kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with the art of war

Sun Tzu says there are Nine Changes that describe how to give your side the advantage when it comes to terrain. The first is “Do not encamp on entrapping terrain.”

One of the most distressing aspects of the current period is the befouling of the commons by control freak Coronatarians who are hell bent on dictating mask and vaccine rules in every public and private space. Covid 19 has turned workplaces, libraries, gas stations, and schools into war zones. For someone with social anxiety, it is unbearable, which is why so many with social anxiety have chosen to take the experimental vaccine as an alternative to dealing with confrontation. One of my oldest friends, a shy young woman in her thirties, went the vaccine route because of family pressuring and has not felt well since.

Unfortunately, for the unvaxxed, it has all turned into entrapping terrain. That is why I think we have no choice but to create our own spaces and to deliberately seek out and patronize places that allow us to fly under the radar without wearing the symbol of salary class psychosis on our faces.

With Friends Like These...

Sun Tzu’s second Change advises for us to “unite with your allies on focal terrain.” Here in Illinois we often have problems with Canada geese who overpopulate the wide, empty wastes of chemical lawn of office parks and apartment complexes. The geese throng in such places because there is little to no cover for predators such as coyotes to hide. There is safety in numbers and in daylight, and it is a good thing when your enemy shows his cards and parades around naked in front of you. I’m oddly grateful for the Coronapocalypse because it showed me who has my back and who is a coyote waiting to snap my neck. I had my suspicions about certain friends of mine and now I know… if we were in Maoist China, they would have been the first to sell their own parents and/or children to the secret police. I need friends like that about as much as I need an extra pair of nostrils on my butt.

Sun Tzu’s third Change advises “Do not remain on isolated terrain”. The number of people in my 5000 member Facebook group Speakeasy Illinois who are losing or have lost their jobs due to vaccine coercion is absolutely disgusting. Any employer who threatens to axe their employees for not taking an experimental drug has shown themselves to be completely tyrannical and untrustworthy, regardless of whether or not they have their way with the employee in question. Millions of non-GMO people are now finding out their bosses are mini-Mussolinis and neo-Francos, and though there may technically be plenty of jobs, there are also plenty of jabs that stand in the way of those jobs. We unvaxxed have no choice but to improvise a new economy from nothing, and the dilemma here is we lack the resources to do it. I’d like to start a school and open my subscription library to walk in traffic; that’s just not possible on my budget. Meanwhile, I pass block after block of vacant commercial buildings when I drive to work, none of which I can afford to rent.

Sun Tzu suggests in his fourth Change that we should make strategic plans for encircled terrain. When menacing maskers approach me in public, my go-to strategy is to vacate the premises. A few weeks ago, I attempted to shop at the Asian supermarket. I was immediately flagged down by a bunch of ill-intentioned store clerks and managers who yelled at me to wear a mask. In my finest display of years of vocal training, I loudly and clearly called “NO SALE” and about faced and left the store. I may never shop there again. My old mechanic put an obnoxious sign about vaccines and masks on their entry door; this provided the impetus for me to find a new mechanic who wouldn’t dream of such idiocy. Other members of my Speakeasy group go into stores equipped with paperwork that informs mask maniacs that they are breaking discrimination laws and they can be sued or imprisoned if they try to prevent an unmasked person from shopping. Personally, it’s not how I prefer to do it but I applaud their bravery.

You Don't Mess with the Kim

In his fifth Change, Sun Tzu says that on fatal terrain, we must do battle. I have yet to be dragged off to a concentration camp for refusing to play Russian roulette, however, if it comes to that, I will not board the train willingly. Violence is a last resort that I am now obliged to think about as times grow increasingly dark. I won’t say much more about this, but know that I am hard to kill yet simultaneously not afraid of death and dying. This makes me the worst sort of enemy to confront.

In his sixth Change, Sun Tzu reminds us there are roads that are not followed. In 2020, there was a group of maskless Californians who decided to convene on their local Trader Joes in what can only be described as flash mob shopping. Their goal was to force Trader Joes to exchange its merchandise for their money despite its mask rules. Attempting to force a store to take your money is stupid and redundant. Retailers live in fear of being ghosted — nothing scares a retail or a restaurant CEO more than empty aisles and tables during what is supposed to be peak shopping/dining time. Every now and then, some doofus in my group will suggest a flash mob of the unmasked and presumably unvaxxed. They usually stop talking when I ask them what they hope to achieve.

In his seventh Change, Sun Tzu says there are armies that are not attacked. We are not at the point of Revolution in the US, though we are getting there, and unlike some other nations, we still have private gun ownership. Nevertheless, just as it is stupid to run into a store with a naked face to say “Take my money!”, public protest has almost no effect and usually serves only to waste time as the mainstream media silences any voices that stray from its narrative. As the Capitol building arrests and the death of Ashli Babbitt prove, the opposition is perfectly willing to frame, bait, cheat, lie, gaslight, and murder in order to bolster its drooping self-image. Protests don’t do much when the government is a bunch of Stalinists.

Sun Tzu’s eighth change talks about how there are fortified cities that are not assaulted. American public schools, much like the prisons and hospital buildings they tend to resemble, are not fixable. They have not functioned as places of learning for many, many years, and that was true decades before Critical Race Theory and Transgender Pedomania arrived on the scene. As hard as it is to do, we have to start walking away from massive institutions we thought would always be there.

Sun Tzu talks about leaving terrain that should not be contended for in his ninth Change. Illinois has a terrible leftist governor. His name is Pritzker and his exploits are tragicomic. He will probably remain governor until at least 2026 or until his morbid obesity gets the better of him. The reason for this is Illinois is a citadel of Leftist grift and there’s no way the powers that be will allow a fair election to take that away. That is why I have high hopes for all of my Speakeasy members who are running for school boards, city council, and raising their children to do the same — government is not taken back through high positions but through small ones such as Library Chairman and County Judge. County board members are the ones who decide how property tax money gets spent.

