes things like food, automobile insurance, homeowner’s insurance, electricity. In fact, more than 3 million people in California are facing household hardship, and more than 300,000 of them are facing eviction soon. This comes at a time when California is having a shortage of affordable housing. This is caused by nearly half a century’s old laws that discourage homes sales and encourage higher rents. Meanwhile, China, where we are sending all of our jobs and money has more than 50 ghost cities. Ghost cities are regions will housing has been overdeveloped to the point that these places are uninhabited. Because California is so hostile towards people and businesses, more than 360 companies have fled the state since 2020. Businesses like Chevron, SpaceX, Oracle, and Hewlett Packard are amongst the names on that list. #RandolphHarris 19 of 28
Also, more than 500,000 people a year are abandoning California because it is too expensive to live in, Gavin Newsom has criminalized homelessness and actually started arresting people without homes, crime is out of control, and they are losing their jobs due to companies relocating. More than 100 companies have announced layoffs in California for 2025. Intel is cutting 15,000 jobs, PayPal 2,500 and Meta has terminated 4,000 employees. The California crisis created by Democrats is driving up home prices and mortgages and rents all over the nation and the world, making living unaffordable for all, and advocates say the crisis is far from over. Accordingly, California has more than 3.5 million illegal immigrants. Having the Southern American boarder open and not having American farmland protected, not producing beef, poultry, fish, fruit, produce and dairy in America, and without American goods and services being our number one manufactured and selling items, America has created a dangerous and significantly elevated risks to national security, national economic security, and national public health. Some people may believe that these claims are overstated, but by not routinely monitoring Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CEVs) or other security relevant alerts, such as end-of-life of machinery is how the Oroville Dam Crisis occurred in 2017. Other crises that have occurred due to neglect of critical infrastructure is the 2025 Palisades fires because Southern California ran out of water, when they are located next to an ocean and they could have simply created desalinating plants to help with the water shortage. The water is so plentiful that it is currently eroding land and causing homes to fall into the sea. #RandolphHarris 20 of 28
The American government should know all exploitable vulnerabilities and fix them prior to the situation becoming a crisis. Failure to take such mitigating actions is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. The American government must understand that significant time and resources must be invested in America. They must also encourage corporations to plan for both mitigating safety vulnerabilities in the short term and eliminating them in the long term. For instance, a company might begin by reaching out to the federal, state or local government and requesting tax incentives to provide security to dangerous communities, to help the government repair bridges and potholes. America needs an approach to eliminate safety vulnerabilities in American cities. There needs to be a road map by the end of 2025, outlining a prioritized approach to eliminate crisis situations in America. There is enough money to send aid to foreign nations, but the American government does not have enough money to care their infrastructure, provide adequate resources, nor end the affordable housing crisis. Nor is there enough money to fund other national critical functions (NCFs). These bad practices of putting America and Americans last is considered exceptionally risky, particularly to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. #RandolphHarris 21 of 28
The American government should know all exploitable vulnerabilities and fix them prior to the situation becoming a crisis. Failure to take such mitigating actions is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. The American government must understand that significant time and resources must be invested in America. They must also encourage corporations to plan for both mitigating safety vulnerabilities in the short term and eliminating them in the long term. For instance, a company might begin by reaching out to the federal, state or local government and requesting tax incentives to provide security to dangerous communities, to help the government repair bridges and potholes. America needs an approach to eliminate safety vulnerabilities in American cities. There needs to be a road map by the end of 2025, outlining a prioritized approach to eliminate crisis situations in America. There is enough money to send aid to foreign nations, but the American government does not have enough money to care their infrastructure, provide adequate resources, nor end the affordable housing crisis. Nor is there enough money to fund other national critical functions (NCFs). These bad practices of putting America and Americans last is considered exceptionally risky, particularly to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. #RandolphHarris 22 of 28
Additionally, with inflation rates at an all-time high, American being in an unofficial recession for about a decade, all insurance in California is becoming unaffordable. State Farm has received an approval for an emergency rate increase, which was approved by the California Insurance Commissioner, to stabilize the market and protect policyholders. Starting 1 June 2025, homeowners will see an average of 17 percent increase, rental dwellings will see an increase of 38 percent, and Condo owners will see a rate increase of 15 percents. These rate increases are due to the distressed caused by the recent wildfires, which accumulated over $7 billion in claims. Furthermore, in 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1107, also known as the Protection California Drivers Act, into law which increases the minimum auto lability limits for bodily injury to $30,000 per person and $60,000 per accident. Senate Bill 1107 also increased the minimum liability limits for property damage to $15,000 per accident and the DMV deposit for uninsured drivers to $75,000. The bill went into effect on January 1, 2025. This means that drivers with existing policies with lower limits will renew at the new minimum limits on or after January 1, 2025, and insurance premiums could increase by as much as 54 percent. America is in a state of crisis right now because of mismanagement by democrats. With the median household income in Sacramento County being $88,724 and a 4-bedroom 2.5-bathroom Cresleigh home costing $798,059, how are people able to afford homes? Because an $800,000 home with a one percent downpayment of $8,000, 30-year fixed loan at 4.176 percent interest comes with a monthly mortgage payment of $4,241. #RandolphHarris 23 of 28
The maximum percentage of your gross income that you should earmark for a monthly mortgage payment is calculated at 28 percent, and no more than 36 percent of your gross income to all debts, including mortgage. If you take 28 percent of the median household income per home in Sacramento County, homeowners can only afford a mortgage of $2,070.23 per month. And if you take 36 percent of their gross income to all debts, including mortgage, they should be devoting no more than $2,661.72 a month to these debts. Mortgage lenders must be using some kind of sorcery to get buyers into these expensive homes. To afford one of these homes using traditional guidelines, a household would need to gross $11,280.24 per month or $135,362.88 per year, but the median household in Sacramento County is grossing $7,393.67 or $88,724.00 and that typically means two to four people in the home are working and contributing to the mortgage. Prices in Sacramento County are actually rivaling the Bay Area, and the Bay Aera is so expensive because they have more higher paying jobs and is a tourist destination. And with the State of California being in a budget deficit of $12 billion, Governor Gavin Newsom Granted 700,000 illegal immigrants free health care at a cost to taxpayers of $3 billion annually, while cutting vital programs for veterans, school children, the disabled and the homeless, and is proposing to fast-track his plan to build a $20 billion water tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta by eliminating environmental reviews and limit avenues for legal challenges. Gavin Newsom only cares about the environment when his policies allow him to raise taxes and restrict freedoms. #RandolphHarris 24 of 28
In fact, Mexico has been causing one of America’s worst environmental disasters. Fifty million gallon a day of industrial chemicals, untreated sewage, and trash flow from Tijuana, Mexico, into southern San Diego County daily. This toxic waste has been turning up on Imperial Beach, and is causing the miles of white sands to become polluted and the ocean breeze to smell of poop, which has been sickening residents and wildlife and costing San Diego millions in the form of lost tourism and health problems. The problem has been going on for more than a century. However, it has become a public health crisis as the population of Tijuana has drastically increased, in recent years, and the waste treatment plants have no longer usable. The beach has been closed for more than three years, and evidence suggests that even breathing the air may be harmful, as toxic particles in the water can become airborne. Yet, even though Gavin Newsom has been governor for six years, he has not rushed into action to stop this very preventable environmental disaster. Why? Because he is not getting kickbacks from China and Mexico, not being gifted mansions and cars, and he cannot tax the struggling California taxpayers to clean up this mess. Simply, it is not profitable for him. Gavin Newsom has been a total tyrant with no regard for taxpayers and does not have a mind for business and should be impeached as soon as possible. He has criminalized poverty, increased taxes and insurance rates so high that people are struggling to survive and has given billions of taxpayer dollars away to illegal immigrants and protected them from law enforcement, while arresting law abiding Americans because they cannot afford to pay rent or mortgage and the homeless shelters are unsafe, overcrowded and have restrictions on who is allowed inside. Wars have been started over governments who tax citizens without representation. Taxation without representation is what led to the American Revolution. If Gavin Newsom is not stopped, next he will euthanize the poor and sterilize the disabled. This monster is unfit to be governor and must never be allowed to be President of America! Stop Gavin Newsom now! Save California and impeach this unreasonable man. #RandolphHarris 25 of 28
Meanwhile, with President Trump, we are seeing crime rates sharply decrease, and he recently secured $10 trillion in investments. Additionally, in May of 2025m the United States of America collected a record $22.3 billion in tariff revenue. If elected president for an unprecedented third term, to make housing more affordable and to offset the cost of homeowner’s insurance and auto insurance, President Trump plans to abolish property taxes. Much like the land crisis in Las Vegas, we could also run out of land to farm and will not be able to grow or cultivate our own food. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. Also, country of origin labeling is very important so Americans can know where their food is coming from and have the ability to support American farmers and ranchers. As money flows, it influences further investment. Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. And in the future, there may be food wars. Also, to ensure that we have farmland and buildable land for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a population that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. #RandolphHarris 26 of 28
When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards on pollution. American companies must be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. #RandolphHarris 27 of 28
As you can see, President Donald Trump and his pledge to “Make America Great Again,” is exactly what America needs to save the country and the American people. And yes, diversity is important, so you can see why it is also important to preserve blonde hair and blue eyes as the people with these characteristics are becoming a minority in America. We must think before we can understand the soul’s existence; we must understand before we can realize it. The earliest beginnings of thought, as apart from instinct, when it was itself still but a lurking tendency, belong far back in primeval time. The human intellect as we find it today, so rich and developed an instrument for the consciousness of the ego, did not arrived at this fulness without a series of graduated stages. We have had plenty of scientific thinking, business thinking, and political thinking long enough, but we have had very little inspired thinking. That is the world’s need. The intellect is cradled in selfishness but runs the evolutionary track into reason where it will one day finish at the winning-post of selflessness. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. “Oh, thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand between their loved home and the war’s desolation! Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, and this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’ And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” #RandolphHarris 28 of 28
Experience an unforgettable journey back to the time of kings and queens with this entry ticket for The Winchester Mansion in Santa Clara, California which was the residence of Heiress Sarah L. Winchester. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After tour, there will be time enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
We wish to express our gratitude to our families, ancestors, spirits, and friends and to our many associates and clients, whose lives touched our lives and whose ideas helped us to grow. We would also like to thank our employees and care takers for putting the technical ideas of this estate into conversational style, and we are, of course, extremely thank to all of our patrons for helping to keep the legacy of the Winchester Family alive. The Winchester Mystery House is full of surprises. What was your favorite, “Oooh!” moment during your visit at the mansion? (And for those of you who still have to check it off your bucket list… we will hopefully see you soon.) https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Harris Plumbing, Heating, Air, & Electric has been in business for 30 years. How many businesses can say that? We take pride in everything we do – no matter how big or small the service call might be. We’re here to help your home be as safe and comfortable as possible for you and your family. We take that responsibility very seriously as a company. Harris will ensure you have the information you need to decide what to do next, whatever your home is facing. We’ll perform a diagnosis and detail what issues are present before starting any work. This gives you a personalized quote and service plan specific to your home’s needs – not some random quote based on the best guess. The only way we can do our best work is to make sure we handle the issues at hand. https://www.callharrisnow.com/about-us/
BMW continues to dominate the luxury car space. With its top ranking in Consumer Reports’ Auto Brand Report Card and consistent market share growth, BMW has demonstrated its ability to produce high-performing, reliable vehicles that meet consumer demands.
BMW stands out due to its focus on driving dynamics and engineering excellence. While other luxury brands prioritize comfort and opulence, BMW is known for creating cars that are fun to drive and offer a unique connection between the driver and the machine. https://www.brianharrisbmw.com/
Randolph Harris San Francisco Taxation & Mergers
Randy advises clients with regard to business transition, taxable and tax deferred mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, restructuring, integrated tax planning, federal and state tax controversy resolution, and real estate transactions. https://www.jmbm.com/l-randolph-harris.html
Cresleigh Bluffs at Plumas Ranch
Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $400’s
Now Selling!
Welcome to Cresleigh Bluffs, the newest home community in Plumas Ranch!
Nestled in the heart of Plumas Lake, CA, Cresleigh Bluffs offers three distinct single story floor plans designed with efficiency and practicality in mind.
Home design is made easy with expertly crafted design packages exclusive to Cresleigh Bluffs. Choose from a variety of packages made to fit your taste and budget. Contact our dedicated sales associates to learn more. PlumasRanch@cresleigh.com
Sign up for our interest list today to stay up to date on community information. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-bluffs-at-plumas-ranch/move-in-ready-homesite-2/
The Little Glass Slipper—To Thyself be Enough!
According to Dr. Freud, “The founder of civilization was the first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone.” For the script analyst, the story of Cinderella has everything. It includes a large variety of interlocking scripts, innumerable nooks, and crannies where delightful new discoveries can be made, and millions of real-life counterparts for every role. Cinderella in this country usually means, “The Little Glass Slipper.” This is a translation of the French version of Charles Samber in 1729. In his dedication to the Countess of Granville, Mr. Samber makes it clear that he understands very well the scripty influence of such stories. He says that Plato “desires Children might suck in those Fables with their Milk, and recommends it to Nurses to teach them to ‘em.” Perrault’s Morals to the tale of “Cinderilla” were, of course, Parental Precepts. “But that thing, which we call good grace, exceeds by far a handsome face; its charms by far surpass the other, and this was what her good Godmother bestow’d on Cinderella fair, whom she instructed with such care, and gave her such a graceful mien, that she became thereby a Queen.” The last three lines describe the Parental pattern which Cinderella received from her godmother. If the child is ever to amount to anything, Perrault also draws a second moral, which stresses the need for permission. #RandolphHarris 1 of 33
“A great advantage ‘tis, no doubt, to man, to have wit, courage, birth, good sense and brain…but none of these rich graces from above, in your advancement in the world will prove of any use, if Godsires make delay, or Godmothers your merit to display.” Mr. Samber’s translation was slightly changed by Andre Lang for his Blue Fairy Book, which is one of the most popular fairytale books read to and by children, and that is whence they get their first picture of Cinderella. In this kindly French version, Cinderella forgives her two stepsisters, and finds rich husbands for them. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which are also very popular in this country, contains the German version, called “Ashenputtel.” This is a bloody tale ending with the sisters’ eyes being systematically pecked out by doves. Cinderella stories are found in many other nations. With this background, we are ready to consider a Martian view of Cinderella, patterned after Perrault, which is the version most English-speaking children have in mind, and discuss the various scripts involved, many of which will be easily recognizable in real life. What Martian and real life tell us, as in the case of Little Red Riding Hood, is something very important: what happens to the characters after the book story ends. #RandolphHarris 2 of 33
According to Perrault, there was once upon a time a gentleman who married for his second wife a widow, the proudest and most haughty woman that ever was known. (No doubt, as is usually the case with such brides, she was also frigid.) She had two daughters who were exactly like her in all things. He also had a daughter by his first wife who was good and sweet, which she took from her mother, who was the best creature in the world. As soon as the wedding was over, the stepmother began to treat Cinderella most cruelly. She could not bear the qualities of this pretty girl because they made her own daughters so much the more hated and despised. The poor girl bore all patiently, and dared not tell her father, who would have rattled her off, for his wife governed him entirely. When the girl had done her work, she used to go into the chimney corner and sit down upon the cinders, so they called her Cinderarse, or, more politely, Cinderella. Now it happened that the King’s son gave a ball, and invited all persons of quality to it, including the two sisters. Cinderella helped them to do their hair and get dressed. Meanwhile, they teased her because she was not invited, and she agreed that such a glamorous occasion was not for the likes of her. After they left, she started to cry. However, her fairy godmother came along and promised that she should go, too. She instructed Cinderella: “Go into the garden and bring me a pumpkin.” She then scooped out the pumpkin and turned it into a golden coach. There were mice for horses, a rat for a fat jolly coachman with fine whiskers, and lizards for footmen. Cinderella got a fine dress to wear, and jewels, and little glass slippers. Her godmother warned her not to stay at the ball after the clock struck twelve. #RandolphHarris 3 of 33
Cinderella made a sensation at the dance. The Prince gave her the most honorable place, and the King himself, old as he was, could not help looking at her, and whispering about her to the Queen. At a quarter to twelve, she left. When her sisters came home, she pretended that she had been asleep. They told her about the beautiful strange Princess. Cinderella smiled, and said: “Oh, she must be very handsome indeed. How I would like to see her! Lend me some of your clothes, so I can go there tomorrow night.” However, they said they would not lend their clothes to such a Cinderarse, and Cinderella was glad, because she would not have known what to do if they had agreed. The next night, Cinderella was having such a good time that she forgot to leave until the clock started to strike twelve. As soon as she heard it, she jumped up and fled, nimble as a deer. The Prince chased her, but he could not catch hold of her, even though in her haste, she lost one of her glass slippers, which the Prince took up very carefully. A few days later, the Prince caused it to be proclaimed, by sound of trumpet, that he would marry her whose foot this slipper would just fit. He sent men around to try the slipper on all the women in the kingdom. After the two sisters had tried to thrust their feet into it without success, Cinderella, who knew the slipper, said laughing: “Let me try it.” Her sisters laughed, too, and began to make fun of her. #RandolphHarris 4 of 33
