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Take Shelter on My Front Porch, Dandelion Sun Scorch, Would You Like a Cold Glass of Lemonade?
That a highly organized monarchy of evil spirit-beings was in existence is not made known in the story of the garden. Only a “serpent” is there; but in the serpent is spoken to by God as an intelligent being, carrying out a deliberate purpose in the deception of the woman. The serpent-disguised of Satan is swept aside by God as He makes known the decision of the Triune God in view of catastrophe which had taken place: a “Seed” of the deceived woman would eventually bruise the head of the supernatural being who had used the form of the serpent to carry out his plan. Yet from that point on the name of “serpent” is attached to him throughout the ages, for it describes the climax action of his revolt against his Creator in beguiling and deceiving the women in Eden and blasting the human race. Satan triumphed, but God overruled. The victim is made the vehicle for the advent of a Victor, who would ultimately destroy the work of the devil and cleanse the Heavens and the Earth from every trace of his handiwork. The serpent is cursed, but, in effect, the beguiled victim is blessed, for through her will come the ”Seed” which will triumph over the devil and his seed; and through her will arise a new race through the promised Seed (Gen. 3.15), a race which will be antagonistic to the serpent to the end of time, through the enmity implanted by God. Henceforth the story of the ages consists of the record of a war between these two seeds: the Seed of the woman—Christ and His redeemed—and the seed of the devil (See John 8.44; 1 John 3.10), right on to the furthermost point of the final committal of Satan to the lake of fire. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Henceforth it is also war by Satan upon the womanhood of the World, in malignant revenge for the verdict of the garden. Yes, war by the trampling down of women in all lands where the deceiver reigns. And war upon all women in Christian lands too, by the continuance of his Eden method of misinterpreting the Word of God: insinuating into men’s minds throughout all succeeding ages that God pronounced a “curse” upon the woman, when in truth she was pardoned and blessed; and instigating fallen men to personally carry out this supposed curse, though in truth it was a CURSE UPON THE DECEIVER and not upon the deceived one (Gen. 3.14). “I will put enmity between thee and the woman,” said God, a well as between “thy seed and her seed,” and this vindictive enmity of the hierarchy of evil toward women, and especially believers, had not lessened in its intensity from that day. Normative and behavioral aspects of a street gang collectively serve to shape and routinize the violent ways of its members. A gang is defined as an, “aggregated peer group that exhibits permanence, engages in criminal activity, and has symbolic representations of memberships.” For gangs, violence generally services critical, symbolic purpose withing the gang subculture. In many cases, violent themes permeate all aspect of gang life. Most gang members seek to develop and maintain a threatening physical presence. Violence tends to be incorporated into the entry rituals, social gatherings, and story-telling of the group. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
An overdeveloped sense of urgency and “threat” produces a contagion of violence, a hallmark of which is a never-ending cycle of preemptive and retaliatory violence among and between rival gangs. Gangs share many of the properties of mobs, crowds, and other collectives, and engage in many forms of collective behavior. Gangs have turf, symbols, organizational structure, permanence, criminality, and a sketchy sense of loyalty. One will notice a gang is always brought down when they trust an outsider. They fail to notice tale tale sighs that someone is working undercover. Many times, they also get too greed, to sloppy, think they are too big to fail, and talk too much, which leads to their down fall. Many gangs do not know when to give up and leave. It is like they are begging to be arrested and sent to prison. Their group membership, behavior, and values, however, make them interesting to criminologist who study gangs. Collective behavior explanations provide insights into gang processes, particularly the escalation of violence, the spread of gangs from one community to another, and increases in gang membership in specific communities. Violence, as we have mentioned, tends to be integral to the life in the gang, and gang members engage in more violence than other youths and senior citizens. Our analysis of gang violence focuses on the role of threat, actual or perceived, in explaining the functions and consequences of gang violence. We define threat as the potential for transgression against or physical harm to the gang, represented by the acts or presence of a rival group. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Threats of violence are important because they have consequences for future violence. Threat plays a role in the origin and growth of gangs, their daily activities, and their belief systems. In a sense, it help to define them to rival gangs, to the community, and to social institutions. Gangs are set apart from other groups by their ability to create “dread,” a direct consequence of involvement in and willingness to use violence. Dread elevates these individuals to street elites through the community members’ perceptions of gang members as violent. In many neighborhoods, groups form for protection against the threat of outside groups. Sometimes these groups are established along ethnic lines, though territorial concerns often guide their formation. There is a natural progression from a neighborhood group to a gang, particularly in the face of “adversarial relations” with outside groups. The emergence of many splinter gangs can be traced to the escalation of violence within larger gangs, and to the corresponding threat that the larger gang comes to represent to certain territorial or age-graded subgroups. Threat also may contribute to the growth of gangs. This mechanism works in two ways: through building cohesiveness and through contagion. Threats of physical violence increase the solidarity or cohesiveness of gangs within neighborhoods as well as across neighborhoods. The source of gang cohesion is primarily external—the results of intergang conflict. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Cohesion within the gang grows in proportion to the perceived threat represented by rival gangs. Threat maintains gang boundaries by strengthening the ties among gang members and increasing their commitment to each other, thus enabling them to overcome an initial reluctance about staying in the gang and ultimately engaging in violence. Thus the threat of a gang in a geographically proximate neighborhood increases the solidarity of the gang, motivates more young men to join their neighborhood gang, and enables them to engage in acts of violence that they might not have committed otherwise. The growth of gangs and gang violence contains elements of what is called “contagion.” In this context, contagion refers to subsequent acts of violence caused by an initial act; such act typically takes the form of retaliation. Violence—or its threat—is the mechanism that spreads gang from one neighborhood to another, as well as contributing to their growth. As the population of people of color grows in a community, many European Americas are prone to[RH1] move when the neighborhood diversifies. This is due to their fears of gang violence, and negative stereotypical beliefs about other racial and ethnic group. Some say White flight is due to increases in crimes, and conflicting political agendas. Many people wonder why there are so few European Americans in low income and middle-class neighborhoods. Well, it is because they tend to become victims of crime and are pushed out of their communities, which creates segregation. Many people do not realize it, but some African Americans are extremely racist. And speaking of segregation, by blockbusting, it is fascinating because many low income races of people do not like living around each other, due to the violence and crime and pests, but then they move to another community, threaten and harass the Europeans Americas until they move and create a ghetto. However, you will then find that these people do not like each other, they do not like living in the ghetto, and want to move out. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Yet, the housing authority in many communities are not actually redeveloping. They are creating ghettos by violating fair housing laws and only renting to low income ethic groups, often from the same family, under the rouse of a lottery system. However, the exclude European America applicants, especially if they are young. The ability to manage the property because impossible because the management is in fear of the residence and neighbors in the surrounding houses live in fear and choose to move. As the community becomes undesirable, the property rates decrease because the area is what the insurance company deems high risk neighborhood (HRN), which makes the rates of any time of insurance in the neighborhood increase because more losses are sustained in that area. It also reduces the likelihood of investments in the neighborhood because it is unsafe. The threat of attack by a group of organized youth or senior citizens from another neighborhood is part of the gang “myth” or belief system, and helps to create the need for protection as well as to generate unity in a previously unorganized group of neighborhood youths and senior citizens. The origin and spread of such beliefs explain, among other things, the viability of the gang. Threat performs an additional function: it enhances the mythic nature of violence in the gang by increasing the talk about violence and preparedness for violent engagements. The threat of violence also “enables” gang member to engage in violent acts (especially retaliatory violence) that they might not have chosen under other circumstances. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The need to respond effectively to rival gang violence escalates weaponry and increases the “tension” that often precedes violent encounters between gangs. Threat has an additional function, however. As gangs and gang members engage in acts of violence and create “dread,” they are viewed as threatening by other (gang and non-gang) groups and individuals. Also, over time, the threats that gang members face and pose isolate them from legitimate social institutions such as schools, families, and the labor market. This isolation, in turn, prevents them from engaging in the very activities and relationships that might reintegrate them into legitimate roles and reduce their criminal involvement. It weakens their ties to the socialization power and the controlling norms of such mainstream institutions, and frees them to commit acts of violence. When once we clearly recognize the existence of an unseen host of evil spirit-being, all actively engaged in deceiving and misleading humans, Old Testament of the Christian Holy Bible history will convey to us an open vision of their doings otherwise hidden from our knowledge. We can trace their operations in relation to the servants of God throughout all history and discern the work of Satan as deceiver penetrating everywhere. We shall see that David was deceived by Satan into numbering Israel because he failed to recognize that the suggestion to his mind was from a satanic source (1 Chron. 21.1). #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
That is why it is not only important for people to remain active members of the church, but to also take a class on Home Economics and also learn how to remain in compliance with the law and be good neighbors by keeping your home clean, inside and out, and not to make too much noise, nor to have too many people hanging out in front of your property. Since senior citizens and the youth have special license as regards involvement rulings, we might ask whether, in American society at least, the genders are differently defined in this regard. Some evidence suggests that women, in general, are more tightly defined than men. There is at least a popular belief that the female toilet takes longer than the male, and that therefore more is entailed in making a female presentable thana in making a male presentable. So, too, a man who appears on a public street with his hair tousled, his tie loosened, a cigarette dangling from his lips seems to be less of an affront to public decorum than is a woman similarly disarrayed. Drunkenness in a woman has a much higher visibility than that in a man, which can be traced to the symbolic qualities of drinking and drunkenness in women in the past, when drinking customarily symbolized the bawd and the harlot. The lack of a long experience with drinking on the part of women in America may explain the greater loss of control they show in their tippling. Another possibility to be counted is that women are more likely to be badly maladjusted when they first turn to excessive drinking, and as a result their overt behavior becomes more flagrantly disorganized. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
The high-pitched and overt behavior becomes more flagrantly disorganized. The high-pitched and shrill laughter of the drunken women often brands her behavior more quickly for what it is than in a man. Women are supposed to be neater, cleaner, fresher, and more fastidious about their dress than the opposite gender, so that disarray brought drunkenness also demarcates their condition more sharply. And yet, of course, women are sometimes defined as creatures who are not expected to be full-fledged participants in public meetings, and so can sometimes engage in somewhat taxing side involvements such as knitting, in recognition that they have not been deeply drawn into the occasioned main involvement. Similarly, there are coming to be more semipublic situations where a young woman may half-daringly slip her shoes off, while a man in the same setting cannot; but perhaps this is merely a sign that the female’s tightness of orientation is more than shoe-deep, and that a foot sheathed only in nylon is already almost presentable enough for safe public display. To speak of the general level of tightness or looseness built into a role is to imply a social rigidity: that is, the individual may be unable from the start to fit into certain social gatherings, finding that some are defined too loosely and others too tightly. Correspondingly, the individual will tend to exhibit alienation from those gatherings from which his role causes him to be unsuitably involved, and even be led to exhibit this kind of alienation at times when he does not want to. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
In this context it is worth considering the relation of work and clothing to the problem of fitting into gatherings. Some clothing, like that worn by deep-sea divers or firemen, is inextricably geared to the task at hand. These personal fronts can hardly serve in nonoccupational situations, nor can hardly serve in nonoccupational situations, nor can the possessor, unless he changes clothes. Even during the coffee-break he will be showing a certain kind of devotion to the job. In the case of white-collar task, however, work clothes transcend the work place and enable the worker to merge into gatherings occurring off the job. Correspondingly, when he is on the job, there will be parts of himself that he need not submerge into work, and this in fact provides him with one basis for self-possession and dignity. Those who must wear a uniform at work, and who cannot leave it in the locker room when they leave the premises, are likely to feel that they are under special constraint to give much of themselves to work and to carry this contribution to any nonwork situation in which they happen to find themselves. In the army, of course, this may be quite explicitly stressed by admonitions to respect one’s uniform. We find, then, that persons often feel unfairly restricted in uniform; they carp about not being able to melt easily into loose gatherings that happen to occur, and they feel their autonomy is threatened. Some individual may, of course, desire to maintain a pervasive alienation from their society at large, and seek membership in informed quasi-military groups partly in order to ensure that they will always be a little out of place. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
When you come into contact with the second and third lines of work, you necessarily come into contact with the will of others. “Is not stopping the expression of negative emotions more or less the same thing as giving up willfulness?” Why do you want to translate one thing into another? Willfulness may have many forms without a definite connection with negative emotions. “It seems to me that if you give up self-will you will get what you desire; that by giving up the desire, you get the desired results.” That is not self-will. Self-will does not include everything you want. If you are hungry and want to eat, that is not self-will. Self-will means preferring to act by yourself and, in our cause, not taking into consideration the work and the principles of the work. We speak of principles of the work and self-will. We can do things in our own way or not. If my self-will is to swear, for instance, and I give it up because it is against the principles of the work, where are the desired results you speak of? As I said earlier, self-will is always connected with self-opinions, a human always thinks one knows something. Then one comes to a school and realizes that one knows nothing. That is why preparation is necessary for school. One is usually full of self-opinions and self-will. Self-will is like a child saying, “I know it myself; I will do it myself.” Self-will has many features. One is told not to do something and at once one wants to do it; one is told that something is wrong, and at once one says, “No, I know better.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
A man who comes to teach school must be ready to accept the teaching and the discipline of the school; he must be free to accept it, or else he will get nothing. He cannot acquire will unless he gives up self-will; just as he cannot acquire knowledge unless he gives up self-opinions. “Must one break self-will oneself, or have it broken?” One must do it oneself, and one must have broken it sufficiently to be in a school. One must be sufficiently free from it to accept things without a fight. One cannot keep all the old views and opinions and acquire new ones. One must be sufficiently free to give up the old, at least for a time. One must be able to understand the necessity of discipline. Will cannot be created until one accepts a certain discipline. Strengthen your self-discipline and discover how it can help you succeed in all areas of your life. Most of life’s mistakes are easily overcome through simple, sincere repentance, a process common to nearly all religious people. In rare instances, we may commit serious transgressions that jeopardize our progress. Church discipline—restrictions and conditions of repentance that prompt a person to reevaluate their situation and return to full fellowship and activity—is a process designed to help us overcome sin in these instances. For all sins, large and small, it is the sacrifice and suffering, mercy and grace—or Atonement—of Jesus Christ that makes repentance possible. Church discipline is designed to help an individual more fully apply the Atonement of Jesus Christ, be cleansed of their sins and move forward in their eternal progression. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Repentance brings peace when we place our lives in harmony with the teachings of Jesus Christ. Church discipline is a process that helps the individual feel that change of heart and change of behavior necessary to bring full forgiveness and peace. Someone who has fulfilled the requirements of Church discipline can be completely forgiven and return to full participation in the Church. Protect the innocent. When someone poses a physical threat to others or a spiritual threat to other members, Church discipline is conducted to provide protection to predatory practices, physical harm, abuse, fraud and apostasy. We all possess the God-given gift of moral agency—the right to make choice and the obligation to account for those choices. “That every human may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him or her, that every man or woman may be accountable for his or her own sins in the day of judgement,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 101.78. By “moral discipline,” I mean self-discipline based on moral standards. Moral discipline is the consistent exercise of agency to choose the right because it is right, even when it is hard. It rejects the self-absorbed life in favor of developing character worthy of respect and true greatness through Christlike service (see Mark 10.42-45). Jesus’s own moral discipline was rooted in His discipleship to the Father. To His disciples He explained, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work,” reports John 4.34. By this same pattern, our moral discipline is rooted in loyalty and devotion to the Father and the Son. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that provides the moral certainty upon which moral discipline rests. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
When the fraction using technology is constant over time, we are at an equilibrium of the game. Our preference for gasoline engines over steam and light-water nuclear reactors over gas-cooled is better explained by historical accidents than by the superiority of the adopted technologies. In 1890 there were three ways to power automobiles—steam, gasoline, and electricity—and of these one was patently inferior to the other two: gasoline. [A turning point for gasoline was] an 1895 horseless carriage competition sponsored by the Chicago Times Herald. This was won by a gasoline-powered Duryea—one of only two cars to finish out six starters—and has been cited as the possible inspiration for R.E. Olds to patent in 1896 a gasoline power source, which he subsequently mass-produced in the “Curved-Dash Olds.” Gasoline thus overcame its slow start. Steam continued viable as an automotive power source until 1914, when there was an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in North America. This led to the withdrawal of horse troughs—which is where steam cars could fill with water. It took the Stanley brothers about three years to develop a condenser and boiler system that did not need to be filled every thirty or forty miles. However, by then it was too late. The steam engine never recovered. While there is little doubt that today’s gasoline technology is better than steam, that is not the right comparison. How would steam have been if it had the benefit of seventy-five years of research and development? While we may never know, some engineers believe that steam was the better bet. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
In the United States of America, almost all nuclear power is generated by light-water reactors. Yet there are reasons to believe that the alternative technologies of heavy-water or gas-cooled reactors would have been superior, especially given the same amount of learning and experience. Canada’s experience with heavy-water reactors allows them to generate power for 25 percent less cost than light-water reactors can operate without the need to reprocess fuel. Perhaps most important is the safety comparison. Both heavy-water and gas-cooled reactors have a significantly lower risk of a meltdown—heavy water because the high pressure is distributed over many tubes rather than a single core vessel, and gas-cooled because of the much slower temperature rise in the event of a coolant loss. The question of how light-water reactors came to dominate has recently been studied by Robin Cowen, in a 1987, Stanford University Ph.D. thesis. The first consumer for nuclear power was the U.S.A. Navy. In 1949, then Captain Rickover made the pragmatic choice in favor of light-water reactors. He had two good reasons. It was then the most compact technology, an important consideration for submarines, and it was the furthest advanced, suggesting that it would have the quickest route to implementation. In 1954, the first nuclear-powered submarine, Nautilus, was launched. The results looked very optimistic. At the same time civilian nuclear power become a high priority. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The Soviets had explored their first nuclear bomb in 1949. In response, Atomic Energy Commissioner T. Murray warned, “One we become fully conscious of the possibility that [energy-poor] nations will gravitate towards the USSR if it wins the nuclear power race, it will be quite clear that this race is no Everest-climbing, kudos-providing contest. General Electric and Westinghouse, with their experience producing light-water reactors for the nuclear-powered submarines, were the natural choice to develop civilian power stations. Considerations of proven reliability and speed of implementation took precedence over finding the most cost-effective and safest technology. Although light-water was first chosen as an interim technology, this gave it enough of a head start down the learning curve that the other options have never had the chance to catch up. The adoption of gasoline engines, and light-water reactors are but two demonstrations of how history matters in determining today’s technology choices. The important insight from game theory is to recognize early on the potential for future lock-in—once one option has enough of a head start, superior technological alternatives may never get the chance to develop. Thus there is a potentially great payoff in the early stages from spending more time figuring out not only what technology meets today’s constraints, but also what options will be the best for the future. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Although exploratory engineering research can show certain technological possibilities, gaining this knowledge can have a paradoxical effect on our feeling of knowledge, on our sense of how much we know about the future. It gives us more information, but it can reveal a range of possibilities so vast that we feel as if we know less than we did before. The prospect of nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing has this paradoxical effect. It makes certain scenarios—such as a mid-twenty first century World of poverty, or choking on pollution caused by massive accumulations of twentieth-century-style industry—seem very unlikely indeed. This is useful information in trying to understand our real situation and trying to make sensible plans for the future. And yet the range of new possibilities opened up is broader than we could have imagined before. On the negative side, one can imagine building engines of destruction capable of devasting the World as thoroughly as a nuclear war. On the beneficial side, one can imagine futures of stable peace with levels of health, wealth, and environmental quality beyond any historical precedent and beyond present expectations. But recall the energy crisis of the 1980s, when home owners and businesses could be fined $10,000 (2023 inflation adjusted $36,307.04) for turning on the heat, the thermostat, during the winter, was required to stay at 65-degrees Fahrenheit. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Within this spectrum of possibilities (and off to its sides) is a range of futures we cannot even imagine. Our actions, day by day, are taking us into one of those futures. Not to some future of our present plans or dreams or nightmares, but to a real future, one that will grow from the intended and unintended consequences of our actions, one that we and our descendants will actually have to live in. Scenarios are useful tools for thinking about the future. They do not represent predictions of what will happen, but instead they present pictures of Worlds that one can imagine happening. By looking at these pictures and seeing how they fit together, we can try to get some idea of which events are more likely and which are less likely, and to get some idea of how the choices we make today may affect the shape of the things to come. We are about to see a fusion of government and private business intelligence on a scale never before known in the capitalist economies. Governments and companies have long had truck with one another. Some giant firms have long provided “cover” for government agents. For example, the Bechtel Corporation, the San Francisco-based construction firm that had hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of contracts in the Middle East, gave nominal jobs to CIA operatives. In return, Bechtel received commercially valuable intelligence from the CIA. At one time U.S. businesses provided cover for some two hundred intelligence agents posted abroad who pretended to be executives. The companies were reimbursed for their costs. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
On the other hand, while may countries simply “expect” their business people to cooperate with intelligence and may apply pressure if they refuse, the United State of America does not. America business executives, including those who have had contacts with high-level foreign politicians, are seldom debriefed. The line between public and private espionage will continue to blur. As multinational corporations proliferate, many grown their own private intelligence networks—“para-CIA,” as it were. This is as true for European oil companies or banks and for Japanese trading houses as it is for American construction firms. Contact between some of these para-CIAs and the intelligence units of their own or their host countries must be assumed. Paralleling “para-intelligence” operations abroad is the recent spread of so-called “competitive intelligence” units in domestic industry. While designed to operate within the law, these apply, at least on a rudimentary level, many of the same methods and skills used by government intelligence operations. The possibilities for informal links with government increase as these business firms hire former spies and analysts from the ranks of government. Such incestuous relationships will multiply as a consequence of the restructuring of World business now taking place, which is leading to complex-cross-national business alliances. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
The company entering into a “strategic alliance” with another firm may never know that some of its partner’s operations are actually espionage activities run for the benefit of the government. Or it may want to know—and demand that its own government’s spies find out. Inevitably, such changes will drag many formerly “private” business activities into the public purview, politicizing them, and firing off a succession of charges, countercharges, upheavals, and explosive scandals. Another change that parallels recent developments in business will be a shift of emphasis from mass production to customization of intelligence. Government policy-makers are demanding more and more targeted, particularized, and precise information. This requires either customized collection of information or, at a minimum, customized analysis. To meet this demand—especially in the fields of economics, technology, and environment—requires pinpointed tactical information about so vast a variety of matters that not even the largest intelligence producers, like the CIA, will be able to recruit, maintain, and pay for all the necessary specialists. Intelligence agencies will therefore do what companies are doing: They will contract more work out, breaking up the vertical integration characteristic of mass-production operations. Espionage agencies have always done some contracting out. The CIA and French intelligence have both hired gangster and Mafiosi to carry out unpleasant tasks for them. Intelligence agencies have often set up pseudo-businesses—like the famous “Foreign Excellent Trench Coat Company,” used as a cover by the Red Orchestra spy network during its work against the Nazis in World War II, or the CIA’s “proprietary” airlines used during the Vietnam War. However, spies will soon be forced to rely on independent outside suppliers and consultants to a great extent than ever. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
The basis for this “out-sourcing” is already being laid by the proliferation of private research boutiques specializing in everything from political risk analysis to technical information searches. Business Environment Risk Information, a Long Beach, California, firm, has made whopping mistakes on occasion, but it is also credited with having told its business subscribers in December of 1980 that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would be assassinated. He was, ten months later. It also correctly forecast Iraq’s invasion of Iran nine months ahead of time. As long ago as 1985, even before the boom in such shops, there were scores of these info-boutiques. Many employ former senior officials or intelligence agents. The most prominent is Kissinger Associates, which at one time or another has employed Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President Bush; Lawrence Eagleburger, the number two man in the American State Department; William Simon, a former Secretary of the Treasury; and, of course, Henry Kissinger himself, a former national security adviser and once Secretary of state. Officials with intelligence connections move in and out of such firms—among them William F. Colby, former director of the CIA, who set up his own shop in Washington after leaving the agency. Said Colby: “The assessment business is a lot like the intelligence business.” Private intelligence enterprises can provide “deniability” to the governments that hire them; they can attract the best professionals at free-market, rather than civil service, wages; they can also perform the niche tasks for which large, bureaucratic sup shops are inherently ill-fitted. What we may well see, therefore, is a far closer fusion or interpenetration of business and government intelligence-seeking. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
I will continue to hold my banner aloft. I find myself born—aye, born—into a people and a religion. The preservation of my people must be for a purpose, for God does nothing without a purpose. His reasons are unfathomable to me, but on my own reason I place little dependence; test it where I will, it fails me. The simple, the ultimate in every direction is sealed to me. It is as difficult to understand matter as mind. The courses of the planets are no harder to explain the growth of a blade of grass. Therefore am I willing to remain a link in the great chain. What has been preserved for four thousand years was not saved that I should overthrow it. My people have survived the prehistoric paganism, the Babylonian polytheism; and it will survive the modern dilettantism and the current materialism, holding aloft the traditional Christian ideals inflexibly until the World shall become capable of recognizing their worth. I am a Christian because the faith of America demands no abdication of my mind. I am a Christian because the faith of America asks every possible sacrifice of my soul. I am a Christian because in all places where there are tears and suffering the Christian weeps. I am a Christian because every age when the cry of despair is heard the Christian hopes. I am a Christian because the message of America is the most ancient and the most modern. I am a Christian because America’s promise is a universal promise. I am a Christian because for American the World is not finished; men will complete it. I am a Christian because for America man is not yet fully created; men are creating him. I am a Christian because America places man and his unity above nations and above America itself. I am a Christian because above man, image of the divine unity, American placed the unity which is divine. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Out for Murder: Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?