Always Look on the Bright Side

Put all the changes together and suddenly we become a force to be reckoned with. The other side doesn’t know how to employ the Changes. Their strategy was to riot, burn, loot, and murder in the aftermath of lockdowns and call it “mostly peaceful protests” ostensibly for the empowerment of non-white people. They eat their own — remember that the salary class is and was a game of musical chairs with ever-faster music. The latest form of de rigueur cannibalism is to shove out the salaried, unvaxxed health care workers so they can replaced with vaxxed, obedient flunkeys. The next step is to force booster after booster on entire families as the condition of staying in the good graces of the insane reality show that is the salary class.

Though I’ll never know for sure, I believe the existence of my group Speakeasy Illinois was a significant reason why Pritzker has not yet been able to enforce a statewide mask mandate. Sun Tzu says to “subjugate the feudal lords with potential harm”, and I believe the corporate stooges who sit in Pritzker’s pockets became frightened when large numbers of people refused to don masks in Illinois stores. We have “labored the feudal lords with numerous affairs” in the form of lawsuits and forced them to “chase after profits” by taking our business to places where medical freedom is respected. Bravery is contagious. It only takes one person to take off the mask to inspire a second person, and then a third. You’ve got to start somewhere, and if the only person is me, which it often is inside the grocery store, well then so be it. I know I could be attacked, shamed, or harassed, but I have finally gotten to the point where it isn’t about me. Once again, they picked the wrong enemy.

Death Wish: Vaccine Edition

Sun Tzu warns of dangerous character traits. He says that “One committed to dying can be slain”. I think the vaccines represent a mass death wish. For a civilization that has loved to fear and avoid death, this one had a funny way of rushing towards it with open arms in the form of a vaccine that routinely kills and maims at a much higher rate than the disease it is supposed to cure. It is ironic that Sun Tzu mentions the opposite propensity in his next character trait, and that is “One committed to living can be captured”. I think he’s talking about the fear of death in this case. If a person is so attached to their lifestyle that they will grovel, beg, and sacrifice their children to a medical experiment to maintain it, they can be made to do dirty deeds and jerked around like marionettes. We have to wonder when the anger will set in as the vaxxed figure out they’ve been had, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon. Sun Tzu warns that “One easily angered and hasty can be insulted.” Insults are a potent tool. They can backfire spectacularly, such as Hillary Clinton and Les Deplorables, or they can ignite a revolution, as in the case of Let’s Go Brandon. The interesting part comes as the shamers get shamed. Sun Tzu mentions “one obsessed with being scrupulous and untainted can be shamed” and we now see cancel culture coming full circle as normies become aware of Hollywood pederasts and Hunter Biden’s laptop. Sun Tzu’s fifth and most sociopathic comment on character traits is “One who loves the people can be troubled”. In this sense, the opposition is unassailable because they don’t love the people and are untroubled by the woes of the working class despite all their posturing about being good, kindly champions. The most difficult order of our time is to maintain the spirit of love and to work around the hate that comes so easily.

When I was a vegetarian in the 1990s, an ostensibly healthy restaurant opened in the mall. They had a breakfast sandwich that I think was meant to imitate sausage. It looked and tasted like cardboard. My boyfriend at the time (who later became my husband) was a lifelong vegetarian. He was raised Seventh Day Adventist, which meant he had lived through every attempt at soy and wheat analog meat in America. He commented that until there was a fake meat that tasted like the real thing, veggie fare like the restaurant’s broken attempt at a breakfast sandwich would continue to marginalize vegetarian food as weird and icky.

I went vegan after 20 years of vegetarianism and pescetarianism in 2010. The vegan movement was still obscure when I joined it.

Sun Tzu said that in military combat “if you make the enemy’s path circuitous and entice them with profit, although you set out after them, you will arrive before them.”

The enemy of the vegan movement was obscurity. Why the hell should anyone eat a bland, weird soy burger when they could chomp down on a tasty ground-up animal sandwich? The animal sandwich was cruel, sure, but it was also cheap, fatty, salty, and satisfying. Not everyone was like me, able to take the blinders off to see the blood of the slaughterhouse, to smell the feces and rot, to hear the anguished cries of the pig or the chicken with her beak cut off, to contemplate the staggering amount of waste that went into a slab of sausage. Vegans were not subtle in messaging: the reason I became vegetarian and not vegan in 1989 was because the only vegan I knew was the neighbor kid who was starving himself to death. The only group of vegans was PeTA, and they were psychotic.

The PeTA method, in Sun Tzu’s vernacular, is to “race forward day and night without encamping, covering two days normal distance at a time, marching forward a hundred li to contend for gain”. It is a failing strategy. PeTa has always loved to rush to the bottom line of YOU MEAT EATERS OUGHT TO FEEL ASHAMED instead of going the slow, circuitous route and showing people why they might want to become vegans. In the 80s, PeTA literally attacked those they disagreed with by pouring red paint on women wearing fur coats. If the vegan movement had never expanded beyond PeTA’s chokehold, the word vegan would not have become a household term. Luckily for me, PeTA fell into the irrelevance and disgrace it richly deserved shortly after I became vegan. Hopefully it won’t be back.

The vegan movement got exciting in the 2010s. We had our fearless leaders: Philip Wollen, Morrissey, Woody Harrelson, Moby, Doctors Esselstyn, McDougall, Barnard, Popper, and Williams. We had our generals: Colleen Patrick Goudreau, Ruby Roth, Patrik Baboumian, Emily the Bite Size Vegan, Gary Yourovsky, Melanie Joy, Joey Carbstrong, Earthling Ed, and James Aspey. We knew the terrain: we could argue from any point and win, and we could do it with humor and style, a la Vegan Sidekick. Our varied and myriad approaches to argument (with a great deal of persuasion) were so effective, industries started catering to us. Vegan became profitable. It was in the 2010s that we got Gardein, the world's first consistently tasty, non-weird tasting vegan meats.