The gentleman who was sent to try the slipper said that he had orders to let every body do so. He told Cinderella to sit down, and found that the slipper fitted her as if it had been made of wax. The astonishment her two sisters were in was very great; but much greater when Cinderella pulled out of her pocket the other slipper and put it upon her foot. Then her godmother came in, and with her wand changed Cinderella’s clothes into rich and magnificent garments. When they saw that she was the beautiful Princess, the two sisters threw themselves at her feet and said: “Sorry,” whereupon Cinderella embraced them and forgave them. Then she was taken to the Prince, and a few days later, her married her. Cinderella gave her two sisters lodgings in the palace, and married them the same day to two great lords of the court. As with Cinderella’s forgiveness to her sisters, this is an actualizing relationship. An actualizing relationship between two people takes place when one person relates to another core-to-core. By “core,” we mean the one’s inner range of potentials. This inner core may also be called one’s real self. Through expressing a variety of passive and active potentials, such as caring and assertiveness, actualizers open paths for the spontaneous “understanding” of themselves and others. Very good friends, as we know, are said to communicate sensitivity to each other. This is contact. If their relationship is core-to-core, a wife may communicate with her husband with as little as a smile or a sigh. #RandolphHarris 5 of 33
Cinderella, being a good Mormon, knew her sisters did not understand what they were doing and that she should show them the love of God. To forgive is a divine attribute. It is to pardon or excuse someone from blame for an offense or misdeed. The scriptures refer to forgives in two ways. The Lord commands us to repent of our sins and seek His forgiveness. He also commands us to forgive those who offend or hurt us. “The Lord is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression,” reports Numbers 14.18. Contact is shown as the touching of two inner cores of actualizing potentials, which we call core-to-core contact. In contrast, manipulation is shown as distant interaction between the outer rings, the surface of each personality. This we call role-to-role manipulation. The manipulative relationship is not intimate, but distant. Contact is a form of loving or trusting another person in a relationship of closeness. Manipulation is a relationship of distance, a withdrawal to less personal or intense forms of communication. Core-to-core contact is based on the truth of each self, whereas role-to-role manipulation is based to some extent on deceit and mistrust. Daniel Defoe’s novel Moll Flanders provides an extreme example of role-to-role manipulation. It seems that Moll, the impoverished heroine of the novel, wishes to contact a man of wealth, any man of wealth, for the purpose of matrimony. To attract such a man, she plays, of course, the role of a wealthy young woman. It seems that a young man, currently out of funds, wishes to contact a woman of wealth, also for the purpose of matrimony. He plays the role of a wealthy young man. You guessed it. They find each other and marry, each certain the other can pay the debts they incurred in creating their wealthy roles. Each is justifiably disillusioned. #RandolphHarris 6 of 33
Core-to-core contact is not a permanent state. Indeed, it is a fragile thing to be developed at each meeting between two individuals. It develops when at least one of the persons can be freely expressive rather than calculatedly impressive—honestly expressive of self rather than deceitful. It also facilitated when at least one of the parties is willing to really listen to the other person and to respond to the other person’s statements and feelings accurately. In a way, being real is catching. If you can present yourself wholly, with both your strengths and weaknesses, with both your assertiveness and lovability, you will in time be able to break down the guardedness, defensiveness, and deceit of the other person. You will have begun to create the fertile ground for a truly core-to-core relationship. However, a core-to-core relationship is not easy to sustain. Manipulators fear vulnerability, fear being exposed or judged. They are afraid that sustained contact with another will reveal a dimension of themselves that they have so far denied or refused to see. True personal contact involves emotional risk. However, the manipulator chooses to avoid risk by attempting to control those around him or her. Consider the case of a father and his fourteen-year-old daughter, discussing whether she can go on a chaperoned, co-ed weekend camping trip. “Now way will I allow you to go!” says the father. “I won’t permit it!” “But, Dad, I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks,” his daughter says. #RandolphHarris 7 of 33
“Absolutely not!” repeats the father, exerting dominance. He avoids saying what is really on his mind: his concern that the girl will experiment with pleasures of the flesh during the weekend. In his zeal to be a good, competent father, which he secretly fears he is not, he resorts to controlling rather than contacting. His wife, having overhead the argument and intuitively sensing his unspoken concern, later tells him, “You needn’t worry that she’ll get into trouble. If you would let yourself be closer to her, you’d know that; you’d know the kind young woman she is.” At this point, the conversation might open a vital and valuable discussion between the parents, for this father truly wants to be closer to his daughter. The trouble is that he is afraid of expressing that sense of caring. There can be many reasons for his fear. Perhaps—to cite one possibility—he was so controlled as a child by his mother that he draws away from the risk of closeness with any woman, or with women in general. All the man can do, then, is turn the charge back upon his wife, shouting: “You’re the one who’s not close to her!” Rather than get into a core-to-core conversation about his feelings, which might reveal his fear of caring for his daughter, the father changes the topic. To avoid a discussion of feelings, he diverts the conversation to a safely “intellectual” topic: “Her school grades are not that great, you know. She could use this weekend to stay home and study.” Instead of trying to see the situation from the girl’s point of view, the man denies his core-caring as he might express it were he able to be in contact with her. #RandolphHarris 8 of 33
Consider the bank loan officer. She felt so insecure about her competence that she hid behind a persona of officiousness and super-efficiency. No one could get close to her. If they thought they would have to deal with her and her cold, controlled manner, customers, no matter how desperate for a loan, would delay applying. One day, however, she felt so overwhelmed with paperwork and so isolated that she uttered the unspeakable to a customer: “I can’t seem to get on top of anything today. I’ll probably be here until midnight, trying to catch up.” To her surprise, the customer smiled at her and said, “Gee. I know what you mean. I’ve been feeling that way, too. Only it’s going to take me about a year!” The barrier dropped, and the two women were able to chat amiably. Risking being herself brought the loan officers an unexpected response. Instead of being judged, as she had feared, she was understood. And her customers felt understood as well. A short, but real, core-to-core contact was made. Manipulators must control everything—themselves, others, even conversations. They choose the topics. They evaluate rather than appreciate. They try to convince others, rather than exchange ideas with others. Or they limit themselves to safe “small talk.” In many people, generalities such as the weather might be a prelude to contact, but in manipulators, often, they are only a means of avoiding personal contact. #RandolphHarris 9 of 33
There are several ways to seek to control communication. By denying that he is communicating. “I think you should apologize to him, but it is not my place to tell you.” (He has said it but at the same time denies that he has.) By denying the message itself. “Oh, forget it; I guess it wasn’t important.” Or she insists the message is misunderstood: “You did not get the point.” By denying that the message is communicated to another person. “I was just talking to myself…just thinking out loud…” By denying the context or situation. “You always make fun of men” (referring to the past)/ “You will think that I am silly” (referring to the future). In both examples, he avoids dealing with the person now. Peer Gynt may serve as a famous illustration from literature. He does not make much of his existing assets, his great intelligence, the spirit of adventure, and vitality. However, he is proud of the one thing he is not, “of being himself,” Actually, he is—in his mind—not himself but his idealized self, with unlimited “freedom” and unlimited powers. (He has lifted his boundless egocentricity to the dignity of a life philosophy with his maxim “To thyself be true,” which—as Ibsen points out—is a glorification of “To thyself be enough.” There are many Peer Gynts among our patients, anxious to preserve their illustrations of being a saint, a mastermind, of having absolute poise, etcetera; and they feel as if they would lose their “individuality” if they budged an inch from these estimates of themselves. #RandolphHarris 10 of 33
Imagination itself may become of supreme value, regardless of the use to which it is put, since it allows its bearer to look down with contempt on the drab and pedestrian people who are concerned with truth. The patient of course would not say “truth” but would speak in vague terms of “reality.” One patient for instance, whose claims were so grandiose as to expect the world to be at his service, at first took a clear stand toward this claim, calling it absurd and even degrading. However, the next day he had retrieved his pride: the claims were now a “magnificent mental creation.” The true meaning of irrational claims had submerged and pride in imagination was triumphant. More frequently, pride is not specifically attached to imagination but to all mental processes: intellect, reason, and will power as well. The infinite powers the neurotic ascribes to himself are, after all, powers of the mind. No wonder, then, that he is fascinated by it and proud of it. The idealized image is a product of his imagination. However, this is not something that is created overnight. Incessant work of intellect and imagination, most of it unconscious, goes into maintaining the private fictious world through rationalizations, justifications, externalizations, reconciling irreconcilables—in short, through finding ways to make things appear different from what they are. The more a person is alienated from himself, the more his mind becomes a supreme reality. (“A person has no existence apart from my thought: I have no existence apart from my thought.”) Like the Lady of Shalott, he cannot see the reality directly but only through a mirror. #RandolphHarris 11 of 33
More accurately: he sees in the mirror only his thoughts about the world and himself. This is why the pride in intellect, or rather in the supremacy of the mind, is not restricted to those engaged in intellectual pursuits but is a regular occurrence in all neurosis. Pride also is invested in faculties and prerogatives to which the neurotic feels entitled. Thus, he may be proud of an illusive invulnerability which, on the physical plane, means never to incur illness or any physical damage and, on the psychic side never to feel hurt. Another may be proud of good luck, of being the “darling of the gods.” It is a matter of pride then not to fall ill in a malaria district, to win in gambling, or to have fair weather for an excursion. It is indeed a matter of pride in all neuroses to asset one’s claims effectively. If they can manipulate others into lending them money, running their errands, giving them medical treatment without charge, those who feel entitled to get something for nothing, feel proud of being granted “snow flake rights.” If a protégé of their does not follow a piece of advice immediately, or if he does something on his own initiative without having asked their advice first, those feeling entitled to manage other people’s lives, experience is as a blow to their pride. Still, some feel entitled to exoneration as soon as they indicate that they are in some distress. If they can elicit sympathy and forgiveness and they feel offended, if the other person remains critical, they are proud. #RandolphHarris 12 of 33
The neurotic’s pride in measuring up to this inner dictate may on the surface look more substantial, but it is in fact just as rickety as other kinds of pride since it is inevitably interwoven with pretenses. The mother who is proud of being the perfect mother usually is so in her imagination only. The person who is proud of his unique honesty may not tell obvious lies but is usually pervaded by unconscious and semiconscious dishonesties. Those who are proud of their unselfishness may not be openly demanding but will impose upon others through their helplessness and suffering, besides mistaking their taboos on shoulds themselves may have a merely subjective merit in that they serve neurotic purposes but no objective value. Thus, for instance, the neurotic purposes but no objective value. Thus, for instance, the neurotic may be proud of not asking and not accepting any help even though it would be more sensible to do so—a problem well known in social work. Some may be proud of driving a hard bargain, others of never bargaining at all—depending on whether they must always be on the winning side or should never be out for their own advantage. Lastly, it may be merely the very loftiness and severity of the compulsive standards that are invested with pride. The fact of knowing “the good” and “the evil” makes them godlike, just as the serpent promised it would to Adam and Eve. #RandolphHarris 13 of 33
A neurotic person’s very high standards make him feel that he is a moral wonder to be proud of, regardless of how he is and behaves. He may have recognized in analysis his ravaging hunger for prestige, his poor sense of truth, his vindictiveness; but all of that does not make him any humbler or make him feel any less a superior moral being. To him, these actual flaws do not count. His pride is not in being moral, but in knowing how he should be. Even though temporarily, he may have recognized the futility of his self-reproaches, or even at times, have been terrified at their viciousness, he still may not relent in his demands on self. If he suffers, what does it matter, after all? Is not his suffering another proof of his superior moral sensibilities? Hence, to sustain this pride seems worth the price. It is not enough to be a collector of other men’s ideas. He must also be an original generator of his own. He must go into the pure silence to think independently, to analyze problems and consider them for himself, and to pray for enlightenment. Unless one is prepared to part with a wrong habit of thinking, unless one is willing to eradicate all limited conceptions which blur clear-sightedness, unless, in short, one is willing to reorient the mental outlook completely, it will never be possible to penetrate the world illusion. The student of philosophy must enforce in his own mind the clear difference between views based on wishful thinking, and views based on adequate knowledge and comprehensive understanding. #RandolphHarris 14 of 33
Before it can search for truth, the mind must be set free: otherwise, it merely seeks either the confirmation or rejection of previously held ideas, systems, opinions, and creeds. It is not enough to express your willingness to learn. You must also be willing to unlearn. It his possible, and must become his object, to develop a completely impartial intellect. It is one thing to have caught a vague notion in the mind, and another to think it out and make it intelligible. The philosophical student, having thoroughly scrutinized the bases of his outlook and attitude, reveals his wisdom and humility by confessing ignorance where he cannot claim knowledge. It is then always possible for him to learn something here. However, the undeveloped or undisciplined mind is not ashamed to make a pretense of knowledge where, in fact, there is none. It is too much to expect that his mind can understand what is quite beyond it; but when repeated, the effort tends to “stretch” the mind’s capacity. It is not enough to acknowledge his misjudgments. He ought also to enquire into the defective qualities which led him into making them. The father he travels from egocentric existence, the clearer and straighter will be his thinking. If the man who utters it is only half-literate, if his statement is ungrammatical, his words are mispronounced, and his voice stutters irritatingly, be willing to accept a truth. If the truth is expressed impeccably and enriched by a fine culture, it is usually more enjoyable, however. #RandolphHarris 15 of 33
Animals, according to Hegel, have an immediate knowledge of the exterior world, a perception of the self, but not the knowledge of self, which distinguishes man. The latter is only really born now when he becomes aware of himself as a rational being. Therefore, his essential characteristic is self-consciousness. Consciousness of self, to be affirmed, must distinguish itself from what it is not. Man is a creature who, to affirm his existence and his difference, denies. What distinguishes consciousness of self from the world of nature is not the simple act of contemplation by which it identifies itself with the exterior world and finds oblivion, but the desire it can feel regarding the world. This desire re-establishes its identity when it demonstrates that the exterior world consists of what it does not possess, but which nevertheless exists, and of what it would like to exist but which no longer does. Consciousness of self is, therefore, of necessity, desire. However, to exist, it must be satisfied, and it can only be satisfied by the gratification of its desire. It, therefore, acts to gratify itself and, in so doing, it denies and suppresses its means of gratification. It is the epitome of negation. To act is to destroy to give birth to the spiritual reality of consciousness. However, to destroy an object unconsciously, as meat is destroyed, for example, in the act of eating, is a purely animal activity. To consumer is not yet to become conscious. #RandolphHarris 16 of 33
Desire for consciousness must be directed toward something other than unconscious nature. The only thing in the world that is distinct from nature is, precisely, self-consciousness. Therefore, desire must be centered upon another form of desire; self-consciousness must be gratified by another form of self-consciousness. If he limits himself to subsisting like an animal, man is not recognized—and does not recognize himself—as a man. He must be acknowledged by other men. All consciousness is, basically, the desire to be recognized and proclaimed as such by other consciousnesses. It is others who beget us. Only in association do we receive a human value, as distinct from an animal. In that the supreme value for the animal is the preservation of life, consciousness should raise itself above the level of that instinct, to achieve human value. It should be capable of risking its life. To be recognized by another consciousness, man should be ready to risk his life and to accept the chance of death. Fundamental human relations are thus relations of pure prestige, a perpetual struggle, to the death, for recognition of one human being by another. The man who puts up a barrier of egoistic prejudices or superiority complexes cannot hope to penetrate the secret circle of truth-knowing. Only he who is ready, tentatively, to shift his intellectual standpoint for that of another is at all likely to be admitted into the sacred treasure house of wisdom. We must now shelve a single fundamental but awkward question. The sanctity of truth is inviolable. #RandolphHarris 17 of 33
The award-winning Sacramento Fire Department must be able to identify hazards and understand how to rectify those hazards. Many fire departments offer to conduct fire and life safety surveys in private dwellings. These surveys identify fire and life safety hazards and provide the occupants with recommendations on how to make their home safer. During a fire and life safety, the Sacramento Fire Department is on the lookout for potential fire hazards and nonfire safety hazards. Poisoning, slip and fall hazards, drownings, burns, and toppling furniture are all common causes of injuries in the home. Simple precautions can prevent some of these emergencies: Pools must be properly enclosed. Furniture, televisions, and appliances must be properly secured to prevent tip overs. Medicines and chemicals must be stored properly where children and pets cannot access them. Stairs and balconies should have handrails and guards. Domestic hot water temperature should not exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49 degrees Celsius. During the survey, fire fighters will point out hazards, explain the reasons for making recommendations, and answer any questions the occupants may have. They always look for fire protection equipment, such as smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, and fire extinguishers. Fire fighters will make sure that there are working smoke alarms on each floor, in the corridor outside each sleeping area, and in each bedroom. Some fire departments install one or more some alarms at no cost in any dwelling that lacks this important protection. Their goal is to educate the occupant about common fire hazards. #RandolphHarris 18 of 33
The Sacramento Fire Department will stress the importance of keeping ignition sources away from combustible materials and keeping bedroom doors closed to limit fire growth and spread. It is especially important for them to discuss the risk of children playing with lighters and matches, leaving food cooking on the stove unattended, and storing combustibles such as towels, potholders, and cooking oils too close to the stove. Many fires have resulted from someone inadvertently turning on the wrong burner and igniting something that was left on the stovetop. Everything in the kitchen should be equipped with an ABC-rated fire extinguisher. If the room contains a fireplace, a wood stove, or a portable heater, ensure that no combustible materials are stored nearby. A fireplace should have a screen to keep sparks and hot embers from escaping. If solid fuels are used, the chimney or flue pipe should be professionally inspected at least once a year. It is also important for home occupants to keep up good housekeeping and to clear junk out of garages, basements, and storage areas. Furnaces and water heaters that operate with an open flame are often located in a basement or garage; they can ignite flammable materials that are stored too close to them. Storage of gasoline and other flammable substances is a major concern because an open flame or pilot light can easily ignite flammable vapors. Gasoline and other flammable liquids should be stored only in approved containers and in outside storage areas or outbuildings. Propane tanks, such as those used in gas grills, should also be store outside or in outbuildings. Small quantities of flammable and combustible liquids (such as paint, thinners, varnishes, and cleaning fluids) should be stored in closed metal containers away from heat sources. Oily or greasy rags should also be stored in closed metal containers. It is recommended that homeowners maintain fully charged fire extinguishers in basements and garages. #RandolphHarris 19 of 33