The dreams of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, who united the Thirteen Colonies in the 18th century, may have died or have at least become shaded in the 21st century. Nothing nettles America more than the hordes of diverse people whom she cannot exclude from her land. The new multitudes are jamming into the cities, making these centers the most fearful jungles of “manyness” and are threatening the Anglo-Saxon empire. The cities are becoming the storm center as well as the nerve center because they are where the serious menaces to America is lurking. They have not only become the home of roughs, gamblers, thieves, robbers, lawless and desperate men and women, rioters, skeptics, and the irreligious, but they are also the lair of wealthy and luxurious people who do not care for the Kingdom. This has allowed people to adopt a sense of pride in their deviant work, as they are gradually able to reconceptualize their killings and other crimes as an acceptable and rewarding business profession. Murder, the unlawful killing of a person, is considered a serious criminal offense in the United States of America, and it is punished by extreme penalties. In addition, most Americans do not feel that the penalties are extreme enough. In overcoming the intense stigma associated with murder, the hit man or hit woman lacks the supports available to more ordinary types of killers. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Some cultures allow special circumstances or sanction special organizations wherein people who kill are insulated from the taint of murder. Soldiers at war, or police in the line of duty, or citizens protecting their property operate under what are considered justifiable or excusable conditions. Individuals acting on their own, who kill in a spontaneous, “irrational” outburst of violence, can also mitigate the stigma of their behaviour. I mean, people will go ape for one minute and shoot, but there are very few people who are capable of thinking about, palling, and then doing it. Individuals who kill in a hot-blooded burst of passion can retrospectively draw comfort from the law which provides a lighter ban against killings performed without premeditation or malice or intent. At one extreme, the spontaneous killing may seem the result of a mental disease or dissociative reaction, and excused entirely as insanity. However, when an individual who generally shares society’s ban against murder, is fully aware that his or her act of homicide is (1) unlawful, (2) self-serving, and (3) intentional, one does not have the usual defenses to fall back on. How does such an individual manage to overcome his or her inhibitions and avoid serious damage to his or her self-image (assuming that he or she does share society’s ban)? This is the special dilemma of the professional hit man or woman who hires himself or herself out for murder. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
There are two types of professional murders: the organized and the independent. The killer who belongs to an organized syndicate does not usually get paid on a contact basis, and performs his or her job out of loyalty and obedience to the organization. The independent professional killer is a freelance agent who hires himself or herself out for a fee. It is the career organization of the second type of killer that will be discussed. The organized killer can mitigate his or her behavior through an “appeal to higher loyalties.” He or she can also view his or her victim as an enemy of the group and then choose from a variety of techniques available for neutralizing the offense against the enemy. However, the independent professional murderer lacks most of these defenses. Nevertheless, built into one’s role are certain structural features that help one avoid deviance ascription. These features include: Contract. A contract is an unwritten agreement to provide a sum of money to a second party who agrees, in return, to commit a designated murder. It is most often arranged over the phone, between people who have never had personal contact. And the victim, or “hit,” is usually unknown to the killer. This arrangement is meant to protect both parties from the law. However, it also helps the killer deny the victim, or hit, is usually unknow to the killer by keeping the individual relatively anonymous. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
In arranging the contract, the hired killer will try to find out the difficulty of the hit and how much the customer wants the killing done. These considerations determine the price. He or she does not ask about motive for the killing, treating it as none of his or her concern. Not knowing the motive may hamper the killer from morally justifying his or her behavior, but it also enables one to further deny the victim by maintaining one’s distance and reserve. Finally, the contract is backed up by a further understanding. If the killer fails to live up to one’s part of the bargain, the penalties could be extreme. This has the ironic effect that after the contract is arranged, the killer can somewhat deny responsibility. Reputation and Money. Reputation is especially important in an area where killers are unknown to their customers, and where the less written, the better. Reputation, in turn, reflects how much money the hit man had commanded in the past. Pete, who could not recall the exact number of people he had killed, did, like other hit men, keep an accounting of his highest fees. To him big money meant not only a way to earn a living, but also a way to maintain his professional reputation. People who accept lower fees can also find work as hired killers. Heroin addicts are the usual example. However, as Pete says, they often receive a bullet for their pains. It is believed that people who would kill for so little would also require littler persuasion to make the talk to the police. This further reinforces the single-minded emphasis on making big money. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
As a result, killing is conceptualized as a business or as just a job. Framing the hit in a normal busineslike context enables the hit man or woman to deny wrongfulness or deny injury. In addition to the economic motive, Pete, and hit men and women discussed how the job was exciting, fun, game-playing, power, and impressive to their romantic partners as incentives for murder. However, none of these motives are mentioned by all sources. None are as necessary to the career as money. And, after a while, these other motives diminish and killing becomes only “just a job.” The primacy of the economic motive has been aptly expressed in the case of another deviant profession. Women who enjoy pleasures of the flesh with their customers do not make good women of the evening, according to those who are acquainted with this institution first hand. Instead of thinking about the most effective way of making money at the job, they would be doing things for their own pleasure and enjoyment. Skill. Most of the hit man and woman’s training focuses on acquiring skill in the use of weapons. “Then, he met these two guys, these two white guys…them two them two was the best. And but they stayed around over there and they got together, and Pete told [them] that he really wanted to be good. He said, if [I] got to do something, I wanted to be good at it. So, they go together, showed him, show him how to shoot…And gradually, he became good…Like he told me, like when he shoots somebody, he always goes for the head; he said, that’s about the best shot. I mean, if you want him dead then and there…And these two guys showed him, and to him, I mean, hey, I mean, he don’t believe nobody could really outshoot these two guys, you know what I mean. They know everything you want to know about guns, knives, and stuff like that.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
The hit man or woman’s reputation, and the amount of money he or she makes depend on his or her skill, his or her effective ability to serve as a means to someone else’s ends. “The result is a focus on technique. Like in anything you do, when you do it, you want to do it just right. On your target and you hit it, how you feel: I hit it! I hit it!” reports Pete. This focus on technique, on means, helps the hit man to “deny responsibility” and intent. In frame-analytic terms, the hit man or woman separates one’s morally responsible, or “principal” self from the rest of himself or herself, and performs the killing mainly as a “strategist.” In other words, one sees oneself as a “hired gun.” The saying, “If I didn’t do it, they’d find someone else who would,” reflects this narrowly technical orientation. Therefore, the contract, based on the hit man or woman with opportunities for denying the victim, denying the injury, and denying responsibility. However, this is not enough. To point out the defenses of the professional hit man or woman is one thing, but it is unlikely that the novice is at a point where he or she both lacks the conventional defense against the stigma of murder, and he or she has not yet fully acquired the exceptional defenses of the professional. How, then, does he or she cope? Negative experience is a feeling of disorientation. Expecting to take up a position in a well-framed realm, one finds that no particular frame is immediately applicable, or the frame that one thought was applicable no longer seems to be, or one cannot bind oneself within the frame that apparently apply. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
One loses command over the formulation of viable response. One flounders. Experience, the meld of what the current scene brings to one and what one brings to it—meant to settle into a form even while it is beginning, finds no form and is therefore no experience. Reality automatically flutters. One has a “negative experience”—negative in the sense that it takes it character from what it is not, and what it is not is an organized and organizational affirmed response. Negative experience can occur when a person finds oneself lapsing into an old understanding of a situation, only to suddenly awaken to the fact that it no longer applies. In this regard, we should expect negative experience to be a special problem for the novice. For example, the first time he killed a man for money, Pete supposedly became violently ill: “When he [Pete], you know, hit the guy, when he shot the guy, the guy said ‘You killed me.’…something like that, cause he struck him all up here. And what he said, it was just, I mean, the look right in the guy’s eye, you know. I mean he looked like: Why me? Yeah? And then he said that at night-time he’ll start thinking about the guy: like he should not have looked at him like that…I mean actually [Pete] was sick…He couldn’t keep his food down, I mean, or nothing like that….[It lasted] I’d say about two months…” #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Pete’s account conforms to the definition of negative experience. He had never killed anyone for money before. It started when a member of the Detroit drug World had spotted Pete in a knife fight outside an inner city bar, was apparently impressed with the young man’s style, and offered him fifty dollars to do a “job.” Pete accepted. He wanted the money. However, when the first hit came about, Pete of course know that he was doing it for money, but yet his orientation was: revenge. Thus, he stared his victim in the face, a characteristic gesture of people who kill enemies for revenge. Expecting to see defiance turn into a look of defeat, they attempt to gain “face” at the loser’s expense. However, when Pete stared his victim in the face, he saw not an enemy, but an innocent man. He saw a look of: “Why me?” And this discordant image is what remained in his mind during the weeks and months to follow and made him sick. As Pete says, “He shouldn’t have looked at him like that.” The victim’s look of innocence brought about a “frame break.” Given that the frame applied to an activity is expected to enable us to come to terms with all events in that activity (informing and regulating many of them), it is understandable that the unmanageable might occur, an occurrence which cannot be effectively ignored and to which the frame cannot be applied, with resulting bewilderment and chagrin on the part of the participants. In brief, a break can occur in the applicability of the frame, a break in its governance. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
When such a frame break occurs, it produces negative experience. Pete’s extremely uncomfortable disorientation may reflect the extreme dissonance between the revenge frame, that he expected to apply, and the unexpected look of innocence that he encountered and continued to recall. The quotes above are from Pete, who is a hit man. Pete speaks of himself in the third person to explore the behavioral side of contract killing, or because his disassociates with himself when it comes time to hit a person. However, it is possible that is become possessed when he has a contract and enforces it. Demon possession is a condition in which one or more evil spirits or demons inhabit the body of a human being and can take complete control of their victim at will. By temporarily blotting out his consciousness, they can speak and act through him as their complete slave and tool. The inhibiting demon (or demons) comes and goes much like the proprietor of a house who may or may not be “at home.” When the demon is “at home,” he may precipitate an attack. In these attacks the victim passes from his normal state, in which he acts like other people, to the abnormal state of possession. Causes of demonic attacks vary. In many case, the targets do not deliberately call on evil spirits so these would latch onto them. Rather, they engage in “spiritual openings” that the spirits consider an invitation, which eventually leads to an attack. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
There are aspects of life where a particular kind of situational respect is required. In daily speech, the terms “formality” and “informality” are sometimes used to refer to this central axis of situational regulation. And these terms might be tend to stress unduly the kind of clothing that is worn, the degree to which the sequence of acts in a social occasion is codified in advance and heavily enjoined, and the range of activities that is permitted. The terms “tight” and “loose” might be more descriptive and give more equal weight to each of the several ways in which devotion to a social occasion may be exhibited. For example, certain social settings in different communities are differently defined as regards tightness. Thus, public streets in Paris seem to be more loosely defined than those in Britain or America. On many Parisian streets one can eat a loaf of bread while walking to or from work, become heatedly involved in peripatetic conversations, engage in a full-course meal at an open café table, expect not to show surprise at oddly costumed persons, and so forth. In Anglo-American society one would have to look to summer resorts to find a similar degree of looseness. (In any case, Americans tend to find France and summer resorts relaxing for the same reason: many public gatherings seem to demand less attachment and respect, allowing one an easier depth of either private or interpersonal concerns.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Similarly, in many Anglo-American communities a teacher will be expected to remain thoroughly oriented in to the situation during school hours, while in a rural community in Southern Italy we learn that: It is not uncommon for a teacher to come late to class and to spend the morning smoking a cigarette and looking idly out the window. In many geographical regions in America, a continuum can be traced regarding the formality of dree required of men who patronize public eateries. There are still establishments that require dinner jackets. Those next in line insist at least on ties and jackets, and may keep a supply of ties handy to accommodate would-be customers who turn up informally attired. At summer resorts in the same geographical regions, one can find establishments whose posted house-rules demand that T-shirts be worn in addition to swimming trunks, these establishments thereby distinguishing themselves from those final seats of beach informality in our society where eating, drinking, and dancing are allowed even barefoot men in swimming trunks. Incidentally, it might be noted here that societies seem to have their own limits regarding tightness and looseness and that these limits seem to change over time. In spite of some recent efforts to bring pomp back into American life, the most formal of evening clothes are becoming more and more rarely sed, and decorations such as jewelled tiaras can properly be worn these days at almost no occasion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Any social establishment is itself likely to provide instructive variation in tightness or formality requirements, according to place and time. In Central Hospital, for example, attendants claimed that they need wear their ties and “look smart,” that is, situationally oriented, only when on that half of the campus that contained the administration building. On the night-shift, when doctors and nurses were absent, attendants would administer medication without bothering to take their cigarettes from their mouths, and tended to slouch more while sitting or standing. Therefore, one can draw from this example that there are ways one leaves oneself more open to demon possession. Are you doing things that are conducive of the Lord? Are you engaging in slander, gossip, fights, drugs, drinking, terrorism, premarital pleasures of the flesh, and not going to church? Well, these are ways to open yourself up to becoming possessed by demons. God’s regulations for good Christian behavior is very tight. “Why did you say we must remember ourselves when it is most difficult?” Our own exposure to life is both a threat and an opportunity. You know you must not do something. One part of you wants to do it. Then your remember yourself and stop it. Self-remembering has an element of will in it. If it were just dreaming, “I am, I am, I am,” it would not be anything. You must give a certain time simply to studying what remembering means, and what not remembering means, and what effect these have. Then you can invent many different ways to remember yourselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
However, actually, self-remembering is not an intellectual or abstract thing; it is moments of will. It is not thought; it is action. It means having increased control; otherwise of what use would it be? You can only control yourself in moments of self-remembering. The mechanical control which is acquired by training and education—when one is taught how to behave in certain circumstances—is not real control. “Are we to understand that self-remembering means awareness?” Not only awareness. It means also a certain capacity to act in a certain way, to do what you want. You see, in our logical way of thinking, according to logical knowledge, we divide consciousness from will. However, consciousness means will. In the Russian language, for instance, “will” is the same word as “freedom.” The word “consciousness” means a combination of all knowledge; as if you had all your knowledge before you at the same time. However, consciousness also means will, and will means freedom. “What does giving up will mean?” Giving up childishness, inefficiency and lying. “Does giving up self-will involve giving up your own judgment?” It depends in what. What does giving will mean? How can it be achieved? You have mistaken ideas about this. First you think of it as a final actions: that you give up will and have no more will. This is an illusion because we have no such will to give up. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
Our will last for about three minutes. Will is measured by time. If once we give up three minutes of will, tomorrow, another three minutes will grow. Giving up will is a continuous process, not one action. A single action means nothing. A second mistake is not remembering certain principles to which you give up will, such as rules. For example, there is a rule that you should not talk about this system. The natural desire is to talk, but if you stop yourself, it means that you give up your will; that you obey this rule. There are many other principles to which you must give up your will in order to follow them. In the 1950s the Ivy League colleges were faced with a problem. Each school wanted to produce a willing football team. The colleges found themselves overemphasizing athletics and compromising their academic standards in order to build a championship team. Yet, no matter how often they practiced or how much money they spent, at the end of the season the standings were much as they had been before. The average win/loss record was still 50/50. The inescapable mathematical fact is tht for every winner there had to be a loser. All the extra work canceled itself out. The excitement of college sports depends as much on the closeness and intensity of the competition as on the level of skill. Many fans prefer college basketball and football to the professional versions; while the level of skill is lower, there is often more excitement and intensity to the competition. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
With the excitement and intensity in mind, the colleges got smart. They joined together and agreed to limit spring training to one day. Although there were more fumbles, the games were no less exciting. Athletes had more time to concentrate on their studies. Everyone was better off, except some alumni who wanted their alma maters to excel at football and forget about academic work. Many students would like to have a similar agreement with their fellow students before examinations. When grades are based on a traditional “bell curve,” one’s relative standing in the class matters more than the absolute level of one’s knowledge. It matters not how much you know, only that others know less than you. The way to gain an advantage over the other students is to study more. If they all do so, they all have more knowledge, but relative standings and therefore the bottom line—the grades—are largely unchanged. If only everyone in the class could agree to limit spring studying to one (preferably rainy) day, they would get the same grades with less effort. The feature common to these situations is that success is determined by relative rather than absolute performance. When one participant improves his or her own ranking, one necessarily worsens everyone else’s ranking. However, the fact that one’s victory requires someone else’s defeat does not make the game zero-sum. In a zero-sum game it is not possible to make everyone better off. Here it is. The scope for gain comes from reducing inputs. While there might always be the same number of winners and losers, it can be less costly for everyone to play the game. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
The source of the problem of why (some) students study too much is that they do not have to pay a price or compensation to others. (Of course, the dumb thing to do is believe you are stupid and not study at all!) Each student’s studying is akin to a factory’s polluting: it makes it more difficult for all the other students to breathe. Because there is no market in buying and selling studying time, the result is a “rat race”: each participant strives too hard, with too little to show for one’s efforts. However, no one team or student is willing to be the only one, or the leader, in reducing the effort. This is just like a prisoner’s dilemma with more than two prisoners. Escape from the horns of this dilemma requires an enforceable collective agreement. As we saw with OPEC and the Ivy League, the trick is to form a cartel to limit competition. The problem for high-school students is that the cartel cannot easily detect cheating. For the collectivity of students, a cheater is one who studies more to sneak an advantage over the others. It is very hard to tell if some are secretly studying until after they have “aced” the test. BY then it is too late. In some small towns, high-school students do have a way to enforce “no-studying” cartels. Everyone gets together and cruises Main Street at night. The absence of those home studying is noticed. Punishment can be social ostracism or worse. To arrange a self-enforcing cartel is difficult. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
It is all the better if an outside enforces the collective agreement limiting competition. This is just what happened for cigarette advertising, although not intentionally. In the old says, cigarette companies used to spend money to convince consumers to “walk a mile” for their product or to “fight rather than switch.” The different campaigns made advertising agencies rich, but their main purpose was defensive—each company advertised because the others did, too. Then, in 1968, cigarette advertisements were banned from TV by law. The companies thought this restriction would hurt them and fought against it. However, when the some cleared, they saw that the ban helped them avoid mutually damaging and costly advertising campaigns and thus improved their profits. As with advertisers, scientists are trying to stop means of losing control. The simplest imaginable approach to “guiding” nanotechnology would be to stop it. The easiest trip to plan is the trip that goes nowhere. This would have a certain appeal, if it were possible. Because of its enormous potential for abuse, nanotechnology has the potential of doing great harm. If we believe that human beings and human institutions are too incompetent to deal with nanotechnology—that they are too likely to turn it to aggressive military use, or too likely to make it freely available to madmen and women—then the option of stopping the development of nanotechnology may seem attractive indeed. However, the ethical question that must guide human actions is not “Would it be better to stop?,” but “Would attempts to stop make things better?” #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
One option is to push forward, emphasizing the need for caution but also the potential for good applications. The promise of medical, economic, and environmental applications, joined with the threat posed by a new arms race, provides a powerful motive for international cooperation. With positive goals and an inclusive stance, international cooperation is a promising strategy; it could provide a basis for guiding the development and application of nanotechnology. Another option would be to emphasize the downside, to focus debate on potential abuses in support of a campaign to halt development. In following this strategy, an activist group would want to downplay the civilization applications of nanotechnology and emphasize its military applications. Horror stories of potential abuse (including abuses that regulation could easily prevent) would help to make the technology seem strange and dangerous. This strategy might succeed in suppressing civilian research in many countries, though probably not all. Unfortunately, it would also guarantee funding for classified military research programs in laboratories around the World, even in the most morally honest countries, because of their then-inevitable fear of consequences if someone else developed nanotechnology first. In a hostile public atmosphere, research would be pushed into secret programs, and in secrecy the prospects for broad international cooperation would disappear. Attempts to stop nanotechnology for fear of a new, unstable arms race become self-fulfilling prophecies. Afterwards, the advocates of this view could then say, “We warned you!” as the World slid toward a war they themselves had helped to prepare. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
Attempting to stop technological development is a simple but dangerous idea. The greater its success, the greater the polarization it would cause between technology advocates and technology critics. A moderate success would push research out of the public universities and into corporate and military research labs. A greater success would push research out of the corporate laboratories and into heavily classified programs. A truly amazing success would end most of these, leaving the only remaining military programs in the hands of those states with thoroughly repressive governments or alien ideologies. This, presumably, is not how one would prefer nanotechnology to be developed. The only genuine success would be a total success, and this would mean banning research not only in the United States of America, and Germany, and France, and the rest of Western Europe, and Japan, and the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan, but in Korea, South Africa, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Vietnam, and the part of Colombia controlled by the Medellin Cartel. Later, as computers improve, as chemistry advances, as more and more proximal-probe microscopes are built by high school students, total success would require banning kids from tinkering in suburban garages in Pittsburgh. Competitive pressures are pushing technology toward thorough control of matter, and we have seen that this goal can be reached by many different paths. Preventing one area of research would not prevent the advance, nor would stopping work in one country. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
When the United States of America delays drug development through regulations by the FDA, drug companies simply switch research overseas, or non-U.S.A. companies pull ahead. Orbital-launch capability and nuclear-weapons capabilities are other examples. Very seldom has one country given these abilities to another, yet at least eight nations are able to launch satellites to orbit independently, at least seven have detonated nuclear devices, and another two are suspected to be within reach of nuclear capabilities. India and Israel have built bombs and launched satellites, though neither is considered a great power or a leading force in World technology. Where nanotechnology is concerned, many countries are capable of doing the required research, and more will be in the future. South Korea has both the needed educational levels and the ambition; visitors from the People’s Republic of China ask about nanotechnology. A decision at the top directing the resources of a nation could get results almost anywhere. The United States of America is only gradually being shaken from its illusion that it rules the World of technology. However, whoever rules the World of technology is generally the World leader. Like military force, economic clout is increasingly based on knowledge. High technology is congealed knowledge. As the super-symbolic economy spreads, the value of leading-edge technology soars. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
In January of 1985 nearly 200,000 tons of Romanian 96-inch carbon steel arrived in North America and went on sale for 40 percent less than comparable Canadian steel. The story of that shipment began thirteen years earlier, when the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu placed his country’s nuclear development program under the aegis of the DIE, his foreign intelligence organization. According to Ion Pacepa, the former head of the DIE, who later defected to the West, teams of intelligence-trained engineers were provided with false papers and sent abroad to find jobs in the nuclear industry. According to Pacepa, these techno-spies actually landed positions in General Electric, Combustion Engineering, their Canadian counterparts of affiliates, as well as in Siemens, Kraftwerke Union, and AEG in West Germany and Ansaldo Nucleari Impiante itn Italy. Soon technical intelligence began barreling into Bucharest. Knowing that the Canadians were having difficult selling their CANDU reactor, Ceausescu, through the DIE, hinted that he might buy as many as twenty CANDUS. In fact, on October 27, 1977, the Romanians signed an agreement with the Canadians, the remainder with Romanian help. Canada thereupon laid down the welcome mat for Romanian nuclear engineers, many of them DIE agents. The result, according to Pacepa, was that “the DIE soon obtained intelligence covering approximately 75 percent of CANDU-600 technology, a modern security system for nuclear plants, technology and equipment for producing heavy water, and architectural and construction plans for nuclear plants built in Canada, West Germany, and France.” #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Better yet, Romania was able to sweet-talk Canada into putting up a $1 billion loan, supposedly to be partly used as payments to Canadian firms involved in the project, the remaining Romanian costs to be paid to Canada in the form of countertrade or barter. By March 1982, the entire commercial deal melted down, as its were. However, Romania had already pocketed an advance tranche amounting to $320 million. Moreover, Romania also already had most of the technology it needed. All it needed to do now was send Canada goods under terms of the barter deal. Which is why Romanian steel entered Canada and began to undersell the domestic product. The Romanian scam, combining technological espionage with an economic rip-off, is less unusual than it might appear in a World in which research cost are skyrocketing and the cost of stolen technology is extremely inexpensive by comparison. In fact, according to Count de Marenches, former chief of French intelligence: “In any intelligence service worthy of the name you would easily come cross cases where the whole year’s budget has been paid for in fully by a single operation. Naturally, intelligence does not receive actual payment, but the country’s industry profits.” This—not just military considerations—explains why spies swarm around any center of new technology, why the Soviets and others have focused on Silicon Valley, why the Russians even tried to buy Valley companies. It is why Japan, too, is a major target today. (According to a former KGB officer stationed there, “Even the special audio equipment used by the KGB residency to monitor radio communications between Japanese National Police surveillance teams was stolen from Japan.”) #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
The entire Romanian system was modeled after the much bigger technology espionage apparatus constructed by the Soviet Union and centered in the so-called Line X of the KGB, its Directorate T, the scientific and technological section. A 1987 U.S.A. State Department report based on CIA data charged that one third of all the officials of the Soviet Chamber of Commerce and Industry are, in fact, known or suspected KGB or GRU officers. “Hosting over 200 trade exhibitions and about 100 Western business delegations annually, and inspecting thousands of goods each year give its employees extraordinary access to imported equipment…” The Soviets pay special attention to robots, deep-sea marine technology, and industrial chemicals. As the lack of hard currency makes it difficult for many in it, they are irresistibly drawn to illegal acquisitions. This suggests a coming step-up in technological espionage by the less affluent countries of Africa, Asia, and South America. If they themselves cannot use the knowledge their engineers or students steal, they can at least sell it. Indeed, one of the frequently ignored aspects of technological espionage is what might be termed the “resale” market. Furthermore, as knowledge become ever more central to economic, military, and political power, techno-espionage causes increasing friction among former allies. Note the recent changes that French intelligence has intercepted IMB transatlantic communications, passed them to Groupe Bull, and also planted agents in American computer firms. Witness, too, CoCom. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
CoCom is the Paris-based Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls set up by sixteen nations to prevent the seepage of Western high technology to what was then the Soviet bloc. CoCom, the scene of escalating dissension among its members, now face possible disintegration. Members increasingly resent its restrictions on trade, and accuse one another of using it to gain commercial advantage. At the initiative of the Europeans and Japanese, moves are under way to shorten the list of restricted technologies and embargoed countries. However, in 1983, when the United States of America, the main force behind CoCom, proposed that Chia be struck from the list, a howl arose. Wester European nations fearing that the U.S.A. would take over the Chinese market vehemently opposed this proposal and kept it from ever seeing the light of day. Japan had recently been embarrassed by the Toshiba affair. This centered on a Toshiba subsidiary’s illegal sale to the Soviets of highly sophisticated equipment for grinding submarine propellers blades. Under heavy U.S.A. pressure, Japan tightened its own domestic export controls to precent a recurrence. One result, however, was to cut itself off from part of its Chinese market. Thus, Japanese machine tool exports to China plummeted by 66 percent in the single years 1987. Japan was furious, therefore, when a Cincinnati Milacron machining center turned up in Shanghai. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
This kind of commercial war now threaten to explode CoCom altogether. Moreover, European economic integration means that the exports controls of individual European nations are weakened, since goods can flow freely among the twelve EC nations. The rise of the super-symbolic global economy also brings with it, as we saw, the creation of transnational or multinational business groups, along with multiple, boundary-crossing commercial alliances and joint ventures. These increase the cross-flows of knowledge, and make it far harder to police. For all these reasons, technology will join economies as a top-priority target for the World’s spies. The spy of the future is less likely to resemble James Bond, whose chief assets were his fists and Ultimate Driving Machine, than the Line X engineer who lives quietly down the block and never does anything more violent than turn a page of a manual or flick on his microcomputer. O Lord, our hope in every generation, we rejoice in the wonderous deliverance Thou didst bring to pass for our fathers. When Haman rose to crush us, Thou wast at our side. Thou didst bring to naught his base designs, delivering us from destruction. In our day, too, O Lord our God, we trust in Thy saving power. We know it is Thy will that evil be subdued and righteousness prevail. Keep us ever steadfast the no weapon formed against us may prosper. Inspire us like Mordecai of old, to be unswerving in our devotion to Thee. Like Esther, may we ever be eager to serve our people, even at the peril of our lives. Cause us to know as Mordecai knew, that whether we be born to high or low estate, we share alike our people’s lot. That though we dwell in safety, blessed with abundance, our brother’s hurt is our hurt, their sorrow, ours. Hasten the day when all oppression shall cease, and tyranny shall forever be crushed: when strife shall no longer set off man from man, but all shall unite in true brotherhood to serve each other, and thus, O Lord, serve Thee. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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You Do Not Know My Pain
From ancient times, people have looked for positive guidance from the spirit World. However, they believed demons caused most of the World’s problems. Demons were said to cause comets, volcanic eruptions, and eclipses. Some people believed demons were the reason for illness, while others believed that demons possessed great powers of healing. For instance, pilgrimages to Epidaurus, in Greece, became World famous, and a night’s sleep in the sacred temple cured thousands. Appolonius of Tyana (3 B.C.—A.D. 96) was a well-known miracle worker who effected magic cures and was regarded by many as “a heathen Christ.” In the temple of Serapis at Alexandria, Egypt, multitudes of pagans were remarkably healed. The World in which Sarah Winchester lived was full of demons. Unlike most, Mrs. Winchester knew that demonic powers did not exist in just in the imagination of frightened men, and that they could not only cause harm, but she also knew of miracles through demon-energized healers and magic workers. It was a lustrous motionless day. Autumn bloom lay on the Winchester Estate, on heavy trees of the weald, on streams moving indolently, far across the fruit orchards. Mrs. Winchester held her breath and gazes. A silence distilled from years of solitude lay on the lawns and Victorian garden. Vying in evil, sorcerers cursed the Winchester family and their fortune. A succession of deaths, allowed Mrs. Winchester to build one of the most unique and beautiful mansions in the World and made her heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Evil spells casted by Witches claimed the life of Mrs. Winchester’s husband, William Wirt Winchester, and her new born daughter, Annie Winchester. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
Although she was stricken by grief, Mrs. Winchester went on to led an active, independent, and decided life. Her home became the focus of her life, and her mission was to continue its construction to ward off any demonic curse. “I shall never leave it!” she said, her heart swelling as if she had taken the vow to a lover. Legions of souls preserved the house in its integrity; and that was worthwhile. Mrs. Winchester was satisfied to carry on such a legacy. That even, when supper was finished, Mrs. Winchester sat with her niece Daisy by the fire she had lit in the salon. It provided a sense of radiance and gave the great room an air of expectancy and welcome. The portraits, the Italian Baroque Walnut cabinets, the Victorian needlepoint parlor Cherub face arm chairs, and charming English needlepoint rugs all look as if they had just been produced. “My dear, what a fine room!” said Daisy. “Yes! It is a delicious room. One of the warmest of the house. This is perfect.” Daisy had still to see the library, cozy and inviting, the Venetian dining room, the breakfast parlor, and the many bed rooms. As they crossed the threshold of the Blue Séance Room, guided by some light from its western window, someone was in the room already; they felt rather than saw another presence. Daisy, behind her, paused also; she did not speak or move. What she saw, or thought she saw, was simply a man in a hooked black cloak turning away from the mahogany desk. Almost before Mrs. Winchester had received the pression there was no one there; only the slightest stir of the needlework curtain over the widow. She heard no step or other sound. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
