11. That power is greatest which is not exercised.
10. Security systems produce insecurity. This is a sub-axiom of "Police create crime." My son has ringed my baby's mama's property, where he lives, with Ring security cams. Four times in the last ten days the Ring cams have captured undeniably suspicious behavior, twice what I believed (but Ring disagreed) were clear attempted crimes. In the category of suspicious was the wandering Orthodox Jew who came onto the property at 8:39 p.m., approached my son's door and then departed when the Ring light came on. My son was home at the time and saw it as it on Ring as it was happening. He got into his car and followed after the man, hailing him and asking "Is everything ok?" "Fundraising" was the reply. The next day, in bright mid-afternoon, when no one was home the Ring cams captured two women, one older, one younger, entering deep into the landscaping around the front, right up to the edge of the main house looking for something. The last two nights, the first at 3:30 a.m., the second just after midnight two clear--Sorry Ring, you're wrong--would-be car thieves got out of a car and ran up to the Maserati belonging to the neighbors across the street, one trying the driver's door handle of the car, the other, with some object in his hand, in some grainy stills it looked very much like a firearm, apparently acting as security on the passenger side. When the car door didn't open the would-be thieves ran back to their car, tires screeching as they made their getaway. And last night the same hooded, masked young man got out the same white car and again went up to the door of the Maserati, tried the door handle and peered into the interior.
The Ring cams prevented no crimes, indeed even the last two were not in Ring's Crime category but rather in the "Property disturbance" and "Safety" categories, and increased insecurity in homeowners and neighbors, including my son, and in me. My son and I spent 45 minutes talking about and reviewing the cam footage of the wandering Jew and the two women. The wandering Jew led to a mild "confrontation" with my son. I told my son in that conversation that my takeaway was that we would have been better off without the Ring cams, better off not knowing. I said that those two innocuous incidents convinced me that I would never, ever install a security cam regimen around my condo unit, that I didn't want to know and wanted to be in secure obliviousness to any incidents of similar nature. And I thought after the last two nights clear criminality that my property, my garbage-can car and my books, were not worth the anxiety of being alarmed, that if I saw somebody trying to break into my car or my unit that I would not intervene, that I would not saddle another young man with a criminal arrest record, and would never risk personal safety for a "property disturbance."
8. Doctors make you sick.
7. Police create crime.
6. Defense departments create foreign threats.
5. Freedom enslaves you.
4. In slavery there is freedom. Walter Lippmann's turn on this was "the people shackle their hands to prevent them from trembling."
3. Politics is sex by other means.
2. Better living through chemicals.
1. Never judge a person by the worst thing (s)he has ever done.
*Updated 1/19/22, 12/31/21, 9/30/21 and 9/28/21. First posted 7/18/21.