Furthermore, it is generally not safe to smoke cigarettes or marijuana in the garage. Secondhand smoke exposure: Garages, even with the door open, may not be adequately ventilated. Secondhand smoke contains harmful chemicals that can affect anyone present, including children. Carbon monoxide risk: Burning cigarettes produce carbon monoxide, a colorless, odorless, and potentially deadly gas. While a single cigarette is unlikely to cause immediate danger, smoking repeatedly or for prolonged periods in a poorly ventilated space could lead to carbon monoxide buildup. Fire hazard: Garages often contain flammable materials like gasoline, paint, solvents, and chemicals. Smoking increases the risk of igniting these materials, leading to a fire. Smoking materials (like marijuana or cigarettes) are a leading cause of residential fires. And it is absolutely not safe to store gasoline without a cap in your garage because gasoline is highly flammable: both the liquid and its vapors are easily ignited. Vapors are dangerous: gasoline vapors are heavier than air and can travel along the floor, accumulating in low areas like a garage. Evaporation and deterioration: leaving the container open allows the gasoline to evaporate, losing its volatile components and becoming less effective. It also increases the risk of water contamination. Health hazards: exposure to gasoline fumes can also pose health risks. #RandolphHarris 20 of 33
The Four Tenets of the Warrior Ethos: always place the mission first. Never accept defeat. Never quit. Never leave a fallen member of the fire department. While all citizens hold beliefs and values that bring our nation together, the Sacramento fire fighters, paramedics, and EMTs must take action to protect the nation. The four tenets of the Warrior Ethos provide the motivation for that action, motivation built on comradeship that the Warrior Ethos creates. Because of that comradeship, members of the Sacramento Fire Department sever for each other, as well as for the nation and for their beliefs. Time and again you see that members of the Sacramento Fire Department would rather die than let their community and the nation down. It is their job as leaders to ensure that their unit has the final ingredients necessary for victory. They train and lead their team to become a competent, confident, flexible, and adaptable team—a team imbued with the Warrior Ethos. The Warrior Ethos is the Sacramento Fire Department’s commitment to overcome all obstacles. It reflects a selfless dedication to the nation, mission, unit, and their fellow team members. They develop and maintain this attitude through discipline, rigorous training, learning, and embodying the award-winning values of the Sacramento Fire Department, and recognizing that as a fire fighter, paramedic, or EMT, they represent the future of Sacramento’s proud heritage. “As to the danger, I believe that when it’s your time to go, it’s your time go. I’m not looking forward to the day I’m gone, but just lived day to day. I don’t dwell on the possibility of this happening, because it breaks your concentration. If you start worrying about every job you go on, you clutter your mind and you cloud your thinking. #RandolphHarris 21 of 33
You just have to say, ‘I’m going in there to do my job, and I’m going from this point to that point, and I have these things to do.’ You have to keep your priorities in order, you know what you have to do, you know what the goal is, and just work to complete that goal. Then afterwards you can say, ‘That building was shaky, or that fire was really coming up our backs.’ I mean, you can think about the dangers afterwards, but you can’t let that stuff cloud your thinking. You have to understand that they are there, and you’ve got to be aware of them. You can’t get careless or reckless, you have to be aware of what’s going on around you at all times. But don’t be so aware of them that you’re going to worry anout something that really isn’t something to worry about. You just go in, do what you have to do, and you’re done. I live one day at a time, stay in top health, and do it as it comes along. Firefighting is a business like any other business, it’s a career for me. The only thing to do now is to eventually move up the ladder, advancing to different positions—lieutenant, captain, whatever—set my wheels in motion for my future. I could stay a firefighter with the Sacramento Fire Department for my whole career, there’s nothing wrong with that. I could be content with that. I’ll plan my future as I move along.” If it is not to degenerate into mere mental effervescence, thinking must move at every step with rigid rationality. #RandolphHarris 22 of 33
If you see a fire truck stopped in the street without the lights on, be very careful. Sometimes there is an emergency situation and you should not pass the fire truck. It might be a good idea to safely turn around and go another way. Sometimes fire fighters are getting back into their vehicle and if you pass the apparatus, you may collide with a firefighter who is on foot. Also, be sure to look at their signals, sometimes emergency vehicles are in motions, albeit, slowly, and drivers try to pass them, and this could lead to a dangerous situation. Also, if you are in an intersection when you see an emergency vehicle, continue through the intersection. Drive to the right as soon as it is safe and stop. Obey any direction, order, or signal given by a law enforcement officer, or a firefighter. Even if they conflict with existing signs, signals, or laws, follow their orders. When their siren or flashing lights are on, it is against the law to follow within 300 feet of any fire engine, law enforcement vehicle, ambulance, or other emergency vehicle. If you drive to the scene of a fire, collision, or other disaster, you can be arrested. When you do this, you are getting in the way of firefighters, ambulance crews, or other rescue and emergency personnel. The concept of professional courage does not always mean being as tough as nails, either. It also suggests a willingness to listen to other peoples’ problems, to go to bat for them in a tough situation and it means knowing just how far they can go. It also means being willing to tell the boss when he or she is wrong. #RandolphHarris 23 of 33
California is the third most expensive state in the nation. A single person making an income above $100,000 is now consider low-income in five counties in California. This distinction now applies to individuals living in Santa Cruze, Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, and Marin counties. In 37 percent of counties, a family of four living on a six-figure income is now considered low-income. In fact, Governor Gavin Newsom of Democratic controlled California, brags about being the world’s “fifth largest economy,” but it also facing a $12 billion deficit, looking to cut $747 million for state worker’s pay, pushing to keep medical insurance for illegal immigrants, but wants to cut medical for anyone who has assets over $2,000 and the state has the largest homeless population in the nation. If they are all officially counted, California has approximately 4 million homeless people. The highest home prices in the nation, the highest taxes and the most unfriendly business regulations known to man. The average home price in California is nearly $1,000,000.00 USD, while the average salary is $96,036.00, meaning that most Californians cannot even afford to buy a home. California is having an affordability crisis. In 2025, many people in California saw their bills increase by an estimated $500 a month. This includes things like food, automobile insurance, homeowner’s insurance, electricity. In fact, more than 3 million people in California are facing household hardship, and more than 300,000 of them are facing eviction soon. This comes at a time when California is having a shortage of affordable housing. This is caused by nearly half a century’s old laws that discourage homes sales and encourage higher rents. Meanwhile, China, where we are sending all of our jobs and money has more than 50 ghost cities. Ghost cities are regions will housing has been overdeveloped to the point that these places are uninhabited. Because California is so hostile towards people and businesses, more than 360 companies have fled the state since 2020. Businesses like Chevron, SpaceX, Oracle, and Hewlett Packard are amongst the names on that list. #RandolphHarris 24 of 33
Also, more than 500,000 people a year are abandoning California because it is too expensive to live in, Gavin Newsom has criminalized homelessness and actually started arresting people without homes, crime is out of control, and they are losing their jobs due to companies relocating. More than 100 companies have announced layoffs in California for 2025. Intel is cutting 15,000 jobs, PayPal 2,500 and Meta has terminated 4,000 employees. The California crisis created by Democrats is driving up home prices and mortgages and rents all over the nation and the world, making living unaffordable for all, and advocates say the crisis is far from over. Accordingly, California has more than 3.5 million illegal immigrants. Having the Southern American boarder open and not having American farmland protected, not producing beef, poultry, fish, fruit, produce and dairy in America, and without American goods and services being our number one manufactured and selling items, America has created a dangerous and significantly elevated risks to national security, national economic security, and national public health. Some people may believe that these claims are overstated, but by not routinely monitoring Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CEVs) or other security relevant alerts, such as end-of-life of machinery is how the Oroville Dam Crisis occurred in 2017. Other crises that have occurred due to neglect of critical infrastructure is the 2025 Palisades fires because Southern California ran out of water, when they are located next to an ocean and they could have simply created desalinating plants to help with the water shortage. The water is so plentiful that it is currently eroding land and causing homes to fall into the sea. #RandolphHarris 25 of 33
The American government should know all exploitable vulnerabilities and fix them prior to the situation becoming a crisis. Failure to take such mitigating actions is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. The American government must understand that significant time and resources must be invested in America. They must also encourage corporations to plan for both mitigating safety vulnerabilities in the short term and eliminating them in the long term. For instance, a company might begin by reaching out to the federal, state or local government and requesting tax incentives to provide security to dangerous communities, to help the government repair bridges and potholes. America needs an approach to eliminate safety vulnerabilities in American cities. There needs to be a road map by the end of 2025, outlining a prioritized approach to eliminate crisis situations in America. There is enough money to send aid to foreign nations, but the American government does not have enough money to care their infrastructure, provide adequate resources, nor end the affordable housing crisis. Nor is there enough money to fund other national critical functions (NCFs). These bad practices of putting America and Americans last is considered exceptionally risky, particularly to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. #RandolphHarris 26 of 33
The American government should know all exploitable vulnerabilities and fix them prior to the situation becoming a crisis. Failure to take such mitigating actions is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. The American government must understand that significant time and resources must be invested in America. They must also encourage corporations to plan for both mitigating safety vulnerabilities in the short term and eliminating them in the long term. For instance, a company might begin by reaching out to the federal, state or local government and requesting tax incentives to provide security to dangerous communities, to help the government repair bridges and potholes. America needs an approach to eliminate safety vulnerabilities in American cities. There needs to be a road map by the end of 2025, outlining a prioritized approach to eliminate crisis situations in America. There is enough money to send aid to foreign nations, but the American government does not have enough money to care their infrastructure, provide adequate resources, nor end the affordable housing crisis. Nor is there enough money to fund other national critical functions (NCFs). These bad practices of putting America and Americans last is considered exceptionally risky, particularly to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. #RandolphHarris 27 of 33
Additionally, with inflation rates at an all-time high, American being in an unofficial recession for about a decade, all insurance in California is becoming unaffordable. State Farm has received an approval for an emergency rate increase, which was approved by the California Insurance Commissioner, to stabilize the market and protect policyholders. Starting 1 June 2025, homeowners will see an average of 17 percent increase, rental dwellings will see an increase of 38 percent, and Condo owners will see a rate increase of 15 percent. These rate increases are due to the distressed caused by the recent wildfires, which accumulated over $7 billion in claims. Furthermore, in 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1107, also known as the Protection California Drivers Act, into law which increases the minimum auto lability limits for bodily injury to $30,000 per person and $60,000 per accident. Senate Bill 1107 also increased the minimum liability limits for property damage to $15,000 per accident and the DMV deposit for uninsured drivers to $75,000. The bill went into effect on January 1, 2025. This means that drivers with existing policies with lower limits will renew at the new minimum limits on or after January 1, 2025, and insurance premiums could increase by as much as 54 percent. America is in a state of crisis right now because of mismanagement by democrats. With the median household income in Sacramento County being $88,724 and a 4-bedroom 2.5-bathroom Cresleigh home costing $798,059, how are people able to afford homes? Because an $800,000 home with a one percent downpayment of $8,000, 30-year fixed loan at 4.176 percent interest comes with a monthly mortgage payment of $4,241. #RandolphHarris 28 of 33
The maximum percentage of your gross income that you should earmark for a monthly mortgage payment is calculated at 28 percent, and no more than 36 percent of your gross income to all debts, including mortgage. If you take 28 percent of the median household income per home in Sacramento County, homeowners can only afford a mortgage of $2,070.23 per month. And if you take 36 percent of their gross income to all debts, including mortgage, they should be devoting no more than $2,661.72 a month to these debts. Mortgage lenders must be using some kind of sorcery to get buyers into these expensive homes. To afford one of these homes using traditional guidelines, a household would need to gross $11,280.24 per month or $135,362.88 per year, but the median household in Sacramento County is grossing $7,393.67 or $88,724.00 and that typically means two to four people in the home are working and contributing to the mortgage. Prices in Sacramento County are actually rivaling the Bay Area, and the Bay Aera is so expensive because they have more higher paying jobs and is a tourist destination. And with the State of California being in a budget deficit of $12 billion, Governor Gavin Newsom Granted 700,000 illegal immigrants free health care at a cost to taxpayers of $3 billion annually, while cutting vital programs for veterans, school children, the disabled and the homeless, and is proposing to fast-track his plan to build a $20 billion water tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta by eliminating environmental reviews and limit avenues for legal challenges. Gavin Newsom only cares about the environment when his policies allow him to raise taxes and restrict freedoms. #RandolphHarris 29 of 33
In fact, Mexico has been causing one of America’s worst environmental disasters. Fifty million gallon a day of industrial chemicals, untreated sewage, and trash flow from Tijuana, Mexico, into southern San Diego County daily. This toxic waste has been turning up on Imperial Beach, and is causing the miles of white sands to become polluted and the ocean breeze to smell of poop, which has been sickening residents and wildlife and costing San Diego millions in the form of lost tourism and health problems. The problem has been going on for more than a century. However, it has become a public health crisis as the population of Tijuana has drastically increased, in recent years, and the waste treatment plants have no longer usable. The beach has been closed for more than three years, and evidence suggests that even breathing the air may be harmful, as toxic particles in the water can become airborne. Yet, even though Gavin Newsom has been governor for six years, he has not rushed into action to stop this very preventable environmental disaster. Why? Because he is not getting kickbacks from China and Mexico, not being gifted mansions and cars, and he cannot tax the struggling California taxpayers to clean up this mess. Simply, it is not profitable for him. Gavin Newsom has been a total tyrant with no regard for taxpayers and does not have a mind for business and should be impeached as soon as possible. He has criminalized poverty, increased taxes and insurance rates so high that people are struggling to survive and has given billions of taxpayer dollars away to illegal immigrants and protected them from law enforcement, while arresting law abiding Americans because they cannot afford to pay rent or mortgage and the homeless shelters are unsafe, overcrowded and have restrictions on who is allowed inside. Wars have been started over governments who tax citizens without representation. Taxation without representation is what led to the American Revolution. If Gavin Newsom is not stopped, next he will euthanize the poor and sterilize the disabled. This monster is unfit to be governor and must never be allowed to be President of America! Stop Gavin Newsom now! Save California and impeach this unreasonable man. #RandolphHarris 30 of 33
Meanwhile, with President Trump, we are seeing crime rates sharply decrease, and he recently secured $10 trillion in investments. If elected president for an unprecedented third term, to make housing more affordable and to offset the cost of homeowner’s insurance and auto insurance, President Trump plans to abolish property taxes. Much like the land crisis in Las Vegas, we could also run out of land to farm and will not be able to grow or cultivate our own food. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. Also, country of origin labeling is very important so Americans can know where their food is coming from and have the ability to support American farmers and ranchers. As money flows, it influences further investment. Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. And in the future, there may be food wars. Also, to ensure that we have farmland and buildable land for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a population that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. #RandolphHarris 31 of 33
When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. #RandolphHarris 32 of 33
As you can see, President Donald Trump and his pledge to “Make America Great Again,” is exactly what America needs to save the country and the American people. And yes, diversity is important, so you can see why it is also important to preserve blonde hair and blue eyes as the people with these characteristics are becoming a minority in America. We must think before we can understand the soul’s existence; we must understand before we can realize it. The earliest beginnings of thought, as apart from instinct, when it was itself still but a lurking tendency, belong far back in primeval time. The human intellect as we find it today, so rich and developed an instrument for the consciousness of the ego, did not arrived at this fulness without a series of graduated stages. We have had plenty of scientific thinking, business thinking, and political thinking long enough, but we have had very little inspired thinking. That is the world’s need. The intellect is cradled in selfishness but runs the evolutionary track into reason where it will one day finish at the winning-post of selflessness. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. “Oh, thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand between their loved home and the war’s desolation! Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, and this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’ And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” #RandolphHarris 33 of 33
Experience an unforgettable journey back to the time of kings and queens with this entry ticket for The Winchester Mansion in Santa Clara, California which was the residence of Heiress Sarah L. Winchester. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After tour, there will be time enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
We wish to express our gratitude to our families, ancestors, spirits, and friends and to our many associates and clients, whose lives touched our lives and whose ideas helped us to grow. We would also like to thank our employees and care takers for putting the technical ideas of this estate into conversational style, and we are, of course, extremely thank to all of our patrons for helping to keep the legacy of the Winchester Family alive. The Winchester Mystery House is full of surprises. What was your favorite, “Oooh!” moment during your visit at the mansion? (And for those of you who still have to check it off your bucket list… we will hopefully see you soon.) https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Harris Plumbing, Heating, Air, & Electric has been in business for 30 years. How many businesses can say that? We take pride in everything we do – no matter how big or small the service call might be. We’re here to help your home be as safe and comfortable as possible for you and your family. We take that responsibility very seriously as a company. Harris will ensure you have the information you need to decide what to do next, whatever your home is facing. We’ll perform a diagnosis and detail what issues are present before starting any work. This gives you a personalized quote and service plan specific to your home’s needs – not some random quote based on the best guess. The only way we can do our best work is to make sure we handle the issues at hand. https://www.callharrisnow.com/about-us/
BMW continues to dominate the luxury car space. With its top ranking in Consumer Reports’ Auto Brand Report Card and consistent market share growth, BMW has demonstrated its ability to produce high-performing, reliable vehicles that meet consumer demands.
BMW stands out due to its focus on driving dynamics and engineering excellence. While other luxury brands prioritize comfort and opulence, BMW is known for creating cars that are fun to drive and offer a unique connection between the driver and the machine. https://www.brianharrisbmw.com/
Randolph Harris San Francisco Taxation & Mergers
Randy advises clients with regard to business transition, taxable and tax deferred mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, restructuring, integrated tax planning, federal and state tax controversy resolution, and real estate transactions. https://www.jmbm.com/l-randolph-harris.html
Pulte Homes Ascent at Montelena
11977 Cobble Brook Drive, Rancho Cordova, California 95742
Now selling in Rancho Cordova, at Ascent at Montelena. This family-friendly community is near major employers like Sutter Health and the State of California. Located in the Sacramento Valley, residents enjoy Northern California at its best.
These two-story single-family homes feature Life Tested® floor plans, smart home features, energy-efficient construction, and modern architecture. Prices start at $625,990 and up for a single family home, with 2,526-2,973 square feet. https://www.pulte.com/homes/california/sacramento/rancho-cordova/ascent-at-montelena-210916
BMW i8 and Left No Crumbs!
