Armies Related Quotes

You want a blood relative to lead your army? Get Marcie. She likes ordering people around. She'll be a natural.

Dear Child, Sometimes on your travel through hell, you meet people that think they are in heaven because of their cleverness and ability to get away with things. Travel past them because they don't understand who they have become and never will. These type of people feel justified in revenge and will never learn mercy or forgiveness because they live by comparison. They are the people that don't care about anyone, other than who is making them feel confident. They don’t understand that their deity is not rejoicing with them because of their actions, rather he is trying to free them from their insecurities, by softening their heart. They rather put out your light than find their own. They don't have the ability to see beyond the false sense of happiness they get from destroying others. You know what happiness is and it isn’t this. Don’t see their success as their deliverance. It is a mask of vindication which has no audience, other than their own kind. They have joined countless others that call themselves “survivors”. They believe that they are entitled to win because life didn’t go as planned for them. You are not like them. You were not meant to stay in hell and follow their belief system. You were bound for greatness. You were born to help them by leading. Rise up and be the light home. You were given the gift to see the truth. They will have an army of people that are like them and you are going to feel alone. However, your family in heaven stands beside you now. They are your strength and as countless as the stars. It is time to let go! Love, Your Guardian Angel

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

War doesn’t only kill humans; it also kills love, trust and relations!

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing.

[Standing armies] constantly threaten other nations with war by giving the appearance that they are prepared for it, which goads nations into competing with one another in the number of men under arms, and this practice knows no bounds. And since the costs related to maintaining peace will in this way finally become greater than those of a short war, standing armies are the cause of wars of aggression that are intended to end burdensome expenditures. Moreover, paying men to kill or be killed appears to use them as mere machines and tools in the hands of another (the nation), which is inconsistent with the rights of humanity.

The core symbols we use for God represent what we take to be the highest good....These symbols or images shape our worldview, our ethical system, and our social practice--how we relate to one another. For instance, [Elizabeth A.] Johnson suggests that if a religion speaks about God as warrior, using militaristic language such as how "he crushes his enemies" and summoning people to become soldiers in God's army, then the people tend to become militaristic and aggressive. Likewise, if the key symbol of God is that of a male king (without any balancing feminine imagery), we become a culture that values and enthrones men and masculinity.

How come we can invent better ways to kill each other, but not one to preserve peace!

Everyday in my office I meet consumers of the modern ideology of marriage. They bought the product, got it home, and found that it was missing a few pieces. So they come to the repair shop to fix it so it looks like what's on the box. They take their relational aspirations as a given－both what they want and what they deserve to have－and are upset when the romantic ideal doesn't jibe with the unromantic reality. It's no surprise that this utopian vision is gathering a growing army of the disenchanted in its wake.

Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret? [Theodore Roosevelt 1901 relating reports of water torture in the Philippines to lynching in the south]

Do either of y’all know what a viscount is?” June is saying, halfway through a cucumber sandwich. “I’ve met, like, five of them, and I keep smiling politely as if I know what it means when they say it. Alex, you took comparative international governmental relational things. Whatever. What are they?” “I think it’s that thing when a vampire creates an army of crazed sex waifs and starts his own ruling body.

What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a notion fixed, canonic, and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal.

As to the ancient historians, from Herodotus to Tacitus, we credit them as far as they relate things probable and credible, and no further: for if we do, we must believe the two miracles which Tacitus relates were performed by Vespasian, that of curing a lame man, and a blind man, in just the same manner as the same things are told of Jesus Christ by his historians. We must also believe the miracles cited by Josephus, that of the sea of Pamphilia opening to let Alexander and his army pass, as is related of the Red Sea in Exodus. These miracles are quite as well authenticated as the Bible miracles, and yet we do not believe them; consequently the degree of evidence necessary to establish our belief of things naturally incredible, whether in the Bible or elsewhere, is far greater than that which obtains our belief to natural and probable things.

within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labour are brought about at the cost of the individual labourer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital. But all methods for the production of surplus-value are at the same time methods of accumulation; and every extension of accumulation becomes again a means for the development of those methods. It follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse. The law, finally, that always equilibrates the relative surplus population, or industrial reserve army, to the extent and energy of accumulation, this law rivets the labourer to capital more firmly than the wedges of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital.