The secret to the success of the vegan movement was its variety. We captured the Hollywood elites by giving them the health fad they craved with the virtue signaling they craved even more. We captured the middle classes by putting convenient vegan comfort foods in every grocery store. Plant milk was something you bought only in health food stores in the year 2000; by 2020 it became commonplace in all but the most rural of rural grocery stores. The vegan movement reached the inner cities where it was embraced with enthusiasm and passion, and people of all colors and ethnic origins delighted in bringing vibrant, nourishing meals to former food deserts.

When we “plundered a district” and gained ground, we shared the wealth. Vegans networked around the world to share recipes, to lend advocacy and words, and to relentlessly campaign for vegan options in restaurants.

We knew when to strike and how to do it. We figured out how to make Thanksgiving seem more appealing without the turkey. We knew when to get environmental (Cowspiracy) and when to appeal to vanity (The Game Changers). We knew how to wear the enemy down and strike when they were weak.

We were doing great. The tipping point had nearly been achieved. Unfortunately, the old saying came true: the larger they are, the harder they fall. Vegans everywhere fell for the oldest trick in the book: the infiltration of the movement by idiot co-opters who devoured it from the inside out. The race baiters, non-functioning autistics, and the gullible do-gooders metastasized, and former skeptics who had once worked overtime to disprove the average allopathic doctor’s insistence that eating animals is healthy and good lined up like lemmings to take an experimental MRNA shot. Greta Thunberg heralded the beginning of the end; the vegan movement now is a shadow of its former self.

That which was in order became disordered and that which was tranquil became clamorous. The vegan movement snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, proving that vegans were largely every bit as credulous as the meat-eaters they were trying to change. The same people who laughed at Dr. Robert Atkins and who would not eat the Impossible Burger because it used animal tests to get to FDA approval were perfectly willing to swallow (or inject) whatever animal-tested Pfizer and Moderna garbage Dr. Anthony Fauci shoved in their direction. Whether or not the vegan movement will return is anybody’s guess. For now, it has been vanquished. Looking on the bright side… at least we got a decent breakfast sandwich!

The scene: Inside Thornton's (gas station) in the suburbs of Chicago.

Her: You need to put on a mask!
Me: I don't do that.
Her: There's a MANDATE! You have to wear a mask!
Me: I know about the mandate. I'm not going to wear a mask. Do you want me to pay for my gas or not?
Her: (blood boiling) YOU... You check out with her... gestures to the young woman behind plexiglass at the register.

A pleasant transaction ensued. I gave the cashier my money, she made change, I thanked her, and I was on my merry way.

Sun Tzu says whoever occupies the battleground first and awaits the enemy will be at ease; whoever occupies the battleground afterward and must race to the conflict will be fatigued.

When I encounter a maskturbator like the gas station manager at Thornton’s, unlike the maskturbator, I am calm and ready. I know the battleground, I understand exactly why I am at war, and I am ready to be hauled off and murdered if necessary because of the courage of my convictions. Death means nothing to me. I am not afraid of it. The gas station manager had no such advantages. She was a terrified, cowed, petty dictator clinging to what little vestiges of power were afforded to her via a mandate. I can almost guarantee she hates her job and everything about it, including customers like me who stand up for their Constitutional rights. She is not ready to die and unlike me, she has made no peace with death, otherwise she would not wear a talismanic binky on her face because the government tells her it will prevent a pathetically non-lethal disease.

The approach outlined above, despite its innocuousness, is a way of forcing the enemy out into the open. We have gotten to a point where showing one’s naked face in a gas station is an act of civil disobedience against the tyrannical State. By demonstrating to the petty tyrant of Thornton’s I would not be moved, she was forced to expose the weakness of her cherished mandate.

I formed a group in early 2021 on Facebook called Speakeasy Illinois to support the owners of businesses and establishments like my own Kimberly Steele Studio that do not force anyone (employees or customers) to be injected with experimental gene modifiers or to wear masks. The group grew from 2 people in February to its current 4400 members today. The army I have amassed is mostly a secret one. The attacks are subtle and quiet. Members send reports from the front lines of which stores, gyms, and offices are face-friendly and which are not. We have our own bits of dialect: “patriot” or “patriotic” means there is zero pressure to mask or vax. FD means face diaper, which is lingo for the mask.

We strike when the enemy least expects us — one of the primary rules of Speakeasy Illinois is to avoid maskturbator/vaxturbator establishments in favor of their patriotic counterparts. Our main weapon against the proto-communists is to ghost their stores and ditch their venues. Nothing scares a maskturbator who complies with government orders (hoping to trade what freedoms they have left) like an empty house. Though many of my soldiers have wanted me to help them create harassment campaigns of going into mask-insistent stores and screaming “you’d better take my money!” it’s not an approach I endorse.

Ghosting their venues works like a charm. There is a theater where I live that puts on live musicals. Their most recent stunt has been to insist that every person walking in the door shows proof of vaccination. Their strategy has gone over like a lead balloon and now they find themselves struggling to put butts in seats. To pretend that it isn’t happening, they have resorted to giving tickets away for free in order to put bodies in chairs. Despite being in a state run by a lunatic leftist emperor-governor, we have put them in a position of either stopping their vaccine nonsense or going out of business. Sadly it looks like they will choose the latter.

This is what maskturbator panic looks like

“If I do not want to engage in combat, even though I merely draw a line on the ground and defend it, he will not be able to engage me in battle because we thwart his movements.”