Some people claim that no one cares about your success because they really want to see the journey of how you got there. However, I do not believe that is true. When you are down and struggling and stuck with a bunch of rejections, bad news, failure, and debt, do you notice that no one is around, people avoid you, and no one offers help. Yet, when you are successful and doing well, you have all of the friends in the world. More than you will ever need. In the process of living, we will face struggles, many of which will cause us to suffer and to experience pain. Many people will suffer in personal struggles, while others will suffer as they watch their loved ones in pain. To gain strength in our struggles, we must have an optimistic perspective of the principles in the plan of salvation. We must realize that we have a personal Savior whom we can trust and turn to in our times of need. We must also learn and live in the principles that the Lord has given to receive the strength needed during our struggles. In the Grand Counsil in Heaven, the decision was made to “make an earth whereon these may dwell,” reports Abraham 3.24. This earth is the place to prove ourselves worthy and to prepare to return to the presence of the Lord. He explained, “And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them,” reports Abraham 3.25. #RandolphHarris 1 of 29
Before we can achieve the creative awareness, we need to overcome the manipulations in our lives, we must learn to identify, experience, and honestly express real feelings, not counterfeit emotions. Some of the manipulator’s repertoire of counterfeit emotions follow. Substituting one emotion for another. Many of us express anger when we pretend anger instead of express hurt. Thus, we hear the lady tears welling in her eyes, cry out: “You make me so mad!” She is not made at all; she is hurt. Her body does not like. Using the same counterfeit pattern, we express anger when we are really afraid. “You make me so angry when you forget to take your medicine,” a young woman screams at her ill mother. Her anger hides her fear. She is worried about her mother health. If she does not take her medicine, she might die. Feelings as a delayed reaction. Here we meet the person whose pace is so slow that he says: “I was mad at you last week.” Last week? It took him a week to find out? Not really. He knew how he felt last week, but he was afraid to express it then for fear he would be attacked in return. A favorite poly of the withdrawing and avoiding manipulator is to hide his or her real emotion at the time it is felt to avoid contact with another. The delayed reaction also provides an advantage to the manipulator: time to prepare a surprise attack. It is just another way to control rather than to make contact with another. #RandolphHarris 2 of 29
Making a virtue of not having normal feelings, or pretending you do not. Most of us know some couple who boast that they have never had a fight. Our response would have to be “Tommyrot!” Normal people who have any contact at all with each other must rub each other the wrong way at times. Of course, they have fights. They have them because they have normal feelings, as much as they would like to appear virtuously free of them. Confusing your feelings with facts. You say to someone, “You are stupid!” Your statement is not a fact at all, since you have not actually measured that person’s intelligence. If you said instead, “I feel that you are stupid,” then you would be stating a fact about your feelings, not a fact about the other individual’s intelligence. Expressing your feelings as you are poised for flight. Such a person may let true feelings slip out, but is ready to run the instant anyone reacts to them. A sign of immaturity, such timidity stunts one’s emotional growth and the development of relationships. With all his strenuous efforts toward perfection and with all his belief in perfection attained, the neurotic does not gain what he most desperately needs: self-confidence and self-respect. Even though godlike in his imagination, he still lacks the earthy self-confidence of a simple shepherd. The great positions to which he may rise, the fame he may acquire, will render him arrogant but will not bring him inner security. #RandolphHarris 3 of 29
He still feels at bottom unwanted, is easily hurt, and needs incessant confirmation of his value. He may feel strong and significant as long as he wields power and influence and is supported by praise and deference. However, all of these feelings of elation collapse easily when, in a strange environment, this support is lacking; when he incurs failure; or when he is by himself. The kingdom of haven does not come through external gestures. Let us survey what happened to self-confidence in the course of a neurotic development. Apparently, for self-confidence to grow, the child needs help from the outside. He needs warmth, feeling welcome, care, protection, an atmosphere of confidence, encouragement in his activities, constructive discipline. These factors given, he will develop “basic confidence,” to use a well-chosen term of Marie Rasey’s which includes both confidence in others and in self. Instead, a combination of injurious influences prevents a child’s healthy growth. However, there are some reasons which render it specifically difficult for him to arrive at a proper self-evaluation. A blind adoration may inflate his feeling of significance. He may feel wanted, liked, and appreciated not for what he is but merely for satisfying his parents’ needs for adoration, prestige, or power. A rigid regime of perfectionist standards may evoke in him a feeling of inferiority for not measures up to such demands. Misdemeanors or bad marks at school may be severely reprimanded, while good behavior or good marks are taken for granted. Move toward autonomy or independence may be ridiculed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 29
All these factors, in addition to a general lack of genuine warmth and interest, give him the feeling of being unloved and unworthy—or at any rate of not being worth anything unless he is something he is more. Moreover, the neurotic development, initiated by the early unfavorable constellation, weakens him at the core of his being. He becomes alienated from himself and divided. His self-idealization is an attempt to remedy the damage done by lifting himself in his mind above the crude reality of himself and others. And, as the stories of the devil’s pact, he gets all the glory in imagination and sometimes in reality. However, instead of solid self-confidence, he gets a glittering gift of most questionable value: neurotic pride. The two feel and look so much alike that an understandable confusion is created in most minds about their differences. A definition in an ole edition of Webster, for instance, says that pride is self-esteem, based either on real or imagined merits. The distinction is made between real and imagined merits, but they are both called “self-esteem,” as if this difference did not greatly matter. The confusion also develops through the fact that most patients regard self-confidence as a mysterious quality arising from nowhere but most desire to have. It is but logical then that they expect the analyst to instill it into them in some way or other. Which always reminds me of a cartoon in which a rabbit and a mouse got an injection of courage; they then grew give times their ordinary size, were bold and full of indomitable fighting spirit. #RandolphHarris 5 of 29
What the patients do not know—and are anxious indeed not to realize—is the strict cause-and-effect relation between existing personal assets and the feeling of self-confidence. This relation is not any less definite than the way in which the financial status of a person depends upon his properties, his savings, or his earning capacity. If these factors are satisfactory, a person will have a feeling or economic security. Or, to take another example, the fisherman’s confidence rests on such concrete factors as his boat being in good shape, his nets being mended, his knowledge of weather and water conditions, and his muscular strength. What are regarded as personal assets vary to some degree with the culture in which we live. For Wester civilization, they include such qualities or attributes as having autonomous convictions and acting upon them, having the self-reliance that stems from tapping our own resources, assuming responsibility for ourselves, taking a realistic appraisal of our assets, liabilities and limitations, having strength and directness of feelings, and having the capacity for establishing and cultivating good human relations. The well-functioning of these factors shows subjectively in a feeling of self-confidence. To the extent that they are impaired, self-confidence will be shaky. Healthy pride likewise is based on substantial attributes. It may be a warranted high regard for special achievements, such as feeling proud of a deed of moral courage or of a job well done. Or it may be a more comprehensive feeling of our own value, a quiet feeling of dignity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 29
Once upon a time there was a man named George, who was equally celebrated for slaying dragons and for fertilizing barren women. He wandered around the countryside as a completely free spirit—or so it seemed. Cantering through the meadows on a summer’s day, he saw columns of smoke and forks of flame shooting upward in the distance. As he approached the scene, he heard a terrible roaring, mingled with the shrill screams of a maiden in distress. “Aha!” he cried, couching his lance. “This is my third dragon and maiden in less than a week. I will slay the dragon, and no doubt my bravery will be richly rewarded.” A moment later, he cried to the dragon: “Avast, lubber!” and to the maiden: “Have no fear!” The dragon drew back and began to paw the ground in anticipation not only of a double meal, but also of what he loved best, a good fight. The maiden, whose name was Ursula, threw her arms out and cried: “My hero! I am saved.” She was delighted, not only in anticipation of being saved and watching a good fight, but also (since she was not really a maiden) at the prospect of showing gratitude to her rescuer. George and the dragon backed off from each other, preparing for the charge, whole Ursula cheered them both on. At the moment, another figure appeared on the scene, richly accoutered with a silver-mounted saddle and fat alforjas filled with gold coins. #RandolphHarris 7 of 29
“Hey boy!” cried the new arrival. George turned and said in surprise: “Father! How nice to see you!” He turned his back on the dragon, dismounted from his horse, and went to kiss his father’s foot. A lively conversation ensured, with George saying, “Yes, father. Certainly, father. Whatever you say, father.” Neither Ursula nor the dragon could hear father’s side of the conversation, but it soon became apparent that it was going to go on indefinitely. “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” said Ursula, stamping her foot in disgust. “Some hero! As soon as his old man appears, he’s right over there bowing and scraping, and he has no time for poor little me.” “You said it,” said the dragon. “This is going to go on forever.” So, he turned off his flame thrower and rolled over and fell asleep. However, eventually, the old man rode off, and George was ready to return to the fray. He couched his lance again, and waited for the dragon to get up and charge and Ursula to cheer him on. Instead, Ursula said: “Jerk!” and walked away. The dragon got to his feet and said: “Crumb!” and he, too, walked away. When George saw that, he yelled: “Hey dad!” and galloped after his father. Ursula and the dragon both turned at the same moment and both shouted after him: “Too bad he’s so old, or I would take him on instead of you.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 29
When I was young, several times it happened that I was “in love” and enjoying serenity and peace. Then I noticed frictions building, and I left before they could be damaging to either of us. This seemed to me best. I did not wish to be harmful to the other or to myself. I was called “callous.” It did not seem that way to me. However, when I had been called “callous” often enough, I thought I was, and stayed—with damage to all of us, including the children, which it took years to heal, and some of it is not entirely clearly up yet. The “loose morals” and “irresponsibility” (about work, with employers) of Hawaiians, Navajos, and Hopis seem to me to make better sense, to be more human, because they are less damaging to other humans and to my humanity. That we “criticize our neighbors for what are our own faults,” could be easily misunderstood. When my neighbor chains his dog on a short leash and blows smoke in the dog’s eyes, I do not like this, but it is not something that I do or even have ever wanted to do. However, when I have “held” someone insistently so that I could tell this individual what one did not wish to hear, is that different? It is not the act itself, but what the act is doing. As a child, when my mother told a “story” to someone who had come to the door, I wished she would not do it. I was “criticizing her”—to use grown-up language. However, I did not yet know this way to think about it. I did not blame her. I wished she would not do it because it opened up a path to me that I did not wish to go, and if she had done this, I would not have known it was there. #RandolphHarris 9 of 29
I knew only honesty until something else was shown to me. It was a very strong factor in my close identification with my father that he was honest. This I liked. I felt steady. He also made it possible for me to be honest with him—when I was small. Later on, he did not. If I want to be told the truth, I must be willing to accept it. And if I wish to have love, I must be willing to receive it. Now, when I feel critical of other people, I often notice that what I am really feeling is, “Please do not do that. It is what I do not want to do, and I so easily fall into it when you are doing it.” This is certainly true of stereotyped chatter about world affairs, gossip, literature, anecdotes, and such, and people who are forever planning, who never live now. Other people’s intellect/ego calls out mine, and then I do not like me. I would like there to be an irreligious order where I could go at times, to be with others who wish to work out the same corrections in themselves, to strengthen me in making mine. However, it can also be simply and directly true that what I criticize in others may be something that I do, too. It is certainly wise to look into myself and check—and also ask others whether it seems to them that I have this fault. It may seem to me that I am only “reminding” someone else (being helpful) while to others it may seem that I am “always nagging.” Then I may understand better how someone else’s nagging (as it seems to me) appears to them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 29
Because people do not feel their inward divinity, they often deny it. In ancient and even medieval times, they were satisfied that it did exist because their simplicity, their uncultivated intellects, created no barriers to this feeling or to faith in it on the authority of tradition and their prophets. We must understand the inevitability of their present skepticism and prove the fact of the Soul as logically, as evidentially as possible. Yet to offer intellectual proof alone is not enough, although a truly excellent step forward. We must also show them how to get the experience of verification for themselves. Skepticism makes conditions which require that truth be presented in a rational form and argued out. Otherwise, the intellectual reactions to it will not be fair and just to its value. The value of metaphysical skepticism is to overcome mental inertia, to liberate us from strict and rigid doctrines, and to teach us tolerance. It frees us to search for higher truths and nobler values. They may try to escape from their doubts, perhaps by stifling them, perhaps by ignoring their very existence, perhaps by going to the guru and getting his reassurance again. This course may succeed for a time, even for a lifetime. However, it is not conducive to their true welfare. There are two ways open to a skeptic. One is to seek the actual experience of transcending intellectual proof of it. The first is a hard and long way; the second short and easy. #RandolphHarris 11 of 29
Just as the very presence of suffering starts a search for its relief, so does the very existence of doubt cause a search for truth to begin. We must begin by suspecting the data furnished by our five senses. We must learn that appearances are dubious, that they are not to be accepted without searching enquiry. Not only is he to question the dogma which orthodoxy hands him but even the doubts which skepticism offers instead of them. Those skeptics who reject the possibility of attaining truth are already stating something as truth and thereby refuting their own theory. Because there is no room in philosophic study for naivete or gullibility, those who suffer from these mental disabilities should first get cured. Where belief comes too easily, error may follow too quickly. To doubt everything and stop at that point, to assent to nothing but criticize every presentation, to meet all affirmative statements with the skeptic’s questions—this is the product of sharp intellect, blunt speech, and negative feeling. If a man is too suspicious of being deceived, he may err when truth is presented to him, and so miss the change of acquiring it. Balance is needed here as elsewhere. To bring one’s natural skepticism into a fine balance with the intellectual sympathy, these subjects demand is not an easy task, but he must try to do it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 29
We can accept nothing on trust as far as the quest of truth is concerned, although we can and needs must accept most things on trust, so far as the practical purposes of life are concerned. No arguments are capable of moving the absolute skeptic, for he does not look into its truth but only into tis weaker places. If you do not know whether God exists, do not fall into the error of denying that he does exist. It is an error because it is something which we do not know and to make such a positive statement has no justification. In the West, physical bulkiness, with large, prominent musculature, has long been a masculine ideal, and such robustness has been praised in popular magazines and valued by women in their men. Heavy musculature has been cultivated by violent exercise, vigorous calisthenics, and comparable feats of endurance. One function of such heaviness (not obesity, just heavy musculature) is to decrease sensitivity to pain and to enhance endurance. In the East, perhaps because patterns of nourishment have been different, slenderness is more the rule. The disciplines of Hatha yoga have been employed in India for several thousand years as a way to bring the body under more control, so that meditation and contemplation will not be obstructed by an insensitive, or a tense, uncomfortable body. Hatha yoga is one part of the Hindu religion and is one of the means of achieving the experience of “union of inner and outer,” or dissolving the ego and unifying awareness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 29
Since prehistoric times, controlled fire has been a source of comfort and warmth, but uncontrolled fire has brought death and destruction. Some of the most important lessons have been learned in the aftermath of tragic fires that resulted in devastating loss of life. The success of the Sacramento Fire Department depends on their ability to think critically and creatively and to communicate their intention and decision to others. The ability to communicate clearly—to get their intent and ideas across so that others understand their message and act on it—is one of the primary qualities of leadership. While you are a college student, your channels of communication include presentations and term papers. When you become a Sacramento Fire Fighter, Paramedic, or EMT, these channels will expand to include training meetings, briefings, and operation orders. The means to effective communication within the Sacramento Fire Department has required team members to develop their speaking and writing skills so that they are able to deliver any message to any audience effectively. They also keep in mind that communication also includes receiving messages from others through reading and listening. #RandolphHarris 14 of 29
Early in your career with the Sacramento Fire Department, much of your communication is direct. For example, coaching team members often requires communication that is one-on-one, immediate, and spoken. Later in your career with the Sacramento Fire Department, as your leadership responsibilities increase, you will inform subordinates and leaders through written orders, procedures, memos, and e-mail. This form of communication is indirect—it goes through other people or processes, is time-delayed, and written. As a member of the Sacramento Fire Department, your ability to communicate—to write, speak, and listen—affects your ability to inform, tech, coach, and motivate those around you. The good news is that you can develop these essential skills. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of these skills. In Sacramento Fire Department operations, as elsewhere, the inability to write and speak can have tremendous costs. History is replete with examples of misunderstood messages. For example, many Civil War scholars believe that victory at Gettysburg may have depended on how a subordinate interpreted Confederate GEN Robet E. Lee’s use of the word “practicable.” [On the first day of the battle of Gettysburg, Pa, Confederate attacks drove Union troops through the town to the top of Cemetery Hill, a half mile south.] The battle so far appeared to be another great Confederate victory. #RandolphHarris 15 of 29