All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. I'm meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or Siobhan, who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs. But Siobhan said we have to use those words because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong, which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we're getting off the bus and they shout, "Special Needs! Special Needs!" But I don't take any notice because I don't listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have a Swiss Army knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self-defense and I won't go to prison.

Colonisation is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had a ‘nobler’, more ‘naturally’ aristocratic dimensions than the ‘coarse’ and ‘bestial’ Hutus. On the ‘nasal index’ for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimetres longer and nearly five millimetres narrower than the median Hutu nose.

On Truth and Lie What is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions. from "On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense

Down through the druid wood I saw Wildman join with Cleaver Creek, put on weight, exchange his lean and hungry look for one of more well-fed fanaticism. Then came Chichamoonga, the Indian Influence, whooping along with its banks war-painted with lupine and columbine. Then Dog Creek, then Olson Creek, then Weed Creek. Across a glacier-raked gorge I saw Lynx Falls spring hissing and spitting from her lair of fire-bright vine maple, claw the air with silver talons, then crash screeching into the tangle below. Darling Ida Creek slipped demurely from beneath a covered bridge to add her virginal presence, only to have the family name blackened immediately after by the bawdy rollicking of her brash sister, Jumping Nellie. There followed scores of relatives of various nationalities: White Man Creek, Dutchman Creek, Chinaman Creek, Deadman Creek, and even a Lost Creek, claiming with a vehement roar that, in spite of hundreds of other creeks in Oregon bearing the same name, she was the one and only original...Then Leaper Creek...Hideout Creek...Bossman Creek...I watched them one after another pass beneath their bridges to join in the gorge running alongside the highway, like members of a great clan marshaling into an army, rallying, swelling, marching to battle as the war chant became deeper and richer.

Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist who has been carrying out a project studying the archipelago of US overseas military bases. She made the fascinating observation that almost all of these bases organize outreach programs, in which soldiers venture out to repair schoolrooms or to perform free dental checkups in nearby towns and villages. The ostensible reason for the programs was to improve relations with local communities, but they rarely have much impact in that regard; still, even after the military discovered this, they kept the programs up because they had such an enormous psychological impact on the soldiers, many of whom would wax euphoric when describing them: for example, “This is why I joined the army,” “This is what military service is really all about—not just defending your country, it’s about helping people!” Soldiers allowed to perform public service duties, they found, were two or three times more likely to reenlist. I remember thinking, “Wait, so most of these people really want to be in the Peace Corps?” And I duly looked it up and discovered: sure enough, to be accepted into the Peace Corps, you need to already have a college degree. The US military is a haven for frustrated altruists.

In the past when I was younger my friends and relations had known what to do with me: some of them used to advise me to volunteer for the army, others to get a job in a pharmacy, and others in the telegraph department; now that I am over twenty-five, that grey hairs are beginning to show on my temples, and that I have been already in the army, and in a pharmacy, and in the telegraph department, it would seem that all earthly possibilities have been exhausted, and people have given up advising me, and merely sigh or shake their heads.

We were no longer, technically, children although in many ways I am quite sure that we were. Childish has become a term of contempt. "Don't be childish, darling." "I hope to Christ I am. Don't be childish yourself." It is possible to be grateful that no one that you would willingly associate with you say, "Be mature. Be well-balanced, be well-adjusted." Africa, being as old as it is, makes all people except the professional invaders and spoilers into children. No one says to anyone in Africa, "Why don't you grow up?" . . . Men know that they are children in relation to the country and, as in armies, seniority and senility ride close together. But to have the heart of a child is not a disgrace. It is an honor. A man must comport himself as a man. . . . But it is never a reproach that he has kept a child's heart, a child's honesty and a child's freshness and nobility.