They drank coffee in the Blue Séance Room. Daisy was a lovely woman, delicate of feature and voice, she could speak home décor one moment and her usual Parisian French the next. A faint shadow of pain passed over Mrs. Winchester’s face. Daisy looked out the window at the drifts of ivy hanging from the evergreen trees. Mrs. Winchester had exulted in her resolve to keep the Winchester Mansion to herself until she and the house should have time to make friend. But the uneasy feeling she had left her wanting to take the chill off. The house was enormous, mysterious, and drawn into its own secret past. “Why not come stay with me?” she said. “I know you would like to settle down somewhere in the country where you will not be disturbed, and I have plenty of room.” “Well, Aunt Sarah, your home certainly does provide the requisite seclusion. I would be honored to.” “I promise no one shall bother you—” Mrs. Winchester added, half-nervously: “Not even the spirits.” Was the solitude already making Mrs. Winchester superstitious? Mrs. Winchester walked Daisy to the bedroom she was to sleep in. They parted ways. While Daisy was dressing for bed she heard a knock, and saw Kaspian Gosta, the Butler’s round face just inside the door. “Is there anything wrong with your accommodations, my lady?” “Yes, what’s wrong is that it freezes in here.” “Nothing can be done, my lady. Everything has been tried.” “That will do, Mr. Gosta. I want a fire to be lit in the fireplace,” said Daisy.” “Yes, my lady.” The door closed on the butler. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
It was the witching hour, or so it seemed. Lights out, and only far-off sounds: a woman laughing hysterically, the crack of a gun. It seemed for a while there had been the faint thudding of drums. Daisy awoke. There was a man standing over her, he was hot, covered with sweat, he stretched uneasily in his clothes. The man emitted inhuman sounds: a piglike squeal. This reduced Daisy to a nervous wreck. She screamed and the made quickly faded away. She heard rapid foot steps in the hallway and then a knock at the door. “Come in,” she said. “My lady, are you okay?” “No, Mr. Gosta. There was someone in my room,” Daisy explained. “That is what I tried to warn you about, my lady. The specter like to keep the heat down in the house.” The next morning, she did not want to be alone in the house for more than a few minutes at a time. However, whenever she would go to Mrs. Winchester there was a strange wind that seemed to repel her from her door. Always, there was something not quite right about the Winchester Mansion, as far back as Daisy could remember. Neighbors and friends suggested that the Winchester fortune was cursed. “I never would believe it,” Daisy said. “That is not how I was brought up.” In her bedroom, she undressed and lied down, holding her rosary beads to her heart, as she hoped and prayed, just as she has over so many nights, that the freezing cold and the specters would stop. Mrs. Winchester employed a small workforce of men and women. By December, the fruit harvest in the orchards had been picked, packages, and dispatched to the respective buyers. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
On October 25, 1896, shortly after she had gone to sleep, Daisy was wakened by a series of loud poundings and scratching noises on the ceiling. She could not tell where they were coming from. She left her bed—and met Mrs. Winchester on the stairs. She was agitated. “Were you making that racket?” Mrs. Winchester asked. “No, Aunt Sarah. I thought it was someone else.” They found all the first-floor gasoliers on and no one about. Mrs. Winchester asked who was last downstairs, if perhaps Mr. Gosta forgot to switch off the lights. However, Daisy was the last one and she swore she had turned everything off. There was a tangible presence in the Winchester mansion. One could hear it at all hours of the day and night. “I would be sitting and would hear it shuffling about,” Daisy recalls. “Not footsteps as such, but rustling and shuffling. I could not see anything. Not at first.” As the months passed, the presence gradually made itself known. Around the middle of January 1897, the Winchester mansion was awakened by a blood curdling scream in the night. Daisy was crying and shaking with fear. After a few hours she calmed down and went back to sleep when she felt something on her back. It was pushing her out of bed, but when she looked around, there was no one there. However, it felt as though someone was trying to eject her from the bed, as if she did not belong there. Then suddenly, the duvet was ripped off the bed, leaving her shivering. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
The next morning, Mrs. Winchester glanced about the great room, with its circle of warmth and light by the hearth, and the sullen shadows huddled at its father end, as if hungrily listening. She noticed that things moved in the room. Doors were left opened—drawers and things have shuffled through. In the night she would hear a lot of running and banging and the sound of horses’ hooves. It was like a cavalry of horsemen passing through the halls. When Mrs. Winchester drew back the curtains and looked out, the lamps on the gateposts were bathing the roadway in a soft light. There were no horses, but the sounds were still coming from the hallway. When she opened the door of her bedroom, the noises got louder, and she could hear men conversing, and shouting at each other. Mrs. Winchester could not understand what they were saying. She had no idea if it was even English. But the galloping and hammering and sawing continued, which was always followed by a terrible howl at dusk. As the peered through the sky, Mrs. Winchester would open her door and be surprised to find that certain rooms had been sealed off and new additions added to the house, along with the most exquisite furnishings. The next night while she was sleeping. Mrs. Winchester was awakened by a ferocious thud on the floor, and she heard Daisy screaming and hollering like she was in great pain. Mrs. Winchester quickly rushed to see what was wrong and found her limp on the floor, unable to move. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
Mrs. Winchester was terrified. The room was as cold as an icebox and seemed darker than usual. Daisy’s face was white as milk. Dr. Odin rushed to the Winchester Estate, finding Daisy immobile and unable to communicate. He said that Daisy’s vocal cords were hoarse and that she had suffered a serious spinal injury with resultant loss of sight. After months of suffering and pain, on April 22, 1897, she was suddenly cured of her blindness. On May 31, 1897, Daisy was cured of her spinal trouble. The cures had apparently been wrought by Mrs. Winchester through séances. Satan is willing and able to perform diabolic miracles. Satanic healings, however, shift the physical disorder into the psychic plane by bringing the “healed” person into some type of occult bondage. The ability of such magicians is conditioned on the human plane by their inherent psychic power, and on the supernatural plane. Black magicians differ in strength and psychic ability to perform magical feats often described as Satanic Miracles. Strong magicians usually own their success to innate psychic powers. Very frequently they come from a family where the occult arts have flourished for generations. Their innate and inherited occult powers are frequently cultivated and enhanced by séances. To enlist the help of Satan and demons, a pact is often made with the powers of evil. The subject consciously and willingly gives oneself over to Satan and demonic agencies who will help one perform healing conjurations and other supernatural feats. Ordinarily the body is cut and the compact with the devil is written and signed in one’s own blood. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
Everything was all right for a while, but the house became disturbed again at night by the sawing of wood. Daisy pushed on the gasoliers and could not believe her eyes. Men were in the hallway sawing wood really fast. She was surprised to find Mrs. Winchester and Mr. Gosta in the front parlor. “What’s going on?” Daisy asked? Mrs. Winchester was in a flood of tears. “Mrs. Winchester thought she saw a black monster with hooves in the bathroom,” Mr. Gosta explained. “But it is gone now.” What was happening in the Winchester Mansion was unnatural. The things were real, but they were not only under attack, the were also being protected by demons. The next time, Daisy was awakened by a loud thud in the far corner of the bedroom. There was an old woman with long, gray hair falling over her face, and a young man with heavy boots, and a dark stain down the front of his shirt. The old woman came towards her with her arms outstretched. Daisy ran to the door but it would not open. And through the door came a deep set of ancient eyes with a demonic face starting into her eyes. From that day on, the smile on her face died. She was always trembling. She stared almost blankly, and was always cold. Never had things in the mansion been so scary. Mrs. Winchester was amazed to see the change in her. Daisy was positively shaken. Mrs. Winchester would ask Daisy, “My dear, what is the matter.” And in a flat, cold tone, Daisy would reply, “You do not know my pain.” And she would look away. Although it heals, many people are psychically ruined through magic. Sometimes violet and sinister forces appear. This indicates that the origin of the damage is primarily of a spiritual nature. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
I conjure thee, O fire, by him who made thee and all other creatures for good in the World. Welcome Spirit Botis and your 60 Legions of Spirits, O most noble King! I say thou art welcome unto me, because I have called thee through Him who has created Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all that is in them contained, and because also thou hast obeyed. By that same power by the which I have called thee forth, I bind thee, that thou remain affably and visibly here before this Circle so constant and so long as I shall have occasion for thy presence; and not to depart without my license until thou hast duly and faithfully performed my will without any falsity. BY THE PENTACLE OF SOLOMON HAVE I CALLED THEE! GIVE UNTO ME A TRUE ANSWER. Please blessed this house with great prosperity, abundance, wisdom, power and longevity. I think you for your empowerments which have served to assist my evolution toward divinity and power. Please take the spiritual wisdom that you bring and open the paths for more prosperity to flow into my life. Allow this sorcerous current to be a conduit of information which comes with it, and become more away of the precise reasons for the work upon the Pathway of Pacts. Allow me to understand this symbolism as well as the most powerful goal of the process. Meratsav tadad oybugird miy a iaruha acmerhtahsx iadzam hsuehgna mananahtoayhs ohgnanam adzad hsuehgnav acah tictahas hsutar ahta oyriav uha ahtay x7. Show various paths to self-mastery through the seven powers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
The Winchester Mystery House
The Winchester Mystery House is elegant, powerful, beautiful, mysterious and insidiously successful in whatever it does. It is a powerful aphrodisiac for certain occultists who are impatient with “parlor” esoteria. Where old systems weakened or visions grew dim, new ones were invented. It is impossible to find a single ideological thread uniting the Winchester Mystery House in its spiritual pilgrimage. One might glace at some choices, none of which stands up to scrutiny. Come and take a tour of the 110 of the remaining 160 rooms of amazement and wonder. Perhaps you will make contact with something special? https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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Computer Output is Still Regarded as Gospel
Criminal behaviour is a topic that captures the attention of the average American. There is simply something about the darker side of human behaviour that peaks our interest. Consider the familiarity of the following scenarios. While involved in a manic run of high-speed channel surfing, an image of Charles Manson or Osama bin Laden suddenly flashes across the television screen. The image is gone as fast as it arrived and your eyes adjust to the next channel. Almost instinctively, you find yourself flipping back to the previous channel and you proceed to fixate upon what is being said about these individuals some people perceive as monsters of modern time. You are sitting alone in public place. Suddenly, you hear a nearby voice telling a friend how he broke the law the past weekend but presumes that he was lucky enough to evade suspicion…perhaps the person is describing how he filed a false tax return or got into fisticuffs at the local pub the night before. Your ears quickly perk up as you anxiously eavesdrop on the crime-related confessional. These anecdotes speak to the armchair criminologist that seems to exist in all of us. When we see or hear about criminal behaviour, we want to know more. When the topic comes up in conversation, we are always willing to add our proverbial two cents. Americans clearly have a healthy appetite for crime. Day in and day out, television viewers have a long list of reality-based/ crime drama network television shows (exempli gratia, SWAT, Chicago P.D., Criminal Minds, Blue Bloods, FBI, FBI International, FBI Most Wanted, CSI, X-Files, Law and Order, Law and Order SVU, Law and Order Organized Crime), or cable station documentaries (exempli gratia, Court TV, The Discovery Channel, A&E) from which to choose, as network executives scramble to quench our thirst for crime-related subject matter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
What is more, it is rare to find a front page of a newspaper or popular magazine that does not flaunt a crime-related story prominently in the headlines. Even mainstream lifestyle magazines, such as women’s Cosmopolitan and Glamour or their male equivalents, GQ and Maxim, now include regular features on “true crime.” Having established that crime sells, the obvious question becomes, Why? The answer is simple—we are feverishly attracted to that which we do not fully understand. Like a puppy chasing its tail, we spin around and around searching for ever-elusive answers. The average citizen is not alone in this ongoing quest for enlightenment. Year in and year out, legions of scholars, criminal justice practitioners, and politicians spend billions of dollars, kill millions of trees, and exhaust countless hours trying to understand, explain, and prevent the exorbitant amount of criminal behaviour that exists in today’s society. Just think about how much written and spoken commentary has ever been directed toward understanding the behaviour and mindset of modern terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden! Efforts to describe and explain crime and criminality overload shelves with books, journals, and reports that details various theoretical and policy initiatives. What is the net gain of this sustained investigation? Or, have we made any substantial progress toward solving this problem? The harsh reality is that we as “learned professionals” have not made nearly as much progress as we would like; and we certainly have not made anywhere near as much progress as the general public expects. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Part of the problem with the criminological enterprise is that it is difficult to come to grips with the parameters of our substantive discussion and approach. First, one must address two fundamental questions: (1) What is the subject matter that we should be studying? (2) What is the best way to study it? Surely, coming up with an acceptable definition of crime should be enough. After all, crime is a routine topic in our daily conversations, it is a mainstay in media reports, and serve as a popular topic for books. However, upon closer examination, we see that “crime” is a relatively slippery concept. By crime do we mean all those acts or omissions of act that are defined by criminal law? Many sociologists consider this sort of legally bound definition of crime to be overly constraining. The “collective conscience” of society can be far more offended by non-criminal acts of deviance (id est, social norm transgressions) than it is by some violations of the law. For example, although it may not be illegal to shout racial lurs in public, there tends to be a much more resounding public outcry against this form of behaviour than there is when a minor law violation such as speeding or littering takes place. Many scholars acknowledge this point, but opt instead to pursue the path of least resistance—they contend that the subject matter in question should include only violations of the criminal law. This definitional parameter is convenient because it immediately limits the discussion to a much more identifiable and manageable set of behaviours. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
More importantly, violations of the criminal law (id est, criminal act) are subject to formal, state-imposed sanctions, while violations of customs or norms (id est, deviant acts) are subject to informal, peer-imposed reprimands. This difference in the nature and process of social control efforts has long been seen as a critical issue that separates crime from deviance. The laws of the land are passed by a legislative body and recorded for dexterity purposes in a document knows as the criminal code. This is the document that police officers and prosecutors use to guide their daily activities. One must recognize, however, that a definition of “crime” that is based solely on existing criminal codes will still produce an exceedingly long list of offense. At the most basic level, one must content with the fact that there exists no single, definitive criminal code. Instead, each jurisdiction, ranging from the federal to the state to the thousands of local jurisdictions, has in place a slightly different criminal code that it calls its own. As such, an effort to compile an exhaustive list of every law violation that is currently “on the books” would result in a truly massive, unmanageable, and often conflicting list of criminal statutes. So let us assume that you could settle on a single criminal code, one from the federal, state, or local jurisdiction of your choice. Such a code would include high-profile offenses such as murder, rape, robbery, and theft. However, the complete list would be far more expansive, including thousands of law violations—everything from jaywalking to murder. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
In addition, criminal codes routinely contain a host of obscure, outdated, and rarely enforced statutes. Seuling (1975) provides a long list of the more ridiculous examples, including: In Kansas City, Missouri, it is illegal for children to buy cap pistols, but not shotguns. Killing an animal with “malicious intent” can result in first-degree murder charges in Oklahoma. It is illegal to have a bathtub in your house in Virginia. Few people are willing to afford equal weight to all of the behaviours detailed in a given criminal code. Instead, one is inclined to set aside the “petty” and “outdated” offenses and focus the discussion on the more “serious” categories of crime. Most scholars follow suit Some turn to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for direction. The UCR is an annual effort to document the number of reported and cleared (id est, a perpetrator has been identified) cases (and arrests) of murder, sexual assault, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, larceny, auto theft, and arson that are encountered by the various law enforcement agencies across the United States of America. These eight offense types are called Part I offenses. The FBI asks all law enforcement agencies to provide host of offense and offender data tht are then used to generate descriptive crime statistics (exempli gratia, demographic profiles and crime rates). #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The difficulty of keeping in touch with the social occasion while at the same time becoming spontaneously involved in situated engagements is often reduced by the arts of concealment. Apparently one of the most significant involvement shields is that afforded by a conversational circle itself. In fact, there seem to be few conversational clusters in which control of facial and bodily expression is not employed to conceal either a deadness to the content of the encounter or an improper drift from the spirit of the occasion. A conversation occurring within a situation, then, is likely to present something of a collusion against the gathering at large; Mrs. Toplofty’s multiplication tables, previously cited, are merely an extreme instance. And yet, of course, the very possibility that conversational content can be shieled from the gathering as a whole removes some of the threat that such smaller circles might have for the larger inclusive one if the drift or deadness were open and visible. We can thus appreciate why some “informal” sociable gatherings are deemed “successful” when each cluster carries away its participants to the point where they can barely conceal their departure. The possibility of sustaining a concealed activity within conversations can become somewhat recognized and institutionalized, so that two different phases of a social occasion can simultaneously occur in the same place among the same participants, one phase being restricted to unfocused interaction and the other to matters that can be parceled out to conversations and concealed in them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
One phrase is likely, then, to be defined as dominant and the other subordinate. For example, in Lincoln, California it was obligatory for male neighbours and male extended kin to attend funerals dressed quite decorously in black, even to the point sometimes of wearing a black cap reserved only for such occasions. It was also obligatory for these male mourners to stand quietly and sedately outside of the cottage in which the deceased was laid out. However, while thus standing, it was quite permissible to carry on entertaining conversational chats with one’s fellow-mourners. To be sure, the sound level of these talks and the features of the talkers were respectfully modulated to fit funeral requirements, but the content of the talk went in another direction. In some cases it was even understood to be in bad taste to turn the topic from the ordinary pleasantries of neighbourly talk to the deceased; attendance and funeral garb were what one owed the other present. The involvement shield provided by a conversation is somewhat portable, because the participants can together move about a room and take their talk with them. Perhaps the most important recently developed portable shield for encounters is the automobile. The protection provided by the back seat has already made social history, and use of the front seat in drive-in movies has become a kind of inadvertent outdoor shrine for paying homage to our society’s use of shielding arrangements. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Mutual-involvement has been treated simply as one variety of situated involvement; the rules regulating situated involvements apply, in fact, with extra force. There are differences, however, between mutual-involvements and other kinds. For one thing, mutual-involvements improperly maintained by the individual necessarily involve others directly; further, of all objects of involvement, other individuals seem to be the most enticing and hence, in turn, the most in need of social control. However, further issues are also to be found. An unengaged individual may easily exhibit the kind of involvement which gives others the impression that one is indeed in a pathological state; the same consequence, however, is rarely possible for persons improperly involved together. Except for the very marginal phenomenon of folie a deux (or a trois, a quatre, etcetera), it seems to be assumed that as long as two individuals are in communication with each other—as long as they are joined in an encounter—whatever they are doing is not occult, however esoteric and opaque it may appear to be. This helps to explain why a person who is “with” another tends to feel free to engage in all kinds of antics, since one can assume one’s contact with the other will guarantee one’s sanity to bystanders. A parallel phenomenon has been observed in connection with the frame of reference by which criminality is imputed (as opposed to mental illness). Apparently there are depredations which can be interpreted as a game when committed by a group of youths, but which are viewed as crime when committed by a solitary offender. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Let us speak about the relation of false personality to other parts of man. In every man at every moment, his development proceeds by what may be called a static triad. This triad is called aa static triad because body, soul, and essence always stay in the same place and act as the neutralizing force, while the other force change only very slowly. So the whole triad is more or less in the same place all the time. There is Body, Soul, Essence at the top of the triangle, the “I” and the left, and False personality at the right. The first triangle forms the state of man in ordinary life; the second forms his state when he begins to develop. There are long period between the state of the first and the state of the second triangle, and still longer between them and the third triangle. Actually, there are many intermediate stages but these three are sufficient to form the way of development in relation to false personality. It is necessary to remember that none of these states is permanent. Any state may last for about half an hour and then another state may come, then again a different state. The triad is made by the body, the soul and the essence at the apex. At the second point if “I”; that is, the many “I”s which are the person, that is to say, all feelings and sensations which do not form a part of false personality. The third point of the triangle is held by false personality (id est, the imaginary picture of self). In an ordinary man false personality calls itself “I”, but after some time, if a man is capable of development, magnetic center begins to grow in one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
One may call it “special interests,” “ideals,” “ideas,” or something like that. However, when one begins to feel this magnetic center in one, one finds a separate part of oneself, and from this part of one’s growth begins. This growth can take pace only at the expense of false personality because false personality cannot appear at the same time as magnetic center. If magnetic center is formed in a man one may meet a school, and when one begins to work one must work against false personality. This does not mean that false personality disappears; it only means that it is not always present. In the beginning it is nearly always present but when magnetic center begins to grow it disappears, sometimes for half an hour, sometimes even for a day. Then it comes back and stays for a week! So all our work must be directed against false personality. When false personality disappears for a short time, “I” becomes stronger, only it is not really “I,” it is many “I”s. The longer the periods for which false personality disappears, the stronger the “I” composed of many “I”s becomes. Magnetic center may be transformed into deputy steward, and when deputy steward acquires control of false personality it really transfers all the unnecessary things to the side of false personality, and only the necessary things remain on the side of “I.” Then, at a still further stage, it may be that permanent “I” which will come on the “I” side with all that belongs to it. Permanent “I” has quite different functions, quite a different point of view from anything we are accustomed to. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The static triad shows that either personal work or degeneration is going on in relation to different manifestations of false personality, but that body, soul, and essence remain the same all the time. After some time they too will be affected, but they do not enter into the initial stages. Body will remain the same body, essence will change later, but it does not enter the beginning of the work. According to this system, essence enters only as much as it is mixed with personality. We do not take it separately because, as already explained, we have no means of working on essence apart from personality. “What is it,” someone asked, “that makes the real ‘I’ begin to develop and false personality to fade?” First of all it is a question of time. Say false personality in ordinary life is there for twenty-three hours our of every twenty-two hours only and magnetic center will be present for an hour longer than usual. Then, in time, all false personality will diminish and will become less important. (This is shown in the second stage of the where false personality has become passive and the man “I”s surrounding magnetic center have become active.) You cannot diminish false personality in the sense of size but you can diminish it in the sense of time. Somebody else said, “I had the impression until now that false personality was the collection of all the many ‘I’s. This concept has made things a little obscure to me.” Among these many “I”s there are many passive “I”s which may be the beginning of other personality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
False personality cannot develop; it is all wrong. That is why I said that all work has to be against false personality. If one fails it is because one has to be against false personality. If one fails it is because one has not given enough attention to false personality, has not studied it, has not worked against it. False personality is made up of many “I”s and they are all imaginary. “I do not understand what you mean by passive ‘I’s.” “I” which are controlled by some other, active “I.” For instance, good intentions are controlled by laziness. Laziness is active, good intensions passive. The “I” or combination of “I”s in control is active. The “I”s which are controlled or drive are passive. Understand it quite simply. There are three different states of man beginning from the most elementary. In the most elementary state false personality is active and “I” is passive. Body, soul, and essence always remain neutralizing. When, after many stages, permanent “I” comes, then “I” becomes active, many “I”s become passive and false personality disappears. Many different examples can be drawn between these two extremes, and further than that there are several possibilities. In 1944, the Allies were planning an operation for the liberation of Europe, and the Nazis were planning their defense against it. There were two possibilities for the initial landing –the Normandy beaches and Pas de Calais. A landing would surely succeed against a weak defense, so the Germans would have to concentrate their attention on one of these two places. Calais was more difficult to invade, but more valuable to win, being closer to the Allies’ ultimate targets in France, Belgium, and Germany itself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The payoffs are given on a scale of 0 to 100. The Allies count a successful landing at Calais as 100, a successful landing at Normandy as 80, and a failure at either place as 0 (and the Germans get the negative of these payoffs). Put yourself simultaneously in the boots of General Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander, and Field Mashal Rommel, the German commander of their coastal defenses in France. What strategies would you choose? There is no equilibrium in the basic strategies, and we must look for mixtures. Allies should choose to land at Normandy or Calais with the odds of (100-20): (80-60), or 4:1, while the Germans should deploy their defenses at Normandy or Calais with the odds (80-20): (100-60), or 3:2. The average point score for the Allies when both use their best mixture is 68. The probabilities and point scores we chose are plausible, but it is hard to be precise or dogmatic about such matters. Therefore let us compare our results with what actually happened. In retrospect, we know that the Allies’ mixing proportions were overwhelmingly weighted toward Normandy, and that is what they in fact chose. For the Germans, it was a closer call. It is less surprising, therefore, that the German decision-making was swayed by the Allies’ double-agent trick, differences of opinion in their commanding ranks, and some plain bad luck, such as Rommel being away from the front at the crucial time. They failed to commit their reserves on the afternoon of D-Day when the Allied landings at Normandy seemed to be succeeding, believing that a bigger landing at Calais would come. Even then, the fate of Omaha Beach was in the balance for a while. However, the Allies gained and consolidated their foothold on Normandy. The rest you know. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
When it comes to voter fraud, the vulnerability is not just inside the computers, or at election times, but in the way computer-generated data, information, and knowledge are used and misused. Smart politicians and officials, of course, do what smart people in general have always done when presented with new information. They demand to know more about its source and the reliability of the data behind it; they ask how samples were drawn in polls and what the response rates were; they note whether there are inconsistencies or gaps; they question statistics that are too “pat”; they evaluate the logic, and so forth. Smarter power players also take into account the channels through which the information arrived and intuitively review in their minds the various interests who might have “massaged” the information in transit. The smartest people—a minority of a tiny minority—do al the above, but also question assumptions and even the deeper assumptions on which the more superficial assumptions are based. Finally, imaginative people—perhaps the fewest of all—question the entire frame of reference. Government officials are found in all four categories. However, in all the high-tech countries they are so harried, so pressured, that they typically lack the time and attention span, if not the brains, to think past the surface “fact” on which they are pressures to make decisions. Worse yet, all bureaucracies discourage out-of-frame thinking and the examination of root premises. Power-players take advantage of this fact. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
When David Stockman , who headed the U.S.A. Office of Management and Budget, proposed budget cuts to the President and White House staff, he carefully chose the reductions from programs accounting for only 12 percent of the total budget. In discussing these cuts with high higher-ups, he never provided context. Telling tells out of school, he later wrote: “What they did not realize—because I never made it clear—was that we were working in only a small corner of the total budget. We hadn’t even looked at three giant programs that accounted for over half of the domestic budget: Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and Medicare. Those three alone cost $250 billion per year.” (As of 2023, that figure is $1.8 trillion per year.) “The projects we had cut saved $25 billion. The President and White House staff were seeing the tip of the budget iceberg; they were not finding out about the huge mass which lurked below the waterline. No one raised any questions about what wasn’t being reviewed.” Were they willfully ignorant, too much in a hurry to ask or blinded by Stockman, a master of statistical legerdemain? Or were they just “snowed” by all the computer-generated numbers? A political speech is barely worth making these days unless it is stuffed with computer-derived statistics. Yet most decision-makers seldom question the numbers that have been crunched for the. Thus Sidney Jones, a former Under Secretary of Commerce, once proposed setting up a Council of Statistical Advisers to serve the President. Presumably they would have been able to tell the President how the notorious “body count” statistics during the Vietnam War were being massaged. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Or why the CIA and the Pentagon could not agree on how powerful Soviet nuclear tests were, and therefore on whether or not the U.S.S.R. was violating the Threshold Test Ban Treaty of 1975. Or why the Commerce Department figures on gross national output were wildly exaggerated at one time, then corrected down to show the economy in a near-recession. The reasons in every case were highly technical—but they were also, inevitably, political. Even the most objective-seeming numbers have been hammered into shape by the push and pull of political power struggle. The U.S.A. Census Bureau takes more pains than most agencies to make public its definitions and statistical procedures so that users can form their own judgments about the validity of its figures. Its top experts readily admit, however, that such reservations and footnotes are routinely ignored in Washington. Accord to one Census staffer: “The politicians and the press do not care. All they say is ‘Gimme a number!’” There are two reasons for this. One is mere naivete. Despite all we have learned in the past generation about the spurious quality of much seemingly hard computer data, according to the Census official responsible for automatic data processing and planning, “Computer output is still regarded as Gospel.” However, there is a deeper reason. For political tacticians are not in search of scholarly “truth” or even simple accuracy. They are looking for ammunition to use in the info-wars. Data, information, and knowledge do not have to be “accurate” or “true” to blast an opponent out of the water. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Some truisms: Almost any technology is subject to use, misuse, abuse, and accident. The more powerful a technology is when properly used, the worse it is likely to be when abused. Any powerful technology in human hands can be the subject of accidents. Nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing replaces modern industry, and if its nanotechnological products replace most modern technologies, then most future accidents will have to involve nanotechnology. Another truism: In a diverse, competitive World, any reasonably inexpensive technology with enormous commercial, medical, and military applications will almost surely be developed and used. It is hard to envision a scenario (short of the collapse of civilization) in which nanotechnology will not make its appearance; it seems inevitable. If so, then its problems, however tough, must be dealt with. Like trucks, aircraft, biotechnology, rockets, computers, boots, and warm clothes, nanotechnology has the potential for both peaceful and aggressive uses. In peaceful uses (by definition), harm to people occurs either by accident or as an unintended consequence. In aggressive uses, harm is deliberate. In a peaceful context, the proper question to ask is Can fallible people of goodwill, pursuing normal human purposes, use nanotechnology in a way that reduces risk and harm to others? In an aggressive, military context, the proper question to ask is Can we somehow keep the peace? Our answer to the first will be a clear yes, and to the second, an apprehensive maybe. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Throughout this discussion, we assume that most people will be alert in matters concerning World safety. During the 1970, people awakening to the new large-scale, long-term problems of technology was out of their control, in the hands of shortsighted and irresponsible groups. Today, there are still battles to be fought, but the tide has turned. When a concern arises regarding a new, obvious technology, it is now much easier to get a hearing in the media, in the courts, and in the political arena. Improving these mechanisms for social vigilance and the political control of technology is an important challenge. Current mechanisms are imperfect, but they can still give a big push in the right directions. Though we assume alertness, alertness can be a scarce resource. The total amount of concern and energy available for focusing on long-term problems is so limited that it must be used carefully, not squandered on problems that are trivial or illusory. Part of our aim is to help sort out these issues raised by nanotechnology so that attention can be focused on problems that must be solved, but might not be. For instance, fresh fruits, vegetables, meat and poultry products are potential vehicles for the transmission of human pathogens leading to foodborne disease outbreaks, which draw public attention to food safety. Therefore, there is a need to develop new antimicrobials to ensure food safety. Because of the antimicrobial properties of nanomaterials, nanotechnology offers great potential for novel antimicrobial agents for the food and food-related industries. The use of nano-antimicrobial agents added directly to foods or through antimicrobial packaging is an effective approach. As a result, the use of nanotechnology by the food and food-related industries is expected to increase, impacting the food system at all stages from food production to processing, packaging, transportation, storage, security, safety and quality. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
Welcome to the neighborhood! 👋
We’re thrilled to meet newcomers to the #Havenwood community. Ideally located in the charming city of #Lincoln just down the street from Palo Verde Park.