However, General Lee could see that so long as the enemy held the high ground south of town, the battle was not over. He knew that the rest of the [Union] Army of the Potomac must be hurrying toward Gettysburg; his best chance to clinch the victory was to seize those hills and ridges before they arrived. So, General Lee gave Ewell discretionary orders to attack Cemetery Hill “if practicable.” Had Jackson still lived, he undoubtedly would have found it practicable. However, Edwell was not Jackson. Thinking the enemy position too strong, he did not attack—thereby creating one of the controversial “ifs” of Gettysburg that have echoed down the years. The Gettysburg vignette illustrates the parts of the communication process. General Lee was the sender. He sent the message: Attack Cemetery Hill. Ewell, the receiver, read the words, “if practicable,” decided that Union artillery on the hill made an attack not “practicable,” and did not attack. The words, “if practicable” made the message vague. (Who and what should define “if practicable”?) Obstacles to communication, such as this lack of clarity—along with other considerations, such as the demands of time, the ease of understanding the sender’s speech, the ability to read the sender’s handwriting, or the distractions in the area—make up what communications theorists call noise. Noise works against the clarity of communication. #RandolphHarris 16 of 29
Looking again at the vignette above, you find that General Lee never checked with Ewell to see if he understood General Lee’s intent: “What do you intend to do?” Ewell never checked to see if he understood General Lee’s intent: “What do you mean by ‘if practicable’?” The communication process included no feedback. Assume for a moment, as some historians do, that General Lee intended that Ewell attack Cemetery Hill immediately and decisively. (Those historians argue that General Lee was used to issuing such vague orders to the aggressive Stonewall Jackson, who had died a few months earlier.) Throwing Billy Yank off the hilltop might well have allowed General Lee to command the battlefield, perhaps even forcing the advancing Union armies to withdraw. That might have led to General Lee’s domination of southern Pennsylvania, choking off Washington from the North and ending the war on the Confederacy’s terms. If that were General Lee’s intent, the message failed. Ewell did not attack. The Union held onto the high ground and won the battle two days later—the beginning of the end for the Confederacy. Effective communication occurs when the receiver’s perceived idea matches the sender’s intended idea. The receiver understands what the sender means, not just what the sender says or writes. And that is why people like to hire and work with people they know and trust. Those who have the required skills for the job. #RandolphHarris 17 of 29
“I wouldn’t do any other job, I enjoy this one too much. I’ve spent my life preparing for it, and it would be hard for me to find employment doing something else. I don’t think I’d want to, I wouldn’t be as happy. I’m with the Sacramento Fire Department for the long haul. I’m still single, and I’m still young. I’m hoping to advance here as far as I can go, but I still have this desire to work in a very heavy urban area, such as New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia. It’s just something that I need personally to do. Here in Sacramento, I’ve only been a captain a year, and I’m looking forward to getting my own company. I would like to have a shifting on the new rescue company that’s going to be put into service here in the near future. I like what I’m doing now because I work with different people all the time and ride different territories. It’s good experience. I’ve been fortunate enough to work in a battalion where most of the people are like me, interested from a very early age, want to do their best, very gung-ho. Professional, very professional. When the company looks bad, everybody looks bad, and people’s perception of us will go down. I try to be as professional as I can, because that’s the way it should be. We should be good.” When intelligence is applied so thoroughly as to yield a whole view and not merely a partial view of existence, when it is applied so persistently as to yield a steady insight into things rather than a sporadic one, when it is applied so detachedly as to be without regard to personal preconceptions, and when it is applied so calmly that feelings and passions cannot alter its direction, then and only then, does a man become truly reasonable and capable of intellectually ascertaining truth. #RandolphHarris 18 of 29
If you see a fire truck stopped in the street without the lights on, be very careful. Sometimes there is an emergency situation and you should not pass the fire truck. It might be a good idea to safely turn around and go another way. Sometimes fire fighters are getting back into their vehicle and if you pass the apparatus, you may collide with a firefighter who is on foot. Also, be sure to look at their signals, sometimes emergency vehicles are in motions, albeit, slowly, and drivers try to pass them, and this could lead to a dangerous situation. Also, if you are in an intersection when you see an emergency vehicle, continue through the intersection. Drive to the right as soon as it is safe and stop. Obey any direction, order, or signal given by a law enforcement officer, or a firefighter. Even if they conflict with existing signs, signals, or laws, follow their orders. When their siren or flashing lights are on, it is against the law to follow within 300 feet of any fire engine, law enforcement vehicle, ambulance, or other emergency vehicle. If you drive to the scene of a fire, collision, or other disaster, you can be arrested. When you do this, you are getting in the way of firefighters, ambulance crews, or other rescue and emergency personnel. The concept of professional courage does not always mean being as tough as nails, either. It also suggests a willingness to listen to other peoples’ problems, to go to bat for them in a tough situation and it means knowing just how far they can go. It also means being willing to tell the boss when he or she is wrong. #RandolphHarris 19 of 29
As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. To help our firefighters, pleasure donate to the Sacramento Fire Department to ensure they have all the resources they require. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. The concept of professional courage does not always mean being as tough as nails, either. It also suggests a willingness to listen to other peoples’ problems, to go to bat for them in a tough situation and it means knowing just how far they can go. It also means being willing to tell the boss when he or she is wrong. Islam is the fastest growing religion in America, out pacing Christianity. While American was once a nation of generations, there are still many indigenous people lift and others who have been here for generations. To protect America and make sure it will remain a land of the free and home of the brave, we must be patriotic and put Americans first. Democrats and Atheists would like nothing more than red blooded American warriors to become slaves in their own country. They would like nothing more than to close American schools so children can be forced into child labor again. It is not time to roll back, nor will it ever be to remove protection for American citizens. If you have not noticed, crime is spreading to communities that had never seen crime before. Homelessness is on the rise. #RandolphHarris 20 of 29
In fact, Governor Gavin Newsom of Democratic controlled California, brags about being the world’s “fifth largest economy,” but it also facing a $12 billion deficit, looking to cut $747 million for state worker’s pay, pushing to keep medical insurance for illegal immigrants, and has the largest homeless population in the nation. If they are all officially counted, California has approximately 4 million homeless people. The highest home prices in the nation, the highest taxes and the most unfriendly business regulations known to man. The average home price in California is nearly $1,000,000.00 USD, while the average salary is $96,036.00, meaning that most Californians cannot even afford to buy a home. California is having an affordability crisis. In 2025, many people in California saw their bills increase by an estimated $500 a month. This includes things like food, automobile insurance, homeowner’s insurance, electricity. In fact, more than 3 million people in California are facing household hardship, and more than 300,000 of them are facing eviction soon. This comes at a time when California is having a shortage of affordable housing. This is caused by nearly half a century’s old laws that discourage homes sales and encourage higher rents. Meanwhile, China, where we are sending all of our jobs and money has more than 50 ghost cities. Ghost cities are regions will housing has been overdeveloped to the point that these places are uninhabited. Because California is so hostile towards people and businesses, more than 360 companies have fled the state since 2020. Businesses like Chevron, SpaceX, Oracle, and Hewlett Packard are amongst the names on that list. #RandolphHarris 21 of 29
Also, more than 500,000 people a year are abandoning California because it is too expensive to live in, crime is out of control, and they are losing their jobs due to companies relocating. More than 100 companies have announced layoffs in California for 2025. Intel is cutting 15,000 jobs, PayPal 2,500 and Meta has terminated 4,000 employees. The California crisis created by Democrats is driving up home prices and mortgages and rents all over the nation and the world, making living unaffordable for all, and advocates say the crisis is far from over. Accordingly, California has more than 3.5 million illegal immigrants. Having the Southern American boarder open and not having American farmland protected, not producing beef, poultry, fish, fruit, produce and dairy in America, and without American goods and services being our number one manufactured and selling items, America has created a dangerous and significantly elevated risks to national security, national economic security, and national public health. Some people may believe that these claims are overstated, but by not routinely monitoring Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CEVs) or other security relevant alerts, such as end-of-life of machinery is how the Oroville Dam Crisis occurred in 2017. Other crises that have occurred due to neglect of critical infrastructure is the 2025 Palisades fires because Southern California ran out of water, when they are located next to an ocean and they could have simply created desalinating plants to help with the water shortage. The water is so plentiful that it is currently eroding land and causing homes to fall into the sea. #RandolphHarris 22 of 29
The American government should know all exploitable vulnerabilities and fix them prior to the situation becoming a crisis. Failure to take such mitigating actions is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. The American government must understand that significant time and resources must be invested in America. They must also encourage corporations to plan for both mitigating safety vulnerabilities in the short term and eliminating them in the long term. For instance, a company might begin by reaching out to the federal, state or local government and requesting tax incentives to provide security to dangerous communities, to help the government repair bridges and potholes. America needs an approach to eliminate safety vulnerabilities in American cities. There needs to be a road map by the end of 2025, outlining a prioritized approach to eliminate crisis situations in America. There is enough money to send aid to foreign nations, but the American government does not have enough money to care their infrastructure, provide adequate resources, nor end the affordable housing crisis. Nor is there enough money to fund other national critical functions (NCFs). These bad practices of putting America and Americans last is considered exceptionally risky, particularly to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. #RandolphHarris 23 of 29
In an effort to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. And as you know, there is no better car on Earth than 1950-1970s American Muscle Car. As an incentive to buy American made cars, President Trump plans to made interest on loans for American cars tax deductible. Americans surely make superior products, but we are buying things from other nations. American food imports have risen by 300 percent since 1999. American farmland declined by nearly 20 million acres between 2017 and 2022. As of 2022, there were 880.1 million acres of land dedicated to farming, compared to 900.1 million in 2017. The data shows there are now little more than 1.9 million farms in the country. Americans and American corporations spent $136 billion on food and beverages from other countries. It is a national security risk to lose American Farms and farmers. If there is a war, and most of our meat, produce, poultry, dairy, and fruit is coming from foreign counties, we stand the risk of starving. With war breaking out all over the World, in these uncertain times, it is very important to bring American farms back. Las Vegas is running out of buildable land and is expected to reach its maximum number of homes in 2032. So, home prices are expected to rise dramatically. #RandolphHarris 24 of 29
Additionally, with inflation rates at an all-time high, American being in an unofficial recession for about a decade, all insurance in California is becoming unaffordable. State Farm has received an approval for an emergency rate increase, which was approved by the California Insurance Commissioner, to stabilize the market and protect policyholders. Starting 1 June 2025, homeowners will see an average of 17 percent increase, rental dwellings will see an increase of 38 percent, and Condo owners will see a rate increase of 15 percents. These rate increases are due to the distressed caused by the recent wildfires, which accumulated over $7 billion in claims. Furthermore, in 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1107, also known as the Protection California Drivers Act, into law which increases the minimum auto lability limits for bodily injury to $30,000 per person and $60,000 per accident. Senate Bill 1107 also increased the minimum liability limits for property damage to $15,000 per accident and the DMV deposit for uninsured drivers to $75,000. The bill went into effect on January 1, 2025. This means that drivers with existing policies with lower limits will renew at the new minimum limits on or after January 1, 2025, and insurance premiums could increase by as much as 54 percent. America is in a state of crisis right now because of mismanagement by democrats. With the median household income in Sacramento County being $88,724 and a 4-bedroom 2.5-bathroom Cresleigh home costing $798,059, how are people able to afford homes? Because an $800,000 home with a one percent downpayment of $8,000, 30-year fixed loan at 4.176 percent interest comes with a monthly mortgage payment of $4,241. #RandolphHarris 25 of 29
The maximum percentage of your gross income that you should earmark for a monthly mortgage payment is calculated at 28 percent, and no more than 36 percent of your gross income to all debts, including mortgage. If you take 28 percent of the median household income per home in Sacramento County, homeowners can only afford a mortgage of $2,070.23 per month. And if you take 36 percent of their gross income to all debts, including mortgage, they should be devoting no more than $2,661.72 a month to these debts. Mortgage lenders must be using some kind of sorcery to get buyers into these expensive homes. To afford one of these homes using traditional guidelines, a household would need to gross $11,280.24 per month or $135,362.88 per year, but the median household in Sacramento County is grossing $7,393.67 or $88,724.00 and that typically means two to four people in the home are working and contributing to the mortgage. Prices in Sacramento County are actually rivaling the Bay Area, and the Bay Aera is so expensive because they have more higher paying jobs and is a tourist destination. And with the State of California being in a budget deficit of $12 billion, Governor Gavin Newsom Granted 700,000 illegal immigrants free health care at a cost to taxpayers of $3 billion annually, while cutting vital programs for veterans, school children, the disabled and the homeless, and is proposing to fast-track his plan to build a $20 billion water tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta by eliminating environmental reviews and limit avenues for legal challenges. Gavin Newsom only cares about the environment when his policies allow him to raise taxes and restrict freedoms. Gavin Newsom has been a total tyrant with no regard for taxpayers and does not have a mind for business and should be impeached as soon as possible. #RandolphHarris 26 of 29
Meanwhile, with President Trump, we are seeing crime rates sharply decrease, and he recently secured $10 trillion in investments. If elected president for an unprecedented third term, to make housing more affordable and to offset the cost of homeowner’s insurance and auto insurance, President Trump plans to abolish property taxes. Much like the land crisis in Las Vegas, we could also run out of land to farm and will not be able to grow or cultivate our own food. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. Also, country of origin labeling is very important so Americans can know where their food is coming from and have the ability to support American farmers and ranchers. As money flows, it influences further investment. Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. And in the future, there may be food wars. Also, to ensure that we have farmland and buildable land for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a population that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. #RandolphHarris 27 of 29
When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt.When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. #RandolphHarris 28 of 29
As you can see, President Donald Trump and his pledge to “Make America Great Again,” is exactly what America needs to save the country and the American people. And yes, diversity is important, so you can see why it is also important to preserve blonde hair and blue eyes as the people with these characteristics are becoming a minority in America. We must think before we can understand the soul’s existence; we must understand before we can realize it. The earliest beginnings of thought, as apart from instinct, when it was itself still but a lurking tendency, belong far back in primeval time. The human intellect as we find it today, so rich and developed an instrument for the consciousness of the ego, did not arrived at this fulness without a series of graduated stages. We have had plenty of scientific thinking, business thinking, and political thinking long enough, but we have had very little inspired thinking. That is the world’s need. The intellect is cradled in selfishness but runs the evolutionary track into reason where it will one day finish at the winning-post of selflessness. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. “Oh, thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand between their loved home and the war’s desolation! Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, and this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’ And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” #RandolphHarris 29 of 29
Experience an unforgettable journey back to the time of kings and queens with this entry ticket for The Winchester Mansion in Santa Clara, California which was the residence of Sarah L. Winchester. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After tour, there will be time enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
We wish to express our gratitude to our families, ancestors, spirits, and friends and to our many associates and clients, whose lives touched our lives and whose ideas helped us to grow. We would also like to thank our employees and care takers for putting the technical ideas of this estate into conversational style, and we are, of course, extremely thank to all of our patrons for helping to keep the legacy of the Winchester Family alive. The Winchester Mystery House is full of surprises. What was your favorite, “Oooh!” moment during your visit at the mansion? (And for those of you who still have to check it off your bucket list… we will hopefully see you soon.) https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Harris Plumbing, Heating, Air, & Electric has been in business for 30 years. How many businesses can say that? We take pride in everything we do – no matter how big or small the service call might be. We’re here to help your home be as safe and comfortable as possible for you and your family. We take that responsibility very seriously as a company. Harris will ensure you have the information you need to decide what to do next, whatever your home is facing. We’ll perform a diagnosis and detail what issues are present before starting any work. This gives you a personalized quote and service plan specific to your home’s needs – not some random quote based on the best guess. The only way we can do our best work is to make sure we handle the issues at hand. https://www.callharrisnow.com/about-us/
BMW continues to dominate the luxury car space. With its top ranking in Consumer Reports’ Auto Brand Report Card and consistent market share growth, BMW has demonstrated its ability to produce high-performing, reliable vehicles that meet consumer demands.