Conquest occurred through violence, and over-expolitation and oppression necessitate continued violence, so the army is present. There would be no contradiction in that, if terror reigned everywhere in the world, but the colonizer enjoys, in the mother country, democratic rights that the colonialist system refuses to the colonized native. In fact, the colonialist system favors population growth to reduce the cost of labor, and it forbids assimilation of the natives, whose numerical superiority, if they had voting rights, would shatter the system. Colonialism denies human rights to human beings whom it has subdued by violence, and keeps them by force in a state of misery and ignorance that Marx would rightly call a subhuman condition. Racism is ingrained in actions, institutions, and in the nature of the colonialist methods of production and exchange. Political and social regulations reinforce one another. Since the native is subhuman, the Declaration of Human Rights does not apply to him; inversely, since he has no rights, he is abandoned without protection to inhuman forces - brought in with the colonialist praxis, engendered every moment by the colonialist apparatus, and sustained by relations of production that define two sorts of individuals - one for whom privilege and humanity are one, who becomes a human being through exercising his rights; and the other, for whom a denial of rights sanctions misery, chronic hunger, ignorance, or, in general, 'subhumanity.

In the world of intellectual property, armies of lawyers (often employed by non-practicing entities, as I mentioned in chapter 6) do battle to seize the property of others—usually small businesses that are relatively defenseless.

When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The courde of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system's defeat and demise. [...] The central subject, the essence, the core relations between Europeans and Africans during the colonial era, was the difference of race, of skin color. Everything-each eaxchange, connection, conflict-was translated into the language of black and white. [...] Into the African was inculcated the notion that the white man was untouchable, unconquerable, that whites constitute a homogenous, cohesive force. [...] Then, suddenly, Africans recruited into the British and French armies in Europe observed that the white men were fighting one another, shooting one another, destroying one another's cities. It was revelation, a surprise, a shock.

Mobile bands of hunter-gatherers are relatively egalitarian, and their political sphere is confined to the band’s own territory and to shifting alliances with neighboring bands. With the rise of dense, sedentary, food-producing populations came the rise of chiefs, kings, and bureaucrats. Such bureaucracies were essential not only to governing large and populous domains but also to maintaining standing armies, sending out fleets of exploration, and organizing wars of conquest.

To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin. I was unable to take the professional view that all successful actions were gains. Our rebels were not materials, like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting our leadership. We were not in command nationally, but by invitation; and our men were volunteers, individuals, local men, relatives, so that a death was a personal sorrow to many in the army. Even from the purely military point of view the assault seemed to me a blunder.

I guess I was always looking for something. What it was, I didn’t know. I wanted help from the VA, but didn’t want to go back, didn’t want to be subjected to that second-rate treatment any longer. I wanted to find peace within myself, but didn’t know how or where to locate it. I wanted to be a sergeant again, a writer, less angry, a better husband, and to ward off the constant bombardment of war-related thoughts. Most of all, I didn’t want any more Americans coming home from Iraq in boxes or with jingle-jangled minds.

He did not see the huge armies but the world divided into two opposites camps: the right and the wrong, the good and the evil, the aggressor and the defender, the unrighteous and the righteous, the arrogant and the humble. It is not the people who are inclined to fight against each other but the men who lead them. Humanity as a rule wants to relate with each other and wars are an exception to this rule.

One of the secrets of the Muslim army's power was its relatively liberal attitude toward the religions of the defeated people-provided they were monoththeists, of course. Muhammad's commandment to treat Jews and Christians as "People of The book" gave them legal protection.

For the correct Marxist classification of the proletariat-the class which is forced by socio-economic compulsion to sell its labour-power to the capitalist owners of the means of production – implies that both variations in the level of the reserve army of labour, and the variegated relations between the ‘purely physiological’ and ‘moral-historical’ components of the value of labour-power,63 are of decisive importance for the proletarian’s immediate destiny.

They say that you need to ride the rails for a while to understand the traveling blues. They're wrong. To understand the traveling blues you need to be locked down somewhere. In a cell. Or in the army. Someplace where you're caged. Someplace where smokestack lightning looks like a faraway beacon of impossible freedom.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

The hardhearted person never sees people as a people, but rather as mere objects or as impersonal cogs in an ever-turning wheel. In the vast wheel of industry, he sees men as hands. In the massive wheel of big city life, he sees men as digits in a multitude. In the deadly wheel of army life, he sees men as numbers in a regiment. He depersonalizes life.