Not a neighbor yet? Find out more on our website! https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/quick-move-homesite-67/
There is No Other Remedy
As a young lady, Sarah Pardee was the Belle of New Haven, Connecticut. Born in the heart of unsurpassing wild and romantic scenery and old legendary castles, she was highly cultured, a finished musician, an avid reader and spoke four languages. Long ago she learned of the existence of some papers which set out doctrines of witchcraft that might well have been the remnants of pagan rituals, hidden away and secretly practised since the conversion of Rome to Christianity in the fourth A.D. Sarah often muttered spells known in old Roman times; she astonish the learned by their legends of Latin gods. In 1862, Sarah married William Wirt Winchester, son of the famous rifle magnate. The son, although in ill health, carried on most ably with the newly named Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Cessation of the Civil War failed to hinder the prosperity of the progress of his company because migration to the West was in full swing. Invention of a practical repeating rifle accelerated success. The Famous Winchester Rifle, “The Gun that Won the West,” attained the dubious fate of “killing more game, more Indians, and more U.S. soldiers than any other weapon in this nation’s history.” Sarah was terribly shocked by the death of her month-old baby girl; in fact, it can be well believed she never fully recovered and this surely influenced some of her eccentricities. Added to this loss was the death of her husband 15 years later from Tuberculosis. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
On arrival in San Jose, she immediately started remodeling the newly purchased, unfinished, eighteen room farm house. She found the planning kept her grief-disturbed mind occupied and she became thoroughly enthused. Financial problems were certainly no deterrent; allegedly she brought with her a fortune of $20,000,000 with her and had an average income of $1,000 a day. That is a great some, especially considering one could build a grand home for $5,000. Nonetheless, just how such precise amounts came to be public knowledge is unknown. However, these have been the commonly accepted figures for years and they do roll off the tongue (or pen) with a satisfying clink. Her lack of architectural training gave her little concern. Every morning she made the rounds with her ever patient foreman inspecting the latest progress. Some days she sketched plans on spot using a saw-horse drawing table and any handy material, often brown wrapping paper (and used both sides). From the foreman came no argument; he had only the problem of interpretation. However, glaring unusual features failed to discourage her and time was fleeting. Sarah simply ordered the error torn out, sealed up, built over, or around, or more likely, totally ignored. Hence came support for the conjecture that for her, this was a gigantic game of building-blocks! Mrs. Winchester communicated with the spirits to get many of the architectural details. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
With the ceremonies and invocations or incantations addressed to Diana, a goddess, the female came down to Earth, established witches and witchcraft and then returned to Heaven. She was also involved in the planning of the Winchester Mansion. Some may think this is eccentric, but theosophy was all the rage among those interested in things in mystical late Victorian London and New York. Humanity was the study of comparative religion and philosophy and many investigated the mystic powers of life and matter. Mrs. Winchester rode in regal splendor in conveyances fitting to the era. First it was a Victoria with Liveried coachman. In later years came a French Renault, a Buick “Town-Car” and finally two Pierce-Arrows, on done in stunning blue and gold. Sarah L. Winchester’s presence was so sensational and the building of her mansion was so fast and massive that there was talk of a new secret society like the Order of the Golden Dawn. Some of these rumors were fueled by the highly publicized occult personal who were involved in activities at the mansion. Mrs. Winchester believed that the theory that witchcraft was identified with satanism and devil-worship was obscured. It was just the starting point for superbly colourful fictional writings. She was personally convinced that it was basically a pre-Christian Dianic cult and she had found the name Diana in writings about witchcraft all throughout history. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
Unlike witches, who had no publc support because they were deemed to exist no longer, the phenomenon of spiritualism and clairvoyance had grown immensely in the Victorian era and had many prominent people among its belivers. There was also a strong lobby movement called the Spiritualists’ National Union which immediately began a vociferous campaign over the injustice which some witches faced, to which they enlisted the support of antrhopologists, lawyers and even some police officers. Many may not be aware, but at one time the laws allowed for witches to be prosecuted. However, there was no place for this type of discrimination in a new free society. Eventually the ancient Witch Act was repealed. Also replealed was Section Four of the Vagrancy Act of 1824 so far as it extended “to persons purporting to act as spiritualistic mediums or to exercise any powers of telepathy, clairvoyance or other similar power.” The two Acts were replaced by the Fradulent Medium Act, 1951 which, as the title explains, finally gave spiritualists and mediums the freedom to operate legally–unless they could be show to be obtaining money or kind by fraud. Any payment for the demonstration of psychic powers for the purposes of entertainment was also freed from the dangers of the law. The lawmakers had prised open the floodgates to allow easy passage for a new movement of witchcraft, paganism, satanism, occultism, spiritualism, mediums, clairvoyance, fortune-tellers, tarot card readers and newspaper astrologers. Authors on occule subjects were going to get a new lease of life too and, whether anyone knew it or not, this was the rebirth of witchcraft. Many reports on witch craft, often include the description of a “black man.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
Mrs. Winchester believed that “the man in black” described at meeting of witches’ covens was a priest dressed variously in dark clothing, or in skins, and wearing horns or antler. It was a ritual disguise, originally intended to represent the Incarnate God, that not merely existed in the practice of ancient ritual, and was copied by the witches of the Middle Ages, but still existed in contemporary witch covens she had experienced in Glastonbury, one of the most “witch-pressed” areas of the British Isles. What began to emerge through study of Mrs. Winchester is that witches possessed diabolic powers given to them by the devil. Sabbatic meetings were able to convince others that they were all able to drawn down the diabolic powers and the hordes of demons swirling through the air, in the Winchester Mansion, waiting to be summoned, by selling their souls to the devil. Many of the executed witches undoubtedly did indeed believe themselves to be servants of the devil, and acted out their magical rituals for that purpose and there were ample descendants employed in the Winchester Mansion. Mrs. Winchester’s auto science engineer, Fred Larsen, believed that she possessed incredible powers, including the fatal power of the evil eye and had the ability to fly, and he said he often saw werewolves and vampires around the estate, and other desperate evils of black magic—all of which he associated with witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
People truly believed that witches could fly through the air and were capable of transforming themselves into animals. Mrs. Winchester studied various ancient recipes for the preparation of witch ointments for these purposes, containing such ingredients as the fat of a deceased unchristened baby, mixed with wolfsbane, poplar leaves and other potent herbs. By this means, said the old textbooks, the witch could be carried through the air in a moonlight night “to feasting, singing, dancing, kissing, and other acts of venery with such youths as they love and desire mostly.” However, instead of child’s fat, Mrs. Winchester, because it was so horrific, Mrs. Winchester would use hog’s lard. She once carried out a test, using one of these recipes. Mrs. Winchester rubbed the ointment all over her body. She fell into a deep sleep for twenty hours. When she awoke, she suffered a sever hangover and made immediate notes of her experiences. She recorded wild dreams of flying through the air, and of monsters and demons. This dovetailed with the claim that witches were able to fly off to these exotic meetings at the Winchester Mansion, leave their bodies apparently asleep so that their husbands suspected nothing. This may explain why at night, passers-by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion, as the bell in the belfry high in the gables would toll regularly at midnight to summon the incoming flights of spirits. It was also reported that it tolled again to warn these visitors to return to their sepulchres. However, once a week these spirits and witches and demons relaxed and danced in the Great Ball Room. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
The devil was easy meat for the popular newspapers whose upsurge coincided with Mrs. Winchester’s arrival. The headlines soon began to appear whenever there was the discovery of the remnants of “black magic” rites in some secluded wood, a set of chicken bones arranged in the sign of a cross, a desecrated gravestone or some other outbreak of witchcraft. Any hint of witchcraft in Santa Clara County was sufficient to arouse immediate press attention and whip of a frenzy of interest, even as time progressed through the nineteenth century. The reaction was generally the opposite in areas of the country where witchcraft had been prevalent; they preferred not to speak of it. There was no better example of this than the murder of an old farmhand at the Winchester Mansion, in December 1899. It later became known as the “witchcraft murder” when the maid Victorian Venison discovered links with the occult. The victim, Stanislas De Duaita, farmhand and suspected witch, was found lying on his back under a willow tree, with a pitchfork driven through his throat and into the ground. A cross had been carved on his chest and the billhook which had been used was left lodged between his ribs, at the base of the cross. The Winchester mansion was surrounded by relics where spirits from the old gods were said to linger. There was even a Stonehenge where Duaita’s body was found, witches were said to hold their sabbats there. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
Local villagers did not want to talk about the murder; they had convinced themselves that Stanislas De Duaita was a witch. He was said to have bred toads and sometimes harnessed them to a miniature plough and allowed them to run in the fields. This was known to be one of the methods of an infamous and malicious witch of the nineteenth century and was said to make the fields sterile and the harvests fail. The previous year, the harvests had been poor round the Winchester Mansion. And, so the story goes, the finger was pointed at Stanislas De Duaita. Then another coincidence was discovered, which later investigators saw as a precedent to Duaita’a murder—and which demonstrated the traditional methods of disposing of witches’ parts, that of blooding them so that as they bled their power vanished. Thirteen years earlier and just 80 acres away, a woman named Helena Petrovna Blavatsky died in exactly the same manner—speared and pinned to the ground by a pitchfork and with a cross carved on her chest by a billhook. On the occasion, a local peasant named Guido von List confessed to the crime; he said the woman had bewitched him. Hundreds of statements were taken in writing, and dozens of samples of clothing, hair and blood for forensic testing, but the investigation came to naught. Stanislas De Duaita had the dubious distinction of being the last known witch—if he was one—to die a brutal death on the Winchester Estate. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
As the mansion continued to grow into this impressive Queen Anne mansion, the spirits requested more Gothic lines of the classical English Victorian. Constructed of the finest materials available, the house reflected essential Queen Anne elements—rounded tower, steep gabled roof and varied textures—at their loveliest. The fourth story had imported Italian wood shingles over redwood sheeting and the prominent corner turret had a wood shingle roof and curved windows. Stained glass windows were another prominent feature. All the trim in the house was redwood, with exception of some of the areas with handcarved oak. The details and quality of materials make modern architectural duplication virtually impossible. The staff complained to Mrs. Winchester that the house was haunted. The butler was awakened by sounds of footsteps approaching his bedroom door. As the foot steps stopped, the door was opened, and he was confronted by darkness. There were other sounds too: laughter and old-fashioned music. After the death of Mrs. Winchester, the mansion was an easy target for looters and vandals who used chain saws to remove staircases, fireplaces and light fixtures. Jackles of the night were literally tearing the house to pieces. Once more the mansion radiates Victorian splendor—though many of the remaining 161 rooms are off limits, but 110 are open to guests. Laughter is anything but eerie, cheerful voices echo through the halls, brisk footsteps are heard. But at night…well no one ever really likes to work too late. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
After the mansion was opened for tours, one woman was prosecuted after police raided a séance she was conducted as a spiritual medium. Her clients included numerous well-to-do people, often anxious to make contact with the “other side” after wartime tragedies. However, it was well documented that during one of these séances of Victorian Venison’s, a young sailor who was aboard the Abigail, which wrecked on Wangerooge Hanover, manifested himself and told how his ship had been sunk with considerable loss of life. The sailor’s mother refused to believe it, saying that if this had happened, she would have been informed. “You will be, mother, three weeks from now,” came the reply from the dead son through the medium. And according to Mrs. Cohen, the confirmation came through exactly as predicted. At her trial, Mrs. Venison was offered to give a séance to prove her abilities. Witnessed also came forward in her defense, but their testimonies were unheeded. She was found guilty and sentences to thirteen months imprisonment. I do invocate, conjure, and command thee, O thou Spirit Vassago, to appear and to show thyself visibly unto me before this Circle in fair and comely shape, without any deformity or tortuosity; by the name and in the name IAH and VAU, which Adam heard and spake; and by the name of God, AGLA, which Lot heard and was saved with his family; and by the name IOTH, which Jacob heard from the angel wrestling with him, and was delivered from the hand of Esau his brother; and by the name ANAPHAXETON which Aaron heard and spake and was made wise. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Winchester Mystery House
Did you know that the floor in the North Conservatory could be pulled up so the water could drain easier without damaging the wood floor? Sarah really did think of everything🌿 Explore this room and more on tour this weekend! https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
And while in the Bay Area, be sure to check out some other Victorian Homes open for tour.
Cohen-Bray House
Some of our team had the absolute joy of visiting the Cohen-Bray House in Oakland yesterday. This Victorian style 3-story home built in 1883 filled with the original contents and interiors is a sight to see + has a wonderful story (we won’t give too much away as you will have to go and tour for yourself 😉). Tours offered every 4th Sunday of the month. See link in their bio for more details! https://www.cohenbrayhouse.org/
Is the Soul’s Health More Important than All the Powers of this World?
I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either. Whoever is without guile, let one lie down with the lion and the lamb and be not ashamed of one’s nakedness; for they shall put a ring upon one’s hand and shoes upon one’s feet; and all that was one’s father’s shall be one’s and also all that one’s mother and one’s sister hath, and likewise the mote that is in one’s brother’s eye. For it is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a camel than for another man to break the Sabbath day and keep it holy. If this astonishing conquest itch were limited to intellectual postures, it would be one thing. However, of course the contemporary mining and polluting of the industrial lands bring forward far more concrete realities. Our Faustian pact with Mephistophelian “sci-tech” goes back a long way. It is an insufficiently realized fact that the contemporary scientific attitude was first nurtured in the bosoms of mystical societies of seventeenth-century England, as the contemporary British scholar Frances Yates has pointed out in a number of valuable studies. Long before this, the pioneering philosopher of the specifically modern cast of organized inquiry, Francis Bacon, had called in his “Fable of Proteus” for a virtually sadistic approach to the natural World: If any skillfull minister of nature shall apply force to nature, and by design torture and vex it in order to its annihilation, it on the contrary, being brought to this necessity, changes and transforms itself into a strange variety of shapes and appearances; for nothing but the power of the Creator can annihilate it or truly destroy it…And that methods of torturing or detaining will prove the most effective and expeditious which makes use of manacles and fetters; id est lays hold and works upon matter in the extremist degree. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
That is an amazing attitude, and one quickly discernible in every aspect of modern life. However, suppose that nature, or at least the Earth as a whole, may not be entirely inert. Can we assume that it would be completely in accord with many of the things we are doing in it? Supposed that, in future generations, the most gifted minds were to find their soul’s health more important than all the powers of this World; suppose that, under the influence of the metaphysic and mysticism that is taking the place of Rationalism today, the very elite of intellect that is now concerned with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its Satanism (it is the step from Roger to Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux)—then nothing can hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries. It is a good thing that in some cases stupidity is not painful because more of us would be in pain and have to admit we need help. As the 1960s faded into the more staid 1970, lurid media accounts of Satanic activity and ritualistic murders became sporadic. However, in 1975, the wire services began to pick up stories that cattle ranchers in Colorado and other western sates were increasingly concerned about the safety of their herds, large numbers of animals having been bizarrely slaughtered. And these are very similar crimes, it would be similar to owning a car dealership and someone stealing all of your cars and no insure to reimburse the loss. So, the cattle were apparently not being killed for food, as little of the meat had been touched, but, in many cases, the blood had apparently been drained and the “private” organs and lips had been surgically removed. To add to the mystery, no footprints, animal or human, were found around the carcasses. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Speculation about the identity of the culprits ranged from UFOs to secret government experiments. A movie Endangered Species, was even produced, postulating the latter theory. Then in Arkansas, several head of cattle were found dead near sites that exhibited evidence of ritualistic activity—and Satanic cultists, who from the beginning were suspected villains, supplanted extraterrestrials and Uncle Sam as the most popular explanation for the rash of killings. As reports of the number of mutilations increased and alarm among ranchers spread, animal pathologists were called in to investigate. Not only did they find the cattle mortality rate no higher than normal, but autopsies on the animals determined that in almost all cases the cattle had died from natural causes, or by predatory attack, and that the mutilation had been the postmortem work of scavengers, not cultists. Teeth, not knives, had been used to remove “private” organs and lips, those parts being attacked because they were the softest and most accessible. Then, amid hundreds of similarly discredited reports, several mutilations in Idaho and Montana were determined to have indeed been the work of a knife-wielder. There, evidence gathered by law enforcement officials implicated several Satanic cults operating in those states. The cults, which up to that time had allegedly preferred dogs and cats as sacrificial victims, had read about the mutilations in the papers and decided to add cattle to their ritual list. The work of the copycat cultists turned out to be truly a case of life imitating art. An astrologer named Dan Fry, host of Minneapolis radio program called Cosmic Age, admitted on a Texas talk show that he had made up the cattle mutilation rumor as a joke, but things had snowballed when the story was repeated as fact by the Huston Post and picked up from there by the wire services. Thus had Fry created an “urban legend.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
An “urban legend” is a term coined by contemporary folklorists to describe a popular story that spreads swiftly by word of mouth and is soon accepted as truth. These folk tales are always reported as having actually happened, often to the friend of a friend, which is what keeps them “immediate.” When the media picks up such stories and prints them as fact, as it did with the cattle mutilation stories, they acquire a further stamp of truth, which is why people point out that the news is not always true and is someone’s perspective and viewers should be advised to use critical thinking and ask question and do their own research. However, once again, cattle mutilations are baffling law enforcement and ranchers. FOX News published a story August 11, 2022 about the serial crime spree leaving a dozen cattle mutilated. “Mutilations differ from typical livestock deaths because the carcasses are found with body parts removed in an unusual fashion,” states Charles Couger of FOX News. In San Luis more than 10,000 mutilations have betwixt ranchers and investigators across the United States of America for decades. Nonetheless, a recent study by Psychology Today of reported “trick or treat poisonings on Halloween failed to turn up one serious injury and found that, in almost every case, the tamperings were the work of the child victim himself, in an attempt to get attention from parents and friends. Yet every Halloween, newspapers print warnings about tampered treats. And, in the mid-1980s, tales of Satanic animal mutilations have began to resurface from California to Alabama, despite the protests of investing game and animal control officials who have said that, in almost all the cases, the animal deaths were the work of predators or poachers. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The Devil, after all, has been an old favorite subject of urban legends. In 1977, for instance, the rumor was widely circulated in fundamentalist circles that the secret of McDonald’s success was that the chain donated portion of its profits each year to the Church of Satan. Corroboration of the Satanic tithing allegedly came from no less a personage than McDonald’s owner, Ray Kroc, who was reputed to have admitted to the diabolic connection while appearing on the Phil Donahue shows. In Fact, Kroc had been a guest on the Donahue show in May of 1977, but his most startling admission had been his intention to introduce the McDonald’s “Filet o’ Fish” in Cincinnati. The idea of a Satanic “pact”—trading one’s soul for Earthly wealth—is an ancient one, and it cropped up again in 1980 when rumors surfaced that the Proctor & Gamble moon-and-starts trademark was in reality a Satanic symbol, and that the company was run by Satanists. The story went that the owners of Proctor & Gamble long ago made a pact with the Devil that ensured the company’s success in exchange for putting Satan’s logo on all its products. “Proof” cited for this ludicrous claim was that a company executive had revealed the demonic truth on Donahue or 60 Minutes, depending on the version. It mattered little that Donahue and spokesmen for 60 Minutes denied any such interview ever took place. Neighbors told neighbors that they had talked to someone who saw the show, or heard it from someone who heard it from someone, etcetera. By mid-1982, Proctor’s consumer services department was getting 15,000 calls a month from people wanting to know about the company’s Satanic connections. Eventually, a counter-publicity campaign was launched, but in the end, the company wound up changing its logo. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
A serious argument about what is most profoundly modern leads inevitably to the conclusion that the study of the problem of Socrates is one thing most needful. It was Socrates who made Nietzsche and Heidegger looks to the pre-Socratics. For the first time in four hundred years, it seems possible and imperative to begin all over again, to try to figure out what Plato was talking about, because it might be the best thing available. The history of classics since the Renaissance has consisted in momentary glimpses of the importance of Greece for man as man, everywhere and always, followed by long periods of merely scholarly study without any sufficient reason for it, living off the gradually dying energy provided by the original philosophic dynamos. Up to Nietzsche, the neglect of and contempt for Plato and Aristotle was the result of a belief that what they tried to do could be done much better. That is why Socrates was always in good repute. He was the skeptical seeker after the way to knowledge by means of unaided reason. He was not tired to any solution or system and thus could be seen s the originator and the inspirer who did not constrain the freedom of posterity. The current contempt for Plato and Aristotle is of an entirely different kind, for it is allied to contempt for Socrates. He corrupted them; they did not pervert him. We did not progress from Socrates, but he marked the beginning of the decline. Reason itself is rejected by philosophy itself. Thus the common thread of the whole tradition has been broke, and with it the raison d’etre od the university as we know it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Thus is was no accident that Heidegger came forward just after Hitler’s accession to power to address the university community in Freiburg as the new rector, and urged commitment to National Socialism. His argument was not without subtlety and its own special kind of irony, but in sum the decision to devote wholeheartedly the life of the mind to an emerging revelation of being, incarnated in a mass movement, was what Heidegger encouraged. That he did was not a result of his political innocence but a corollary of his critique of rationalism. That is why I have entitled this section “From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede.” The university began in spirit from Socrates’ contemptuous and insolent distancing of himself from the Athenian people, his refusal to accept any command from the Athenian people, his refusal to accept any command from them cease asking, “What is justice? What is knowledge? What is a god?” and hence doubting the common opinions about such questions, and in his serious game (in the Republic) of trying to impose the rule of philosophers on an unwilling people without respect for their “culture.” The university may have come near to its death when Heidegger joined the German people—especially the youngest part of that people, which he said had already made an irreversible commitment to the future—and put philosophy at the service of German culture. If I am right in believing that Heidegger’s teachings are the most powerful intellectual force in our times, then the crisis of the German university, which everyone saw, is the crisis of the university everywhere. It may be thought that I have devoted too much space to this idiosyncratic history of the university. However, the university, of all institutions, is most dependent on the deepest beliefs of those who participate in its peculiar life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Our present educational problems cannot seriously be attributed to bad administrators, weakness of will, lack of discipline, lack of money, insufficient attention to the three R’s, or any of the common explanations that indicate things will be set aright if we professors would just pull up our socks. All these things are the result of a deeper lack of belief in the university’s vocation. One cannot say that we must defend academic freedom when there are grave doubts about the principles underlying academic freedom. To march out to battle on behalf of the university may be noble, but it is only a patriotic gesture. Such gestures are necessary and useful for nations, but they do little for universities. Thought is all in all for universities. Today there is precious little thought about universities, and what there is does not unequivocally support the university’s traditional role. In order to find out why we have fallen on such hard times, we must recognize that the foundations of the university have become extremely doubtful to the highest intelligences. Our petty tribulations have great causes. What happened to the universities in Germany in the thirties is what has happened and is happening everywhere. The essence of it all is not social, political, psychological or economic, but philosophic. And, for those who wish to see, contemplation of Socrates is our most urgent task. This is properly an academic task. Some technologies come in disguise. Rudyard Kipling called them “technologies in repose.” They do not look like technologies, and because of that they do their work, for good or ill, without much criticism or even awareness. This applies not only to IQ tests and to polls and to all systems of ranking and grading but to credit cards, accounting procedures, and achievement tests. It applies in the educational World to what are called “academic courses,” as well. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
A course is a technology for learning. I have “taught” about two hundred of them and do not know why each one lasts exactly fifteen weeks, or why each meeting lasts exactly one lasts exactly one hour and fifty minutes. If the answer is that this is done for administrative convenience, then a course is a fraudulent technology. It is put forward as a desirable structure for learning when in fact it is only a structure for allocating space, for convenient record-keeping, and for control of faculty time. The point is that the origin of a raison d’etre for a course are concerned from us. We come to believe it exists for one reason when it exists for quite another. One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies. Perhaps the most interesting example of such lack of awareness is the widespread belief that modern business invented the technology of management. Management is a system of power and control designed to make maximum use of relevant knowledge, the hierarchical organization of human abilities, and the flow of information from bottom to top and back again. It is generally assumed that management was created by business enterprises as a rational response to the economic and technological demands of the Industrial Revolution. However, research by Alfred Chandler, Sidney Pollard, and especially Keith Hoskin and Richard Macve reveals a quite different picture and leads to a startling conclusion: modern business did not invent management; management invented modern business. The most likely place for management to have originated is, of course, in Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, there is no evidence that British industry knew anything about management as late as 1830, nor did there exist anything approximating a “managerial class.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Management was created in the United States of America “out of the blue,” as Hoskin and Macve say. It was not a creation of any obvious needs of American industry, which was only a marginal force in the World economy in the mid-nineteenth century. The roots of management may be traced to a new educational system, introduced in 1817 to the United States Military Academy by the academy’s fourth superintendent, Sylvanus Thayer. Thayer made two innovations. The first, borrowed from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, was to grade examinations by giving numerical marks. As I have previously noted, the grading of student papers originated in Cambridge University towards the end of the eighteenth century, and the practice was taken up by several schools on the Continent. Thayer’s use of this technology is probably the first instance of it in America. As every teacher knows, the numerical mark changes the entire experience and meaning of learning. It introduces a fierce competition among students by providing sharply differentiated symbols of success and failure. Grading provides an “objective” measure of human performance and creates the unshakable illusion that accurate calculations can be made of worthiness. The human being becomes, to use Michel Foucault’s phrase, “a calculable person.” Thayer’s second innovation, apparently his own invention, was a line-and-staff system. He divided the academy into two divisions, each organized hierarchically. As Hoskin and Macave describe it: “Daily, weekly and monthly reports were required, all in writing. There were continual relays of written communication and command, going from the bottom to the top of each line, before being consolidated and passed to the central ‘Staff Office.’” #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Thayer rejected the traditional leader’s role of direct, visible command. He ruled indirectly through the medium of written reports, charts, memos, personnel files, etcetera, not unlike the way a modern CEO functions. We do not know how most of the two hundred cadets at the academy reacted to Thayer’s new system (which Hoskin and Macve term the “grammatocentric principle,” meaning that everything was organized around the use of writing). However, we do know that two of them, Daniel Tyler and George Whistler, were impressed. Both were in the graduating class of 1819, and took with them their lieutenant’s rank and Thayer’s general approach to organizations. Desert Rose Industries and other manufacturers can make almost anything quickly and at low cost. That includes the tunneling machines and other equipment that made the subway system they use for shipping. Digging a tunnel from coast to coast now costs less than digging a single block under New York City used to. It was not expensive to get a deep-transit terminal installed in their basement. Just as the tents are not mere bundles of canvas, these subways are not slow things full of screeching, jolting metal boxes. They are magnetically levitated to reach aircraft speeds—as experimental Japanese trains were in the late 1980s—making it easy for Carl and Maria to give their customers quick service. There is still a road leading to the plant, but nobody’s driven a truck over it for years. They only take in materials that they will eventually ship out in products, so there is nothing left over, and no wastes to dump. One corner of the plant is full of recycling equipment. There are always some obsolete parts to get rid of, or things that have been damaged and need to be reworked. These get broken down into simpler molecules and out back together again to make new parts. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The gunk in the manufacturing ponds is water mixed with particles much finer than silt. The particles—fasteners, computers, and the rest—stay in suspension because they are wrapped in molecular jackets that keep them there. This uses the same principle as detergent molecules, which coat particles of oily dirt to float them away. Though it would not be nutritious or appetizing, one could drink the tent mix and be no worse for it. To one’s body, the parts and their jackets, and even the nanomachines, would be like so many bits of grit and sawdust. (Grandma would have called it roughage.) Carl and Maria get their power from solar cells in the road, which is the only reason they bothered having it paved. In back of their plant stands what looks like a fat smokestack. All it produces, though, is an updraft of clean, warm air. The darkly paved road, baking in the New Mexico sun, is cooler than one might expect: it soaks up solar energy and makes electricity, instead of just heat. Once the power is used, it turns back into heart, which has to go somewhere. So the heat rises from their cooling tower instead of the road, and the energy does useful work on the way. Some products, like rocket engines, are made more slowly and in a single piece. This makes them stronger and more permanent. The tents, though, do not need to be superstrong and are just for temporary use. A few days after the tents go up, the earthquake victims start to move out into new housing (permanent, better-looking, and very earthquake-resistant). The tents get folded and shipped off for recycling. Recycling things built this way is simple and efficient: nanomachines just unscrew and unsnap the connectors and sort the parts into bins again. The shipments Desert Rose gets are mostly recycled to begin with. There is no special labeling for recycled materials, because the molecular parts are the same either way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
For convenience (and to keep the plant small), Carl and Maria get most of their parts prefabricated, even those they can make almost anything. They can even make more production equipment. In one of their manufacturing ponds, they can put together a new cabinet full of special-purpose assemblers. They do this when they want to make a new type of part in-house. Like parts, the part-assemblers are made by social-purpose assemblers. Carl even can make big vats in medium-size vats, unfolding them like tents. If Desert Rose Industries needed to double capacity, Carl and Maria could do it in just a few days. They did this once for a special order of stadium sections. Maria got Carl to recycle the new building before its shadow hurt their cactus garden. Now, let us focus on mining knowledge. Even these changes, however, are dwarfed by China’s ravenous pursuit of wealth-relevant know-how. China has become a World leader in the creation, purchase—and theft—of data, information and knowledge. As far back as the winter of 1983, soon after Deng Xiaoping shut the door on the Maoist past, we personally witnessed Chinese scientists in Beijing reverse-engineering computers and carrying out the country’s earliest experiments with fiber optics in Shanghai. The available facilities were primitive, dirty, and freezing. China was still wretchedly not very well-off financially. However, its leaders, even then, understood the importance of technology—and piracy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Today the picture is dramatically different. Up-to-date research labs are proliferating, the country’s total expenditure on research and development (R&D) amounted to about 2.79 trillion yuan (about $441.13 billion) in 2021, which is 14.2 percent year-on-years. After deducting price factors, China’s R&D spending in 2021 rose 9.4 percent year-on-year. And as we have noted in the past, thousands of United States of America—trained Chinese scientists are heading back to China. In five years, America will still be the World center of corporate research. However, China will outrank Britain, Germany, and Japan. Add China’s sharklike appetite for data, information and ideas from the outside World. To do business in China, foreign companies usually have had to transfer technology—and many agreed to do so in return for even limited access to the huge Chinese market. Nor is this hunger for know-how narrowly restricted to technology. As formerly Communist China entered into broader economic relationships with the West, it also sought practical knowledge about capitalist management, finance and business in general. As of 2022, there are 46 MBA programs offered in China—many in partnership with leading American schools such as MIT, UC/Berkeley and Northwestern. Less formally, knowledge is transferred by the more than 600,000 international students who now live and work in China—in sharp contrast to the days when foreigners were likely to be labeled spies or allowed to enter only as part of closely monitored tourist groups. Behind China’s amazing drive, therefore, we find radically changed attitudes toward all three of the deep fundamental central to economies of the future—further evidence of its intention to create the World’s leading knowledge-based economy. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Taken together, facts like these suggest an unstoppable China on a short, double-quick march to superpowerdom. Beijing, however, knows better. Recently, China watchers have begun to spin dark scenarios. Those include the possibility that China could suffer a financial crisis like the one that hit the rest of Asia in 1997-98, for example. Or that it will go through a series of ups and downs that it will attempt to mitigate with Keynesian measures. Alternatively, worriers point to a possible convergence of other troubles—an energy breakdown, and environmental crisis or something else. Or, worse, yet, a war with Taiwan in which both sides hurl missiles at each other, destabilizing the new Asia. Any or all of these could hammer the global economy in the years immediately head. One of the most pessimistic assessments of China’s future is that the nation will collapse, the revolution has grown old, the discontent of the people is explosive, state-owned enterprises are dying, Chinese banks will fail, and that ideology and politics restrain progress—and that is only part of the list. However, experts are saying the same about America. If this is true, the global financial system might have to be wheeled into the intensive-care ward. Investors, corporations and central banks around the World could all be traumatized. The price of T-shirts and toys might drop still further in the corner Wal-Mart. However, hundreds of millions of workers around the World—from iron-ore miners in Brazil to bankers in Manhattan or Tokyo—would be looking for jobs. These scenarios are dire enough. However, they overlook more startling possibilities. “They will throw their money in the streets, tossing it out like worthless trash. Their silver and gold will not save the on that day of the LORD’s anger,” reports Ezekiel 7.19. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The info-wars cast the corporation—and the work that does on in it—into a new light. Forget, for a moment, all conventional job descriptions; forget ranks; forget departmental functions. Think of the firm, instead, as a beehive of knowledge processing. In the day of the smokestack it was assumed that workers knew little of importance and that relevant information or intelligence could be gathered by top management or a tiny staff. The proportion of the work force engaged in knowledge processing was tiny. Today, by contrast, we are finding that much of what happens inside a firm is aimed at replenishing its continually decaying knowledge inventory, generating new knowledge to add to it, and upgrading simple data into information and knowledge. To accomplish this, employees constantly “import,” “export,” and “transfer” data and information. Some employees are essentially importers. These “OUT-IN” people gather information from outside the company and deliver it to their co-workers inside. Market researchers, for example,” are OUT-INers. Studying consumer preferences in the external World, they add value by interpreting what they learn, and then deliver new, higher-order information to the firm. Public relations people do the reverse. They market the firm to the World by collecting information internally and disseminating or exporting it to the outside World. They are IN-OUTers. House accounts are basically IN-IN people, gathering most of their information from inside the firm and transferring it internally as well. Good salespeople are two-way RELAYS. They disseminate information, but also collect it from outside and then report it back to the firm. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
