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kimberlysteeleIn brief, Sun Tzu talks about two things in this chapter: the importance of getting in and out quickly if there is going to be combat and knowing to mine the enemy for resources instead of one's own forces.
One and Done
Never, says Sun Tzu, should you involve your armies in a protracted, long series of campaigns. "One who excels in employing the military does not conscript the people twice or transport provisions a third time." Either make war quick and efficient or don't bother, which is to say Sun Tzu feels about war like I have always felt about shopping.
A great example of the abject failure of a long campaign is the measures that have been taken against the economic damage of COVID shutdowns, otherwise known as stimulus checks. The war would have been over had government and the mainstream media taken a different turn in 2020. COVID, a disease which at its most lethal kills far fewer people than cancer or diabetes any given year, could have been exposed as a nothingburger as early as April 2020. Instead, we Americans were peppered with a fusillade of "free" money, the cost of which is the current recession which may well become a new Great Depression. Not only was the relief badly aimed, it was a disguise for leftist government grift to fund ridiculous ventures such as modern art museums and gender reassignment surgeries in Muslim nations.
When Empires Overreach
"The State is impoverished when it transports provisions far off." The more I see of the decaying American Empire, the more I understand the genius of medieval Japan. Isolationism has its benefits. Staying local concentrates power.
Speaking of staying home, one of the primary reasons the salary class embraced the Coronapocalypse with such enthusiasm was because it put an end to the supercommutes of a majority of its members. A supercommuter is a person who commutes an hour or more to work each way. Supercommuting is a way of life for the working poor and lower middle classes, but over the years it crept into salary class life as well. Unlike the salary classes, the working poor and lower middle classes did not get to stay at home past the initial months of the Plandemic (if they got to stay at home at all) because their jobs involved "essential" activities such as driving a truck or working a cash register at the grocery store or more typically they could not afford a hiatus in pay.
To this day, unionized Chicago teachers have refused to step back into their classrooms, ostensibly because they're scared of COVID. Yeah, right. It has nothing to do with chaotic schools as babysitting operations/low security prisons for materialistic, shiftless, violent young adults with no better place to be and chips on their shoulders.
For the average salary class woman who actually loved her husband, the Coronapocalypse represented the first break the poor guy had gotten since his college days. The man who barely graced his family with his presence every other weekend suddenly was not a ghost anymore. All those business trips, golf games, business dinners, and supercommutes got cancelled. Suddenly the Big Cheese breadwinner was home, real, and involved with the children he sired. Isolation has its benefits.
Every person who has the luxury of working from home saves a ton of money: travel of any sort is expensive and time consuming. A long commute, Sun Tzu would say, impoverishes our State.
My issue with the above teachers and salary class telecommuters is their dishonesty. If only they would just admit it: they like having three extra hours a day and getting paid the same amount of money. Instead they give us a steaming dish of sanctimony with sides of fear porn and mask theater. Increasingly, we see peeks at a scheme that made salary class lives more pleasant and comfortable by design with little thought for the human expense.
Starve and Plunder Your Enemy 101: How Much Is Too Much?
"Thus the wise general will secure foodstuffs from his enemy." The salary classes have done this, except the enemy was the corporations they work for and/or draw stock benefits from in a parasite/host relationship. The salary class finally managed to turn the tables with COVID. Instead of the salariman or salariwoman being drained of vitality by his or her long commute and grueling office environment, the flow of the company's resources changed direction. The etheric power at home is now isolated in a bubble of apparent safety and not fed upon by a parasitic boss at the end of a long train or auto commute. The trouble here is that by reversing the flow of etheric resources, several albatrosses have been created. One is the empty office: what to do with the giant, empty commercial space where office workers used to congregate? What about the surrounding economies, such as the restaurants that served the office workers? What of the economies that had little or nothing to do with the office workers, such as Broadway entertainers or the little chess club that barely eked out an existence in the best of times? Starving the enemy and forcing his resources to flow to you stops making sense when you wake up and realize you've made a *glass factory of the land you intended to colonize. Just saying.
Sun Tzu suggests we assimilate our enemy and (eventually) treat them well -- it worked for Genghis Khan! Such a strategy avoids the blundering idiocy I mention in the above paragraph. Treat your client states well. Don't be like China, the US, or the salary class: overextended, thoughtless, doomed.
*"glass factory" is American slang for the aftermath of detonating a nuclear bomb
One and Done
Never, says Sun Tzu, should you involve your armies in a protracted, long series of campaigns. "One who excels in employing the military does not conscript the people twice or transport provisions a third time." Either make war quick and efficient or don't bother, which is to say Sun Tzu feels about war like I have always felt about shopping.
A great example of the abject failure of a long campaign is the measures that have been taken against the economic damage of COVID shutdowns, otherwise known as stimulus checks. The war would have been over had government and the mainstream media taken a different turn in 2020. COVID, a disease which at its most lethal kills far fewer people than cancer or diabetes any given year, could have been exposed as a nothingburger as early as April 2020. Instead, we Americans were peppered with a fusillade of "free" money, the cost of which is the current recession which may well become a new Great Depression. Not only was the relief badly aimed, it was a disguise for leftist government grift to fund ridiculous ventures such as modern art museums and gender reassignment surgeries in Muslim nations.