The line in the sand I draw and encourage my Speakeasy infantry to draw is one of politeness. No matter what the enemy spews, no matter how rabid or stupid they act, we don’t sink to their level. We hold our heads high and proud. If the maskturbator absolutely insists, we loudly say “NO SALE!” and leave the establishment, preferably with a smile. Had the ridiculous Thornton’s manager called the police on me, I would have politely stepped outside the store, waited for the police, and then handed them the cash or card to take inside to the register person. Had the police arrested me and hauled me off to jail, I would let them make an example of me in order to use the outrage to further my cause. I am always ready to strike where they are vulnerable, shifting like water to avoid the substantial and strike the vacuous.

Our members show up in stores constantly without masks, which gives us the advantage of hollowing out the enemy via amorphous psychological warfare. Courage is infectious. My members constantly report others taking off their masks because they see us doing it in public. The enemy only knows how to hate and fear. They destroy and suffer the blowback of destruction; we build and enjoy the effects of construction.

Sun Tzu opens this chapter by revisiting the idea that commanding a large number of troops is like commanding a few. He implies that success in many ventures depends on assigning the right person to the right task, which is an area where American business model has utterly failed. Think of all the liberal arts majors who ended up with useless college degrees and how most of their talents have been wasted in a string of dead end office and service jobs -- rarely was any one of them trained for the exact job they ended up doing. Multiply the disillusioned collegiate by millions and we have the smoking wreck that is the American office, a scene I would have happily been homeless to avoid after having a taste of it in my tender years after graduating musical college.  

Sun Tzu continues by talking about the power of the orthodox and the unorthodox. In business, the orthodox boils down to the Golden Rule: do unto others, don’t screw those you are working with, treat your customers and workers fairly. This rule applies whether you are a struggling small business owner like me or a corporate giant. The unorthodox part is what we do within the confines of those rules. Innovating a better product or service is unorthodox. Figuring out ways to make workers productive and happy, something which lacks greatly in the American office cesspool, requires unorthodox thinking. Once the structure is erected, then we get to play.  

Sun Tzu says: “The notes do not exceed five, but the changes of the five notes can never be fully heard." Rules and structure are essential in work and in music. The saddest, most unintentionally funny musical abortions of all time are atonal music and its idiot nephew, musique concrete. Atonal music is the ultimate cart before the horse. When early 20th century edgelords attempted to re-invent chromaticism by forcing a structure where coherent melodic and harmonic patterns could not exist, they made the musical equivalent of Cecilia Jimenez’s ruined Jesus.

For those who aren’t aware of the story, Jimenez was 81 years old at the time she volunteered to restore her church’s fresco portrait of Jesus. By the time she was done with it, Jesus looked like a ten year old’s impressionistic canvas of Cornelius from Planet of the Apes. To add insult to injury, Jimenez arrogantly refused to apologize for her aberration in any significant manner and asked for a chunk of the profits from tourists who paid to gawk at the ruined artwork.   

Limits make for beautiful art, and the limits of fresco are especially severe. Fresco is a weird set of techniques that cannot be mastered without at least 10,000 hours of training; I think it is safe to say these are hours Jimenez did not put in during her eight decades on the planet.  

Just be glad she didn't get a chance to "restore" this one...

In Western music, we have a twelve note scale and what boils down to three main chords, I, IV, and V. The atonalists Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern thought they were being clever when they “broke” tonality by forcing a new form of music composition called serial music. Serial music is composition via tone rows, which takes Math for Dummies and applies it to the 12 note scale to deliberately randomize it. The result is music without coherence that always sounds like a horror movie soundtrack no matter what instruments are used to create the piece. Musique concrete is almost always a bunch of random creepy haunted house sounds interspersed with the computerized version of intestinal gas. That is to say, it sucks. 

“Thus the strategic configuration of power of those that excel in warfare is sharply focused, their constraints are precise," says Sun Tzu.   The beauty of a John Prine song is its limits. The chords he plays on his guitar aren’t especially exotic. Every now and then he’ll use a secondary dominant, but that’s a common enough chord usage that it is featured in Jingle Bells and Happy Birthday. His whole illustrious career, from its beginnings in the Chicago suburb of Maywood to his death in Nashville, was based on singing while strumming a guitar. Like a fellow music icon, Johnny Cash, he wasn’t a fan of overcomplexity. Prine’s unorthodoxy was his especially beautiful voice, exquisitely crafted lyrics, and the X factor. The X factor, that undefineable je ne sai quois that makes John Prine’s music great, is what he did within the strict confines of song form. His music may have been quieter and less edgy than Berg’s screechy operas and Schaefer’s sampled train commute, but he knew instinctively that limits are power, and for that, Prine’s songs are much more likely to survive into the distant future... thank the gods!   

"In antiquity, those that excelled in warfare first made themselves unconquerable." The position of strength is the leitmotif of this chapter. This theme has strong parallels with the discussion of evil in Dion Fortune's Cosmic Doctrine, especially this paragraph:

"When you resist evil you lock up good. You lock up the force of good which holds the evil inert.

This serves no useful purpose, unless you have a superabundance of good which shall stand upon the platform thus formed and leap up from it to greater heights. Therefore it is not enough to meet hate with love - evil with good. This is the course of the ignorant and the reason why exoteric religion has made so little impression in the world. You must hate with hate sufficiently to cause a locking up of the force. You must hate the hate and, having rendered evil inert by opposition, the love can take its stand upon the firm platform and use it as a thrust-block. Therefore you only oppose evil when you wish to do constructive work - when you wish to make something new. You never oppose the evil when you wish to destroy.

You make a vacuum around it. You prevent opposition from touching it. Then, being unopposed, it is free to follow the law of its own nature, which is, to join the motion of the Ring-Chaos."