BMW stands out due to its focus on driving dynamics and engineering excellence. While other luxury brands prioritize comfort and opulence, BMW is known for creating cars that are fun to drive and offer a unique connection between the driver and the machine. https://www.brianharrisbmw.com/
Randolph Harris San Francisco Taxation & Mergers
Randy advises clients with regard to business transition, taxable and tax deferred mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, restructuring, integrated tax planning, federal and state tax controversy resolution, and real estate transactions. https://www.jmbm.com/l-randolph-harris.html
Experiencing the Unpredictability of Life
Risk and contingency surround us, as though our every act were a stone dropped in a pond. The number of potential risks and potential outcomes are beyond our knowing. Humans feel powerless. Many people feel like, “Since I cannot control everything that will determine what happens to me, I have no control at all.” Experiencing the unpredictability of life, some people give up and enact their feelings of having no possibility of affecting what happens to one. These people make themselves totally an object. Those with power and authority, on the other hand, sometimes victimize other people, capitalizing on their powerlessness. Parents who are oppressed by the dread of powerlessness often need to make their children excessively dependent upon them and to defeat the child’s efforts to gain independence. Usually, the parent is someone with power and authority and the child is the subordinate, and we see the use of the, “If you eat your potatoes, then you may watch television.” “If you do your homework, then you may use the car.” Naturally, the child soon learns the technique, too: “If I mow the lawn, then how much money do I get?” “If Jim’s father lets him use the car every weekend, then why will you not?” #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The truly power and authority manipulator might simply roar: “Do as I say and no questions.” We see it in business: “I own 51 percent of the stock, and they will work on Saturday s because I want them to.” Even in education the founder of a certain college used to say: “I do not care what color the buildings are, so long as they are blue.” It has been discovered that schizophrenics are intensely afraid of close interpersonal relationships and so they try to avoid them. People play games to regulate their emotions and thereby avoid intimacy. One of our basic fears is the fear of involvement. In effect, then, a manipulator is a person who ritualistically relates to people in an effort to avoid intimacy or involvement. Furthermore, each of us learns certain illogical assumptions about living. One of them is the dire necessity to ne approved by everyone. Those who lack power and authority, but are manipulators are persons who refuse to be truthful and honest with others and instead try to please everyone because they foolishly believe that they must gain everyone’s approval. People manipulate because they are afraid. For instance, Muffy sat of a bar stool night after night, drinking whiskey sours. One evening a rather rough character sat down beside her. He frightened her, but she did not run away. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Eventually, she married him in order to take care of him so that he could write better novels. When he was drunk, he beat her physically and when he was sober, he humiliated her verbally, but still she did not run away. The group members were at first sorry for her and horrified at her husband’s behavior, but as moths elapsed, their attitude changed. “How about getting up off your tuffet and doing something about it?” they would say. “You seem real happy when you have a sad story to tell us, so you are really playing a hard game of ‘Ain’t It Awful.’” One day, Dr. Q asked Muffy what her favorite fairy tale was. “I do not have one,” she replied. “But I have a favorite nursery rhyme, ‘Little Miss Muffet.’” “So that is why you sit on your tuffet.” “Yes, I was sitting on one when he met me.” “So, why does he not frighten you away?” “Because when I was little, my mother told me if I ever ran away from home, I would get into worse trouble than I was in already.” “Well, what about the original tuffet?” someone asked. “Oh, you mean the potty? Well, they certainly made me sit there, and they frightened me with their threats, but I was too scared to get up and run away.” Thus, her script was like Miss Muffett’s, only she was allowed to run away, and did not know where she could run to. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Meanwhile, instead of whey, she drank whiskey. The group gave her permission to get up off her tuffet, throw away her whey, and strike out for herself. Previously, she had always looked sour, but now she began to smile. What her husband knew was that after you said Hello to Miss Muffet, you said Boo! and she was supposed to run away. Most girls did, but Muffy did not. If you say Boo! to miss Muffet and she does not run away, the only thing to do is say Boo! again, and that is what he did. In fact, one way or another, that was about all he ever said to her, expect maybe Pooh! Clinical Analysis: Little Miss Muffet sits on a tuffet feeling curdy and waiting for a spider, which is all she can hope for. When he comes, he tries to frighten her, but she decides that he is the most beautiful spider in the world and stays with him. He continues to frighten her periodically and she refuses to run away. However, when he says that she frightens him, that really scares her. She looks around for another spider, but cannot find one as beautiful as her own, so she sticks with him as long as she can help him spin. Clinical Diagnosis: Character disorder. Nursery Rhyme: Little Miss Muffet. Roles: Rescuer, Victim. Switches: Victim (of circumstances) to Rescuer (of men) to Victim (of men). Parental Precept: “Do not give up.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Parental Pattern: “Here is how to endure it—drink.” Parental Injunction: “Do not leave, you will get into worse trouble.” Position: “I am O.K.—if I help him produce.” Decision: “If I cannot produce, I will find someone who can.” Sweatshirt: Front—“I Can Handle It.” Back—“Kick Me.” Games: “Kick Me,” “Is It Not Awful.” Antithesis: Stop sitting on your tuffet and stop drinking. Permission: To strike out on her own. Classification: Little Miss Muffet is a nonwinner’s script. She is not ever going to get ahead, but at least she has a spider to sit down beside her. It is a Goal-Structured Can Script with the slogan: “You can help him produce.” It is based on an “Until” plan, “Sit by yourself until you meet a spider prince, then you can start living.” The time between Hello and Good Night is structured with quarrels and drinking and loving and work. One of the way in which people louse themselves up is by looking outside instead of in. Sometimes people think they are doing well because they are freer than their friends. They keep an eye on the distance between them, and as long as there is this same distance, they think that they are doing all right. However, many do not notice that their friends are narrowing down, and that when the distance between them remained the same, the individual was also narrowing down as much as their friends are. Their “superiority” is an illusion. There is absolutely no growth being made. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Some settle for a notion of “maturity” which is an end. They do not notice any of this until they get so pinched, unfree and unhappy (in spite of many happinesses) that they have become desperate. Then, one realizes that what one should have don’t was to keep track of oneself—one’s own direction. Reactions of anxiety often escape attention because the customary defenses against anxiety are set going instantaneously. Shoulds have a coercive power. A person may function fairly well as long as he lives in accordance with his inner dictates. However, if he is caught between two contradictory shoulds, he may be thrown out of gear. For instance, one many felt that he should be the ideal physician and give all his time to his patients. However, he should also be the ideal husband and give his wife as much time as she needed to be happy. When realizing he could not do both to the full, mild anxiety ensured. It remained mild because he immediately tried to solve the Gordian knot by cutting it with a sword: by determining to settle down in the country. This implied his whole professional future. The dilemma was finally solved satisfactorily by analyzing it. However, it shows that amount of despair that can be generated by conflicting inner dictates. One woman almost went to pieces because she could not combine being an ideal mother with being an ideal wife, the latter meaning to her being all enduring toward an alcoholic husband. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
If not indeed impossible, naturally such contradictory should render it difficult to make a rational decision between them because the opposite demands are equally coercive. One patient had sleepless nights because he could not decide whether he should go with his wife on a short vacation or stay in his office and work. Should be measure up to his wife’ expectations or to the alleged expectations of his employer? The question as to what he wanted most did not enter his mind at all. And, on the basis of the should, the matter simply could not be decided. A person is never aware either of the full impact of the inner tyranny or of its nature. However, there are great individual differences in the attitudes toward this tyranny and the ways of experiencing it. They range between the opposite poles of compliance and rebellion. While elements of such different attitudes operate in each individual, usually one or the other prevails. To anticipate later distinctions, the attitudes toward and ways of experiencing inner dictates are primarily determined by the greatest appeal life holds for the individual mastery, love, or freedom. The belief that the unaided reason of man can solve all his problems is merely an expression of reason’s own arrogance. Unless it co-operates with mystical insight, its best solutions of ultimate questions will either be fictitious ones or contradictory ones. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
At the end of all this work what does he get? Does he touch reality? The answer is no. He simply gets one thought instead of another, replaces an old thought by a new one. There is here a danger that the replacement may be the exact opposite of the thought which it replaces—as if he were substituting a correct concept for an erroneous one. However, this still does not bring him into reality, the knowledge of which is Truth. There is indeed only one way out of this impasse and that is to recognize that the plane of thoughts and concepts is not the plane which holds the real but must be transcended. This realization is a kind of crisis which enables him to admit that they way of the intellect is in the end a circular way leading from one thought to another and that it must be transcended. However, the thinking has led to one useful result, though it is indeed a negative result: it has told him what reality is not, and the use of thought has enabled him to destroy the belief that thought is the way to the goal. It is much like the metaphor about the use of one thorn to remove another which had got stuck in the finger. And so, this point reached, it is but one step further to perceive that the consciousness which holds all thoughts is what he is really seeking and not those projections from it which appear as concepts, ideas, and thoughts. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
There, in this consciousness, he can come to peace: the peace of the silent Mind, the transcendental Mind. Once he has become steeped deeply in this realization, he perceives with full clarity that it is not the movement from one set of beliefs or one set of ideas to a new one which is going to complete his search but the redirection of attention to THAT which is behind all thoughts—the reorientation of concentration to THAT which is in the gap between two thoughts. If this is done with perseverance and sustained with patience, Truth dawns upon him either slowly or swiftly and then stays with him forever and cannot be broken by any form of materialism in thinking, of dualism in belief, or personality cult in practice. He looks henceforth only to the infinitude of Being which is within him, within the cosmos, and has always been so. If indeed in meditation the World disappears, he does not need to go so far as the Advaitans and assert that there is no world! If in wide activity it reappears, he knows it is still a phenomenon, an appearance made by mind, issuing forth from mind, and the Ultimate Mind was there and is there now. Whatever form thoughts and concepts may take, he knows them for what they are and does not let go of That which is their ultimate origin. This is real knowledge, for it is practice, it is life and not a concept. No single human faculty is alone adequate to the search for truth. All must be used, including intuition, and finally crowned by a new one—insight. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Once blindness, crippling, or debilitating disease have afflicted a person, it is natural that the person’s life will be thrown into chaos. Plans for the future will have been disrupted. It becomes a physical impossibility for the person to exploit former sources of satisfaction. If personal security and self-esteem have been dependent upon certain kinds of activity that are now precluded, then his or her life will seem empty and futile indeed. When a heart ailment makes it necessary to give up active sports, an athlete may become very depressed. Someone whose self-esteem is predicated primarily on physical beauty will see little point in living, following an accident that leaves that person with unsightly scars. The reactions of depression and self-pity are inevitable when handicap occurs. What we are interested in here is the person’s reactions to the emotional responses. The most common unhealthy reason is resignation. Resignation to handicap means giving up, or “digging in” for a life devoid of satisfaction. When resignation occurs, and last for more than some period of time, say six months to a year, the resigner may be deriving some kind of enjoyment from the affliction and the power it affords. The person may make claims on intact people, in accordance with the idea, “Since the world has handed me such a dirty deal, I am entitled to a lot of support and consideration from others.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Many physically disabled persons, however, have provided our culture with superb examples of the healthy personality through the courageous manner in which they have been able to integrate their tough physical problems into a fully functioning philosophy of life. A man began to have “epileptic” seizures some years ago. They were intense, grand-mal convulsions, such that he frequently broke his hands as he thrashed about during the period of unconsciousness. Over a period of years, the medications to control the seizures elevated his blood pressure and damaged his kidneys. It appeared he was going to die from kidney failure or from circulatory failure. Two psychologist undertook to train this man, through correspondence, to recognize his “auras” and to engage in actions that might forestall his seizures. The frequency of his loses of consciousness with convulsions was dramatically reduced, as was his need for sedating, anticonvulsant medications. Their hypothesis was that once the man had his first seizure, and showed the characteristic “spikes” on his EEG tracing, he became the subject of a hypnotic, brainwashing onslaught of suggestion, as if his doctors were saying, “Why, you lost consciousness and never had a seizure. You are a sufferer from epilepsy. Never mind, there is no shame connected with this. Julius Caesar was an epileptic, Shakespeare and Jesus probably were, and of course Dostoyevsky was. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
“But you are lucky. Advances in medical science have made it possible for us to control seizures with some power drugs. Trust us and put yourself in our hands. Of course, you may feel sleepy, and your gums may get puffy, but if you are careful to take your medicine regularly, you can live a normal life.” It is difficult to resist such a powerfully seductive invitation to view oneself as helpless, with no power to prevent the loss of consciousness and the seizure; in short, to become dependent upon drugs, to become passive in order to let outside agencies control bodily happenings. There is reason to subject that many people deemed “epileptic” are leading drugged lives, rather than being helped to find ways of mobilizing their strength and wits in order to stay conscious and nonconvulsing. It seems that the ability to notice may be more a matter of our noticing than of individual differences. If I “forget my pain” (as I am told to do) I cannot notice it. And so with dreams. And with the experiencing of something much greater than oneself in one. Whatever an individual dismisses, one cannot explore. Like the doctor in New Jersey who was furious when penicillin was discovered because his bacteria cultures were killed by molds too, and he kept throwing them out instead of studying them as Alexander Fleming did. What else are we not noticing that would be helpful to us? #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The planet is evolving harmoniously. The dom-species Me-generation grown-up is at present relaxed and reasonably secure. The presence of an enormous growing population of pre-dom future-oriented humans make it possible to look realistically at the futures that can be fabricated by this explosive gene colony. This is a most fast-moving, volatile time in the evolution of Life on Earth. Every attempt must be made to give terrestrials future-maps that will allow them to anticipate what is to come—with enthusiasm and intelligence. Saint-Just, the contemporary of Sade, finally arrives at the justification of crime, though he starts from very different principles. Saint-Just is, of course, that anti-Sade. If Sade’s formula were “Open the prisons or prove your virtue,” then Saint-Just’s would be: “Prove your virtue or go to prison.” Both, however, justify terrorism—the libertine justifies individual terrorism, the high priest of virtue State terrorism. Absolute good and absolute evil, if the necessary logic is applied, both demand the same degree of passion. Of course, there is a certain ambiguity in the case of Saint-Just. The letter which he wrote to Vilain d’Aubigny in 1792 has something really insane about it. It is a profession of faith by persecuted persecutor which ends with a hysterical avowal: “If Brutus does not kill others, he will kill himself.” A personality so obstinately serious, so voluntarily cold, logical, and imperturbable, leads one to imagine every kind of aberration and disorder. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Saint-Just invented the kind of seriousness which makes the history of the last two centuries so tedious and depressing. “He who makes jokes as the head of a government,” he said, “has a tendency to tyranny.” An astonishing maxim, above all if one thinks of the penalty for the mere accusation of tyranny, one which, in any case, prepared the way for the pedant Caesars. Saint-Just sets the example; even his tone is definitive. That cascade of peremptory affirmatives, that axiomatic and sententious style, portrays him better than the most faithful painting. His sentences drone on; his definitions follow one another with the coldness and precision of commandments. “Principles without redress.” It is the style of the guillotine. Such pertinacity in logic, however, implies a profound passion. Here, as elsewhere, we again find the passion for unity. Every rebellion implies some kind of unity. The rebellion of 1789 demands the unity of the whole country. Saint-Just dreams of an ideal city where manners and customs, in final agreement with the law, will proclaim the innocence of man and the identity of his nature with reason. And if factions arise to interrupt this dream, passion will exaggerate its logic. No one will dare to imagine that, since factions exist, the principles are perhaps wrong. Factions will be condemned as criminal because principles remain intangible. “It is time that everyone retuned to morality and the aristocracy to the Terror.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
However, the aristocratic factions are not the only ones to be reckoned with; there are the republicans, too, and anyone else who criticizes the actions of the legislature and of the Convention. They, too, are guilty, since they threaten. Saint-Just, then, proclaims the major principle of the twenty-first century tyrannies. “A patriot is he who supports the Republic in general; whoever opposes it in detail is a traitor.” Whoever criticizes it is a traitor, whoever fails to give open support is a suspect. When neither reason nor the free expression of individual opinion succeeds in systematically establishing unity, it must be decided to suppress all alien elements. Thus, the guillotine becomes a logician whose function is refutation. “A rogue who has been condemned to death by the tribunal says he wants to resist oppression simply because he wants to resist the scaffold!” Saint=Just’s indignation is hard to understand in that, until his time, the scaffold was precisely nothing else but one of the most obvious symbols of oppression. However, at the heart of this logical delirium, at the logical conclusion of this morality of virtue, the scaffold represents freedom. It assures rational unity, and harmony in the ideal city. It purifies (the word is apt) the Republic and eliminates malpractices that arise to contradict the general will and universal reason. “They question my right to the title of philanthropist,” Marat exclaims, in quite a different style. “Ah, what injustice! Who cannot see that I want to cut off a few heads to save a great number?” #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
A few—a faction? Naturally—and all historic actions are performed at this price. However, Marat, making his final calculations, claimed that two hundred and seventy-three thousand heads. However, he compromised the therapeutic aspect of the operation by screaming during the massacre: “Brand them with hot irons, cut off their thumbs, tear out their tongues.” This philanthropist wrote day and night, in the most monotonous vocabulary imaginable, of the necessity of killing in order to create. He wrote again, by candlelight deep down in his cellar, during the September nights whole his henchmen were installing spectators’ benches in prison courtyards—men on the right, women on the left—to display them, as a gracious example of philanthropy, the spectacle of the aristocrats having their heads cut off. Men who have daily experience of a divine presence will not waste their time arguing whether or not a divine power exists. The absence of a universal consensus amongst philosophers certainly does indicate the inability of intellect to arrive at indisputable truth. However, the only alternative which could be proposed—that of an integral development of all sides of our nature—is superior, yet still not enough. For the other sides—that is, feeling, mystical intuition, and mystical experience—will also suffer from the same deficiencies. There is the same possibility of endless contradiction here. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
One arrives, therefore, at the conclusion that a new faculty is really needed wherewith to ascertain ultimate Truth, one which, if it is attained, will function in precisely the same manner in all persons. Such a faculty can be given the name of “insight.” The purity of this insight must necessarily be a consequence of the purity of the entire character and mentality of the individual who has it. This applies not only in the moral realm, but also in the intellectual and emotional realms of his being. For the very tendencies of the intellect which brough him to his spiritual standpoint must also be discarded. Only by this ruthless self-pruning can he respond quite impersonally to reality and not falsify it. It is, presumably, the same as the divinization of the human mind. The gulf between intellectual revelation and personal realization is greater than that between thought and action. The depth of insight is not to be measured by the length of intellect. Thought bedims consciousness instead of expressing it, coffins the universal Mind into the narrow ego. Man began to think when he began to forget his Overself. However, the forces of evolution will so work that one day he will learn to remember his divinity and yet use his intellect at will without losing this remembrance. The cultivation of intelligence is one of the supreme duties of man. Fact-fed thinking—hard, deep, rational, and thorough—is what converts vague surmise into unbreakable certainty, blind belief or tormenting doubt into irrefutable knowledge, and native error into new truth. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
In the past few years, the fire service has seen a veritable explosion in new equipment designed uniquely for improved safety. Although with equipment, the Sacramento Fire Department implements fitness to keep their team safe. Before beginning a new experience program, firefighters are given a checkup by a physician. A doctor can advise a firefighter to avoid or participate in activities based on their current health and history. It is also important to stay within your limit. If you are injured while exercising, remember to P-R-I-C-E your recovery. Protect the injured area from further injury. You can wrap it lightly in an elastic bandage or wear a padded brace. Do not tightly or heavily tape up an injury, as good circulation is important to healing. Rest the injured area. Use a sling, a cane, brace, or crutch as necessary to take your weight and decrease activity off the affected body part. Keep the joint or muscle as inactive as possible. Ice can be applied to the affected area for 5 to fifteen minutes. Wrap several handfuls of crushed ice in a towel and hold it on and around the injured area. Many people instinctively try to soak an injury in warm water, and while this increases blood flow to the injury, it does not ease the inflammation and swelling. Compression is also important. Wrap an elastic bandage around the ice to compress the injured area lightly—but not enough to cut off circulation to the injured area. After the cold compress, wrap the affected area lightly in an elastic bandage or use a flexible brace. So not wrap any injury too tightly, as this will cut off good circulation to the injury. Elevation is also key. Rise the affected area slightly to reduce swelling and inflammation. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