There are few wars in which they make not a considerable part of the armies of both sides: so it often falls out that they who are related, and were hired in the same country, and so have lived long and familiarly together, forgetting both their relations and former friendship, kill one another upon no other consideration than that of being hired to it for a little money by princes of different interests; and such a regard have they for money that they are easily wrought on by the difference of one penny a day to change sides. 

Every authoritarian structure can be visualized as a pyramid with an eye on the top. This is the typical flow-chart of any government, any corporation, any Army, any bureaucracy, any mammalian pack. On each rung, participants bear a burden of nescience in relation to those above them. That is, they must be very, very careful that the natural sensory activities of being conscious organisms — the acts of seeing, hearing, smelling, drawing inferences from perception, etc. — are in accord with the reality-tunnel of those above them. This is absolutely vital; pack status (and “job security”) depends on it. It is much less important — a luxury that can easily be discarded — that these perceptions be in accord with objective fact.

A good anesthesiologist is essential to any important surgical effort. Without one, the greatest surgeon in the world is helpless. With one, relatively untalented surgeons can look good.

Nowhere do “politicians” form a more separate and powerful section of the nation than precisely in North America. There, each of the two major parties which alternatively succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies of the Union as well as of the separate states, or who make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory are rewarded with positions. It is well known how the Americans have been trying for thirty years to shake off this yoke, which has become intolerable, and how in spite of it all they continue to sink ever deeper in this swamp of corruption. It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. And nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends – and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality dominate and plunder it.

The weather was worsening, but winter was not the enemy of the Russian soldier; thirteen million pairs of fleece-lined boots stamped Made in the USA ensured that the Red Army marched in relative comfort.

In the economic sphere too, the ability to hold a hammer or press a button is becoming less valuable than before. In the past, there were many things only humans could do. But now robots and computers are catching up, and may soon outperform humans in most tasks. True, computers function very differently from humans, and it seems unlikely that computers will become humanlike any time soon. In particular, it doesn’t seem that computers are about to gain consciousness, and to start experiencing emotions and sensations. Over the last decades there has been an immense advance in computer intelligence, but there has been exactly zero advance in computer consciousness. As far as we know, computers in 2016 are no more conscious than their prototypes in the 1950s. However, we are on the brink of a momentous revolution. Humans are in danger of losing their value, because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. Until today, high intelligence always went hand in hand with a developed consciousness. Only conscious beings could perform tasks that required a lot of intelligence, such as playing chess, driving cars, diagnosing diseases or identifying terrorists. However, we are now developing new types of non-conscious intelligence that can perform such tasks far better than humans. For all these tasks are based on pattern recognition, and non-conscious algorithms may soon excel human consciousness in recognising patterns. This raises a novel question: which of the two is really important, intelligence or consciousness? As long as they went hand in hand, debating their relative value was just a pastime for philosophers. But in the twenty-first century, this is becoming an urgent political and economic issue. And it is sobering to realise that, at least for armies and corporations, the answer is straightforward: intelligence is mandatory but consciousness is optional.

The Nephilim (Aldebaran’s extraterrestrials in Maria’s messages) who survived the great deluge returned to Phoenicia; the Bible made reference to their return. They lived with the Phoenicians for 33 years and 33 days in Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Baalbeck. The number 33.33 represents the period of the Tana-wir or Tanwir, which means enlightenment. The number 33.33 became the most important and the most secret number in Phoenician occultism, architecture, and numerology, because it refers to their place of origin, Jabal Haramoun (Mt. Hermon in Lebanon) which is located exactly at 33.33° East and 33.33° North.)   The number 33 is equally important in the Masonic rite King Hiram created with the assistance of King Solomon. This number is closely related to the compass and square, which were given to the Phoenicians as a gift from the Anunnaki lords. This explains how and why the early Phoenicians excelled in building ships, navigation and land-seas maps making, and surpassed their neighbors in these fields, beyond belief! Worth mentioning here, that the Egyptian Sphinx was built some 11,000 years ago, before the Biblical Great Flood by the early Phoenicians, the Nephilim and an army of Djinns created by the Anunnaki.