Fading empires that are about to be vanquished love to engage in overreach, demonstrating the opposite approach to the formulas for success listed above by Sun Tzu and Dion Fortune. The US is a prime example of a failing strategy. A less obvious one is China. US and Chinese leaders are ambitious, but both empires are past the pull date of their glory days. When it was a manufacturing powerhouse, the US managed to get a leg up after World War II because of petroleum luck and the enthusiasm of its people. The Chinese attained their chokehold on the current world economy by ruthlessly exploiting the environment via the merciless exploitation of the Chinese people, a strategy that culminated in a fissured national spirit and a fractionated landscape. The Chinese Communist Party seeks to install its failed communism in the hearts of minds of every human being on the planet, by force if necessary. But China is a paper tiger with an increasingly cartoonishly evil image in a slow moving demographic collapse. They have severe energy and food dependency issues, and the albatross of a severely degraded environment. Neither of the above empires are strong in the way Genghis Khan's was in its day. Both countries are leaky dams that would do better to stop the posturing and drama and just mind their own business, removing the beams in their eyes before attending to their neighbor's motes.

Keeping Up With The Joneses

The "In this house, we believe..." sign is an advertisement often found on the front lawns of houses in elite wokester suburbia. I last encountered one when I was on foot in Naperville, Illinois walking to the auto repair shop. The sign is designed for foot pedestrians like me to see it -- it's too small to read if you are whizzing by in a car. I have only ever seen it in luxe suburban neighborhoods with mature trees, personal basketball hoops for the solitary male child in the house, and professionally laid concrete surrounded by $25 a pot perennials bought from Home Depot. The sign irritates me because it is the epitome of wokester hypocrisy. The neighborhood that the sign occupies is miles and miles away from the black lives that supposedly matter. In my lower middle class neighborhood, a black person isn't a rare sight because they're the immediate neighbors. In the sign's neighborhood, the only black people present and accounted for are the ones delivering a package from a truck or checking the electrical meter. If injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, then the people with the sign in their yard are Public Enemy Number One. Nevertheless, they are to be pitied. For one, they are mentally ill. They are not sitting pretty: their houses are overlarge and inefficient, their communities are dog-eat-dog, every family for itself. They are one salary class job loss away from total disaster and humiliation. Their yards are useless, often covered by monocultured lawn and swimming pools. When trouble inevitably arrives, they have no strength with which to overcome it.

Patience

"One who cannot be victorious assumes a defensive position". Most of us find ourselves in a defensive position these days; I certainly do. It has been helpful to identify my enemy as the salary class I once wished to take my place within. They are not my only enemy, of course. All of us have enemies in the form of dwindling petroleum resources. The government has proven over the last year and a half especially that it is not our friend.

For those living in less than ideal circumstances, such as adults who live with their parents like my husband and I did for many, many years, the best defense is psychological strength. Conformity and its accompanying urges are the enemy. When living with my parents, I felt buffeted by messages of my own inferiority for doing so despite the fact I appreciated being there and knew I would always treasure the time I got to spend with them, which proved to be true.

Even now, I can feel the pressure to own my own washing machine every time I schlep linens and clothes to the laundromat. If I lived in a neighborhood without laundromats every few blocks, I would feel this pressure much more acutely as it would be obvious that conformity in the form of owning a washing machine is "easier" than the machine-less alternative. Not having one's own washing machine kind of sucks but it is better for the planet. In remembering that small bonus, I have learned to use my washing machine free status as a thrust block.

Living with one's parents is actually a great defensive position for both parent and adult child. There are solid reasons why most religions had extended families living under one roof as a common household arrangement. One could seek advice from both one's elders and God/the gods at the same time if everyone lived in one house. I miss living with my parents and will not mind if I am forced to do so again. Plus they have a washing machine...

The Kids are Not All Right

Sun Tzu said that "Wrestling victories for which All under Heaven proclaim your excellence is not the pinnacle of excellence." Just because many normies (for the moment) believe that occupying a big suburban house with 2.5 kids and a pool with a virtue-signaling sign is the height of living does not mean that such a lifestyle is worth emulating. Normie suburban houses are nestled in terrible infrastructure and badly built. Their "safe" spaces are dangerous as anyone who has ever played as a child near a suburban street can attest: there is the constant danger of being run over by cars, and once the children are sequestered "safely" indoors and online, there is the imminent threat of psychological dysfunction as they disappear into the polluted astral realms of games and social media. There is an entire generation being raised to live in fear, molly-coddled and trained from birth to believe that there are salary class office jobs waiting for them once they complete their indoctrination in the form of college. My enemy is a village that has no idea how to raise a child. I call that a house of cards waiting for a strong breeze.

Instead of fighting them, the smart thing to do is to pay them no mind and to build our own strength so we can overcome them easily once natural forces have taken their toll. That's why I run a group on a platform I hate (Facebook) so that I can amass the people who are willing to go around Covid fearmongering to support local businesses and establishments that don't play into the Covid narrative. Instead of fighting the local public schools, I feel sane parents must find ways around them such as home-schooling. We avoid that which opposes us and when we are able, we use their bad example as a thrust-block.

Unless you are one of the lucky few, you have probably had to deal with a neighbor you didn’t get along with. I am not untouched by the bad neighbor experience. Sun Tzu gives us some help in learning how to battle a bad neighbor on both the large and the small scale in this chapter that may be of some use to those (like myself) currently embroiled in dealings with less-than-savory neighbor situations.

Sun Tzu the Good Neighbor

Right out of the gate, Sun Tzu says “preserving the enemy’s state-capital is best, destroying their state capital is second best.”