These functions relate to flows of data, information, or knowledge. Cutting across them is a set of functions that have to do with upgrading the stock of data, information, and knowledge that the firm and its people already possess. Some mind-workers are creators, capable of finding new, surprising juxtapositions of ideas, or putting a fresh spin on an old idea; other “edit” new ideas by matching them against strategic requirements and practical considerations, then deleting those that are irrelevant. In reality, we all do all these things at various times. However, while different functions emphasize one or another, no conventional job descriptions or management texts deal with such distinctions—or their implications for power. At almost every step in this knowledge processing, some people or organizations gain, and others lose, an edge. Thus, conflicts—tiny, sometimes highly personal info-wars—are fought over things like who will or will not be invited to a meeting, whose names appear on the routing slip, who reports information to a superior directly and who, by contrast, is asked to leave it with a secretary, and so forth. These organizational battles—“micro info-wars,” so to speak—are hardly novel. They are a feature of all organizational life. They take on new significance, however, as the super-symbolic economy spreads. Since the value added through smart knowledge-processing is critical in the new system of wealth creation, 21st-century accountants will find ways to assess the new economic value added by various informational activities. The performance ratings of individuals and units may well take into account their own contribution to knowledge enhancement. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Today, a geologist who funds a huge oil strike is likely to be well rewarded by the company for adding to its reserves. Tomorrow, when knowledge resources are recognized as the most important of all, employee remuneration may well come to hinge, at least in part, on the success of each individual in adding value to the corporate knowledge reserve. In turn, we can expect even more sophisticated power struggles for the control of knowledge assets and the processes that generate them. We are already witnessing the beginnings of a change in management assumptions about the functions of the work force. Thus, all employees are increasingly expected to add not merely to the firm’s knowledge of assets in general, but to its competitive intelligence arsenal as well. A company tht does CI work for both U.S. and Japanese firms, the Japanese take a far more wholistic view of intelligence than do the Americans. While Japanese executives regard information collection as a routine part of their jobs, if you ask a typical Harvard M.B.A., it is the company librarian’s job. That narrow assumption, however, is fading. At General Mills every employee is expected to engage in competitive intelligence gathering. Even janitors when buying supplies are supposed to ask vendors what competing firms are buying and what they are doing. Telephone companies in the United States of American runs seminars and distribute literature explaining the methods and benefits to CI to their executives. Bayer even rotates executives through its CI staff to teach them the importance of this kind of information collection. GE links CI directly into its strategi planning. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Pushed to extremes, such measures inch us toward the nation of the corporation as a total info-war fighting machine. Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel it ways into disturbing contacts. To a believer, the effect of the contemplation of science is of being in the presence of the good, the true, and the beautiful. However, what he is awed by is mutilation. To our crippled intellects, only the maimed is what we call understandable, because the unclipped ramifies into all other things. According to my aesthetics, what is mean by beautiful is symmetrical deformation. In very various strata of Iranian literature from the most ancient texts of the Avesta to the poetry of Firduis, we find elements of the saga of the primeval king Yima or Yama, a figure transmuted from primeval Indo-Aryan tradition into Indian and Iranian mythology. He “whose gain is like the sun,” the “great shepherd”—he has rightly been explained as the ancient shepherd-god of the Persians seen through the eyes of the peasant—is born immortal, but become mortal through his offence. The highest god, Ahura Mazdah, invited him to tend and protect religion, his, Ahura Mazdah’s religion, and then, when Yima has declared himself unfit for this, he bids him foster, multiply and guard the World, his, Ahura Mazdah’s World. This Yima is prepared to do; he assumes dominion over the World and it shall be a World in which none of the destructive powers will have a part, neither cold nor hot wind, nor sickness, nor death. Already previously he had besought the gods with sacrifices to grant him that in his real man and cattle should be released from death, and water and trees from drought. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
He besought them to let him become the ruler of all countries, them shall take all evil from off Ahura Mazdah’s creatures. This is now granted him. Three hundred year elapse, and since none of the creatures dies the Earth overflows “with small cattle and great cattle and dogs and birds and red flaming fires.” Called by Ahura Mazdah, Yima advances “to light, at midday, towards the path of the sun” and, with the gold-embellished goad and friendly incantation received from the god, urges on the Earth to stretch apart until it has become greater by a third of its size. This is repeated twice more: the Earth has now doubled its size, and all creatures live upon it at their pleasure. However, now Ahura Mazdah gathers together the gods and the best men, Yima at their peak. To him he announces that upon the World given over to materiality (here it sounds as though, in consequence of Yima’s refusal, it was devoid of spirituality) there will descend the greater winter, which will first cover it in snow and then flood it in the thaw, so that no creature will be able any more to put its feet upon the ground. Then Yima is instructed to erect a mighty pen, like a citadel, and to secure therein the seed of the best and most beautiful of all living and growing things. It is done. Then, however, Yima vouchsafes the access of demonry, which he had hitherto held in coercion, and takes the lie into his mind by lauding and blessing himself. Immediately the regal glory, the lustre of good-fortune, which has till then irradiated his brow, leaves him in the shape of a raven and he becomes mortal. “And I would not that ye think that I know of myself—not of the temporal but of the spiritual, not of the carnal mind but of God,” reports Alma 36.4. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Find a Way to Have Your Own Mind
Everyone is God and the Devil, for together Satan and Christ inhabit everyone. Like Christ and Satan, many people are both metaphorically crucified and sent to hell. Anything that is not created out of the depths of loneliness is not a creation, only a production, and has no soul to sustain it. Many people who claim to be waiting for the second coming are not genuine, often they are just waiting for a chance to get on the second crucifixion. A few of them are already bargaining for the television rights lest they get caught with their pants down by an unknown contender making a surprise bid for the number one spot. What they fail to realize is that the twenty first-century savior is going to outfox them all by, yes, he is going t crucify himself, thus getting a jump on his competitors. Not only that, but his loyal followers will be standing there beside him, not just gawking or taking notes, but yes, sports lovers, actually crucifying themselves right along with their leader. And they stand, eyes wild. It is hard to see because the light is getting so bright, but it seems that each one of these men and women is armed with a golden hammer and a handful of plutonium spikes. They are standing in a circle around a tower, on the breast of a hill in the midst of a slum, and they are actually nailing themselves to the ground, fellow Americans, and some of them are nailing each other to the ground—let us have a slow motion replay of that last bit of actions—wonderful—and now it appears that these people are actually driving these spikes in rhythm and singing some sort of spiritual or worksong!—word just in from our computers indicates that the language they are singing in has never been spoke on Earth before—perhaps that is why they are singing it instead—and ladies and gentlemen, the modern messiah has just announced that as soon as he is sure these spikes have been driven deeply enough, he and his disciples will rise, that is right, folks, they are going to rise into the Heavens, and since they are so, well, attached to the Earth, they are going to drag it along behind them! #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Wow! Sounds like they have got their work cut out for them, eh? Lucky you can just sit in your armchair and wait for it to come on tv! They seem to be nearly ready for the Big Drag now…hard to tell what is actually happening from down here, though, what with all the blood and thunder and fire and screaming—maybe I will just step up the hill here a bit, and get a closer look…might be a little risky, but it is my job to get the truth, before it gets me. The Enlightenment thinkers understood themselves to be making a most daring innovation: according to Machiavelli, modern philosophy was to be politically effective, while Plato and Aristotle, and all the ancients who followed them since Socrates founded political philosophy were politically ineffective. Machiavelli follows Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, who ridicules Socrates for being unable to defend himself, to avert insults or slaps in the face. The vulnerability of the philosopher would seem to be the starting place for the new reflection and the renewal of philosophy. This may seem trivial to many today, but the entire philosophic tradition, ancient and modern, took the relation of mind to society as the most fruitful beginning point for understanding the human situation. Certainly the first philosophy of which we have a full account begins with the trial and execution of the philosopher. And Machiavelli, the inspirer of the great philosophical systems of modernity, starts from this vulnerability of reason within the political order and makes it his business to correct it. Some might say it was not concern with the fate of philosophers but the wish, In Bacon’s phrase, to ease man’s estate that motivated the modern thinkers. This, however, comes down to the same thing—a criticism of the ancient philosophers for their impotence, and a reflection on the relation of knowledge to civil society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
The ancients were always praising virtue, but men were not made more virtuous as a result. Everywhere there were rotten regimes, tyrants persecuting peoples, rich exploiting the less affluent, computer hackers robbing people of their hard earn money through various means, nobles keeping down citizens men insufficiently protected by laws or arms, et cetera. Wise men saw clearly what was wrong in all this, but their wisdom did not generate power to do anything about it. The new philosophy claimed to have discovered the means to reform society and to secure the theoretical life. If the two purposes were not identical, they were intended to be complementary. It must be remembered that this was a dispute within philosophy and that there was an agreement among the parties to it about what philosophy is. The moderns looked to and disagreed with the Greek philosophers and their heirs, the Roman philosophers. However, they shared the view that philosophy, and with it what we call science, came to be in Greece and had never, so far as is known, come to be elsewhere. Philosophy is the rational account of the whole, or of nature. Nature is a notion that itself is of Greek origin and requisite to science. The principle of contradiction guided the discourse of all, and the moderns presented reasoned arguments against those of their predecessors with who they disagree. The moderns simply took over a large part of ancient astronomy and mathematics. And they, above all, agreed that the philosophic life is the highest life. Their quarrel is not like the difference between Moses and Socrates, or Jesus and Lucretius, where there is no common universe of discourse, but more like the differences between Newton and Einstein. It is a struggle for the struggle for the possession of rationalism by rationalists. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
This fact is lost sight of, partly because scholasticism, the use of Aristotle by the Roman Catholic Church, was the phantom of philosophy within the older order that was violently attacked by the modern philosophy. Another reason why the essential agreement between ancients and moderns is no longer clear is the modern science of intellectual history, which tends to see all differences of opinion as differences of “Worldview,” which blurs the distinction between disagreements founded on reason and those founded on faith. They very term Enlightenment is connected with Plato’s most powerful image about the relation between thinker and society, the cave. In the Republic, Socrates presents men as prisoners in a dark cave, bound and forced to look at a wall against which are projected images that they take to be the beings and that are for them the only reality. Freedom for man means escaping the bonds, civil society’s conventions, leaving the cave and going up to where the run illuminates the beings and seeing them as they really are. Contemplating them is at once freedom, truth and the greatest pleasure. Socrates’ presentation is meant to show that we begin from deceptions, or myths, but that it is possible to aspire to a nonconventional World, to nature, by the use of reason. The false opinions can be corrected, and their inner contradictions impel thoughtful men to seek the truth. Education is the movement from darkness to light. Rason projected on the beings about which at first we only darkly opine produces enlightenment. The moderns accepted that reason can comprehend the beings, that there is a light to which science aspires. The entire difference between ancients and moderns concerns the cave, or non-metaphorically, the relation between knowledge and civil society. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Socrates never suggests that, even in the unlikely event that philosophers should be kings and possess absolute wisdom, the nature of the cave could be altered or that a civil society, a people, a demos, could not make any but the happy few able to see the beings as they really are. They would guide the city reasonable, but in their absence the city would revert to unreason. Or to put it in another way, the unwise could not recognize the wise. Men like Bacon and Descartes, by contrast, thought that it was possible to make all men reasonable, to change what had always and everywhere been the case. Enlightenment meant to shine the light of being in the cave and forever to dim the images on the wall. Then there would be unity between the people and the philosopher. The whole issue turns on whether the cave is intractable, as Plato thought, or can be changed by a new kind of education, as the greatest philosophic figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth century taught. As Plato tells us, Socrates was charged with impiety, of not holding the same gods the city held, and he was found guilty. Plato always presents Socrates as the archetypical philosopher. The events of Socrates’ life, the problems he faced, represent what the philosopher as such must face. The Apology tells us that the political problem for the philosopher is the gods. It makes clear that the images on the wall of the cave about which me will not brook contradiction represent the gods. Socrates’ reaction to the accusation is not to assert the right of academic freedom to pursue investigations into the things in the Heavens and under the Earth. He accepts they city’s right to demand his belief. His defense, not very convincing, is that he is not a subversive. He asserts the great dignity of philosophy and tries as much as possible to reduce the gap between it and good citizenship. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
In other words, he temporizes or is insincere. His defense cannot be characterized as “intellectual honest” and is not quite to contemporary taste. He only wants to be left alone as much as possible, but is fully aware that a man who doubts what every good citizen is supposed to know and spends his life sitting around talking about virtue, rather than doing virtuous deeds, comes into conflict with the city. Characteristically, Socrates lives with the essential conflicts and illustrated them, rather than trying to abolish them. In the Republic he attempts to unite citizenship with philosophy. The only possible solution is for philosophers to rule, so there would be no opposition between the city’s commands and what philosophy requires, or between power and wisdom. However, this outline of a solution is ironic and impossible. It only serves to show what one must live with. The regime of philosopher-kings is usually ridiculed and regarded as totalitarian, but it contains much of what we really want. Practically everyone wants reason to rule, and no one thinks man like Socrates should be ruled by inferiors or have to adjust what he thinks to them. What the Republic actually traches is that none of this is possible and that our situation requires both much compromise and much intransigence, great risks and few hopes. The important thing is not speaking one’s own mind, but finding a way to have one’s own mind. Contrary to common opinion, it is Enlightenment that was intent on philosophers’ ruling, taking Socrates’ ironies seriously. If they did not have the title of king, their political schemes were, all the same, designed to be put into practice. And they were put into practice, not by begging princes to listen to them but by philosophy’s generating sufficient power to force princes to give way. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The rule of philosophy is recognized in the insistence that regimes be constructed to protect the rights of man. The anger we experience on reading Socrates’ censorship of the poets is unselfconscious, if we agree, as we willy-nilly do, that children must be taught the scientific method prior to any claims of the imagination on their belief or conduct. Enlightenment education really does what Socrates only tentatively proposes. Socrates, at least, tries to preserver poetry, whereas Enlightenment is almost indifferent to its fate. The fact that we think there should be poetry classes as well as education in reasoning helps us to miss the point: What happens to poetic imagination when the soul has been subjected to a rigorous discipline that resists poetry’s greatest charms? The Enlightenment thinkers were very clear on this point. There is no discontinuity in the tradition about it. They were simply solving the problem to the advantage of reason, as Socrates wished it could be solved but thought it could not. Enlightenment is Socrates respected and free to study what he wants, and thereby it is civil society reconstituted. In the Apology, Socrates, who lives in thousands fold poverty because he neither works nor has inherited, purposes with ultimate insolence that he be fed at public expense at city hall. However, what is the modern university, with its pay and tenure, other than a free lunch for philosophy and scientists? Moreover, the Enlightenment’s explicit effort to remove the religious passion from politics, resulting in distinctions like that between church and state, is motivated by the wish to prevent the highest principle in political life from being hostile to reason. This is the intention in the Republic of Socrates’ reform of the stories about the gods told by the poets. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Nothing that denies the principle of contradiction is allowed to be authoritative, for that is the reef against which Socrates foundered. However, Socrates did not think that church and state could be separated. He would have treated both terms as artificial. The gods are believed to be the founders of every city and are its most important beings. He would not have dared to banish them in defense of himself. The Enlightenment thinkers took on his case and carried on a way against the continuing threat to science posed by first causes that are irrational or beyond reason. The gradual but never perfect success of that war turns the desire to be reasonable into the right to be reasonable, into academic freedom. In the process, political life was rebuilt in ways that have proved intolerable to many statesmen and thinkers, and have gradually led to the reintroduction of religion and the irrational in new and often terrifying guises. This is what Socrates would have feared. However, here I am only indicating the unity of the tradition, that Enlightenment is an attempt to give political status to what Socrates represents. The academy and the university are the institutions that incorporate the Socratic spirit more or less well. Yet the existence of these institutions underlines at the same time how they differ from Socrates, who founded no institutions and had only friends. And these attacks on these institutions made first by Rousseau and then by Nietzsche are attacks on Socratic rationalism made in a Socratic spirit. The history of Western thought and learning can be encapsulated in the fate of Socrates, beginning with Plato defending him, passing through the Enlightenment institutionalizing him, and ending with Nietzsche accusing on him. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The cherishing, for two and a half millennia, of the memory of this man, who was put to death by the city for philosophizing, ends with his spiritual execution in the name of culture at the hands of the latest of great philosophers. Both city and culture are authorized by the sacred. The meditation on Socrates is the inspiring theme of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle, through Farabi and Maimonides, Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau and Hegel, to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Socrates is the complementary man whose enigmatic being leads to reflection of the nature of the knowers. Sometimes the problem of slowing down rather than promoting cooperation. An example is the prevention of collusive business practices by avoiding the very conditions which would promote cooperation. Unfortunately, the very ease with which cooperation can evolve even among egoists suggests that the prevention of collusion is not an easy task. Cooperation certainly does not require formal agreements or even face-to-face negotiations. The fact that cooperation based upon reciprocity can emerge and prove stable suggests that antitrust activities should pay more attention to preventing the conditions that foster collusion than to search for secret meetings among executives of competing firms. Consider, for example, the practice of the government selecting two companies for competitive development contracts for a new military airplane. Since aerospace companies specialize to some degree in planes for either Air Force or the Nav, there is a tendency for firms with the same specialty to face each other in the final competition. This frequency of interaction between two given companies makes tacit collusion relatively easy to achieve. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
To make tacit collusion more difficult, the government should seek methods of reducing specialization or compensating for its effects. Paris of companies which shared a specialization would then expect to interact less often in the final competitions. This would cause later interactions between them to be worth relatively less, reducing the shadow of the future. If the nest expected interaction is sufficiently far off, reciprocal cooperation in the form of tacit collusion cases to be a stable policy. The potential for attaining cooperation without formal agreements has its bright side in other contexts. For example, it means that cooperation on the control of the arms race does not have to be sought entirely through the formal mechanism of negotiated treaties. Arms control could also evolve tacitly. Certainly, the fact that the United States of America and Russia know that they will both be dealing with each other for a very long time should help establish the necessary conditions. The leaders may not like each other, but neither did the soldiers in World War I who learned to live and let live. Occasionally a political leader gets the idea that cooperation with another major power should not be sought because a better plan would be to drive them into bankruptcy. This is an extraordinarily risky enterprise because the target need not limit its response to the withholding of normal cooperation, but would also have a strong incentive to escalate the conflict before it was irreversibly weakened. Japan’s despairing gamble at Pearl Harbor, for example, was a response to power American economic sanctions aimed at stopping Japanese intervention in China. Rather than give up what it regarded as a vital sphere, Japan decided to attack America before becoming even further weakened. Japan understood that American was much more powerful, but decided that the cumulative effects of the sanctions made it better to attack rather than to wait for the situation to get even more desperate. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Trying to drive someone bankrupt changes the time perspective of the participants by placing the future of the interaction very much in doubt. And without the shadow of the future, cooperation becomes impossible to sustain. Thus, the role of time perspectives is critical in the maintenance of cooperation. When the interaction is likely to continue for a long time, and the players care enough about their future together, the conditions are ripe for the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship. When the conditions are right, the players can come to cooperate with each other through trial-and-error learning about possibilities for mutual rewards, through imitation of other successful players, or even through a blind process of selection of the more successful strategies with a weeding out of the less successful ones. Whether the players trust each other or not is less important in the long run than whether the conditions are ripe for them to build a stable pattern of cooperation with each other. Just as the future is important for the establishment of the conditions for cooperation, the past is important for the monitoring of actual behavior. It is essential that they players are able to observe and respond to each other’s prior choices. Without this ability to use the past, defections could not be punished, and the incentive to cooperate would disappear. Fortunately, the ability to monitor the prior behavior of the other player does not have to be perfect. When dealing with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, people sometimes assume perfect knowledge of the other individual. In many settings, however, an individual may occasionally misperceive the choice made by the other. A defection may go undetected, or a cooperation may be misinterpreted as a defection. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The role of time perspective has important implications for the design of institutions. In large organizations, such as business corporations and governmental bureaucracies, executives are often transferred from one position to another approximately every two years. This gives executive a strong incentive to do well in the short run, regardless of the consequences for the organization in the long run. They know that soon they will be in some other position, and the consequences of their choices in the previous post are not likely to be attributed to them after they have left their position. This gives two executives a mutual incentive to defect when either of their terms is drawing to an end. The result of rapid turnover could therefore be a lessening of cooperation within the organization. Economics of the past, whether agricultural or industrial, were built around long-lasting structures. In place of these, we are laying the electronic basis for an accelerative kaleidoscopic economy capable of instantly reshuffling itself into new patterns without blowing itself apart. The new extra-intelligence is part of the necessary adaptive equipment. In the confusing new flux, businesses can use extra-intelligence to launch surprise attacks on entirely fresh territory, which means that companies can no longer be sure where the next competitive push will come from. The classic blitzkrieg—much analyzed in the network literature—was Merrill Lynch’s launch of its Cash Management Account in 1977, an early use of information technology for a strategic, as distinct from merely administrative, purpose. The Cash Management Account, or CMA, was a new financial product that combined four previously separate services for the customer: a checking account, a deposit account, a credit card, and a securities account. The customer could move money back and forth among these at will. There was no float and the checking account paid interest. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The integration of these previously disparate products into a single offering was made possible only by Merrill Lynch’s sophisticate computer technology electronic networks. In twelve months, Merrill sucked in $5 billion of customer fund and by 1984, according to consultant Peter Keen, $70 billion had flooded into Merrill Lynch’s hands. Keen calls it a “preemptive strike” against the banks, which saw vast sums withdrawn by customers who preferred the CMA to an ordinary bank checking account. A securities house, not subject to ban regulations and not regarded as a bank, devastated the bank. Since then, many banks and other financial institutions have offered similar packages, but Merrill has a several-year head start on them. The strange new hybrid patterns of competition—which reflect a restructuring of markets as a result of extra-intelligence—are seen in the move of retailers like Japan’s Seibu Saison group into the financial services business. A Seibu subsidiary is planning to install electronic cash dispensers in railroad stations. British Petroleum, having set up its own internal bank, sells banking services to outsiders. Extra-intelligent networks help explain the widespread push for deregulation of industry, and they suggest that existing government regulations will prove less and less effective. For existing regulations are based on categories and divisions among industries that no longer exist in the age of extra-intelligence. Should banking regulations apply to nonbanks? What, after all, is a bank these days? By linking actual operations across company lines, by making it possible for companies to compete in fields once regarded as alien, extra-intelligent networks break up the old specialization, the old institutional division of labor. In their place come new constellations and cluster of companies, densely interrelated not merely by money but by shared information. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Ironically, it is the disruption cased by this drastic restructuring of the economy around knowledge that explains many of today’s breakdowns and inefficiencies—the misplaced bills, the computer errors, the inadequate service, the sense that nothing works properly. The old smokestack economy is disintegrating; the new super-symbolic economy is still being built, and the electronic infrastructure on which it depends is still in a primitive stage of development. Information is the most fluid of resources, and fluidity is the hallmark of an economy in which the production and distribution of food, energy, goods, and services increasingly depend on symbolic exchange. What emerges is an economy that itself looks more like a nervous system than anything else, and which runs according to rules no one has as yet formulated coherently. Indeed, the unprecedented rise of extra-intelligence raises profound, sometimes chilling questions for society as a whole, quite different from those raised by earlier communications revolutions. The World media today focus on the striking changes wrought by the outsourcing of jobs to India from the United States of America and elsewhere. Indeed, the story of I.T. jobs flowing to Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurgaon, and Jaipur has made front-page headlines around the World. By 2021, India was earning $157 billion a year by manning call centers, writing software, performing back-office work, accounting and even financial analysis for American and other foreign firms. And India’s projected revenue from firms being outsourced to that nation is $245 billion by 2022. But the charge that outsourcing takes jobs away from Americans overlooks a reserves effect. For instance, Bangalore Central, a new shopping mall offering such imported brands as Levi’s, Polo, Lacoste and Jockey. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The outsourcing boom—insourcing from India’s point of view—is unlikely to continue at its present pace of growth, but it has helped create a segment of nouveaux riches who are young, middle-class, focused on “now” and very witty, too much so for their elders. The 2004 election in India resurrected the Congress Party, whose roots in quasi-socialism led it to view development conventionally as a matter of factories and smokestacks rather than the transition to a knowledge-based wealth system. However, even longtime holdouts are coming around, including Communists, who are theoretically farther to the let than the Congress Party. A reporter not long ago chided the Communist chief minister of the state of West Bengal, where Calcutta is located, pointing out that “your party helped protect the advent of computers.” The chief minister’s response: “That was in the 1970s—that was foolish, foolish. It stated when they were going to introduce computers in bans and [insurance companies]. Their employees protested and we supported it. Nowadays they have understood…We have entered a century where industries will be talent-based.” Now even Calcutta, once the World symbol of urban misery, has reached out and attracted IMB. Article after article has pictured India’s talented young I.T. workers as a greedy, socially irresponsible, yuppiesque middle class. Less attention has been paid to the fact that, because of computers over 8 million people in the state of Karnataka can now, for the equivalent of thirty cents, get a printout of land records securing their property from takeover by corrupt, farm-grabbing landlords. On a wider scale, a consortium of Indian and U.S. corporations, along with the World Bank, and the Indian government set up Internet kiosks in five thousand Karnataka villages that allow rural residents access to banking, education and government services. Karnataka is held up as a model for the rest of the nation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
An enterprising company made available a machine called HAGOTH, of which it might be said, this was Technopoly’s most ambitions hour. The machine cost $1,5000, the baragen of the century, for it was able to reveal to its owner whether someone talking on the telephone was telling the truth. It did this by measuring the “stress content” of a human voice as indicated by its oscillations. You connected HAGOTH to your telephone and, in the course of conversation, asked your caller some key questions, such as “Where did you go last Saturday night?” HAGOTH had sixteen lights—eight green and eight red—and when the caller replied, HAGOTH went to work. Red lights went on when there was much stress in the voice, green lights when there was little. As an advertisement for HAGOTH said, “Green indicates no stress, hence truthfulness.” In other words, according to HAGOTH, it is not possible to speak the truth in a quivering voice or to lie in a steady one—an idea that would doubtless amuse Richard Nixon. At the very least, we must say that HAGOTH’s definition of truthfulness was peculiar, but so precise and exquisitely technical as to command any bureaucrat’s admiration. The same may be said of the definition of intelligence as expressed in a standard-brand intelligence test. In fact, an intelligence test works exactly like HAGOTH. You connect a pencil to the fingers of a young person and address some key questions to one; from the replies a computer can calculate exactly how much intelligence exists in the young person’s brain. HAGOTH has mercifully disappeared from the market, for what reason I do not know. Perhaps it was sexist or culturally biased or, worse, could not measure oscillations accurately enough. When it comes to machinery, what Technopoly insists upon most is accuracy. The idea embedded in the machine is largely ignored, no matter how peculiar. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Some may wonder, how can protein engineering build molecular machines? Proteins can self-assemble into working molecular machines, objects that do something, such as cutting and splicing other molecules or making muscles contract. They also join with other molecules to form huge assemblies like the ribosome (about the size of a washing machine, in our simulation view). Ribosomes—programmable machines for manufacturing proteins—are nature’s closet approach to a molecular assembler. The genetic-engineering industry is chiefly in the business of reprogramming natural nanomachines, the ribosomes, to make new proteins is termed protein engineering. Since biomolecules already form such complex devices, it is easy to see that advanced protein engineering could be used to build first-generation nanomachines. Making proteins is easier than designing them. Protein chemists began by studying proteins found in nature, but have only recently moved on to the problem of engineering new ones. These are called de novo proteins, meaning completely new, made from scratch. Designing proteins is difficult because of the way they are constructed. A characteristic of proteins is that their activities depend on their three-dimensional structures. These activities may range from hormonal action to a function in digestion or in metabolism. Whatever their function in digestion or in metabolism. Whatever their function, it is always essential to have a definite three-dimensional shape or structure. This three-dimensional structure forms when a chain folds to form a compact molecular object. To get a feel for how tough it is to predict the natural folding of a protein chain, picture a straight piece of cord with hundreds of magnets and sticky knots along its length. In this state, it is easy to make and easy to understand. Now pick it up, put it in a glass jar, and shake it for a long time. Could you predict its final shape? Certainly not: it is a tangled mess. One might call this effort at predation “the sticky-cord-folding problem”; protein chemists call theirs “the protein-folding problem.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Given the correct conditions, a protein chain always folds into one special shape, but that shape is hard to predict from just the straightened structure. Protein designers, though, face the different job of first determining a desired final shape, and then figuring out what linear sequence of amino acids to use to make that shape. Without solving the classic protein-folding problem, they have begun to solve the protein-design problem. Now many people wonder why so much pleasures of the flesh and so much skin is shown on television? Well, it is because lust is better television than satisfaction. Ebullience and anxiety are better than tranquility. On the other hand, anger is better than anxiety. Jealousy is better television than acceptance. All of these work more easily than love. Passionate love is more communicable than brotherly and sisterly love. Competition is inherently more televisable than cooperation as it involves drama, winning, wanting and loss. Cooperation offers no conflict and becomes boring. Materialism, acquisitiveness and ambition, all highly focused attitudes, work better than spirituality, nonseeking, openness and yielding. The medium cannot deal with ambiguity, subtlety and diversity. Doing is also easier to convey than being. Activity will always be chosen over inactivity. When dealing with tribal peoples, objective events such as hunting, building, fighting or dancing are easier to convey through television than subjective details of qualities of experience, ways of mind, alternative perceptions. The latter qualities, which form the heart of life for tribal people, are dropped out in favor of the former. Lound is easier to televise than soft. Close is easer than distant. Large is easier than small. Too large is harder than medium. The narrow is easier than the wide. Therefore, television is not an accurately display of live, culture, people, or civilization, and it does not really teach a lot of values one wants their kids to follow. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Therefore, do not let the news teach you how to profile situations or people, nor let them teach you how to predict future events. Local news tends to be fake. They are just trying to get ratings and they can keep their thoughts and prayers to themselves. Who knows what they are thinking and praying about besides a way to strike fear into people and spread ignorance in the community. Like the God of Heaven, man makes in himself the choice between good and evil, both of which, like Him, he bears within himself. Between God and man, however, stand the primal spirits, they too choosing, but in pure paradox. They neither contain nor confront a duplicity, each possesses only himself in the most extreme differentiation; the other one, the other thing, he only has as his absolute computer; such is the situation in which he chooses himself, his own kind and the work commensurate wit it. Choosing, each acknowledges himself. The evil chooses and acknowledges himself, not however merely as created thus and not otherwise, but precisely as the evil, and for his followers he does not merely posit that after death they shall abide with him, but that it is just the worst existence which shall fall to their lot (in this doctrines there is no distinction of category between bad and evil: the bad is precisely that which cases evil, and in the last analysis there is no other evil than that which it causes.) He desires evil as such; and thereby he fulfills the will of the highest god, who brought forth him and his twin: only through mastering unmitigated evil does existence attain to transfiguration. Here the most harassing of questions remains unasked: how can the God of Heavens, the primal being, have contained and encompassed evil? “And they hearkened not unto the voice of the Lord, because of their wicked combinations; wherefore, there began to be wars and contentions in all the land, and also may famines and pestilences, insomuch that there was a great destruction such and one as never had been known upon the face of the Earth; and all this came to pass in the days of Shiblom. And the people began to repent of their iniquity; and inasmuch as they did the Lord did have mercy on them, reports Ether 10.7-8. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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It Would Save My Life—That’s All!