And when I started at NYU and I met all those kids right out of undergrad, I thought, Hell, yeah, I’m a fucking Marine. Some of them, highly educated kids at a top five law school, didn’t even know what the Marine Corps did. (“It’s like a stronger Army, right?”) Few of them followed the wars at all, and most subscribed to a “It’s a terrible mess, so let’s not think about it too much” way of thinking. Then there were the political kids, who had definite opinions and were my least favorite to talk to. A lot of these overlapped with the insufferable public interest crowd, who hated the war, couldn’t see why anybody’d ever do corporate law, didn’t understand why anyone would ever join the military, didn’t understand why anyone would ever want to own a gun, let alone fire one, but who still paid lip service to the idea that I deserved some sort of respect and that I was, in an imprecise way that was clearly related to action movies and recruiting commercials, far more “hard-core” than your average civilian. So sure, I was a Marine. At the very least, I wasn’t them.

For it was the horrible reality of the ever increasing death and devastation in Vietnam that galvanized growing numbers of Americans to demand an end to the terror. The pulverizing destruction of a tiny nation in the name of self-determination, and the related barbarization of the once proud American Army, were gruesome and shameful ways to learn the nature of disaster. The final terror would come to be if ending the war did not lead to fundamental changes in the American outlook, in American society, and hence in American foreign policy.

Well, I think that we constantly have to make connections. So that when we are engaged in the struggle against racist violence, in relation to Ferguson, Michael Brown, and New York, Eric Garner, we can’t forget the connections with Palestine. So in many ways I think we have to engage in an exercise of intersectionality. Of always foregrounding those connections so that people remember that nothing happens in isolation. That when we see the police repressing protests in Ferguson we also have to think about the Israeli police and the Israeli army repressing protests in occupied Palestine.

Consumer debt is the lifeblood of our economy. All modern nation-states are built on deficit spending. Debt has come to be the central issue of international politics. But nobody seems to know exactly what it is, or how to think about it. The very fact that we don't know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power. If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt- above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong. Mafiosi understand this. So do the commanders of conquering armies. For thousands of years, violent men have been able to tell their victims that these victims owe them something. If nothing else, they "owe them their lives" (a telling phrase) because they haven't been killed.

raw state militias patrolling the west with seasoned troops better capable of confronting the Indians of the Great Plains. South of the Arkansas, this meant eradicating the Kiowa and the Comanche, who were blocking movement along the Santa Fe Trail into New Mexico. North of the Platte, it meant killing Red Cloud and Sitting Bull. General Ulysses S. Grant, the Army’s commander in chief, had long planned such a moment. The previous November, the day after the Sand Creek massacre, Grant summoned Major General John Pope to his Virginia headquarters to put such plans in motion. Despite his relative youth, the forty-three-year-old Pope was an old-school West Pointer and a topographical engineer-surveyor whose star had risen with several early successes on western fronts in the Civil War. It had dimmed just as rapidly when Lincoln placed him in command of the eastern forces; Pope was thoroughly outfoxed by Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Pope had been effectively exiled to St. Paul, Minnesota, until Grant recalled him to consolidate under one command a confusing array of bureaucratic Army “departments” and “districts” west of St. Louis. Grant named Pope the commanding general of a new Division of the Missouri,

The Hindu epic the Bhagavad Gita relates how in the midst of a murderous civil war, the great warrior prince Arjuna is consumed with doubt. Seeing his friends and relatives in the opposing army, he hesitates over whether to fight and kill them. He begins to wonder what good and evil are, who decided it, and what the purpose of human life is.

It was from Granny's conversations, year after year, that the meager details of Grandpa's life came to me. When the Civil War broke out, he ran off from his master and groped his way through the Confederate lines to the North. He darkly boasted of having killed "mo'n mah fair share of those damn rebels" while en route to enlist in the Union Army. Militantly resentful of slavery, he joined the Union Army... Mustered out, he returned to the South and, during elections, guarded ballot boxes with his army rifle so that Negroes could vote. But when the Negro had been driven from political power, his spirit had been crushed. He was convinced that the war had not really ended, that it would start again.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.