Sun Tzu wants everyone to get along. Though he doesn’t rule it out, he reminds us that it is vastly preferable not to obliterate our neighbor’s ability to thrive. Let’s say there is a family living in an average suburban house in an average suburban neighborhood called the Average Family. One day, a family of hoarders moves in next door. The hoarders are extremely well off (this is often the case with hoarders) and over the span of a few years, they cram their home with junk. Mr. and Mrs. Average could go ballistic on the hoarders, shunning them, shaming them, and generally abusing them, or they could go the high road and treat them as they would want to be treated: with kindness and compassion. Hoarding, after all, is a mental disorder and though those who hoard should not be enabled, bullying them serves little to no purpose except one’s own ego-gratification. If push truly comes to shove, for instance if the hoarders share common walls (and rats, roaches, and ants) with the average family’s duplex, the second option of attempting to destroy their capital comes into play. To destroy their capital, we could take any array of options from having them fined by the town, the association, or both, or we could employ natural magic against them in the form of hot foot powder. Sun Tzu’s preferred approach is to sweeten the relationship instead immediately going for the jugular.

There Goes the Neighborhood

Let’s say the hoarders move out… yay! The For Sale sign goes up and in a few months, there is a new neighbor moving in next door to the Average Family. Problem solved, right? Wrong! The family next door is now a bunch of drug dealers. Great.

Sun Tzu says that the highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy’s plans, but how do you attack the enemy’s plans when they’re dealing drugs? Magic and prayer would be a good place to turn in this case, because the only way you are going to get in their way is with the help of the gods. One would think that doing magic to destroy them would be the order of the day, but actually you should take the opposite approach. Doing magic to strengthen your own morale and praying for your own ability to transcend your law-breaking neighbor is the best strategy for undermining their deleterious effects upon you and your surroundings. Fortifying your own “vibe” with the power of beings that are much, much smarter than you will get in the way of your drug dealing neighbor far better than any hexes or curses you can throw at them. Trust me on this one, as I have an uncanny natural talent for hexing and cursing that I wisely no longer use. You can also ask others to pray for your well being… give those nosy Christians something to do, but make sure you specify they are not to pray for your conversion to Christianity unless that’s what you want!

The next level of the realization of warfare is to attack the enemy’s alliances. “Alliances” in our case applies to the drug dealer’s clients, suppliers, and the municipality in which they are doing illegal business. If your neighbors are drug dealers, you will have to consider reporting them to the authorities. You will want to talk to your neighbors, who might also know what they are doing. You might consider hiring an investigator or looking into their criminal records. The City Council might be able to act on your behalf depending on the situation.

The next level of the realization of warfare is to attack their army. When you call the police on your bad neighbor’s loud party or leave a terse message on their voicemail, this is what you are doing. You aren’t attacking the head of the enemy: you are doing nothing to drive away the forces that keep the demand for drugs in full swing. You are merely throwing grenades at foot soldiers.

The lowest level of the realization of warfare is to attack their fortified cities. Now we are looking at the tactics of Antifa and BLM, the lowest of the low. You decide to torment your neighbor by marching around his house with a bunch of your own posse and a bullhorn. You purposefully draw the police to your protest so they may hear you whine about the injustice and unfairness they are allowing.

Sun Tzu always argues for subjugating the enemy without fighting whenever possible. As frustrating as “leave it to the gods” and “do self-encouraging magic” sounds, it really is the best and most effective strategy.

A Tale of Two Neighbors' Resources

Sun Tzu goes on to talk about resources and how they pertain to warfare. If you have ten times the drug dealer neighbor’s resources, you might be able to buy the house they are in and evict them. You could certainly afford to move if you don’t mind moving. At the very least, if you are not able to be kind and friendly to them, you can have a wall or fence erected between the two of you.

If you have five times their resources, you can consider getting legal on them. You might not be able to stop them from doing business, but you might be quietly able to make it difficult for them to proceed by reporting them to their internet service provider or slowing the flow of customers in and out of their door.

If you have double their resources, Sun Tzu suggest dividing your forces. You could acquire a pied-a-terre in another state so that you can take vacations during their annoying busy seasons. You might buy a nearby house and rent out the original residence to someone who doesn’t mind being next door to a drug dealer until the drug dealer leaves. You might send the kids to go live with their grandmother for a few weeks at a time.

If you are equal in strength, you can engage your enemy. You have every right to be there, after all, and they are breaking laws. Can doesn’t mean “should”. My thoughts are that you shouldn’t expect too much from the police these days, at least not in the US.

Finally, you can avoid your enemy if you are outmatched by them. This is what I have done in the case of my own bad neighbors when they were doing illegal things in their space. The Average Family might put up a large address plaque on their house to deter addicts and other dealers from mistakenly flocking to their door instead of the dealer's place. They would do well to plant trees and bushes on the border between the two houses, which will add a magical protective effect as well as a visual shield. Periodically sprinkling salt laced with hot pepper at the edge of their property will also keep their customers and colleagues from wandering in the direction of your house. Putting up a decorative mandala-like symbol somewhere near the door such as a hex sign confounds the negative energies of addiction that swirl around your bad neighbor and their clientele. The ultimate avoidance of the enemy, of course, is moving.

Sun Tzu says not to entangle the army if you don’t have to. Right now, if the Average Family decides to move its troops, they might end up getting soaked. We are in a massively inflated property bubble. If the Average Family sells high, they’ll only end up buying high somewhere else and in a few years, will end up under water in their mortgage or rent. So pick your battles carefully.

Sun Tzu also talks about generals who do not understand the army’s affairs yet tries to direct them like its own civil administration. The Average Family might think that they are owed law and order in their neighborhood because they are law-abiding citizens. They are naive. When you are dealing with a bad neighbor, are you looking at the general symptoms of decline in your geographical area and the larger landscape of your country? We are in a Long Descent where even the “good” neighborhoods are infested by crime. Many people can no longer make an honest living even if they want to. Drug dealing, prostitution, and homelessness is going to touch the Average Family because that is modern life. Not-In-My-Backyard or NIMBYism is harder to sustain with each passing year.

Know your enemy. Their goal is simple: Continue staying afloat by selling drugs. In the case of hoarders, it is to accumulate lots of stuff until they die, whereupon they will quickly realize they can’t take it with them. They aren't your friends, but they also aren't Josef Stalin.