In 1839 down-at-heels artist who gave lessons in drawing was asked by a pupil whether payment of a ten-dollar fee would be helpful. The art teacher—a something dabbler in the mysteries of the electromagnetism—replied. “It would save my life, that’s all.” Samuel F.B. Morse had already proved that he could send coded messages along an electric wire. However, it was not until four years later, by dint of strenuous lobbying, that Mores managed to persuade the United States of America’s Congress to appropriate $30,000 to build a telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. It was on the opening of that earliest line that Morse sent his historic telegram—“What hath God wrought!” With that Morse opened the age of telecommunications and triggered one of the most dramatic commercial confrontations of the 19th century. He started a powerful process that is still unfolding in our time. Today, even as the battle of the supermarket checkout counters intensifies, a larger conflict is shaping up, centered on control of what might be called the electronic highways of tomorrow. Because so much of business now depends on getting and sending information, companies around the World have been rushing to link their employees through electronic networks. These networks form the key infrastructure of the 21st century, as critical to business success and national economic development as the railroads were in Morse’s era. Some of these are “local area networks,” or LANs, which merely hook up computers in a single building or complex. Others are globe-girdling nets that connect CitiBank people the World over, or help Hilton reserve its hotel rooms and Hertz its cars. Every time McDonald’s sells a Big Mac or a McMuffin, electronic data are generated. McDonald’s is the World’s leading global foodservice retailer with over 38,000 restaurants in over 100 countries, McDonald’s operates no fewer than 20 different networks to collect, assemble, and distribute information. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Du Pont’s medical sales force plugs laptops into its electronic mail network, and Sara Lee depends on its nets to put L’eggs hosiery onto the shelves. Volvo links 20,000 terminals around the World to swap market data. DEC’s engineers exchange design information electronically Worldwide. IBM alone connection over 355,000 terminals around the World through a system called VNET, which in 1987 handled an estimated 5 trillion characters of data. By itself, a single part of that system—called PROFS—saved IBM the purchase of 7.5 million envelopes, and IBM estimates that without PROFS it would need nearly 40,000 additional employees to perform the same work. Networking has spread down to the smallest businesses. With some 250 million PCs in use in the United States of America, Wang now advertises its networking equipment over the radio, sandwiching its commercials about “connectability” between Bach and suites and Beethoven symphonies. Companies daily grow more dependent on their electronic nets for billing, ordering, tracking, and trading; for the exchange of design specification, engineering drawings, and schedules; and for actually controlling production lines remotely. Once regarded as purely administrative tools, networked information systems are increasingly seen as strategic weapon, helping companies protect established markets and attack new ones. The race to build these networks has taken on some of the urgency that accompanied the great age of railroad construction in the 19th century, when nations became aware that their fate might be tied to the extensiveness of their rail systems. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Yet the power-shifting implications of this phenomenon are only dimly perceived by the public. To appreciate their significance, it helps to glance back to what happened after Samuel Morse strung the first telegraph network. By the mid-19th century Morse franchises had built thousands of miles of telegraph lines. Competing companies sprang up, networks grew, and an intense race began to connect major cities to one another across the continent. Stringing its wires along railroad rights of way, a company called Western Union began gobbling up smaller companies. Within eleven years its lines reached from one end of America to the other, and its capital had shot up from $500,000 to $41,000—a bank-boggling amount in those days. Soon its subsidiary, the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, was providing high-speed information for investors and gold speculators—paving the way for today’s Dow Jones or Nikkei. At a time when most messages were still carried across the continent in saddlebags or railway cars, Western Union had a stranglehold on the means of advanced communications. Success, as usual, bred corporate arrogance. Thus, in 1876, when a voice teacher named Alexander Graham Bell patented the first telephone, Western Union tried to laugh it off as a joke and a fad. However, as public demand for telephone service soared, Western Union made it clear it was not about to surrender its monopoly. A knockdown conflict ensured, and Western Union did everything possible to kill or capture the newer technology. It hired Thomas Edison to invent alternatives to the Bell technology. Its lawyers fought Bell in court. It hired Thomas Edison to invent alternatives to the Bell technology. Its lawyers fought Bell in court. “At another level,” writes Joseph C. Goulden, author of Monopoly, “Western Union barred Bell from the right-of-way monopolies it owned for its wires along highways and railroads. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
“Western Union had its instruments in every major hotel, railway station, and newspaper office in the nation, under terms which forbade installations of telephones. A Bell manager in Philadelphia was forbidden to erect lines anywhere in the city; his workers frequently were jailed on complaints sworn by Western Union. The telegraph company’s political influence in Washington kept Bell phones from federal offices.” Despite all this, Western Union failed, swept aside not so much by its smaller antagonist as by the business World’s desperate hunger for better communications. In turn, the winner of that corporate power struggle grew into the biggest privately owned business the World had ever seen—the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T). During the Worldwide Great Depression in the 1930s, a satirical French movie called Le Million showed two farmers sitting at an outdoor bistro savouring glasses of Bordeaux. When the waiter gives them the check, l’addition, one farmer reaches into a sack and hands him a chicken. The waiter returns with change, putting two eggs on the table, at which point the farmer picks up the eggs and places one back as the trip, or pourboire. The absurdity perfectly captures the realities of life for millions in economies where money loses its value, as it did not so long ago in Southeast Asia, Russia, and Argentina. However, tomorrow we may not wait for crises to engage in moneyless transactions. Barter, long regarded as impractical in complex markets, is being given new life. For the average person, the word barter calls to mind images of a primitive society or of small-scale personal exchanges. A lawyer writes a will for a friend who gives him a tennis lesson in return. So many of these transactions occur daily and are so natural that they pass for favors. However, economically speaking, they are in fact minor forms of barter. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
However, barter is also big business. While reliable global statistics are hard to come by because definitions vary, according to Forbes, “it is estimated that more than 60 percent of all Forbes 500 companies use barter. Even heavyweights, including General Electric, Marriott, and Carnival Cruise Lines have been known to barter goods or services.” Fortune reports that two thirds of all major global companies regularly engage in barter and have set up departments specifically to handle such deals. In Argentina in 2002, as the economy tanked and auto sales melted away, Toyota and Ford agreed to accept grain in payments for cars. When Ukraine racked up a massive debt for natural gas, Russia took eight Tu-160 Blackjack bombers as partial payment. Russia swapped three billion dollars worth of Stolicnaya vodka for Pepsi-Cola syrup. Other governments have put on the barter block everything from alpaca cloth to zinc. At the global level, according to Bernard Lietaer, formerly chief planner of Belgian central bank and one of the architects of the euro, international corporate barter, otherwise known as countertrade, is in “common use among no less than 200 countries around the World, with a volume that now ranges from $800 billion to $1.2 trillion a year.” And barter growth is accelerating. One reason is that we may be heading into decades of tempestuous economic conditions. Say Lietaer, major currencies today are “exhibiting a volatility that is presently four times higher than it 1971.” High volatility suggests that an increasing number of countries will find themselves facing periodic foreign-exchange shortages. Bater gives governments and business a way to trade when no one wants their own nation’s currency. When currencies oscillate wildly, it is also a way to reduce risk. When countries agree to exchange goods or services in lieu of money, currency risk is essentially eliminated. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Until now, the main objection to barter has been the difficulty of matching what one person wishes to sell with what another has to offer in return—what economists have called a necessary “coincidence of needs.” However, the rise of the Internet radically reduces these impediments, making it almost instantly possible to locate potential trading partners around the World and expanding the variety of barterable items. Not only is it easier—given today’s remarkable financial networks—to find a partner for a two-sided trade, but the ready availability of data and global communications makes it possible to match the simultaneous offerings and needs of multiple participants. This points toward more complex but far bigger barter deals in days to come. How big? Big enough to replace money within this lifetime? “There is no reason products and services could not be swapped directly by consumers and producers through a direct exchange—essentially a massive barter economy.” That conclusion comes from Mervyn King, formerly deputy governor of the Bank of England. Combine (1) the rise of para-money; (2) the growth of barter; (3) the increase of intangibility; (4) the spread of ever-more-complex global financial networks; and (5) radical new technologies soon to be deployed. Set these against (6) a World economy that is highly leveraged, rocked by largely unregulated speculation; and (7) the coming decades f seismic changes in the World geopolitical framework, and conventional, industrial-age money may not disappear—but it may become a collector’s item. Today, as these forces converge, we also find scattered small-scale experiments with alternate currencies, mostly at a community level, often combined with elements of barter. However, crypto currency was hyped when it first came out, but its value has decrease nearly 60 percent since its peak and now most people are likely to lose money when investing in it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
A program pioneered in Ithaca, New York, and now copied in dozens of other communities allows consumers and merchants to use chits rather than real currency to exchange goods and services for everything ranging from rent and medical bills to theater tickets. Another system, created by Edgar Cahn and detailed in his book Time Dollars, lets people build up service credits for, say, taking an elderly neighbour shopping, which can then be used to obtain babysitting from another participant in the network. In their own ways, all of these ventures seek to recognize and give quasi-monetary value to the many economic contributions made by prosumers. Considering the vast new opportunities opened by electronic exchange, it may be possible to expand on such community-based experiments and develop large-scale alternative currencies for certain kinds of prosumer activity. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Terra Project calls for a superanational currency based not on gold or wildly floating exchange rates but on a basket of internationally traded commodities and services. The larger questions facing us, however, involve not only the fate of money but, as we have seen, the future of property, capital and markets—and their interactions—as well. They involve the shift from wage labour toward “portfolio work” and self-employment; from handcraft prosuming to technology-based prosuming; from profit-based production toward open-source contributions to software, medicine to value based on ideas, images, symbols and models inside billions of brains. They involve completely altered uses of time, space and knowledge—among the deepest fundamental of wealth. How might the growing links between unpaid prosumer production in the non-money economy and the paid production in the money economy affect capitalism? #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
What happens to capitalism when its most important input is not scarce, but essentially limitless and non-rival? What happens to capitalism when a growing proportion of property becomes not only intangible, but doubly intangible? Faced with these changes, as the Third Wave of change supplants industrialism and spread far beyond its origins in the United States of America, capitalism faces a crisis of redefinition. When that revolutionary redefinition is completed, will what remains still be capitalism? I know that the millions of people who migrate to and the other country that try to copy America sure hope so. When I was fifteen years old, I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life. I had never before seen, or at least had not noticed, buildings that were evidently dedicated to a higher purpose, not to necessity or utility, not merely to shelter or manufacture or trade, but to something that might be an end in itself. The Middle West was not known for the splendor of its houses of worship or its monument to political glory. There was little visible reminiscence of the spiritual heights with which to solicit the imagination or the admiration of young people. The longing for I knew not what suddenly found a response in the World outside. It was, surely, the World outside. Although the Gothic buildings were magnificent, they are not as grand as the ones in Europe. However, they pointed toward a road of learning that leads to the meeting place of the greats. There one finds examples of a sort not likely to be seen around one, without which one could neither recognize one’s own capacities nor know how wonderful it is to belong to the species. This imitation of styles of faraway lands and ages showed an awareness of lack of, and a respect for, the substance expressed by those styles. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
These buildings were a bow to the contemplative life by a nation addicted more than any other to the active life. The pseudo-Gothic was much ridiculed, and nobody build like that anymore. Even though it is not authentic, they should continue to build that way. To me it was and remains an expression of what we are, especially since some of these buildings were created with authentic elements from ancient Egypt, Athens, and Medieval Europe. However, one wonders whether the vulture critics had as good an instinct about out spiritual needs as the vulgar rich who paid for the buildings. This nation’s impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration. Reminiscences and warnings from the past are our only monitor as we careen along our path. Those despised millionaires who set up a university in the midst of a city that seems devoted only to the American goals paid tribute to what they had neglected, whether it was out of a sense of what they themselves had missed, or out of bad conscience about what their lives were exclusively devoted to, or to satisfy the vanity of having their names attached to the enterprise. (What feeds a man’s vanity teaches as much about him as anything.) Education was an American thing, and not only technical education. For me the promise of these buildings was fully kept. From the moment I became a student there, it seemed plausible to spend all m time thinking about what I am, a theme that was interesting to be but had never appeared a proper or possible subject of study. In high school I had seen many of the older boys and girls go off to the state university to become doctors, lawyers, social workers, teachers, the whole variety of professions respectable in the little World in which I lived. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The university was part of growing up, but it was not looked forward to as a transforming experience—nor was it so in fact. No one believed that there were serious ends of which we had not heard, or that there was a way of studying our ends and determining their rank order. In short, philosophy was only a word, and literature a form of entertainment. Our high schools and the atmosphere around them puts us in this frame of mind. However, a great university presented another kind of atmosphere, announcing that there are questions that ought to be addressed by everyone but are not asked in ordinary life or expected to be answered there. It provided an atmosphere of free inquiry, and therefore excluded what is not conducive to or is inimical to such inquiry. It made a distinction between what is important and unimportant. It protected the tradition, not because tradition is tradition but because tradition provides models of discussion on a uniquely high level. It contained marvels and made possible friendships consisting in shared experiences of those marvels. Most of all there was the presence of some authentically great thinkers who gave living proof of the existence of theoretical life and whose motives could not easily be reduced to any of the baser ones people delight in thinking universal. They had authority, not based on power, money or family, but on natural gifts that properly compel respect. The relations among them and between them and students were the revelation of a community in which there is a true common good. In a nation founded on reason, the university was the temple of the regime, dedicated to the purest use of reason and evoking the kind of reverence appropriate to an association of free and equal human beings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The years have taught me that much of this existed only in my youthful and enthusiastic imagination, but not so much as one might suppose. The institutions were much more ambiguous than I could have suspected, and they have proved much frailer when caught in contrary winds than it seemed they would be. However, I did see real thinkers who opened up new Worlds for me. The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for. If fortune had not put me into a great university at one of its greatest moments, they accompany me every minute of every day of my life, making me see much more and be much more than I could have seen or been. I have had teachers and students such as dreams are made on. And most of all I have friends with whom I can share thinking about what friendship is, with whom there is a touching of souls and in whom works that common good of which I have just spoken. All of this is, of course, mixed with the weaknesses and uglinessess that life necessarily contains. None of it cancels the low in man. However, it informs even that low. None of my disappointments with the university—which is after all only a vehicle for contents in principle separable from it—has ever made me doubt that the life it gave me was anything other than the best one available to me. Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university, and I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society. Falling in love with the idea of the university is not a folly, for only by means of it is one able to see what can be. Without it, all these wonderful results of the theoretical life collapse back into the primal slime from which they cannot re-emerge. The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties. However, such debunking can obscure them, and has. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
When driving a car, one’s nervous system becomes linked with the vehicle in a very basic way. If the driver decides to brake, the body performs a complex sequence of maneuvers with the brake, accelerator and steering wheel, all acting as sense-extension. The vehicle becomes body-like and responds in body-like fashion to the driver’s thoughts. If the driver decides to accelerate, the brain signals the foot which responds by signaling the accelerator, which responds by increasing fuel flow, which enacts a series of events that causes the vehicle to increase speed. In a sense, the car is the driver’s body and is directly controlled by the driver’s brain and central nervous system. The driver “feels” other objects external to the vehicle and judges distances from the car in a manner crudely analogous to the operations involved in judging one’s environment from the physical body. The difference is that the signal flow from the brain to the auto is indirect and is impeded by the physical separation of the operator’s appendages from the appropriate control mechanisms. A little over a decade ago, there was talk of an experimental automobile braking system which was to be engaged by simply lifting an eyebrow, cutting in half the reaction time of a conventional brake system and reducing physical effort and mechanical work. As we designed increasingly subtle mechanisms responsive to heat, pressure, and biological signals, we appear to be approaching a time when “willing” a machine into action will be relatively common. The separate steps between thought and realization of a desire goal begin to blur and finally disappear. Signal flow between organic and mechanical units linked in a system gradually becomes continuous and unbroken. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
This trend toward continuous communications has resulted in the transfer of the machine operator’s work from “…the level of muscular activity to the level of perception, memory and thought—to internal mental processes.” MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) noted that the Industrial Revolution concerned the machine primarily as an alternative to human muscle. According to Lewis Mumford in The Pentagon of Power, “Man’s biological emergence during the last two million years has, indeed, accelerated; and it has done so mainly in one direction, in the enlargement of the nervous system, under an increasingly unified cerebral direction.” Machines make the body expendable. If machines have accomplished nothing else, they have reduced the human self to the brain and central nervous system. The history of simple tools is a chronology of extension and articulation of human functions. Tools, originally conceived about two million years ago as crude adjuncts of the body to increase its power and efficacy, are passive participants in accomplishing work. A machine is merely a supplemental limb; this is the be-all and end—all of machinery. Tools connected in series produce machines. Machinery has gone a step beyond the tool in that it is capable of varying degrees of automatism (self-regulated activity without human participation), contingent behavior (decision making) and reaction to sensory stimulus through artificial organs. Mechanical history involves not only extension but replacement of human acidity. Mumford has actually called that machine “…a sort of minor organism, designed to perform a single set of functions.” You might say that extension of the limb evolved into extensions of the brain. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Technology improves itself in a Darwinian way, as seen in the electronic marketplace, where unfit contraptions become extinct every year. As technology absorbs more and more human work, the line separating biology and mechanics gradually becomes less distinct. Though we are still toolmakers and our “logic engines” are still tools in the general sense of the word, the context has changed. No one living at the time of Hero of Alexandria had any idea that five machines he defined would have produced offspring capable of instantaneous logarithmic calculation or incorporated into the body as working parts. By World War II, machines were exhibiting behaviour originally thought to be characteristic of primitive life. Early guided missiles were designed with the idea of goal-seeking and scanning in mind, which “had combined as the essential mechanical conception of a working model that would behave very much like a simple animal. Throughout history, limited tools have limited achievement. Leonardo da Vinci’s sixteenth-century chain drives and ball bearings were theoretically workable, yet never worked in their inventor’s lifetime. Charles Babbage’s nineteenth-century mechanical computer suffered the same fate. The problem? Both inventors needed precisely machined parts that (though readily available today) were beyond the manufacturing technology of their times. Physicist David Miller recounts how a sophisticated integrated circuit design project at TRW counts how a sophisticated integrated circuit design project at TRW hit similar limits in the early 1980s: “It all came down to whether a German company could col their glass lenses slowly enough to give us the accuracy we needed. They couldn’t.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
In the molecular World, tool development again paces progress, and new tools can bring breathtaking advances. Mark Pearson, director of molecular biology for Du Pont, has observed this in action: “When I was a graduate student back in the 1950s, it was a multiyear problem to determine the molecular structure of a single protein. We used to say, ‘One protein, one career.’ Yet now the time has shrunk from a career to a decade to a year—and in optimal cases to a few months.” Protein structures can be mapped atom by atom by studying X-ray reflections from layers in protein crystals. Pearson observes that “Characterizing a protein was a career-long endeavor in part because it was so difficult to get crystals, and just getting the material was a big constraint. With new technologies, we can get our hands on the material now—that may sound mundane, but it is a great advance. To the people in the field, it makes all the difference in the World.” Improved tools for making and studying proteins are of special importance because proteins are promising building blocks for first-generation molecular machines. At one end of what we might think of as the spectrum of personal experience, there is the occasional momentous event. Emotionally engulfing. Intellectually overpowering. These experiences happen to everyone, but they are relatively rare. Between these “highs,” life moves along from routine experience to routine experience, flowing one into the next, developing the overall pattern that is life’s true content. When you sit down at a café with a friend, you do not need to have a highly excitable and joyful emotional experience to be worthwhile. Perhaps nothing will happen in that hour or two. No exclamations of passion. No news of dire events. No shoot-outs at the next table or in the street. Perhaps you will explore some obscure detail in your friend’s feelings or personal history. Perhaps you will merely converse or watch the passing parade. Perhaps you will explore some obscure detail in your friend’s feelings or personal history. Perhaps you will muse about fashion. Most coffeehouse conversations, like the rest of life, will go more or less that way. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Ordinary life contains speaks and valleys of experience, highs and lows, long periods of dormancy, many periods of quiet, indecision, ambiguity, resolution, failed resolution. All of these fit into a wide pattern that is the way of life is actually lived. Included within this pattern are occasional highlighted events: great shocks, unexpected eruptions, sudden achievements. Life would be frustrating without such catharsis and excitement, but life would be bizarre and maddening if it had too many of these peak events. Much of the nervousness in the World today in both individual and national life may be attributable to the destiny and power of the experiences that are prearranged for our consumption. Too much happens too fast to be absorbed and integrated into an overall pattern of experience. It is no accident that the World outside television has concentrated increasingly on large and cathartic events. All artificial environments and the consumer life encourage focus on peak events. When nature is absent, so is natural subtlety. Personal attunement to slower, nature-based rhythms is obscured. We focus on the “hits” that are provided, and these reduce more and more to commodities. Every commodity is advertised as offering a bigger and better and more powerful experience than the one that preceded it. Since life’s experiences have been reduced to packaged commodities, like the chimpanzee in the lab, that is what we seek. Television, in addition to being the prime exponent of the commodity life, makes a direct contribution to distorting life in the direction of highlighted experience by choosing its contents to fit this pattern. It is a technological necessity that it do so. Since television is such a vague and limited medium, so unlikely to produce much of any response in a viewer, producers must necessarily divide all the content into two distinct categories: peaks and troughs, the highlighted and the routine, always choosing the former and not the latter. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In this way, the choices in content match the technical bias toward artificial unusualness and also the tendencies of the wider commodity-based, artificial environment. The programming bias is always toward the more vivid, more powerful, more cathartic, more definite, “clean” peaks of content. The result, not the process. The bizarre, rather than the unusual. When we think about territorial systems, suppose that a single individual using a new strategy is introduced into one of the neighbourhoods of a population where everyone else is using a native strategy. One can say that the new strategy territorially invades the native strategy if every location in the territory will eventually convert to the new strategy. Then one can say that native strategy is territorially stable if not strategy can territorially invade it. All this leads to a rather strong result: it is no harder for a strategy to be territorially stable than it is to be collectively stable. In other words, the conditions that are needed for a strategy to protect itself from takeover by an invader are no more stringent in a territorial social system than they are in a social system where anyone is equally likely to meet anyone else. If a rule is collectively stable, it is territorially stable. The proof of this proposition gives some insight into the dynamics of a territorial system. Suppose there is a territorial system in which everyone is using a native strategy that is collectively stable, except for one individual who is using a new strategy. Now consider whether a neighbour of the newcomer would ever have reason to convert to the newcomer’s strategy. Since the native strategy is collectively stable, the newcomer cannot be scoring as well when surrounded by natives as a native who is surrounded by natives is scoring. However, every neighbour of the newcomer actually does have a neighbour who is also a native and who is entirely surrounded by other natives. Therefore no neighbour of the newcomer will find the newcomer’s neighbours will retain their own native strategy, or, what amounts to the same thing, will convert to the strategy of their native neighbours. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Therefore, the new strategy cannot spread in a population of collectively stable strategies, and consequently a collectively stable strategy is also territorially stable. The proposition that a collectively stable rule is territorially stable demonstrates that protection from invasion is at least easy in a territorial system as in a freely mixing system. One implication is that mutual cooperation can be sustained in a territorial system by a nice rule with no greater requirement on the size by a nice rule with no grater requirement on the size of the discount parameter relative to the payoff parameters than it takes to make that nice rule collectively stable. Even with the help of a territorial social structure to maintain stability, a nice rule is not necessarily safe. If the shadow of the future is sufficiently weak, then no nice strategy can resist invasion even with the help of territoriality. In such a case, the dynamics of the invasion process can sometimes be extremely intricate and quite fascinating to look at. Meanies spreading in a population of TIT FOR TAT goes something like this: there is an initial situation of one mean person in the population, by generation 1, there are five meanies. By generation 7 most of the community is mean, while the nice people being a very small minority. In this case, the shadow of the future has been made quite weak. By generation 19, the meanies have practically taken over, and finding a pocket of nice people extremely rare. The meanies colonize the original TIT FOR TAT population, forming a fascinating patten of long borders and bypassed islands of cooperators. Another way of looking at the effects of territoriality is to investigate what happens when the players are using a wide variety of more or less sophisticated strategies. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The Biblical tale of the flood is started when the wickedness of man is so great on Earth and all the imagery of the designs of his heart only evil the whole day, and He repents of having made man. God Himself speaks: He does not wish again to curse the Earth on account of man, “for the imagery of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Scripture has at its core such a powerful mythology that even the residue of that mythology is still sufficient to serve as an exacting control mechanism for some people. It provides, first of all, a theory about the mean of life and therefore rules on how one is to conduct oneself. With apologies to Rabbi Hillel, who expressed it more profoundly and in the time it takes to stand on one leg, the theory is as follows: There is one God, who created the Universe and all that is in it. Although humans can never fully understand God, He has revealed Himself and His will to us throughout history, particularly through His commandments and the testament of the prophets as recorded in the Bible. The greatest of these commandments tell us that humans are to love God and express their love for Him through love, mercy, and justice to our fellow humans. At the end of time, all nations and humans will appear before God to be judged, and those who have followed His commandments will find favour in His sight. Those who have denied God and the commandments will perish utterly in the darkness that lies outside the presence of God’s light. To borrow from Hillel: That is the theory. All the rest is commentary. Those who believe in this theory—particularly those who accept the Bible as the literal word of God—are free to dismiss other theories about the origin and meaning of life and to give minimal weight to the facts on which other theories are based. Moreover, in observing God’s laws, and the detailed requirements of their enactment, believers receive guidance about what books they should not read, about what plays and films they should not see, about what music they should not hear, about what subjects their children should not study, and so on. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
For strict fundamentalists of the Bible, the theory and what follows from it seal them off from unwanted information, and in that way their actions are invested with meaning, clarity, and they believe, more authority. “These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them…I am whoever you make me, but what you want is a fiend; you want a sadistic fiend, because that is what you are,” say Charles Manson. Many people try to persuade the youth to follow religion and come and meet Jesus Christ, but some to not accept the invitation and become Worldly. A lot of people are disenchanted and have dropped out from main stream society. As they do, the converge to partake in their own great social experiment. They were alienated by the sterility of a technological society that elevated scientific materialism and rational planning as its ultimate ideals, yet could not solve basic problems such as poverty and economic injustice. They were frustrated by the hypocrisy and failures of religious and political institutions that preached Christian tolerance, yet supported the ecology-shearing practices of big business, racial intolerance, and the horrors of the 2020 riots. They sought solace in an atavistic romanticism. En masse, they “turned in, turned on, and dropped out.” This counterculture was a full-fledged revolt against the American technocracy, social form in which an industrial society reaches the peak of its organizational integration. In an attempt to blot out the vision of a “brave new World,” in which corporate profits supersede all other goals, these youths came together in an attempt at a utopian tribal society, in which man was in harmony with the environment, and in which the needs of all members of the tribe would be taken care of willingly, without government coercion. “Therefore we did pour out our souls in prayer to God, that He would strengthen us and deliver us out of the hands of our enemies, yea, and also give us strength that we might retain our cities, and our lands, and our possession, for the support of our people,” reports Alma 58.10. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
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A Haven in a Heartless World
A torrent of oncoming technologies will make possible endless further varieties of para-money. Thus, cards may soon let us decide how much fungibility we want. The Arab Malaysian Bank in Kuala Lampur has offered a card to Muslim customers that disallows use in massage parlors or nightclubs. Before long, activist political movements, for example, may issue millions of “boycott cards” that are fully fungible—except that they cannot be used to buy Nikes, Shell gasoline, clothes from the Gap or products of other companies on their hit list. Wives or husbands might program restrictions on a free-spending spouse’s card. Or parents may give their children cards that cannot be used to buy candy, alcohol, tobacco—of fast food. Above average weight individuals wishing to avoid fast-food fat-food but finding it hard to resist may get help from a pay card they themselves can program to block any payment to Pizza Hut or Taco Bell—or all fast-food vendors. Make a resolution, quit carrying more than a dollar’s worth of cash and let your card help stiffen your resolve. Even newer technologies are making cards themselves obsolete. In many countries, cell phones and watches are already the equivalent of electronic wallets. Containing a chip or a virtual card provided by a participating bank, the phone can authorize the retailer to make a withdrawal from your account. Such phones are already used at high-end clothing stores, restaurants, vending machines, supermarkets, and train stations, among other locations. No one expects to kill cash anytime soon, but they are hoping to eventually remove paper currency from the market. New technologies pose a parallel death threat to cards as well as cash. Three new converging forces will provide an even greater variety of payment options. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