In addition to P-R-I-C-E, you can talk to your doctor about using anti-inflammatory medication as needed, such as aspirin, acetaminophen, or Ibuprofen. You should check to see if you have allergies to these drugs before use. Under no circumstances should you take them while drinking alcohol. The safety and well-being of firefighters are enhanced when they improve their overall health. “I am a journalist and a firefighter. Sometimes it’s difficult to separate the two. Many of the things I learned growing up in the firehouse were tremendous assets when I became a journalist. The ability to respond quickly to an emergency situations. Journalism deals with a lot of emergency situations. I was heavily influenced by the officers I knew and served under. I learned many things as a fireman that have stood me in good stead as a journalist. People think of journalism as an intellectual occupation and firefighting as physical. Both are oversimplifications. Good firefighters also have to have an intellect, and for journalist who lead the type of life I have led, a lot of physical stamina comes into the thing. I suppose the fact that in some respects the two are so different is one of the blessings of having a dual life. When I do journalism, it is total immersion in journalism; when I am with the Sacramento Fire Department, it is total immersion in the fire department. I prefer the fire department. Another equally important part of my life is my family.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
To help save lives and keep the community safe, if you are in an intersection when you see an emergency vehicle, continue through the intersection. Drive to the right as soon as it is safe and stop. Obey any direction, order, or signal given by a law enforcement officer, or a firefighter. Even if they conflict with existing signs, signals, or laws, follow their orders. When their siren or flashing lights are on, it is against the law to follow within 300 feet of any fire engine, law enforcement vehicle, ambulance, or other emergency vehicle. If you drive to the scene of a fire, collision, or other disaster, you can be arrested. When you do this, you are getting in the way of firefighters, ambulance crews, or other rescue and emergency personnel. The concept of professional courage does not always mean being as tough as nails, either. It also suggests a willingness to listen to other peoples’ problems, to go to bat for them in a tough situation and it means knowing just how far they can go. It also means being willing to tell the boss when he or she is wrong. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. To help our firefighters, pleasure donate to the Sacramento Fire Department to ensure they have all the resources they require. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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You Cannot Make it Unless You Meet a Prince
The reasonable man adapts himself to the World; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the World to himself. This is same disregard for feasibility which pervades the drive for actualization. Many of these demands are of a kind which no human being could fulfill. They are plainly fantastic, although the person himself is not aware of it. He cannot help it, however, as soon as his expectations are exposed to the clear light of critical thinking. If anything, such an intellectual realization, however, usually does not usually change much. Let us say that a physician may have clearly realized that he cannot do intensive scientific work in addition to a nine-hour practice and an extensive social life; yet, after abortive attempts to cut down one or another activity, he keeps going at the same pace. His demands that limitations in time and energies should not exist for him are stronger than reason. Or take a more subtle illustration. At an analytic session, a patient was dejected. She had talked with a friend about the latter’s material problems, which were complicated. My patient knew the husband only from social situations. Yet, although she had been in analysis for several years and had enough understanding of the psychological intricacies involved in any relationship between two people to know better, she felt that she should have been able to tell her friend whether or not the marriage was tenable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 27
I told her that she expected something of herself which was impossible for anybody, and pointed out the multitude of questions to be clarified before one could even begin to have a more than dim impression of factors operating in the situation. It turned out then that she had been aware of most of the difficulties I had pointed out. However, she had still felt that she should have a kind of sixth sense penetrating all of them. Other demands on self may not be fantastic in themselves yet show a complete disregard for the conditions under which their analysis has little to do with intelligence. The reasoning power which these people have may, in fact, be used to obstruct progress. What counts are the emotional forces operating in the patients, their capacity to be straight and to assume responsibility for themselves. This expectation of easy success operates not only in reference to the length of the whole analysis, but equally so in regard to an individual insight gained. For instance, recognizing some of their neurotic claims seems to them the equivalent of having outgrown them altogether. That it requires patient work; that the claims will persist as long as the emotional necessities for having them are not changed—all of this they ignore. They believe that their intelligence should be a supreme moving power. Naturally, then, subsequent disappointment and discouragement are unavoidable. #RandolphHarris 2 of 27
In a similar way, a teacher may expect that, with her long experience in teaching, it should be easy for her to write a paper on a pedagogical subject. If the words do not flow from her pen, she feels utterly disgusted with herself. She ignored or discarded such relevant questions as: Has she something to say? Have her experiences crystallized to some useful formulations? And even if the answers are affirmative, a paper still means plain work in formulating and expressing thoughts. The inner dictates, exactly like political tyranny in a police state, operate with a supreme disregard for the person’s own psychic condition—for what he can feel or do as he is at present. One of the frequent shoulds, for instance, is that one should never feel hurt. As absolute (which is implied in the “never”) anyone would find this extremely hard to achieve. How many people have been, or are, so secure in themselves, so serene, as never to feel hurt? This could at best be an ideal toward which we might strive. To take such a project seriously must mean intense and patient work at our unconscious claims for defense, at our false pride—or, in short, at every factor in our personality that makes us vulnerable. However, the person who feels that he should never feel hurt does not have so concrete a program in mind. He simply issues an absolute order to himself, denying or overriding the fact of his existing vulnerability. #RandolphHarris 3 of 27
One patient revealed that she does not believe that she needs to experience a number of outside relationships to become happier about herself and things in general. However, after being with this particular person, she thought of nothing but sleeping with every man who appealed to her. She would walk down the street and look at everybody and wonder whether they are looking at her and what would they be like to sleep with. And somehow, just this one experience with a man, which was not terrific and did not make her terribly happy in regards to pleasures of the flesh, was enough to make her feel much more excited about being with people. It gave her a new feeling about life, which she never had with her husband because she was so dragged down and smudged. The pleasures of the flesh with this man made herself more like herself again, which contradicts what she initially said. This experience made her more aware of what she was as an individual as opposed to what her husband wanted her to be. She was living exactly according to the traditional image of the female, because her husband could not accept anything else. And one morning, she woke up and said, “I hate cleaning the house, and I want somebody to help me, and I’d like to sculpt in the middle of the night and paint in the middle of the night alone. And I want privacy and I want individuality and I want to be recognized for being a girl—not even so young any more!—with interests. I am human and an individual and also female, and I don’t want to be submerged in this housewife role.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 27
She deferred to her husband to the point where she almost forgot who she was or what she wanted or what she thought. However, it was her who decided that it was her role as a woman to please a man and therefore completely to submerge her own identity. This woman claimed that she was not going to hunt for relationships because she was more interested in quality than quantity. Although she wants to end up with a man and that she wants to be able to relate to a man, she admits does not know what she wants. It seems that she is mostly busy trying to remember all the things she wanted to feel and activate the things she wanted to do. She seems to be desperate for some kind of communication and relationships with men are just to serve a purpose and not to be permanent. This woman seems to be indulging herself in a Walter Mitty-type fantasy. This would be understandable under the circumstances since she has just begun to break out of her marriage and has used infidelity as a springboard. The danger lies in the possibility that this fantasy expresses a more fundamental aspect of her personality, an immaturity that is more Peter Pan than Walter Mitty—reflecting a wish not to grow up. When this is the case, a man or a woman uses extramarital affairs as a way of avoiding responsibility for the achievement of an enduring relationship. #RandolphHarris 5 of 27
For an affair, after all, can be an opportunity for growth, a chance to experience more than simply pleasure of the flesh—a chance to work at a relationship so that it will sustain intimate passions and even intensify them. The alternative is to go from one partner to another, experiencing little beyond a temporary relief of frustration with pleasures of the flesh. This is clearly not her intention—intellectually, at least. The danger lies in the ease with which good intentions dissolve in the face of easy opportunities to act otherwise. Marriage is, among other things, a challenge to two individuals to find their identities by meeting the responsibilities that arise in the natural course of events, but affairs have no such built-in challenges. It is all too easy to continue an affair only to the point where it requires an individual to grow up, to accept some responsibility for his or her own development and to invest attention and feeling and energy in developing a long-rage relationship rather than concentrating it all on short-term pampering of the individual self. One way to integrate your authoritative personality and your marginalized personality is to accept the paradox that both exist in you and they are equal, like a two-party system in politics or a battery with positive and negative poles. A democracy collapses without opposing, equally strong political parties. #RandolphHarris 6 of 27
A battery will not work without the positive and negative electrical charges, and a healthy human being cannot function at the fully human level without both strength and weakness, love and anger. You have to listen to both sides, both your weak marginalized self and your authoritative self. By accepting and listen to both sides of yourself, the antagonistic poles become complementary. When both sides of ourselves are accepted equally, the power of integration occurs. Another way to integrate your authoritative self and your marginalized self is to express your feelings as accurately as possible. For example, if your husband is flirting, you may tell yourself that it does not really bother you. However, what do you really feel? When he interrupts your conversation to tell some waitress how terrific she looks, it is irritating, right? Do you tell him? No. Because you do not want to ruin your marriage with jealousy. Because you love him. Do you feel loving at those times? Not really, right? You actually feel inadequate. Are you inadequate? If you are not inadequate, then what are you? You are made at him, correct? It really hurts being ignored by the man you love. Those closer a woman comes to accurately expressing her feelings, the more she is able to: integrate her authoritative personality with her marginalized, and resolve the dichotomy that is robing her of her self-esteem and falsifying her communications. However, not all women are in a position to do this because of the dynamics of their relationship. #RandolphHarris 7 of 27
Some women had to manipulate a man into marrying them, others are dependent on his money, or maybe a combination of both. So, they have had to be subservient in their relationships to keep a man. Other are dating abusive men. For woman in this position, asserting her authority could be disastrous and even deadly. As Maslow says, in healthier people, dichotomies are resolved, and polarities disappear. Learning to listen to both your authoritative and marginalized personalities—giving them equal time, so to speak, and learning to accurately express your feelings—telling the truth, enables you to integrate your warring factions and transcend your manipulations. Often the hypnogogic experiences are just out of reach of what can be remembered unless they are immediately recorded, which action tends to disrupt the state. When I was suffering from infirmary for so long and living alone, I learned to “stay with” what was going on until I felt that I had it clear and firm, so that it seemed that it could not possibly escape me. However, when I made a movement, it was gone—utterly. Even shifting a leg or moving an arm or thinking a thought would break up this authoritative personality. Surely, this is not completely alien to anyone, when all have known arriving at something in our heads and then some movement or other interruption broke it up and we lost it? #RandolphHarris 8 of 27
In much the same way, some women are frightened at causing a rift in their relationships. However, for me, there was something else that annoyed me even more, in terms of wishing to present proof of what can go on in me that is intelligent beyond my usual intelligence: when I did manage to move my body without losing the knowing and wrote some notes—clues to the much more, which I hoped would serve as an anchor so that I could recapture the rest—I lost the rest. The clues by themselves read like nonsense—as a list of errands in one’s private code does to someone else. However, my clues were not to familiar things which could easily be related to each other by myself: they were clues to ideas, to explanations, to knowings and understandings so great that when I looked at my clues I thought, “It is like trying to put a woolly mammoth through a funnel. What comes through does not look much like a woolly mammoth.” Is this difficulty any more “mystic” or “irrational” than what these woman are going through? The mind is multidimensional to an impossible degree, whereas any description is limited to one dimension. Language can describe only one sequence of events at a time; if several occur simultaneously, language has to jump to and fro among the parallel lines, creating difficulties, if not confusion, for a listener. A further, almost insurmountable, complication is caused by the fact that mental events not only take place simultaneously along parallel lines, but influence each other profoundly. #RandolphHarris 9 of 27
It seems to me that this is why reliance on verbal communication gets us into so much trouble. I can never say to you completely what is going on in me. When I use words, this sounds (and is) inadequate and unconvincing. If I then go on to express other parts of what is going on in me, it takes so long, and you become tired of listening. You want to know what is really going on in me, as if there were only one thing which could be real. And I, aware of what was going on in me, now notice that his has changed and throw in the towel. It is when my total organism receives from you, through non-verbal communication or some mixture of non-verbal and verbal communication, that I am closest to knowing what goes on in you. Little Pink Riding Hood was an orphan, and she used to sit in a clearing in the forest waiting for someone wo needed help to pass by. Sometimes she would wander down the paths in case anyone needed her in another part of the woods. She was very poor and could not offer very much, but whatever she had, she shared freely. She could hold thing when people needed an extra pair of hands, and her head was full of wise precepts which she had learned from her parents while they were still alive. She was also full of merry quips, and she liked to cheer up men who were scared of getting lost in the forest. In this way she made many friends. However, she was nearly always alone on weekends because then everybody went on picnics in the meadows and left her alone and a little scared herself to be in the forest. Sometimes they invited her to go along, but as she got older this happened less and less often. #RandolphHarris 10 of 27
She led a different life from Little Red Riding Hood, and in fact the one time they met, they did not get along well together. Little Red Riding Hoos was hurrying through the forest and passed by the clearing where Little Pink Riding Hood sat. She stopped to say Hello, and the two of them looked at each other for a minute, thinking they might become friends because they looked a little bit like each other except that one wore a pink cloak and the other a red one. “Where are you going?” asked Pink. “I’ve never seen you around here before.” “I’m taking my grandmother some sandwiches my mother made,” replied Red. “Oh, how nice,” said Pink. “I don’t have any mother.” “Furthermore,” said Red proudly, “when I get to my grandmother’s, I’m going to be eaten by a wolf—I think.” “Oh,” said Pink. “Well, a sandwich a day keeps the wolf away. And it’s a wise child that knows her own wolf when she meets him.” “I don’t think those merry quips are funny,” said Red. “So good-by.” “How stuck-up can you get?” asked Pink. However, Red had already departed. “She has no sense of humor,” thought Pink to herself, “but I think she needs help.” So Little Pink Riding Hood struck out into the forest to find a hunter who would protect Little Red Riding Hood from the wolf. Eventually she found one, an old friend of hers, and she told him that Little Red Riding Hood was in trouble. She followed him to the door of the hut where Red’s grandmother lived and saw everything that happened there: Little Red in bed with the wolf, the wolf trying to eat her, the hunter killing to wolf, and he and Little Red laughing and joking as they cut the wolf open and put stones in his belly. #RandolphHarris 11 of 27
However, Red did not even bother to thank Pink, which made Pink sad. And after it was all over, the hunter was better friends with Red than he had been with Pink, which made Pink even sadder. She was so sad that she began to eat peppy berries every day, and then she could not sleep, so she would eat sleepy berries at night. She was still a cute kid and still liked to help people, but sometimes she thought the best thing to do would be to take an overdose of sleepy berries. Clinical Analysis: Little Pink Riding Hood is an orphan, or has reason to feel like one. She is a cute kid, full of wise precepts and merry quips, but she leaves it to others to do the real thinking, organize things, and carry them through. She is conscientious and always ready to help people, and has many “friends” as a result, but somehow, she usually gets left out in the end. She then begins to drink and take stimulating drugs and sleeping pills, and often thinks of suicide. After she says Hello, she makes merry quips, but that is only to pass the time until she has a chance to ask: “Can I help you with anything?” Thus, she could have a “deep” relationship with a loser, but did not do so well with winners after the quips were over. Clinical Diagnosis: Chronic-depressive reaction. Little Pink Riding Hood is a loser’s script, since everything she gets, she loses. It is a Goal-structured Cannot script, with the standard slogan: “You cannot make it unless you meet a Prince.” It is based on a “Never” plan, “Never ask for anything for yourself.” After she says Hello, she proves she is a helpful, cute kid. #RandolphHarris 12 of 27
Theological philosophy is based on logic. Scientific philosophy is based on reason. I uphold rationalism against intellectualism, the thinking power in man against the classifying power, the mind which evaluates thoughts against the mind which merely collects and describes them. So long as these two faculties of human kind—reason and imagination—are surrendered to its animal side, so long will they prevent the real human being from being born. The victories of reason are the only enduring ones. When we abdicate reason for unquestioning belief, when we sign away out birthright of private judgment to another man, we part with a precious possession. Reason is active in the developed man. He cannot stop it from demanding a cause for an effect. I took this use of the term “Reason” from Aristotle, who made it higher than ordinary intellect, as well as creative, spiritual, eternal, and undying. The faculty of discrimination which we are to use in the pursuit of truth is not the intellect but the true Reason, which itself judges the intellect and rejects or confirms what it says. The conclusion to which reason comes can only have obligatory force upon the reason itself, not necessarily upon the whole integral being of man. We are finally to decide the problems of life by the integration of all our human nature and not merely by the judgment of a particular part of it. To make life a matter only of rational concepts about it is to reduce it, is to make a cold abstraction from it, and thus to fall into the fallacy of taking the part for the whole. #RandolphHarris 13 of 27
Metaphysical concepts may fully satisfy the demands of the totality of our being. They satisfy reason because they are the products of reason itself. However, man is more than a reasoning being. His integral structure demands the feeling and the fact as well as the concept of it, the feeling as well as the idea of it. So long as he knowns it only with a limited part of his being, only as empty of emotional content and divorced from physical experience, so long will it remain incompletely known, half-seized as it were. It is at this crucial point that the seek must realize the limitations of metaphysics and be ready to put aside as having fulfilled its particular purpose that which he has hitherto valued as a truth-path. It is impossible for the modern mind to encounter such experiences without seeking their explanation. And therefore, it is of little practical use for a master to tell his followers not to trouble their heads about the reason why such things happen or not to ask questions about the meanings and purpose of the World. Reasoning, in its highest sense, transcends mere logic and welcomes the alliance of meditation; out of their union comes wisdom, peace, balance, and so, blessing. The man whose chariot is driven by reason holding well the reins of his mind, reaches the end of his journey, the Supreme Pervading Spirit. Beyond the senses is the mind, and beyond mind is reason…beyond reason is the great Self. We may reject reason’s ideas about Divinity but in the end it is reason we have to rely upon to support the ideas which authority, tradition, emotion, or faith put forward. The agnostic, even the atheist, is a believer, too. Only he has more faith in the validity of reason than in the validity of intuition. Yet it is only the reason’s own vanity that asserts that its validity is a higher one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 27
Just as we ought not muse emotion, so we ought not misuse reason. We may use reason to justify an intuition, provided we use it faithfully and not to flatter our prejudices or prepossessions. We shall then be as ready to examine critically searchingly and impartially our own conclusions as those of an opponent. Reason properly used will critically examine an emotion which is leading one astray, whereas improperly used it will uncritically defend such an emotion. It will not hesitate to puncture the ego’s inflated compliancy in the first case whereas it will support his complacency in the second one. How often is reason judgment pushed aside by mere physical appeal which obscures what is below the surface. A person’s body concept includes everything the person believes about the structure, capabilities, and limits of his or her body. As with any other concept—one’s concept of other people, of animals—the body concept may be accurate or inaccurate, complete or incomplete. An accurate body concept is important for achieving healthy personality. Accuracy of the body concept is achieved by all of the means employed to arrive at reality-tested knowledge in general: through observation, through continual verification of conclusions, and through contact with reliable authorities and sources of knowledge. However, many persons have been taught erroneous belief about diet, healthy, requirements, and the like. #RandolphHarris 15 of 27