More importantly, know yourself. Know your own weaknesses and don’t sink to the level of hating your neighbor. They may be parasites, but aren’t we all? Takes one to know one.

In 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.

"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

A few Tuesdays ago, I felt the call to study the Art of War. Unbeknownst to me, Dreamwidth bloggers Violet Cabra and Read Old Things had already felt the same urge. As most of you can sense, there are some big changes happening in the astral plane right now. I believe that the urge to study Sun Tzu's Art of War is part of that. Though I cannot speak for my fellow Ecosophians, I believe I got the transmission from Ares himself or one of his messengers. I have prayed to Ares before to understand and begin to resolve issues in my personal karma.

Ares, at least as far as I can tell, controls the discharge and accumulation of the harshest forms of karma. He is a fair god: he gives us plenty of opportunities to deal with our karma outside of violence, but because we are human, it's unfortunately rare for us to discharge our karma via the higher road of being willing to face it and deal with it upfront. Instead, we tend to put it off, place blame, and make it someone else's problem until it comes flying back in our faces in the form of a war, a natural disaster, or a more personal form of misfortune.

This series will have an overarching theme about dealing with bad karma as it comes, preventing it wherever possible. I will be doing these posts in the place of the normal post that occurs Mondays or Wednesdays on the third Tuesday of each month until the book is complete. Like John Michael Greer's book club, I'll field new comments for the month of the post until the new post arrives.

Thanks for joining me in this discussion. I know I probably don't need to ask, but I have a no-profanity policy on all of my posts. Thanks for your understanding.

Sun Tzu opens the first chapter with:

"Warfare is the greatest affair of the State, the basis of life and death, the Way (Tao) to survival or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."

Life Is A Battlefield

This is to say that life itself is a constant war. We live on the material plane. It is NASTY here. The meat plane is a battlefield in every single way. Nevertheless, even in more subtle planes of imagination (astral) and the spirit, there are always forces fighting against others, pushing and pulling, struggling against limits presented by the Universe itself and of each other. That's just our world. What Sun Tzu is saying is that you have a choice: you can sit idly by and refuse to contemplate the Eternal Fight -- however, that way lies extinction.

Warfare is the greatest affair of the State can also be interpreted in the most direct sense. A country is made or broken by its attitude towards war. That's why the US's terminally frivolous, imperialistic, denialist approach to the occupation of other countries is breaking the US. Such a strategy can only work for so long: compare the revered soldiers of World War I and II to the reviled, disposable soldiers of Vietnam. Investment in previous failures has not been thoroughly pondered and analyzed enough for the US to sensibly back down from Empire and wars for cheaply available petroleum. The guilty parties who will be on the receiving end from the cavalcade of bad decisions in the form of mass karma include me, a person who drives a car every day as an act of continuing Sartrean bad faith.

Friends, Enemies, Frenemies

Denial of war does not make it any less real or pertinent. To analyze war, you must ask yourself: "Who is my enemy and why am I fighting them?"

For me, the enemy is my former friends and the people I grew up with who still dwell in the gilded cage of the upper middle class I fell from approximately a decade ago. They are in denial that they are racists who accuse people of lower classes (and these days, anyone who disagrees with them) of being racist so they can continue to believe in their own virtuousness. They are the mainstream media dog whistlers who co-sign shutdowns and riots that collapsed the world economy. They are the obedient, brainwashed maskturbators who decided nobody who worked in the arts was "essential" enough to continue to make an honest living.

My enemy is the clueless drug dealer in my neighborhood who could get me shot at any time because of the drugs he moves across competing drug-dealer's neighborhoods.

My enemy is the government official who wants to raise my taxes and take away my rights. My enemy is the Federal Reserve, a private bank that exists in order to enslave me and everyone I love.

My enemy is my former self, a person who put very bad patterns into play that I've had to back out of and make amends for in my current path towards being a better self.

Picking Your Battles

There are five types of questions that we are instructed to ask of ourselves and of our side before going into battle. Knowing the answers to these questions guarantees victory... and that's the catch. It would take a god to know all of the answers to the questions. Nevertheless, we are told to ask them, and there are five main aspects we should ask about.

The first question, "Who has the Tao?" relates to the specific world you occupy. Sun Tzu says that "the Tao causes people to be fully in accord with the ruler." This is the idea of going in the direction of the wind rather than against it. As much as American culture loves the trope of the fearless rebel who saves the Lost Ark from the Nazis with nary a scratch for his efforts, it's much easier to work with the nature of one's time and place in the world. The Tao is your overall environment, most of which you can do nothing about. As an example, I once threw everything I had at acquiring a live-work situation where I would teach lessons in a commercial space and live above the space in an apartment. Because of the anti-pragmatic spirit of the times and the particular part of the map where I have settled, suburban Chicagoland, this arrangement quickly proved to be impossible on my modest lower middle class budget. The zeitgeist of the times was against me six years ago when I tried to obtain grants from fast-talking development council grifters and real estate shady ladies in search of big commissions. My Lost Ark: the suburban arrangement "without a future" in the scathing words of James Howard Kunstler, was not to be recovered from the SS, at least not by me personally, at any rate. All's well that ends well: I live in a modest house that isn't ideal for hosting music lessons, though one day I may teach out of it yet out of necessity.

The Karate Kim

The second and third questions, those of generals, Heaven, and Earth, has to do with limits. Who is better at working with limits, you or your enemy? This question alludes to the art of choosing your battles wisely. When I was a child, I took karate classes in hopes of managing the inappropriate amount of anger I had towards other human beings despite my soft, plush suburban upbringing. Though karate helped me to be in peak physical condition as a youngster, it absolutely was not meant for me and I think it was more damaging than helpful. I went into my first tournament thinking that I could kick butt. I was paired to fight with a chunky girl of my own age who, at twice my physical size, beat me into the ground, causing me bruises and more anger than I started with. The limits of my anger were quickly realized: all bark and no bite, no trophy, no resolution until the novels I would write many, many years later in order to exorcise the demons of past lives.