"No country ever benefitted from prolonged warfare" cautions Sun Tzu. Onlookers watching the collapse of the American empire take note of the shambles all around us: America has been at war to exploit new territories long before 1776, and look where that got us. The leaders of China don't seem to be willing to learn from American mistakes. Hell-bent on becoming the next Great World Power, they have gone to war with both their own citizenry and their land, raking both over the coals in the name of Progress. The greedy CCP takes paving paradise to put up a parking lot to a whole new level: the ghost city. Ghost cities are the eerie vision of China at war with itself, gaming and cannibalizing the strength of its own people in order to display the ever-less-convincing trompe d'loeil version of power.
For All The Young People Out There: A Warning
To take it down to a more personal level, I would advise any person considering college right now to heed Sun Tzu's advice in this chapter, and that is to make college short and sweet. College, now more than ever, is a war to cheat you (and this includes your parents and your future self) out of as much money as possible for a tiny scrap of education you probably won't be able to use. Personally, I had to invent my job as a music teacher after the long fight to graduate with a Bachelor's of Music in 1995. Nobody else I know teaches in their field. My high school friend who got a Musical Theater degree ended up translating German textbooks. Another art degreed friend ended up in retail management. Yet another had a degree in Communications, whatever the hell that means, and had every job from car rentals to banking. Most of the people I started musical college with did not make it to year four. The college was gleeful to rob them of their money in exchange for no degree and a bunch of debt, of that I am sadly confident. Not that they could use the degree anyway. If you go to college, do it as quickly as possible. Or just don't go. If I had it to do all over again, I would have taken a couple years at my local community college or in this day an age, a cheaper online college, and then finished the degree while already working as a private music teacher, for instance teaching out of my parent's home or driving to student's homes. What I would not do would be to obtain a Masters or a PhD. College is such a racket these days that I think most people should steer clear of it, lest they be trapped in the unending cycle of undischargeable debt by the time they are my age.When Empires Overreach
"The State is impoverished when it transports provisions far off." The more I see of the decaying American Empire, the more I understand the genius of medieval Japan. Isolationism has its benefits. Staying local concentrates power.
Speaking of staying home, one of the primary reasons the salary class embraced the Coronapocalypse with such enthusiasm was because it put an end to the supercommutes of a majority of its members. A supercommuter is a person who commutes an hour or more to work each way. Supercommuting is a way of life for the working poor and lower middle classes, but over the years it crept into salary class life as well. Unlike the salary classes, the working poor and lower middle classes did not get to stay at home past the initial months of the Plandemic (if they got to stay at home at all) because their jobs involved "essential" activities such as driving a truck or working a cash register at the grocery store or more typically they could not afford a hiatus in pay.
To this day, unionized Chicago teachers have refused to step back into their classrooms, ostensibly because they're scared of COVID. Yeah, right. It has nothing to do with chaotic schools as babysitting operations/low security prisons for materialistic, shiftless, violent young adults with no better place to be and chips on their shoulders.
For the average salary class woman who actually loved her husband, the Coronapocalypse represented the first break the poor guy had gotten since his college days. The man who barely graced his family with his presence every other weekend suddenly was not a ghost anymore. All those business trips, golf games, business dinners, and supercommutes got cancelled. Suddenly the Big Cheese breadwinner was home, real, and involved with the children he sired. Isolation has its benefits.
Every person who has the luxury of working from home saves a ton of money: travel of any sort is expensive and time consuming. A long commute, Sun Tzu would say, impoverishes our State.
My issue with the above teachers and salary class telecommuters is their dishonesty. If only they would just admit it: they like having three extra hours a day and getting paid the same amount of money. Instead they give us a steaming dish of sanctimony with sides of fear porn and mask theater. Increasingly, we see peeks at a scheme that made salary class lives more pleasant and comfortable by design with little thought for the human expense.
Starve and Plunder Your Enemy 101: How Much Is Too Much?
"Thus the wise general will secure foodstuffs from his enemy." The salary classes have done this, except the enemy was the corporations they work for and/or draw stock benefits from in a parasite/host relationship. The salary class finally managed to turn the tables with COVID. Instead of the salariman or salariwoman being drained of vitality by his or her long commute and grueling office environment, the flow of the company's resources changed direction. The etheric power at home is now isolated in a bubble of apparent safety and not fed upon by a parasitic boss at the end of a long train or auto commute. The trouble here is that by reversing the flow of etheric resources, several albatrosses have been created. One is the empty office: what to do with the giant, empty commercial space where office workers used to congregate? What about the surrounding economies, such as the restaurants that served the office workers? What of the economies that had little or nothing to do with the office workers, such as Broadway entertainers or the little chess club that barely eked out an existence in the best of times? Starving the enemy and forcing his resources to flow to you stops making sense when you wake up and realize you've made a *glass factory of the land you intended to colonize. Just saying.