Further, a person may become so alienated from the body (as part of the more general process of self-alienation) that the person loses the capacity to “listen” to the body, the capacity for somatic perception. Thus, some people may fail to recognize that inadequate diet, lack of exercise, insufficient rest, and excessive self-indulgence are gradually weakening their bodies. To the extent that a person has knowledge of the effects of various things on health, then to that extent the person’s body welfare is his or her own responsibility. In societies where medical knowledge is not available, people may have erroneous beliefs about the causes of health and of illness. Consequently, one may observe that entire sector of a population suffers from some chronic ailment that they all accept as “natural,” as part of the scheme of living, for instance, rickets or Tuberculosis. It is only from the standpoint of the contemporary scientific concept of the body that it becomes possible to make judgements about how healthy (or sick) and entire society might be. Some overprotected people grown up ignorant of the process of reproduction; a nineteen-year-old student of mine believed that the menstruation only occurred in virgins; once a woman engaged in pleasures of the flesh, she stopped menstruating. She could not discuss biological questions with her mother, and she was too embarrassed to talk about pleasures of the flesh with her better-informed girlfriends. Aging person with false pride may misjudge their strength and endanger their health through overexercise. However, just as persons may overestimate their bodies’ capacity, so may they underestimate it. We are all tougher than we have been led to believe. #RandolphHarris 16 of 27
It is extremely important to engage with and train community-based partners to improve the outcomes of at-risk populations. The Sacramento Fire Department seeks to guide practitioners, researchers, policy makers, funding organizations, and other stakeholders in understanding and using the available evidence to inform their decision making. It also seeks to demonstrate methodologies and other interested researchers to evaluate complex interventions. With the Sacramento Fire Department, they speak of resources in terms of the three M’s—men, money, and materials. To these three, they must add time. However, there is a distinct difference between time and the three other resources. If they do not use their own money or materials today, they are available tomorrow. To a lesser degree, this is also true of men. It is not at all true of time, for time is a highly perishable commodity. An hour lost today is lost forever! To success in the Sacramento Fire Department, you must competently manage your resources—people, materials, and information. However, perhaps the most precious resource you must manage is time. You cannot replace it once it is gone. Time management can also be called, “personal management,” since you are the only thing you can control. The time-management sills you develop as a fire fighter and a student will set a pattern for you as a future captain. That is why you must cultivate a process for effectively managing time today. #RandolphHarris 17 of 27
In the Sacramento Fire Department, you encounter significant barriers to effective time management. However, you can overcome those barriers by setting goals and using systematic techniques. Time management is a system for getting things done as efficiently and productively as possible. You assume leadership responsibilities in the Sacramento Fire Department, your time will become even more valuable and its management more complex. You will need to manage not just your own time, but also the time of those you lead. When you put an efficient time-management system into action, you become a more effective leader because your team members perceive the value you place on both your time and theirs. The respect you show for their time will support everyone’s efforts to become more efficient as the unit works toward meeting tsk deadlines and completing the mission schedule. However, it all starts in college and training, where your studies require significant time-management skills. Your success at cultivating good time-management skills depends on your ability to set aside enough time for each of your classes, sports, and other activities. Doing this efficiently requires that Sacramento firefighters recognize time wasters (black holes). Set goals that reduce patterns of wasted time, and implement a system of the POWER model. The POWER model, discussed later, moved firefighters toward their personal, professional, and career goals. #RandolphHarris 18 of 27
How does the value you place on time management translate into your team members wasting less time? Is there a trickle-down effect? Pick a goal you have set for yourself: Make enough money to buy a car; graduate with honours; land a summer internship with the Sacramento Fire Department; improve your English language kills. Now turn it into a SMART goal. What did you learn about yourself and your goal? In your schedule, “black holes” are spaces of time that eat into your productivity and prevent you from reaching your goals and the goals of others you work with. Black holes devour productive time and consume your efficiency. You will learn that a lot of your associates, peers, and friends are black holes. The ability to identify black holes is the first and most important aspect of good time management. To do this, you should conduct an informal inventory of how you use your time. Consider a typical week and, within that week, a typical day. Most people are surprised at how much of their time is unfocused and unstructured—putting things off—and distracters—things that take you away from your planned work or activities. One way to fight procrastination is to realize that it will only make things worse. Putting off an easy thing makes it hard, and putting off a hard one makes it impossible. Distracters are often subtle. They might be talking on the phone with friends or relatives, losing track of time while Instant Messaging (IM) or playing video games, or helping other people on their projects. Or you may face an unexpected change in your work schedule. #RandolphHarris 19 of 27
Learning to deal with distracters—saying no when necessary; turning off your cell phone, the IM, or the video game; negotiating your schedule with your supervisor; even finding a different spot to work or study away from distractions—builds the discipline that helps you stay on course. Trying to overcome these two sources of black holes in your life goes a long way toward improving your use of available time. Additionally, the better you get at completing work on schedule, the better you will get at scheduling time for recreation, hobbies, social activities, and other things you enjoy. Goal setting is a critical part of managing your time. If you do not know where you are going, how can you possibly calculate how long it will take you to get there? If you want one of these new smart homes, you have to start by making yourself smart. The SMART model: Specific: make the goal concrete and clear. Measurable: Decide how you will measure success in reaching the goal. Achievable: Keep goals reasonable—milestones are helpful. Realistic: Consider other factors that may affect the goal. Time-bound: make yourself accountable for a specific date. The POWER Model. Prepare: Set SMART goals. Organize: Keep a calendar to know where you are, where you have been, and what is ahead. Work: Work on establishing boundaries for your time—prioritize activities, and avoid procrastinating, learn when to say no, and keep track of how long important tasks take. Evaluate: Review how you are spending your time. Rethink: Explore better and better ways of managing your time—identify what you need to change, and enter the God mode. #RandolphHarris 20 of 27
The SMART model for goal setting is a useful starting point for filling up black holes with useful activities—activities that get you where you want to go on your mission, in your career, and in your life. One you have established your goals, you need to apply an effective time-management system to reach them. Practice techniques of good time management, such as completing tasks before moving to the next item or limiting distractions when doing exercise or homework. Some useful tools include c calendar, a weekly schedule, and a To-Do list. You can find sophisticated time-management assistants at an office-supply store or perhaps a book store. Your personal computer may also have useful time-management software. In applying any time-management strategy, it is a good idea to keep in mind that you must be flexible. Since on one can foresee the future, you need to be willing to modify your plans to accommodate events and even a few surprises. Using time more efficiently than the enemy is the first requirement of victory. Successful time management is a never-ending process. It is time to take control of your time using the SMART technique and POWER model you have learned. Start today! Common sense assists the triumph of reason over sentimentality. The faculty of reason also has two phases; the lower is practical and reaches perfection in the scientist; the higher is abstract and reaches perfection in the metaphysician. #RandolphHarris 21 of 27
If we bury our reason alive, so much the worse for us. Its wraith will rise up one day and sneer in revenge at our silly errors and self-made troubles. The utmost use of the reasoning faculties cannot always provide for every factor in a situation. There are some only which intuition can grasp—the Universal laws, for instance. This explains the miscalculations of men who possess the most highly developed rationality but who lack a counterbalancing development of intuition. “I wasn’t a particular religious person before my injury, and I’m not a fanatic now, but I do attend church a lot more regularly and say prayers more. The only way I can figure it out, the gift of life dame through Jesus. I went back and looked at the accident scene, and there is no way I should have lived. I should be dead right now. Today, I’m on administrative detail, I’m doing a job I really don’t want to do, in fire prevention. I give 100 percent while I’m working, but it’s not where my heart is at. Riding around a street, going to inspect a building, I’ll here an alarm come in, and I’m like the old fire horse that’s pulling a milk wagon. I wander over and want to go to the fireground. I’ll stand around and watch, and it’s like you want to get in there. My back is healed enough, and I feel I could do the job. The doctors say they think I can do it, but they’re afraid of the way we live in the fire department. It’s all uncontrolled. You’re on the ladder and you’re reaching for somebody—you’re on the roof and you’re falling—and you grab something. #RandolphHarris 22 of 27
“If it were the type of work where you’re lifting boxes all day, I mean you can stand there and lift, but fire department lifting it totally different. I mean, you could be on a stairway and the stairway could give out, and the next thing you know a ladder could come down on you. So right now they don’t want me going back into the fires. The chief of the fire department has worked with me, and he could have told me to get the hell out, but he said we’ll wait and see. If it comes to the time that the doctors are not going to change their minds, then I’ll take a permanent job. The alternative is to take the pension and get out, do something different. I don’t think that I could. I could go out and train myself. I could do contracting work. If I needed to go to school, I’d go to school. No matter what I wanted to do, I could do it, I think. I have no doubt in myself. But at my age—I’m getting up to thirty-eight—they’re not hiring people out there. There are no jobs around, really. I could get an insurance job, you know, underwriting or adjustment, but I wouldn’t want it. I like feeling the way I do about myself when I put the uniform on. I get up and come to work, I look forward to coming to work. I look forward to doing my job with the people I work with. I mean, you meet any fireman, you’ve got something in common with him. I was on a night inspection at a restaurant, and a chief from Santa Clara was there. He introduced himself, and we must have talked for forty-five minutes. Things like that. If I was an insurance salesman and went into a restaurant, nobody would know. And if they did, they wouldn’t give a damn. #RandolphHarris 23 of 27
“It’s an interesting life. There are great feelings of satisfaction. One of the rescues I had was basement fire. I got a man out of there. We were the third engine in, and I was leading off. The radio said there were people trapped down there. I came up and said, ‘Did you find the people yet?’ the guys were like, ‘No. No.’ Nobody was going down to look. I was like, ‘Bubba, get your ass in there.’ I went down and made a search, and on the first search, there he was. I had him up and out and back to where he lived. If I hadn’t acted, he probably would have died. I had one fire where there was a picture in the newspaper of a lieutenant brining a kid down the ladder, but I had handed the kid out. It was the same thing. Guys were searching in the room, and I just made a turn and went to the other room, and bang, there the kid was in the corner. I went right at him, and there was the guy right on the ladder, and it was perfect. Those types of things. It’s the kind of job where even before you’re out of fire school, you know if you want to do this type of work or not. You get people who are afraid of heights, putting a mask on. If you make it through that, it’s a rewarding job. You touch more people’s lives than you think just by doing the job, even if it’s just going out and pumping a flooded basement, or going out on inspection and showing them about a cord on their car, or smoke detector programs. It touches you to know that you’re helping people that way, that it’s true purpose of your job, and that your job is to protect the citizens. It’s going to make you feel good. If you’re doing your job right, you’re going to feel good about it. #RandolphHarris 24 of 27
“I miss the excitement, the chance to do the things that make you feel good, making a rescue, cutting somebody out of a car, helping somebody out of a window. Even a vacant building fire, when you put the ashes out and you look back, it makes you feel good that you did it. You pull up, and it’s all fire, and you say, ‘Oh man.’ And you get in there, and it’s out, and you feel good about yourself. I guess it’s like a pitcher pitching a no-hitter. I mean, it worked good, everybody feels good, and they’re all smiling. You’re out in twenty below at four in the morning, but, ‘Good job, good job.’ You get back, you sit around and have coffee and talk about it. That feeling is great. You go out and inspect a building, and you say, ‘The guy needs an extinguisher, big deal.’ Some guys on inspection don’t consider themselves part of the department, they don’t want to have the radio scanner on and hear that noise. It’s the way you feel about doing the job. I’ve always given 100 percent, and I feel good no matter what, if it’s a trash fire, a pot of food, whatever. I never shirked my duties, I was always in there, and nobody can say, ‘He’s a bum.’ I’m always with the people, with the men. You look back at old pumpers. When I came in, we were still using 1945 Macks. In ten more years, they’ll look at an old Mack picture and say, ‘My God, these guys used to stand on the back steps.’ Riding the truck company, that was the biggest thing, just riding on the side, and when they turned you just turned your head that way. #RandolphHarris 25 of 27
“I remember it pulling out, and if you didn’t run down the street and jump on it, then that was it. You’d get up there and ride the truck to the fire. It’s changed now. It changed for the better because of safety. You look at what people did, they worked twenty-three hours and had one off; they went home and ate, and came back and put in another twenty-three hours. The only reason those guys did it was because they felt the same way I do. Why else would a person do the job for the money you make? It’s because you like it, and because of the tradition. You look around and see all the firemen dying of cancer. But there is only so much you can do to make the job safe and still do the job. Hopefully, it never gets to the point where you’ll be standing on the sidewalk and somebody’s house is on fire, and you say, ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, we have to let it burn down.’ It’s taken ten years off my life. A guy who came through school with me died of cancer. This guy was thirty-seven years old. I’m an old guy now, still in my thirties. When I came in the department, there were guys in their forties and fifties, and it was like, ‘Is that old man still in here? When is the old bastard leaving?’ I guess I’m the old guy in the department now, even though I’m still young. If I were a banker, I would hope to live to be seventy or eighty, but if a fireman makes it to fifty, he takes his pension, and a month later he’s dying of some weird disease.” Those sceptics who reject the possibility of attaining truth are already stating something as truth and thereby refuting their own theory. #RandolphHarris 26 of 27
If you are in an intersection when you see an emergency vehicle, continue through the intersection. Drive to the right as soon as it is safe and stop. Obey any direction, order, or signal given by a law enforcement officer, or a firefighter. Even if they conflict with existing signs, signals, or laws, follow their orders. When their siren or flashing lights are on, it is against the law to follow within 300 feet of any fire engine, law enforcement vehicle, ambulance, or other emergency vehicle. If you drive to the scene of a fire, collision, or other disaster, you can be arrested. When you do this, you are getting in the way of firefighters, ambulance crews, or other rescue and emergency personnel. The concept of professional courage does not always mean being as tough as nails, either. It also suggests a willingness to listen to other peoples’ problems, to go to bat for them in a tough situation and it means knowing just how far they can go. It also means being willing to tell the boss when he or she is wrong. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. To help our firefighters, pleasure donate to the Sacramento Fire Department to ensure they have all the resources they require. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 27 of 27
Never has there been a building so talked about. You will find The Winchester Mystery House in what was once the countryside known as “Winchester Valley,” where it has left past guests feeling a little spooked passing through certain rooms. It is well known for its reputation of being the world’s most haunted location. Do you fear the dark? Does the idea of the supernatural scare you? Do you sometimes anticipate the worst that can happen to you? Do you shiver when you read about victims of violent crime and think “that could have been me?” Does life seem insane? When you walk through the twisting hallways of The Winchester Mansion, are you apprehensive about what might be around the next corner? While standing at the door-to-nowhere, have you ever worried that life may have no meaning? Are you anxious that the next day might be your last? Do your days sometimes seem irremediably gloomy? Are you afraid of dying? We have examined your case thoroughly and think you will find the antidote for your condition at The Winchester Mystery House. A daily dose of horror is just the tonic you need. If fortifies the spirit with bracing jolts of terror. It inoculates the soul against fears that hound us all. It quickens the reflexes against life’s inhospitable surprises and tempers the imagination with thoughts unthinkable. Here you will find madmen in a variety of shapes and sizes who will help make things seem more rational. Feeling a bit self-absorbed? There is nothing like a tale of Mrs. Winchester’s hauntings to give you the right perspective.
The Winchester Estate dates back to the late 19th century, and it has a history that is packed full of legends and stories of spirits. The guided post-sunset walk takes visitors through the history of the mansion, while also offering a chance to spot some of the more well-known Winchester ghosts. There are stories of a little girl playing in the hallways and tugging at bedcovers at night and a woman in white who crosses the courtyard and passes through the walls. Lightening in colours no one can name sear across the infinite and multihued sky in jagged shards the size of which no one can conceive. Alien winds scream their impossible being in warring cacophony of notes no one can ever believe at volumes none can bear. And when the winds pick up on the fourth floor of the mansion, they make an eerie whining noise. It sounds as if everything around you is screaming. Right before a quick scratching sound, then something flares. A small spot of light glides like a firefly toward you. Another flare, then a dull yellow flow. A thin man has been said to step into the light. “Found some others out there,” is all he says before disappearing before your very eyes, and then everything is absolute darkness. Outside, the winds are said to kick up; it screams across the night. Well, maybe it is the wind. We all know the story of The Winchester Mansion.
The carpenters, who worked day and night for 36 years to build the mansion, that was once nine stories high, containing as many as 600 rooms. They knew the area was dense in spiritual energy. The hallways often possessed a great river of shadows. As these men felt a moan rising from a core of solid fear, they were so afraid that they would stand frozen for the space of one deep, shuddering breath. It was believed even the objects they could see were enemies, because they were keeping secrets. They knew, but were not telling. The cold quiet of The Winchester Mansion was a familiar song. Often, Mrs. Winchester’s guests would crough down, huddling against the floor, until help arrived. The mansion is situated over the crossing of two Ley Lines. In these areas, the veneer between the physical and spirit realms is thinner and much more permeable. This permeability and natural energy allow entities to manifest much more readily than in a normal location. Any thought or action in these areas, whether positive or negative has a much stronger and more focused effect. In the case of The Winchester Mansion decades of compounded suffering, negativity and strong emotional experiences have left a marked effect on the atmosphere in and around the mansion.
Some tour guides have heard chanting coming from outside the mansion and have heard their names being called. Others have reported seeing a woman hovering in the mansion. Although her journals are sometimes vague, Mrs. Winchester experienced bizarre poltergeist activity during construction. She mentions to a friend the incredible amount of poltergeist activity that occurred during the time spent building the front of the mansion. One night, when darkness fell, the mansion was filled with eerie music like nothing Mrs. Winchester had ever heard before. Creatures from her maddest nightmares filled into the Grand Ball Room in some kind of funeral procession. She watched from the hallway, terrified of being seen yet unable to turn away. The very last thing she saw was her maid at the end of the procession, following the creatures off into the darkness.
Mr. Hasen, one of Mrs. Winchester’s foremen, had written about his tools getting moved to the far corners of the room when his back was turned. Mr. Hansen was staring at ta kaleidoscope World of shifting, flickering lights, a surfaceless void with an unimaginably distant vanishing point near which huge amorphous shapes twisted and withered in a constant fury of becoming. He had been a hint that the matter that made up the forms of this World which everyone accepted as solid and separate was in fact all one and that only probability kept everything as it was and kept our reality apart from a multiverse of others. Although they were paid three times the going rate, provided with medical care, subsidized groceries, and lived in Victorian cottages once on the estate, carpenters employed by Mrs. Winchester frequently suddenly left and did not come back, never giving a reason to their departure. On September 5, 1922, construction efforts were suddenly stopped when the ladders several carpenters were working from were pushed away from the wall, forcing them to jump several stories. Moments later, it was discovered that Mrs. Winchester had passed away in her sleep.
The mansion that has survived such a long history, is a marvel to see in person. Today, it stands four stories high, and has an estimated 160 rooms, of which 110 are open for tour. There has been some restoration over the years and ongoing maintenance. Come inside the mansion to see the priceless architecture and learn of its history. The guided tours are exquisitely led by a well prepared and enthusiastic team, who make sure that you and all guests are entertained by the great stories. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After tour, there will be time enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. Even if you do not believe ghost stories, you might still get goosebumps passing through the most infamous basement. Enjoy panoramic views and discover quirky features such as secret staircases, doors that open to nowhere, stairs to the ceiling, hidden trapdoors, and other unusual features.
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Why Choose Harris?
Harris Plumbing, Heating, Air, & Electric has been in business for 30 years. How many businesses can say that? We take pride in everything we do – no matter how big or small the service call might be. We’re here to help your home be as safe and comfortable as possible for you and your family. We take that responsibility very seriously as a company. Harris will ensure you have the information you need to decide what to do next, whatever your home is facing. We’ll perform a diagnosis and detail what issues are present before starting any work. This gives you a personalized quote and service plan specific to your home’s needs – not some random quote based on the best guess. The only way we can do our best work is to make sure we handle the issues at hand. https://www.callharrisnow.com/about-us/
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 