First are new technologies to verify a user’s identity. A rash of increasingly reliable identification methods are coming into use. In Japan, for example, the largest credit-card issuer, JBC, has introduced a system that identifies individuals by the unique pattern of blood vessels in a finger. Banks and card issuers, using research accelerated by the fight against terrorism, are also exploring other biometric methods, including retinal scanning and voice and face recognition. Second are new wireless technologies, too numerous and rapidly changing to detail here. And third, across the board, are dramatic advances in miniaturization. Drawing on innovations in all three of these fields, many companies, including Sony, Philips, Sun Microsystems and IBM, are working on striking alternative to conventional plastic, and virtual cards seem to be the way to go. Virtual cards are essential the same as debt and credit cards, with the exception that there is no physical card. One just goes to their banking online system, requests a card and the details you need are given to you to make an online transaction or to use your phone as a method of payment in the store. I suppose many stores will eventually allow customers to physical enter their virtual card payment methods manually. Credit cards are just a physical variant of identity, so anyway you can identify someone can be a way to pay for things. So much technology is coming out that it is hard for retailers to keep up with. Blend these technologies together with the Gage principle, and it is not difficult to imagine the eventual implantation in out pinky, say, of a minute chip that would make it possible to purchase anything at any time from any place by simply activating it. A pinky chip could wirelessly assure a retailer that we are who we claim to be, supply a bank-account number and simultaneously authorize the bank to pay the appropriate amount. The phrase “giving someone the finger” could take on fresh meaning. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
This rapid diversification of both payment methods and degrees of fungibility reflects the advanced economy’s overall move away from the one-size-fits-all mass society of the industrial past. Even more radical possibilities have entered the World’s economy such a Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. Sony has also been considering creating a currency of its own for use inside the company. That could permit a Sony unit in China, for instance, to do business with sister units in Japan or elsewhere without first exchanging foreign earnings into yen. The main objective would be to reduce currency risk. A further possibility would be to create a joint currency with other companies such as BMW or Chevy. The dollar may not remain a low-risk haven for foreign investors forever. And unlikely as it may seem today, the day could come when one would rather have an electronic pocketful of Microsoft “Gateses” or Sony “Moritas” than euros or dollars. Or a currency collectively backed by the Fortune 500—or, someday, the Xinhua 500. Among their other functions, para-monies are designed to speed up or slow down payment. Thus, credit cards encourage delayed payment (in return for an interest charge, of course). Debit cards, rather than delaying payment, speed it, immediately deducting the purchase price from the cardholder’s bank account. The emerging new wealth system also opens the path to radical changes in how, and especially when, we are paid to work. In the industrial past, workers were typically paid intermittently, at the end of a week or month. Most still are. This means that employers have a week’s or month’s free use of money actually owed to the employees. This “float” is the equivalent of an interest-free loan from workers to their employers. Conversely, utility bills, for example, are usually paid after the customer has already received a month’s worth of electricity or gas. In this case, the customer is the beneficiary of float. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
In the larger economy, some companies and industries—publishers of subscriber magazines, for example—live on float. However, float, regarded by some economists as inefficient for the economy as a whole, may be on its way out. Once companies and customers are all adequately wired up or wirelessly interconnected and we pay pills electronically, we may see utility providers demand streaming payment—a contract to allow their computer to electronically such payments out of our equally electronic bank accounts moment by moment as we use their services. They would get their money sooner, would be able to use or invest it earlier and could—theoretically, at least—reduce the price they charge us. We may also see groups of workers demanding to be paid electronically minute by minute for the work they do, rather than waiting for paydays. Streaming pay and payments are the natural parallel of the move in advanced knowledge-based economies from batch or intermittent production to continuous-flow, 24/7 operations. And the more instantaneous the in-stream of paychecks and the out-stream of payments, the closer the effects are to direct cash transactions. These accelerating innovations have given rise to many forecasts suggesting the “death of money.” At one time, these may have seemed fanciful. However, are they? So many forces are changing power relationships in Japan as well. According to Alex Stewart, author of a definitive report on Japanese distribution systems, “retailers are now the dominant force within the distribution industry,” while “manufacturers have to rely increasingly on retailers to interpret the needs of the marketplace.” George Fields is chairman and CEO of ASI Market Research (Japan). According to Fields, in Japan “distribution no longer means putting something on the self. It is now essentially an information system.” Distribution anywhere, he notes, “will no longer be a chain of inventory points, passing goods along the line, but an information link between the manufacturer and the consumer.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
What Fields is perhaps too police to say, and what the Japanese in particular feel uncomfortable in making explicit, is that this transformation will dethrone many of the “shoguns” of industry in Japan. In Japan, too, power will shift toward those firms or industrial sectors that know best how to win the info-wars. However, the battle between manufacturers and retailers is only beginning, and it is not a two-sided struggle. The real-life tug-of-war has drawn many others into the battle zone—everyone from banks and computer manufacturers to truckers and telephone companies. Squeezed between manufacturers and retailers are wholesalers, warehousers, transport firms, and others, each engaging in a fiercely competitive war-against-all, wielding advanced information and communications technologies at the main weapons. Moreover, what we have seen so far is only the opening skirmish, and manufacturers themselves are mounting important counter-offensives—selling through alternative channels outside the store (direct mail, for example), using computers and telecommunications to set up their own vertically integrated distribution systems, buying up retail stores, and attempting to leapfrog technologically, to get ahead of the retailers. Information flowing from these technologies will transform all our production and distribution systems, creating vast power vacuums that completely new groups and institutions are already racing to fill. Throughout history, people have worked to achieve better control of matter, to convince atoms to do what we want them to do. This has gone on since before people learned that atoms exist, and has accelerate ever since. Although different industries use different materials and different tools and methods, the basic aim is always the same. They seek to make better things, and make them more consistently, and that means better control of the structure of matter. From this perspective, nanotechnology is just the next, natural step in a progression that has been underway for millennia. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Nano technology is unpredictable and it goes to the heart of important questions: “How will this technology be developed? Who will do it? Where? When? In ten years? Fifty? A hundred? Will this happen in my lifetime?” The answers will depend on what people do with their time and resources, which in turn will depend on what goals they think are most promising. Human attitudes, understanding, and goals will make all the difference. Nanoscience is the study of structures and material on an ultra-small scale. A nanometre is one billionth of a metre. The physical and chemical properties of matter change at the nano level. Nanotechnology has the potential to revolutionize a diverse range of fields, from health care to manufacturing. The safety of nanomaterials and nanotechnology is still being debated, tested, and assessed. Nanoscience is an emerging area of science which involves the study of materials on an ultra-small scale and the novel properties that these materials demonstrate. Nanoscience has the potential to reshape the World around us. It could lead to revolutionary breakthroughs in fields ranging from manufacturing to health care. However, what is nanoscience, how does it work and how could it help change our lives? Nanoscience is the study of structures and materials on an ultra-small scale, and the unique and interesting properties these materials demonstrate. Nanoscience is cross disciplinary, meaning scientists from a range of fields including chemistry, physics, biology, medicine, computing, materials science and engineering are studying it and using it to better understand our World. Nanotechnology (also sometimes called molecular manufacturing), on the other hand, is the design, production and application of structures, devices and systems at the nanoscale. So essentially one is studying nanomaterials and their properties and the other is using those materials and properties to create something new or different. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The nanoscale is the dimensional range of approximately 1 to 100 naometres. However, what does this really mean? Well, it is so tiny that it might take a moment to get your head around. Take a look at the back of your hand. Using just your eyes you can focus down to a scale of 1 centimetre to 1 millimetre. At this scale the skin looks flat. However, get out a magnifying glass and you can see it is actually wrinkly with cracks and folds. The magnifying glass allows you to study the fine structure of the skin at less than a millimetre (or one-thousandth f a metre). If you were to look more closely with a microscope, you could examine the cells that make up your skin. Now you are working at the scale of micrometres (one-thousandth of a millimetre), sometimes referred to as the microworld. Cells and bacteria are measures in micrometres, and electronic components on a silicon chip are usually around 1 micrometre in size. To reach the nanoworld you have to go smaller again. A nanometre (nm) is 10^-9, which is one-thousandth of a micrometre, or one-billionth of a metre. This is the scale at which we measure atoms and the molecules they make. By manipulating and moving atoms around, we can create new things. Think of nanotechnology, then, as being a bit like construction…only on a tiny scale. Nanotechnology may seem like something out of the future, but in fact, many everyday products are already made using nanotechnology. Sunscreen is a product of nanotechnology. Nanoparticles have been added to sunscreen for years to make them more effective. Two particular types of nanoparticles commonly added to sunscreen are titanium dioxide and zinc oxide. These tiny particles are not only high effective at blocking UV radiation, they also feel lighter on the skin, which is why modern sunscreens are nowhere near as think and gloopy as the sunscreens used in the past. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Nanotechnology is even used in textiles. Nanoparticles of silica can help to create fabrics that repel water and other liquids. Silica can be added to fabrics either by being incorporated into the fabric’s weave or sprayed onto the surface of the fabric to create a waterproof or stainproof coating. So if you have ever noticed how liquid forms little beads on waterproof clothing-beads that simply roll off the fabric rather than being absorbed—that is thanks to nanotechnology. Carbon nanotubes are close to replacing silicon as a material for making smaller, faster and more efficient microchips and devices, as well as lighter, more conductive and stronger quantum nanowires. Graphene’s properties make it an ideal candidate for the development of flexible touchscreens. A new semiconductor developed by Kyto University makes it possible to manufacture solar panels that double the amount of sunlight converted into electricity. Nanotechnology also lowers costs, produces stronger and lighter wind turbines, improves fuel efficiency and, thanks to the thermal insulation of some nanocomponents, can save energy. The properties of some nanomaterials make them ideal for improving early diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases or cancer. They are able to attack cancer cells selectively without harming other healthy cells. Some nanoparticles have also been used to enhance pharmaceutical products such as sunscreen. Air purification with ions, wastewater purification with nanobubbles or nanofiltration systems for heavy metals are some of its environmentally-friendly applications. Nanocatalysts are also available to make chemical reactions more efficient and less polluting. When it comes to food, nanobiosensors could be used to detect the presence of pathogens in food or nanocomposites to improve food production by increasing mechanical and thermal resistance and decreasing oxygen transfer in packed products. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Researchers play a central role in the development of nanotechnology. They tend to work on what they think is interesting, which depends on what they think is possible, which depends on the tools they have or—among the most creative researchers—on the tools they can see how to make. Our tools shape how we think: as the saying goes, when all you all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. New tools encourage new thoughts and enable new achievements, and decisions about tool development will pace advances in nanotechnology. This field will exceed $125,000,000,000 USD globally by 2024. Nanotechnology is really a great idea because if you recall, graphene—modified carbon is harder than steel, lighter than aluminum and almost transparent. We tend to focus on money, technology, housing, jobs, and cars so much that this may cause some people to become cold. However, consider the family. As it developed in Europe in the late eighteenth century, its theory included the premise that individuals need emotional protection from a cold and competitive society. The family became, as Christopher Lasch calls it, a haven in a heartless World. Its program included (I quote Lasch here) preserving “separatist religious traditions, alien languages and dialects, local lore and other traditions.” To do this, the family was required to take charge of the socialization of children; the family became a structure, albeit an informal one, for the management of information. It controlled what “secrets” of adult life would be allowed entry and what “secrets” would not. There may be readers who can remember when in the presence of children adults avoided using certain words and did not discuss certain topics whose details and ramifications were considered unsuitable for children to know. A family that does not or cannot control the information environment of its children is barely a family at all, and may lay claim to the name only by virtue of the fact that its members share biological information through DNA. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
In fact, in many societies a family was just that—a group connected by genetic information, itself controlled through the careful planning of marriages. In the West, the family was as an institution for the management of nonbiological information began with the ascendance of print. As books on every conceivable subject becomes available, parents were forced into the roles of guardians, protectors, nurturers, and arbiters of taste and rectitude. Their function was to define what it means to be a child by excluding from the family’s domain information that would undermine its purpose. That the family can no longer do this is, I believe, obvious to everyone. Courts of law, the school, and the family are only three of several control institutions that serve as part of a culture’s information immune system. The political party is another. As a young man growing up in a Democratic household, I was provided with clear instructions on what value to assign to political events and commentary. The instructions did not require explicit statement. They followed logically from theory, which was, as I remember it, as follows: Because people need protection, they must align themselves with a political organization. The Democratic Party was entitled to our loyalty because it represented the social and economic interests of the working class, of which our family, relatives, and neighbors were members (except for one uncle who, though a truck driver, consistently voted Republican Party represented the interests of the rich, who, by definition, had no concern for us. The theory gave clarity to our perceptions and a standard by which to judge the significance of information. The general principle was that information provided by Democrats was always to be taken seriously and, in all probability, was both true and useful (expect if it came from Southern Democrats, who were helpful in electing presidents). #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Information provided by Republicans was often balderdash to many non-Democrats and was only useful only to the extent that it confirmed how self-serving some Republican were considered to be. The rule of law is an oversimplification. A curriculum is an oversimplification. So is a family’s conception of a child. That is the function of theories—to oversimplifying, and thus to assist believers in organizing, weighting, and excluding information. Therein lies the power of theories. Their weakness is precisely because they oversimplify, they are vulnerable to attack by new information. When there is too much information to sustain any theory, information becomes essentially meaningless. The most imposing institution for the control of information are religion and that state. They do their work in a somewhat more abstract way than do courts, schools, families, or political parties. They manage information through the creation of myths and stories that express theories about fundamental questions: why are we here, where have we come from, and where are we headed? I have already alluded to the comprehensive theological narrative of the medieval European World and how its great explanatory power contributed to a sense of well-being and coherence. Perhaps I have not stressed enough the extent to which the Bible also served as an information control mechanism, especially in the moral domain. The Bible gives manifold instructions on what one must do and must not do, as well as guidance on what language to avoid (on pain of committing blasphemy), what ideas to avoid (on pain of committing idolatry). Necessarily but perhaps unfortunately, the Bible also explained how the World came into being in such literal detail that it could not accommodate new information produced by the telescope and subsequent technologies. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The trials of Galileo and, three hundred years later, of Scopes were therefore about the admissibility of certain kinds of information. Both Cardinal Bellarmine and William Jennings Bryan were fighting to maintain the authority of the Bible to control information about the profane World as well as the sacred. In their defeat, more was lost than the Bible’s authority in defining and categorizing moral behavior was also weakened. When the World’s population reached five billions the Earth was heavily burdened to support it. However, wars, pestilences and famines brought relief, from time to time, and in some degree reduced the prodigious pressure. The memorable benefaction of the year 508, which was a famine reinforced by a pestilence, swept away sixteen hundred millions of people in nine moths It was not much, but it was something. The same is all that can be said of its successors of later periods: The burden of population grew heavier and heavier and more and more formidable, century by century, and the gravity of the situation created by it was steadily and proportionately increased. After the age of infancy, few died. The average of life was 600 years. The cradles were filling, filling, filling—always, always, always; the cemeteries stood comparatively idle, the undertakers have but little traffic, they could hardly support their families. The death-rate was 2250 in the 1,000,000. To the thoughtful this was portentous; to the light-witted it was matter for brag! These latter were always comparing the population of one decade with that of the previous one and hurrahing over the might increase—as if that were an advantage to the World; a World that could hardly scratch enough out of the Earth to keep itself from starving. And yet, worse was to come! Necessarily our true hope did not and could not lie in spasmodic famine and pestilence, whose effects could be only temporary, but in war and physicians, whose help is consistent. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Self-perception and self-relationship are the peculiarly human, the irruption of a strange element into nature, the inner lot of man. Here also, then, the demoniac, whose desire is toward us, as a woman’s is towards a man—to arouse this association in the reader, one of the phrases God addressed to Eve is incorporated in His speech to Kain—is first to be encountered directly; from this point too it first become accessible and demonstrable to us in the World. Here, at the inner threshold, there is of course no further room for disposition; the struggle must now be fought out. In contradistinction to the first humans, Kain does not reply to God’s address, He refuses to account to him for this deed. He refuses to fact the demon at the threshold he thus delivers himself up to the latter’s “desire.” Intensification and confirmation of indecision is decision to evil. So Kain murders. He speaks to his brother, we are not told what he says’ he goes with him into the field; he strikes him dead…Why? No motive, not even jealousy, is sufficient to explain the monstrous deed. We must remember that it is the first murder: Kain does not yet know that such a thing exists, that one can murder, that if one strikes a person hard enough one strikes him dead. He does not yet know what death and killing are. It is not a motive that is decisive, but an occasion. In the vortex of indecision Kain strikes out, at the point of greatest provocation and least resistance. He does not murder, he was murdered. When God’s curse—again in words which refer back to the cursing of the first humans and lead over and beyond it—sends him forth from the ploughed fields to be “a fugitive and a vagabond on Earth,” he is allotting him a destiny which is the incarnate representation of what took place within his soul. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
What is so paradoxical is that our language is the product of the extraordinary thought and philosophical greatness at which this cursory and superficial survey has done nothing more than hint. There is a lifetime and more of study here, which would turn out impoverishing certitudes into humanizing doubts. To return to the reasons behind our language and weigh them against the reasons for other language would in itself liberate us. I have tried to provide the outline of an archeology of our souls as they are. We are like unenlightened shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part. All that is necessary is a careful excavation to provide them with life-enhancing models. We need history, not to tell us what happened, or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible. This is our educational crisis and opportunity. Western rationalism had culminated in a rejection of reason. Is this result necessary? Many will say that my reports of the decisive influence of Continental, particularly German, philosophy on us are false or exaggerated and that, even if it were true that all this language comes from the course to which I attribute it, language does not have such effects. However, the language is all around us. Its sources are also undeniable, as is the thought that produced the language. We know how the language was popularized. I need only think of my Amherst students or my Atlanta taxi driver to be persuaded that the categories of the mind determined the perceptions. If we can believe tht Calvinist “worldviews” made capitalism, we can also credit the possibility that overpowering visions of German philosophers are preparing the tyranny of the future. #RandolphHrris 14 of 20
I must reiterate that Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche are thinkers of the very highest order. This is, in fact, precisely my point. We must relearn what this means and also that there are others who belong in the same rank. Nations, businesses, tribes, and birds are examples of individuals which often operate mainly within certain territories. They interact much more with their neighbors than with those who are far away. Hence their success depends in large part on how well they do in their interactions with their neighbors. However, neighbors can serve another function as well. A neighbor can provide a role model. If the neighbor is doing well, the behavior of the neighbor can be imitated. In this way successful strategies can spread throughout a population, from neighbor to neighbor. Territories can be thought of in two completely different ways. One way is in terms of geography and physical space. For example, the live-and-let-live system in trench warfare might have spread from part of the front line to adjacent parts. Another way of thinking about territories is in terms of an abstract space of characteristics. For example, a business might market a soft drink with a certain amount of sugar and a certain amount of caffeine. The “neighbors” of this soft drink are other drinks on the market with a little more or less sugar, or a little more or less caffeine. Similarly, a political candidate might take a position on a liberal/conservative dimension and a position on an internationalism/isolation dimension. If there are many candidates vying with each other in an election, the “neighbors” of the candidate are those with similar positions. Thus territories can be abstract spaces as well as geographic spaces. Colonization provides another mechanism in addition to imitation by which successful strategies can spread from place to place. If the location of a less successful strategy was taken over by an offspring of a more successful neighbor, colonization would occur. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
However, whether strategies spread by imitation or colonization, the idea is the same: neighbors interact and the most successful strategy spreads to bordering locations. The individuals remain fixed in their locations, but their strategies can spread. To make this process amenable to analysis, it must be formalized. For illustrative purposes, consider a simple structure of territories in which the entire territory is divided up so that each individual has four neighbors, one to the north, one to the east, one to the south, and one to the west. In each “generation,” each individual attains a success score measured by its average performance with its four neighbors. Then if an individual has one or more neighbors who are more successful of them (or picks randomly among the best in case of a tie among the most successful neighbors). Territorial social structures have many interesting properties. One of them is that that it is at least as easy for a strategy to protect itself from a takeover by a new strategy in a territorial structure as it is in a nonterritorial structure. If the newcomer does better with a native than a native does with another native, a single individual using a new strategy can invade a population of natives. If no strategy can invade the population of natives, then the native strategy is said to be collectively stable. “And it was by faith that the three disciples obtained a promise that they should not taste death; and they obtained not the promise until after their faith. And neither at any time hath any wrought miracles until after their faith; wherefore they first believed in the Son of God. And there were many whose faith was so exceedingly strong, even before Christ came, who could not be kept from within the veil, but truly saw with their eyes the things which they had beheld with an eye of faith, and were glad,” reports Ether 12.17-19. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Pop Art demonstrated that the boundaries between art and mass media (exempli gratia ads and comics) are dissolving. Its perfunctory and mass-produced look is that of the whole society and the detached, blank quality of Warhol and his products sum it up. Banal, morally weightless, depersonalized images, cynically manipulated by a fashion-conscious marketing stratagem: the nothingness of modern art and its World revealed. The proliferation of art styles and approaches in the 60s—conceptual, minimalist, performance, et cetera—and the accelerated obsolescence of most art brought the “postmodern” era, a displacement of the formal “purism” of modernism by an electric mix from past stylistic achievements. This is basically a tired, spiritless recycling of used-up fragments, announcing that the development of art is at an end. Against the global devaluing of the symbolic, moreover, it is incapable of generating new symbols and scarcely even makes an effort to do so. Occasional critics, like Thomas Lawson, bemoan art’s current inability “to stimulate the growth of really troubling doubt,” little noticing that a quite noticeable movement of doubt threatens to throw over art itself. Such “critics” cannot grasp that art must remain alienation and as such must be superseded, that art is disappearings because the immemorial separation between nature and art is a death sentence for the World that must be voided. Deconstruction, for its part, announced the project of decoding Literature and indeed the “texts,” or systems of signification, throughout all culture. However, this attempt to reveal supposedly hidden ideology is stymined by its refusal to consider origins or historical causation, an aversion it inherited from structuralism/poststructuralism. Derrida, deconstruction’s seminal figure, deals with language as solipsism, consigned to self-interpretation; he engages not in critical activity but in writing about writing. Rather than a de-constructing of impacted reality, this approach is merely a self-contained academicism, in which Literature, like modern painting before it, never departs from concern with its own surface. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Meanwhile, since Piero Manzoni canned his own feces and sold them in a gallery and Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm and crucified to a Volkswagen, we see in art ever more fitting parables of its end, such as the self-portraits drawn by Anastasi—with his eyes closed. “Serious” music is long dead and popular music deteriorates; poetry nears collapse and retreats from view; drama, which moved from the Absurd to Silence, is dying; and the novel is eclipsed by non-fiction as the only way to write seriously. In a jaded, enervated age, when it seems to speak is to say less, art is certainly less. Baudelaire was obliged to claim a poet’s dignity in a society which had no more dignity to hand out. A century and more later how inescapable is the truth of that condition and how much more threadbare is the consolation or station of “timeless” art. Adorno began his last book thus: “Today it goes without saying that nothing concerning art goes without saying, much less without thinking. Everything about art has become problematic: its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.” But Aesthetic Theory affirms art, just as Marcuse’s last work did, testifying to despair and to the difficulty of assailing the hermetically sealed ideology of culture. And although other “radicals,” such as Habermas, counsel that the desire to abolish symbolic mediation is irrational, it is becoming clearer that when we really experience with out hearts and hands the sphere of art is shown to be pitiable. In the transfiguration we must enact the symbolic will be left behind and art refused in favor of the real. Play, creativity, self-expression and authentic experience will recommence at that moment. With TV, the Technical Events Test is extremely subversive to television. This is one reason I have asked you to do it. As people become aware of the degree to which technique, rather than anything intrinsically interesting, keeps them fixed to the screen, withdrawal from addiction and immersion can begin. I have seen this happen with my own children. Once I had put them to the task of counting and timing these technical events, their absorption was never the same. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
When viewers become alert to the technology being used upon them, they can separate technique from content. With the effects of technique stripped away, the true content of the program has to stand on its own. In the case of advertising, it falls apart. Regular programming also assumes its true worth and it is often even less than you may have imagines was possible. As you become able to pull back out of the immersion in the TV set, you can widen your perceptual environment to again include the room you are in. Your feelings and personal awareness are rekindled. With self-awareness emerging you can perceive the quality of sensory deadness television induces, the one-dimensionality of its narrowed information field, and arrive at an awareness of boredom. This leads to channel switching at first and eventually to turning off the set. Any act that breaks immersion in the fantastic World of television is subversive to the medium, because without the immersion and addiction, its power is gone. Brainwashing ceases. As you watch advertising, you become enraged. The great German dramatist Bertolt Brecht used the term “alienation” to describe this process of breaking immersion. Writing during the early thirties, Brecht used the term to mean the shattering of theatrical illusion. By breaking immersion in the fantasy the theater-goer becomes self-aware and attains a mental attitude that allows discernment, criticism, thought and political understanding of the material on display. Without “alienation,” involvement is at an unconscious level, the theater-goer absorbing rather than reflecting and reacting. Brecht argued that becoming lost or immersed in the words, fantasies and entertainments of theater was preparation for similar immersion in the words and fantasies of theatrical leadership: Hitler. Brecht, like Walter Benjamin, felt that the entire development of art during the thirties furthered ways of mind suitable for autocracy. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Brecht developed his concept of “alienation” in order to break the form of the theatrical relationship. To accomplish this, he would interrupt the line of the theatrical action; or have the actors step out of their parts to speak directly to the audience personally or politically; or add such elements as placards. In films, he would put words on the screen to explain the meaning of a scene that might otherwise have been received as “entertainment,” thereby shattering unconscious absorption. In Brechtian terms, if an actor developed a character in such a way that the audience became absorbed in the character rather than the meaning of the character, then the actor would have failed. The goal was that each member of the audience become aware that he or she is in a theater, that actors are performing, that the characters are created on purpose to convey a message, and that the massage applies directly to each person in the audience. In this way, theater had the capacity to become educational in a revolutionary way, capable of moving people to actions. Without this shattering of illusion, Brecht felt, theater remains an example of mindless immersion within an autocratic format. And yet, because theater involves a live public performance, the possibilities for technically created illusion are far fewer than in film of television. It is this very quality of “alienation” from the illusion, the experience of self-awareness, that advertisers and program producers go to such lengths to avoid. They may not actually be thinking to themselves: “I have got to keep these viewers hyped and away from boredom or I’ll lose them.” Instead, they define some production values as “good television” and others as “bad television.” They will do anything they can to develop and keep your fixed gaze and total involvement. They have found that technical tricks do better than content because, as we have seen, the content loses too much in the translation through the medium to be engrossing on its own. However, they do also choose content for its immersive and hyperactive value. In addition to shattering your normal perceptual patterns by artificially unusual imagery, dragging your mind and awareness forward, never allowing stasis or calm or a return to self-awareness, producers must also make program choices that fit the process. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
“But tomorrow may rain so, I’ll follow the sun” – The Beatles 🎶
We’ll follow the sun through those giant windows at our #CresleighRanch home at #MillsStation – this is Residence 2, Lot #104…and it’s ready for its new owner!
Sunshine yellow footstools aren’t required, but they’re a nice touch – we can’t wait to see how you decorate.