Sun Tzu suggests we assimilate our enemy and (eventually) treat them well -- it worked for Genghis Khan! Such a strategy avoids the blundering idiocy I mention in the above paragraph. Treat your client states well. Don't be like China, the US, or the salary class: overextended, thoughtless, doomed.
*"glass factory" is American slang for the aftermath of detonating a nuclear bomb
no subject
Date: 2021-04-14 12:52 am (UTC)America ‘s wars aren’t really wars anymore, although the poor slob on the other end who’s staring at the smoking rubble of his house may not be able to tell the difference. American “wars” nowadays are a form of middle-class welfare that keep defense contractors, big and small, going, and all the support businesses that cater to same. It’s one of the few growth industries left in the U.S. DOD has about 800K civilians on its payroll. No one knows how many contractors it’s paying—realistic estimates are at least 1,500,000–and that’s not counting the big Defense outfits like Northrup and Lockheed that have their own large payrolls. All this has to be fed, and that means when the U.S. wins a war, it loses. If we declare victory and go home before we get thrown out, we have to gin up another “war” somewhere, or a war under another name like “regime change,” to keep the whole expensive, bloody treadmill running. The alternative is a depression that affects everybody in the U.S., not just flyover Deplorables but REAL people, people with degrees and keyboard jobs.
Sun Tzu, on the other hand, is talking about war the way most of us think of it—a definable issue or issues and a clear point at which we can see we’ve won or lost and can all go home. So most of what he’s discussing doesn’t apply to the modern U.S.
I wonder what he’d think of progress payments.
A progress payment is an interest-free, upfront loan to a contractor, recouped back over the life of the contract. E.g. we, DOD, have a hundred-dollar contract with Cutekitten Industries to manufacture new improved left/handed widgets. We give CK $90 so they can get the needed supplies. Eventually CK sends its first invoice for $25.00. CK has already been fronted 90% of contract value, so DOD cuts Cutekitten Industries a check for $2.50, the remaining 10% on that invoice, and credits back—“liquidates”—the other $17.50 against that interest-free $90 we gave CK Industries upfront. The remaining 3 invoices will be handled the same way and so at the end of the contract it all comes out even.
The original idea here was reasonable. A lot of DOD contracts require expensive materiels, rare earths and the like. A small outfit like Cutekitten Industries is unlikely to be able to afford the unobtainium needed to begin production on many defense contracts, so progress payments kept DOD from being overly reliant on the big guys and allowed small businesses some access to the gravy. But when the prospect of interest-free loans arose, the big guys put their pet lawmakers to work, so now, every day, you get to advance interest-free money to struggling small businesses like Bell Helicopter and Northern Telecom. I’m not sure how Sun Tzu would have dealt with this—probably by throwing up his hands and retiring—but it’s most likely here to stay. I think you’d have to completely reform American capitalism to make DOD the Department of actual Defense instead of the Department of Middle-class Welfare. As far as I can tell, there is no government department devoted to actual defense of America and its protectorates. DOD personnel are generally honest and do what they can when they can, but defense is no longer their primary function and they lack the power to make it their primary function. (Just in case you had nothing to worry about, now you have!). I do not know the solution. Previous greedy ruling classes have always tried to maintain some sort of defense, if only so the Mongols or Huns won’t show up and confiscate the hoard, but the U.S. ruling class has been lulled into complacency by those two buffering oceans and the way WW II ended. As we know, Hitler came darn close to winning WW II—but he didn’t, and the U.S. rulers have since fancied themselves untouchable. It’s worrisome.
—Lady Cutekitten
no subject
Date: 2021-04-14 02:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-14 04:09 am (UTC)Here we have a site that can be described by the most beautiful words in the language: ANNOTATED and FREE!
https://suntzusaid.com/book/1
no subject
Date: 2021-04-14 04:30 am (UTC)Maybe write it as fiction? You can get away with quite a bit if you call it fiction.
I look forward to reading your blog once you create it!
no subject
Date: 2021-04-14 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-14 04:35 am (UTC)—Lady Cutekitten
no subject
Date: 2021-04-15 01:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-15 03:45 am (UTC)—Lady Cutekitten of Lolcat
V4ccine
Date: 2021-04-16 03:38 pm (UTC)I tried to copy and paste the link to that website (the truth ref one you mentioned in another post) into a text message and it just won’t go.
Re: V4ccine
Date: 2021-04-16 04:33 pm (UTC)https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YK0JR_lFy88Zu3rcC3L5NvL_Xr3ib6zY/view?fbclid=IwAR0w-K0uu6O6zOb4iTVJ0wGQHRzC3FqPFwQW7F0eUNjeVm_BdxxRSHXxo1c
Re: V4ccine
Date: 2021-04-16 05:00 pm (UTC)—Lady Cutekitten