Discipline, Political Correctness, and Slimebaggery

The fourth question, "Whose laws and orders are more thoroughly implemented?" is a question of discipline. A sloppy army, perchance one that lowers its physical requirement of pull-ups from 30 to 3 in order to appease the self-appointed tyrants of political gender correctness such as the US Marine Corp (they're lowering the requirements for men because women cannot physically measure up), will have no chance against the modern equivalent of Sparta. For us non-soldiers, we have to ask which path we're traveling -- the Left Hand Path, the Right Hand Path, or the Middle Way of bouncing around until we evolve at the glacial pace nature designed for us. The Left Hand Path hopes to cheat natural law, to gain ground by stomping others into the morass, to invoke the heady powers of sleaziness and degradation in a frenzy of self-lathering adulation. The Right Hand Path demands recognition of natural law and adherence to strict codes of live and let live; that is, no cheating and attempting to cajole others to force your own solipsistic will on the Universe. The Middle Way, the most common approach, is the bumbling Way of the Iceberg, reacting and not acting unless pressed upon pain of death. Arguably, the Chinese Communist Party, with its Left Hand Path wargames of international demoralization, mass enslavement, and other slimebaggery, is headed for history's dustbin of overwrought empires right along the US... eventually. In the short run, however, he with the most disciplined team wins, as can be proven at any kid's sports championship near you.

The Jewish Woman Who Was Like Donald Trump

When asking yourself "Whose forces are stronger?", it's another way of asking "What are my weaknesses?" This means we have to be honest about the shadows we are projecting, lest we end up going into battle with the enemy who is actually not the enemy but a shadow projection of our worst selves; a mirage. Of course I'm going to bring up the Left, those ardent love-haters of the projected Shadow. I once used to pal around with a vegan who loves to hate Donald Trump. She would be horrified of my analysis of how much she is like Donald Trump. Like him, she is extremely crass, American, and loud. Many of her so-called achievements have more to do with being born to wealthy parents than her own natural talents or hard work. Like Donald Trump, she is overweight and aging. She too likes to act as judge, jury, and executioner when someone says something she doesn't like, lashing out with vile ad hominems that have no place in civilized argument. No wonder she loves to obsess about Donald Trump -- what would she do without such a convenient straw man to target in place of working on herself?

When we ask ourselves, "Whose forces and troops are better trained?" This asks if we truly have allies in intimate places, and if so, are they prepared for what could be thrown at them for being associated with the likes of us? For instance, there is a whole crowd of people I do not envy, and that is the crowd of parents with young children. As someone who works with children, from my vantage point, there are few children escaping unscathed from the year plus of semi-school and mask theater we've all been forced to take sides in. The kids being raised by double-masking parents ought to be able to sue someday for irreparable damage due to child abuse. Such children, upon adulthood, will have been trained to fear life itself. I cannot see it ending well for them.

Good Business Practices

Lastly, there is the idea of clarity of punishment and reward. My husband has had quite a few jobs in the last dozen or so years. Most of them have featured the usual bumbling, inept business heads that make the American workplace an infamous cesspool of misery as portrayed in the film The Office. One place, however, had a great policy left over from its glory days of fair corporate practices, and that was of rewarding employees with good attendance with paid time off and punishing employees who showed up late without calling or otherwise notifying management with immediate termination. My husband, steadfast and punctual, racked up paid time off which he happily used to do projects around our house.

Sun Tzu all but guarantees our success if we take into account every factor mentioned above. Me? I don't think so, but thinking it through is worth a shot.

The Lies of War

His next advice to us concerns warfare as a Way (Tao) of deception. This is classic poker -- don't show anyone your cards. My mom is the classical embodiment of Midwestern Nice. This is because she actually is extremely nice, but it is also because Midwesterners are not raised to wear their hearts on their sleeves. Midwestern Nice is the ultimate poker face: you don't tell someone how you actually feel when they ask, "Hi, how are you?" That would be against the rules. You are supposed to say "Fine, how are you?" and suss out the undercurrents of what's really going on from their body language and subjects they do and do not cover.

A Point of Contention and of Agreement

Sun Tzu suggests creating disorder in one's enemy's forces in order to take them and perturb them when they are angry. Here is where I diverge from Sun Tzu. If you truly hate your enemy, and I truly hate mine, you will hate them enough to ignore them. You won't have time or interest in creating disorder in their forces because you'll be too busy creating a thrust block in order to push yourself far above them. I hate the maskturbators, but instead of trying to create disorder in their ranks by yelling at them in grocery stores, I go to the grocery stores that don't force me to diaper my face for luxury communism. I go around them.

Sun Tzu then suggests if they are rested, to force them to exert themselves. I agree here, and so does Donald Trump, who often used his Twitter feed or other publicity to force the Left to spend all of its energy in predictable outrage while he quietly passed laws or made deals that helped the lower and middle class workers of the US. As I predicted, Donald Trump now rules from the sidelines as the Left hangs itself with the rope it cheated to acquire.

In Conclusion

As for attacking when the other side's troops are unprepared, I think of my garden, which is much easier to till in the early spring than any other time of year. After the harsh March ice (we had a mini-snowstorm today, good times) and pounding April rains, the soil is just loose enough to get seeds in. Any later and I will be battling weeds, hardness, and dry Illinois clay. I "attack" before my enemies (really my frenemies, because I love weeds) get their foothold on my garden, and then I mulch so my plants of choice have a chance at becoming fully grown.

Sun Tzu then suggests we retire to the ancestral temple to determine whether or not we will be victorious... I think this is his way of saying Meditate On It!