Keep in mind that the primary suite is downstairs and offers a deep soaker up, full sized window, and a shower that provides a spa like retreat. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/
Nothing Like this Has Ever Happened Before
Knowledge has always been a factor in the creation of wealth. However, in no previous wealth system has the knowledge sector played so dominant a role. Today we are seeing an explosive growth in the amount, variety and complexity of knowledge needed to design, produce and deliver value in every market. As a result, the market for data, information and knowledge is itself growing exponentially. Consumers devour endless amounts of information, misinformation and disinformation on every conceivable subject, from business and finance to news and entertainment, health and religion, pleasures of the flesh and sports. Companies burn through nonstop flows of data about their customers, competitors and suppliers. Scientists and researchers collect findings and formulas from all over the World. Knowledge has always been hard to define, but as we use it here, it includes not just printed texts or computer data but whispered secrets, visual images, stock tips and other intangibles. No one today knows precisely how large the knowledge sector is, and controversy rages over what to include or exclude. However, never before has so much money passed from hand to hand in exchange for knowledge, its component data and information—or for obsoledge. The knowledge market, however, is not merely expanding. It is simultaneously morphing, owing once more to changes at the deep-fundamental level of the wealth system. Never has the collection, organization and dissemination of everything from the rawest of data to the most abstract and sophisticated knowledge moved through society and the marketplace at such click speeds. This parallels and even exceeds the accelerative processes we see in every sector of the economy. Time is compressed to nanoseconds. Simultaneously, dissemination crosses all boundaries, expanding the spatial reach of knowledge in all its forms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Even more important are changes in our knowledge about knowledge and in the way know is organized, with long-standing disciplinary divisions going up in flames. In earlier wealth systems, access to economically valuable knowledge was severely limited. Today much of it flashes nonstop across hundreds of millions of screens and monitors in offices, kitchens and dorm rooms from Manhattan to Mumbai. In agrarian societies for thousands of years, peasants needed to know about planting a patch of land, predicting bad weather, storing harvested crops. This knowledge was local, spread by word of mouth and basically unchanging. In industrial economies, workers and managers alike required non-local knowledge from more sources about more things. However, economically valuable knowledge—about, say, advances in metallurgy—needed relatively infrequent updating. Today, by contrast, much knowledge becomes obsoledge almost before it is delivered. The range of subject matter is constantly broadening. The sources are multiplying. And they may originate in any part of the World. What we are seeing, then, are self-reinforcing, interacting changes that transform the relationships among not products but whole market sectors. Yet even the cumulative impact of all of these is dwarfed in long-term significance by the emergence of an entirely new, previously impossible marketplace. Virtually every traditional market sector—whether for land, labour, capital, things, services, experiences, or knowledge—now has a virtual twin. In effect, the great, global cybermarket adds a second layer on top of every conventional marketplace. Nothing like this has ever happened before. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
At the turn of the last century, the dot-com collapse briefly made e-commerce a dirty word among investors as headlines proclaimed the death of online business: DOT-COMS FLAME OUT…THE PARTY’S OVER…DOT.COM DISASTER…BOOM TO BUST IN SECONDS FLAT…THE CRAZE COLLAPSES…THE END OF INTERNET TIME. However, as with the Idaho baby revived an hour after being pronounced dead, eager naysayers buried e-commerce too soon. In 2003, consumers around the World were buying some $250 billion worth of products through e-markets that did not, and could not, exist even twenty years ago—something like $40 worth a year for every person on the planet. In 2021, retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately $4.9 trillion U.S.A. dollars Worldwide. This figure is forecast to grow by 50 percent over the next four years, reaching about $7.4 trillion dollars by 2025. In 2021, the reported total value of retail trade e-commerce sales in the United States of America amounted to $870 billion dollars. Further, they offer no clue to the real size, power and potential of online market or exchanges for direct business-to-business transactions, as e-commerce sales may be even high than reported because the Commerce Department number does not necessarily include these other services. However, the number for all retail sales in the United States of America is drastically larger at an annual total of $6.6 trillion dollars. Thirteen airlines, ranging from All Nippon and KLM Royal Dutch to Lufthansa, Air New Zealand and Northwest, created Aeroxchange, the virtual equivalent of a medieval fair, to display their wares and make deals. Today’s thirty-three members buy parts from four hundred online vendors in thirty counties with an annual revenue of $ 8 million. Similar electronic exchanges now exist for many industries, including automotive, utilities, chemicals, defense, health care, restaurants, all kinds of repair services and spare parts. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
This global move to a knowledge-based wealth system should not be measured merely in terms of stock-market prices and the diffusion of technology. It is much more profound, and threatens capitalism as it has, until now, been described. As the Third Wave, knowledge-intensive wealth system spreads to Asia and other parts of the World, they, too, will see revolutionary changes in their property bases, capital formation, markets and—as we will see next—in money itself. The People’s Bank of China is building a yuan reserve with five other nations, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Chile, with each contributing 15 billion yuan, about $2.2 billion, to the Renminbi Liquidity Arrangement, China’s central bank said in a statement Saturday. “When in need of liquidity, participating central banks would not only be able to draw down on their contributions, but would also gain access to additional funding through a collateralized liquidity window,” the bank said. According to the report, the funds will be stored with the Bank for International Settlements. Russian and China have been attempting to develop a new reserve currency with other BRICS countries, Russian President Vladimir Putin explained last week. The basket of currencies would present a United States of America-dominated International Monetary Fund alternative and include contributions from Brazil, Russian, India, China, and South Africa. “The matter of creating the international reserve currency based on the basket of currencies of our countries is under review,” Putin explained to the BRICS Business Forum on 22 June 2022. He went on to say, “We are ready to openly work with all fair partners.” Meanwhile, China’s foreign-exchange reserves—the World’s largest—grew last month for the first time in 2022, state data showed. The nation’s reserves rose by $80.6 billion to reach #.313 trillion. At the same time, the United States of America’s dollar has reached a 20-year high in recent weeks. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
In March, reports emerged of a Saudi oil deal priced in yuan. An economist told us that a deal done without dollars could signal unease in relaying too heavily on the USA’s currency. “While any deal would be symbolic, the Chinese are not alone in the search for a nondollar reserve currency,” Aleksandar Tomic previously explained. “Other countries’ need for dollars exposed them to the UAS financial sector, and consequently gives the United States of American political leverage.” Not long ago it was announced that the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, D.C., one of the most prestigious museums in the World, was considering the purchase of a small diner in New Jersey. It was the plan of the Smithsonian to move this little restaurant to Washington, make it part of the museum, perhaps even operate it, to illustrate the synthetic materials used during a certain period in American life. The plan was never carried out. For many Americas the roadside diners exercised a nostalgic fascination. Many a 1930s Hollywood scene took place in a diner. Hemingway’s famous story “The Killers” is set in a diner. So, quite beyond illustrating the uses of vinyl and Formica, there was a certain logic to the Smithsonian’s surprising idea. However, if the Smithsonian ever wishes to show what American meant to the outside World in the 1950s, the dead center of the 20th century, it should buy and relocate not a diner but a supermarket. Pushing a car down a brightly lit supermarket aisle was a weekly ritual for a majority of American families. The supermarket with its glistening, packed shelves became a symbol of plenty in a hungry World. It was a marvel of American business and was soon emulated the World over. Today the supermarket is still there, but, largely unnoticed by the public, it has become a battlefield in the information wars—one of many raging throughout the business World today. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
From one end of the United States of America to the other, a multibillion-dollar tug-of-war today pits giant manufacturers like Nabisco, Revlon, Procter & Gamble, General Foods, and Gillette, once at the top of the industrial heap, against the lowly retail stores that put their products into the customer’s shopping bag. Fought at the checkout counter, this battle gives a glimpse of things to come in the super-symbolic economy. In the early days of the supermarket the big food processors and manufacturers would send their thousands of salespeople across the country to call on these stores and push their various lines of food, cosmetics, soft drinks, cleaning supplies, and the like. Every day, thousands of negotiations occurred. In this day-to-day dickering, sellers had the edge. They carried with them the clout of their giant firms, which even the largest supermarket chains could not match. Each of these megafirms was a commanding presence in its chosen markets. The Gillette Company, for instance, until the late 1970s sold six out of every ten razor blades used in the United State of America. When the French firm Bic, the World’s largest maker of ballpoint pens and disposable cigarette lighters, challenged Gillette on its home turf with a line of disposable razor blades, Gillette fought back and wound up with 40 to 50 percent of the U.S.A disposable market. Bic was left with under 10 percent. Gillette operated outside its own country too. Today, Gillette has company locations in forty-six countries and manufacturing plants in twenty-seven, spread across the globe from Germany and France to the Philippines. When a Gillette salesperson came to call, the supermarket listed hard—or else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
From the 1950s into the 1980s, the balance of power, with the giant manufacturers at the top and the wholesalers and retailers at the bottom, remained essentially unchanged. One of the reasons for manufacturer-power was control of information. At the peak of this dominance, these manufacturers were among the heaviest mass advertisers in America. This gave them effective command of the information reaching the consumer. Gillette was particularly astute. It spent heavily to advertise razor blades or shaving cream on TV broadcasts of baseball’s World Series. It plugged its perfumes on the televised Miss America Pageant. Gillette typically ran six “marketing cycles” in the course of a year, each with a big backup ad campaign. This was called “pull-through” marketing—designed to “pull” customers into the store aisles and wipe the shelves clean in no time. These campaigns were so effective, supermarkets could hardly afford not to carry the Gillette products. In turn, success at the cash register meant that Gillette, like the other big firms, could order its own supplies in bulk, at reduced prices. In this way, by coordinating production and distribution with the mass media, manufacturers by and large came to dominate al the other players in the production cycle—farmers and raw material suppliers as well as retailers. In fact, the Gillette man (rarely a woman) could often dictate to the store how many blades it would buy, what types, how they would be displayed, when they would be delivered, and, not infrequently, what the price would be. This was economic power in actions, and it could not have existed without the pivotal control of information. It was Gillette, after all, not the retailer, who touted the advantages of Foamy or Gel shaving cream on television, or showed stubble-faced athletes using Gillette blades to get a clean shave. What the World knew about these products it learned from Gillette. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Moreover, if Gillette controlled the information going to the consumer, it also collected information from the consumer. At every stage, Gillette simply knew more than any of its retailers about how, when, and to whom its products would sell. Gillette knew when its advertising would appear on television, when new products were to be launched, what price promotions it would offer, and it was able to control the release of all this information. In short, Gillette and the other mass manufacturers stood between the retailer and the customer, feeding information under their exclusive control, to both. This control played a critical, though largely overlooked, role in maintaining the traditional dominance of the manufacturer vis-à-vis the store. And it paid off. There was a time when Campbells Soup did not even take the trouble to list a phone number on its salespeople’s calling cards. “No use calling them,” vice-president of the Grand Union supermarket chain points out. “They never name deals.” Similarly, when Gillette’s salesman came to the store to sell, he knew what he was talking about. The buyer did the listening. Now, while on the subject, it is also a great time for everyone to think about having some kind of life insurance policy, no matter how young or mature you are. Even kids, teens, young adults, and mature adults should be insured. Many parents have policies for their children, but if you are a young adult or mature, it is a good idea to think about getting your own life insurance policy. Globe Life is a very friendly, safe and professional company to buy a policy from. They offer policies with monthly rates for adults for $3.49 and $2.17 for children. Coverages range from $5,000 to $100,000 and there is no medical exam, and no waiting period. Even if you just buy the lowest cost policy, it is better than having nothing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
That way, if the unthinkable happens, you will not be a burden on your family, and can maybe even get a large enough policy to pay not only for funeral costs, but also to leave some money behind for your wife, kids, parents, sibling, family members, maybe even a friend or a charity. Having life insure is very important and it is way to make sure your loved ones and/or property are taken care of and your bills are paid in case you get called home to Heaven. And remember, even a small policy is better than no policy, and some cost less than a bottle of juice. So check out Globe Life, you will be happy you are not leaving your loved ones to the fate of the World. In considering how the evolution of cooperation could have begun, some social structure was found to be necessary. In particular, in a population of meanies who always defect, they cannot be invaded by a single individual using a nice strategy such as TIT FOR TAT. However, if the invaders had even a small amount of social structure, things could be different. If they came in a cluster so that they had even a small percentage of their interaction with each other, then they could invade the population of meanies. There are also four factors that we will discuss over the next few days that can give rise to interesting types of social structure, which includes: labels, reputation, regulation, and territoriality. A label is a fixed characteristic of an individual such as gender or skin colour, which can be observed by the other player. This is why when people are upset, they usually find something about you mean to day that is different from a characteristic they possess. It does not mean that is what they truly think, it could be that they just want to hurt your feelings because they are hurting. Differences and labels can give rise to stable forms of stereotyping and status hierarchies. However, not all stereo types are bad. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The reputation of an individual is malleable and comes into being when another individual has information about the strategy that the first one has employed with other individuals. Reputations give rise t a variety of phenomena, including incentives to establish a reputation as a bully, and incentives to deter others from being bullies. Regulation is a relationship between a government and governed. Governments cannot rule only through deterrence, but must instead achieve the voluntary compliance of the majority of the governed. Therefore regulation gives rise to the problems of just how stringent the rules and the enforcement procedures should be. Finally, territorially occurs when players interact with their neighbours rather than with just anyone. It can give rise to fascinating patterns of behaviour as strategies spread through a population. People often related to each other in ways that are influenced by observable features such as gender, age, skin color, hair style, and style of dress. These cues allow a player to begin an interaction with a stranger with an expectation that the stranger will behave like others who share these same observable characteristics. In principle, then, these characteristics can allow an individual to know something useful about the other individual’s strategy even before the interaction begins. This happens because the observed characteristics allow an individual to be labeled by others as a member of the group with similar characteristics. This labeling, in turn, allows the inferences about how that individual will behave. The expectations associated with a given label need not be learned from direct personal experience. The expectations could also be formed by secondhand experiences through the process of sharing of anecdotes. The interpretations given to the cues could even be formed through genetics and natural selection, as when a turtle is able to distinguish the gender of another turtle and respond accordingly. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
A label can be defined as a fixed characteristic of an individual that can be observed by other individuals when the interaction begins. When there are labels, a strategy can determine a choice based not only on the history of the interaction so far, but also upon the label assigned to the other person. One of the most interesting but disturbing consequences of labels is that they can lead to self-confirming stereotypes. To see how this can happen, suppose that everyone has either a Blue label or a Green label. Further, suppose that both groups are nice to members of their own group and mean to members of the other group. For the sake of concreteness, supposed that members of both groups employ TIT FOR TAT with each other and always defect with members of the other group. And supposed that the discount parameter is high enough to make TIT FOR TAT a collectively stable strategy. Then a single individual, whether Blue or Green, can do no better than to do what everyone else is doing and be nice to one’s own type and mean to the other type. This incentive means that stereotypes can be stable, even when they are not based on any objective differences. The Blues believe that the Greens are mean, and whenever they meet a Green, they have their beliefs confirmed. The Greens think that only others Green will reciprocate cooperation, and they have their beliefs confirmed. If you try to break out of the system, you will find that your own payoff falls and your hopes will be dashed. So if you become a deviant, you are likely to return, sooner or later, to the role that is expected of you. If your label says you are Green, others will treat you as a Green, and since it plays for you to act like Greens act, you will be confirming everyone’s expectations. This kind of stereotyping has two unfortunate consequences: one obvious and one more subtle. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The obvious consequence of stereotyping is that everyone is doing worse than necessary because of mutual cooperation between the groups could have raised everyone’s score. A more subtle consequence comes from any disparity in the numbers of Blues and Greens, creating a majority and a minority. In this case, while both groups suffer from the lack of mutual cooperation, the members of the minority group suffer more. No wonder marginalized groups tend to suffer more. No wonder people who are not members of the non-dominant group often seek defensive isolation. Some may even seek to take over a location. To see why, suppose that there are eighty Greens and twenty Blues in a town, and everyone interacts with everyone else once a week. Then for the Greens, most of their interactions are within their own group and hence result in mutual cooperation. However, for the Blues, most of their interactions are with the other group (the Greens), and hence result in pushing mutual defection. Thus, the average score of the minority Blues is less than the average score of the majority Greens. This effect will hold even when there is a tendency for each group to associate with its own kind. The effect still hold because if there are certain number of times a minority Blue meets a majority Green, this will represent a larger share of the minority’s total interactions than it does of the majority’s total interactions. The result is that labels can support stereotypes by which everyone suffers, and the minority suffers more than the rest. Labels can lead to another effect as well. They can support status hierarchies. For example, supposed that everyone has some characteristic, such as height or strength or skin tone, that can be readily observed and that allows a comparison between two people. For simplicity imagine that there are no tie values, so that when two people meet it is clear which one has more of the characteristic which one has less. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Now supposed that everyone is a bully toward those beneath them and meek toward those above them. Can this be stable? Yes, and here is an illustration. Suppose everyone uses the following strategy when meeting someone beneath them: alternate defection and cooperation unless the other individual defects even once, in which case never cooperate again. This is being a bully in that you are often defecting, but never tolerating a defection from the other individual. And suppose that everyone uses the following strategy when meeting someone above them: cooperate unless the other defects twice in a row, in which case never cooperate again. This is being meek in that you are tolerating being a sucker on alternating moves, but it is also being provocable in that you are not tolerating more than a certain amount of exploitation. This pattern of behaviour sets up a status hierarchy based on the observable characteristic. The people near the top do well because they can lord it over nearly everyone. Conversely, the people near the bottom are doing poorly because they are being meek to almost everyone. It is easy to see why someone near the top is happy with the social structure, but is there anything someone near the bottom can do about it acting alone? Actually there is not. The reason is that when the discount parameter is high enough, it would be better to take one’s medicine every other move from the bully than to defect and face unending punishment. Therefore, a person at the bottom of the social structure trapped. He or she is doing poorly, but would do even worse by trying to advance in the system. The futility of isolated revolt is a consequence of the immutability of the other individuals’ strategies. A revolt by a low-status individual might alter their behaviour under duress, then this fact should be taken into account by a lower-status individual contemplating revolt. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
However, this consideration leads the higher-status individual to be concerned with their reputation for firmness. To study this type of phenomena, one needs to look at the dynamics of reputations. Life-style was first popularized here to describe and make acceptable the lives of people who do attractive things that are frowned upon by society. It was identical to counterculture. Two great expressions in the American usage, draped in the authority lent by their philosophic genealogy, provided moral warrant for people to live exactly as they please. Counterculture, of course, enjoyed the dignity attaching to culture, and was intended as a reproach to the bourgeois excuse for a culture we see around us. What actually goes on in a counterculture or a life-style—whether it is ennobling or debasing—makes no difference. No one is forced to think through one’s practices. It is impossible to do so. Whatever you are, whoever you are, is the good. All this is testimony to the amazing power, about which Tocqueville speaks, of abstractions in a democratic society. The mere words change everything. It is also a commentary on our moralism. What begins in a search if not precisely for selfish pleasures—historians of the future will not look back on us as a race of hedonists who knew how to “enjoy,” in spite of all our talk about it—then at least for avoidance of and release from suffering or distress, transmogrified into a life-style and a right, becomes the ground of moral superiority. The comfortable, unconstrained life is morality. One can see this in so many domains across the whole political spectrum. Self-serving is expressed as, and really believed to be, disinterested principle. When one looks at the earnest, middle-class proponents of birth control, abortion, and easy divorce—with their social concern, their humorless self-confidence and masses of statistics—one cannot help thinking that all this serves them very well. This is not to deny the reality of the problems presented by too many children for the poor, the terrible consequences of assaults and battered wives. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
However, none of those problems really belongs to the middle classes, who are not reproducing themselves, are rarely assaulted or battered, but who are the best-rewarded beneficiaries of what they themselves propose. If one of their proposals entailed a sacrifice of freedom or pleasure for them or their class, they would be more morally plausible. As it is, all their proposals contribute to their own capacity to choose, in the contemporary sense of choice. Motives that could easily be so flawed should not be, but are, the basis for moral smugness. It this case, as in so many others, making relations involving pleasures of the flesh becomes identical to morality. I fear that the most self-righteous of Americans nowadays are precisely those who have most to gain from what they preach. This is made all the more distasteful when their weapons are constructed out of philosophic teachings the intentions of which are the opposite of theirs. Life in civilization is lived almost wholly in a medium of symbols. Not only scientific or technological activity but aesthetic activity consists largely of symbol processing. The laws of aesthetic form are cannon of symbolization, often expressed quite unspiritually. It is widely averred, for example, that a limited number of mathematical figures account for the efficacy of art. There is Cezanne’s famous dictum to “treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere and the cone,” and Kandinsky’s judgment that “the impact of the acute angle of a triable on a circle produced an effect no less powerful than the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo.” The sense of a symbol, as Charles Pierce concluded, is its translation into another symbol, thus an endless reproduction, with the real always displaced. Though at is not fundamentally concerned with beauty, its inability to rival nature sensuously has evoked many unfavorable comparisons. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
“Moonlight is sculpture,” wrote Hawthorne: Shelley praised the “unpremeditated art” or the skylark; Verlaine pronounced the sea more beautiful than all the cathedrals. And so on, with sunsets, snowflakes, flowers, et cetera, beyond the symbolic products of art. Jean Arp, in fact, termed “the most perfect picture” nothing more than “a warty, threadbare approximation, a dry porridge.” Why then would one respond positively to art? As compensation and palliative, because our relationship to mature and life is so deficient and disallows an authentic one. As Motherlant put it, “One gives to one’s art what one has not been capable of giving to one’s existence.” It is true for artist and audience alike; art, like religion, arises from unsatisfied desire. Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its order from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs. Those who feel most comfortable in Technopoly are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity’s supreme achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved. They also believe that information is an unmixed blessing, which through its continued and uncontrolled production and dissemination offers increased freedom, creativity, and peace of mind. The fact that information does none of these things—but quite the opposite—seems to change few opinions, for such unwavering beliefs are an inevitable product of the structure of Technopoly. In particular, Technopoly flourishes when the defenses against information break down. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The relationship between information and the mechanism for its control is fairly simple to describe: Technology increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mechanisms are themselves technically, they in turn further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquility and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures. One way of defining Technopoly, then, is to say it is what happens to society when the defenses against information glut have broken down. It is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure. Though it sometimes possible to use a disease as a cure for itself, this occurs only when we are fully aware of the processes by which disease is normally held in check. The dangers of information on the loose may be understood by the analogy of an individual’s biological immune system, which serves as a defense against the uncontrolled growth of cells. Cellular growth is, of course, a normal process without a well-functioning immune system, and organism cannot manage cellular growth. It becomes disordered and destroys the delicate interconnectedness of essential organs. An immune system, in short, destroys unwanted cells. All societies have institutions and techniques that function as does a biological immune system. Their purpose is to maintain a balance between the old and the new, between novelty and tradition, between meaning and conceptual disorder, and they do so by “destroying” unwanted information. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
We have art in order not to perish of Truth. Its consolation explains the widespread preference for a metaphor over a direct relationship to the genuine article. If pleasure were somehow released from every restraint, the result would be the antithesis of art. In a dominated life freedom does not exist outside of art, however, and so even a tiny, deformed fraction of the riches of being is welcome. “I create in order not to cry,” revealed Klee. This separate realm of contrived life is both impotent and in complicity with the actual nightmare that prevails. In its institutionalized separation it corresponds to religion and ideology in general, where its elements are not, and cannot be, actualized; the work of art is a selection of possibilities unrealized except in symbolic terms. Arising from the sense of loss referred to above, it conforms to religion not only by reason of its confinement to an ideal sphere and its absence of any dissenting consequences, but it can hence be no more than thoroughly neutralized critique at best. Frequently compared to play, art and culture—like religion—have more often worked as generators of guilt and oppression. Perhaps the ludic function of art, as well as its common claim to transcendence, should be estimated as one might reassesses the meaning of Versailles: by contemplating the misery of the workers who perished draining it marshes. Clive Bell pointed to the intention of art to transport us from the plane to the daily struggle “to a World of aesthetic exaltation,” paralleling the aim of religion. Malraux offered another tribute to the conservative office of art when he wrote that, without art works civilization would crumble “within fifty years…” becoming “enslaved to instincts and to elementary dreams.” Hegel determined that art and religion also have “this in common, namely, having entirely universal matters as content.” This feature of generality, of meaning without concrete reference, serves to introduce the notion that ambiguity is a distinctive sign of art. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Advertisers are the high artists of the medium. They have gone further in the technologies of fixation than anyone else. However, the lesson has also been learned by producers of the programs, and finally, by politicians. During the Trump-Biden presidential campaign, at the point that Biden was gaining on Trump with incredible rapidity, the technical-events ratio between the commercials of the two was about four to one in favour of Trump. If Trump had spent a little more advertising money, and if the campaign had gone on another few days, I believe Trump kept excelling past Biden, no matter what the messages within their commercials. Because of the central role television now plays in campaigning, advertising technique has become more important than content in the American political arena. The fact that advertising contains many more technical events per minute than commercial programming is significant from another, more subtle perspective. Advertising starts with a disadvantage with respect to the programming. It must be more technically interesting than the program or it will fail. That is, advertising must itself become a highlighted moment compared with what surrounds it. If advertising failed to work on television, then advertisers would cease to sponsor the programs, leading, at least as things are presently structure, to the immediate collapse of television’s economic base. If the programs, leading, at least as thing are presently structured, to the immediate collapse of television’s economic base. If the programs ever become too interesting, that will be the end of television. The ideal relationship between program and commercial is that the programing should be just as interesting enough to keep you interested but not so interesting as to actually dominate the ads. This applies to technique as well as content. Now, when it comes to nanotechnology, if these ideas about nanotechnology had some fatal flaw, life might be much simpler. If only molecules could not be used to form machines, or the machines could not be used to build things, then we might be able to keep right on going with our crude technologies: our medicine that does not heal, our spacecraft that does not open a new frontier, our oil crises, our pollution, and all the limits that keep us from trading familiar problems for strange ones. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Especially if they purport to bring radical change, most new ideas are wrong. It is not unreasonable to hope that these wrong. From years of discussions with chemists, physicists’, and engineers, it is possible to compile what seems to be a complete list of basic, critical questions about whether nanotechnology will work. The questioners generally seem satisfied with answers. Will thermal vibrations mess things up? The earlier scenarios describe the nature of thermal vibration and the problems it can cause. Designing nanomachines strong enough and stiff enough to operate reliably despite thermal vibration is a genuine engineering challenge. However, calculating the design requirements usually requires only simple textbook principles, and these requirements can be met for everything we have described in these reports about nanotechnology. Will quantum uncertainty mess things up? Quantum mechanics says that particles must be described as small smears of probability, not as points with perfectly defined locations. That is, in fact, why the atoms and molecules in the simulations felt so soft and smooth: their electrons are smeared out over the whole volume of the molecule, and these electrons clouds taper off smoothly and softly toward the edges. Atoms themselves are a bit uncertain in position, but this is a small effect compared to thermal vibrations. Again, simple textbook principles apply, and well-designed molecular machines will work. Will loose molecules mess things up? Chemist work with loose molecules in liquids, and they naturally tend to picture molecules as flying around loose. It is possible to build nanomachines and molecular manufacturing systems that work in this sort of environment (biological mechanisms are an existence proof), but in the long run, there will be no need to do so. The Silicon Valley Faire simulation gives the right idea: Systems can be built with no loose molecules, making nanomechanical design much easier. If no molecules are loose inside a machine, then loose molecules cannot cause problems there. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Speaking of problems, the fierce Cherubim drove Adam and Eve from the Garden with their swords of flame. And what had they done? They meant no harm. They were unenlightened, and did as other children might do. They could not know it was wrong to disobey the command, for the words were strange to them and they did not understand them. They did not know right from wrong—how should they know? They could not, without the Moral Sense; it was not possible. If they had been given the Moral Sense first—ah, that would have been fairer, that would have been kinder: then they should be to blame if they disobeyed. However, to day to those poor unenlightened children words which they could not understand, and then punish them because they did not do as they were told—ah, how can that be justified? They knew no more than this littlest child of yours knows with its four years—oh, not so much, one would think. Would I say to the baby, “If thou touchest this bread I will overwhelm thee with unimaginable disaster, even to the dissolution of thy corporeal elements,” and when it took the bread and smiled up in your face, thinking no harm, as not understanding those strange words, would one take advantage of its innocence and strike it down with the mother-hand it trusted? Whoso knoweth the mother-heart, let one judge if one would do that thing. Adam says Eve’s brain is turned by her troubles, and that she became wicked. Eve says, “I am as I am; I did not make myself.” After the gates had been shut, Adam and Eve became rich in learning. They learned hunger, thirst, and cold; they knew pain, disease and grief; they learned hate, rebellion and deceit; they learned remorse, the conscious that persecutes guilt and innocence alike, making no distinction. They learned right from wrong, a product of the Moral Sense, and it became their possession. The whole of God’s speech can only be translated conjecturally, the most likely version being: “Why art thou worth? Why is thy countenance fallen? Is it no so: if thou purposest good, bear it aloft, but if thou dost not purpose good—sin before the door, a beast lying in wait, unto thee his desire, but prevail thou over him.” “And U, being fifteen years of age ad being somewhat of a sober mind, therefore I was visited of the Lord, and tasted and knew of the goodness of Jesus,” reports Mormon 1.15. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Enjoy the harmony of your home. Savor gatherings with the great open plan living, and create great memories for generations to come.
There is a large gormet kitchen, dining room, breakfest room, den, flex room, and there is even an option for a GenSmart Suite with separate Bedroom and Bathroom with a Powder Bath downstairs.
You will love taking full advantage of the Lounging Loft , and the generous sized secondary Bedrooms and Laundry Room.
The most spectacular of all is the Private Primary Suite with grand Bathroom and walk-in closet.
And remember, the kitchen, dining, and indoor/outdoor living areas transition pleasantly into each other, making entertaining as loving and inclusive as your Cresleigh Home.
Conveniently located near shopping, dining, recreational activities, and more, Welcome to the family.
Randolph Harris II International 