The Belgian period was the beginning of the most successful era in the history of the Congo. It was the only period in which it had an effective police force and army. The country was being run orderly, was relatively incorrupt and capable of maintaining internal order and of protecting its sovereignty. Only then, under the Belgians, was that the case.

This was crazy. Celeste had merely said her relatives would love to have her stay with them, they had plenty of room. She hadn’t said that they could have housed a large portion of the Confederate army. Well, she’d stay one night and if things didn’t work out, she’d seen an inn in the little town they’d just driven through. It at least had a coat of paint.

though she isn’t stupid at all. “Wow, other people are mastering this, even people who were as clueless as I was in the beginning, and I just can’t seem to learn to think in this manner.” 5. Caroline Sacks was experiencing what is called “relative deprivation,” a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer during the Second World War. Stouffer was commissioned by the U.S. Army to examine the attitudes and morale of American soldiers, and he ended up studying half a million men and women, looking at everything from how soldiers viewed their commanding officers to how black soldiers felt they were being treated to how difficult soldiers found it to serve in isolated outposts. But one set of questions Stouffer asked stood out. He quizzed both

This is the history of governments, - one man does something which is to bind another. A man who cannot be acquainted with me, taxes me; looking from afar at me, ordains that a part of my labour shall go to this or that whimsical end, not as I, but as he happens to fancy. Behold the consequence. Of all debts, men are least willing to pay the taxes. What a satire is this on government! Everywhere they think they get their money's worth, except for these. Hence, the less government we have, the better, - the fewer laws, and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be owned, but a shabby imitation. That which all things tend to educe, which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is character; that is the end of nature, to reach unto this coronation of her king. To educate the wise man, the State exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State unnecessary. The wise man is the State. He needs no army, fort, or navy, - he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him; no vantage ground, no favourable circumstance. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the lawgiver; no money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is; no experience, for the life of the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him, needs not husband and educate a few, to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers.

Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re­create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, busi­ness enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand. Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifi­cally accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social relations. Some societies (including colonial New England) have explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and possession by the devil. The explanation makes sense to those whose daily lives produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of rational "evidence" disprove it.

A Congressional subcommittee hearing in 1994 revealed that up to 500,000 Americans were endangered by secret defense-related tests between 1940 and 1974. These included covert experiments with radioactive materials, mustard gas, LSD, and biological agents. The General Accounting Office testified that between 1949 and 1969, the Army released radioactive compounds in 239 cities to study the effects.

The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent.’” To put it perhaps a little more clearly: any attack or other operation is CHENG, on which the enemy has had his attention fixed; whereas that is CH’I,” which takes him by surprise or comes from an unexpected quarter. If the enemy perceives a movement which is meant to be CH’I,” it immediately becomes CHENG.”] 4.    That the impact of your army may be like a grindstone dashed against an egg— this is effected by the science of weak points and strong. 5.    In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory. [Chang Yu says: “Steadily develop indirect tactics, either by pounding the enemy’s flanks or falling on his rear.” A brilliant example of “indirect tactics” which decided the fortunes of a campaign was Lord Roberts’ night march round the Peiwar Kotal in the second Afghan war.76 6.    Indirect tactics, efficiently applied, are inexhausible as Heaven and Earth, unending as the flow of rivers and streams; like the sun and moon, they end but to begin anew; like the four seasons, they pass away to return once more. [Tu Yu and Chang Yu understand this of the permutations of CH’I and CHENG.” But at present Sun Tzu is not speaking of CHENG at all, unless, indeed, we suppose with Cheng Yu-hsien that a clause relating to it has fallen out of the text. Of course, as has already been pointed out, the two are so inextricably interwoven in all military operations, that they cannot really be considered apart. Here we simply have an expression, in figurative language, of the almost infinite resource of a great leader.] 7.    There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard. 8.    There are not more than five primary colors (blue, yellow, red, white, and black), yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen. 9.    There are

All in all, French armies wrought much suffering in Europe, but they also radically changed the lay of the land. In much of Europe, gone were feudal relations; the power of the guilds; the absolutist control of monarchs and princes; the grip of the clergy on economic, social, and political power; and the foundation of ancien régime, which treated different people unequally based on their birth status. These changes created the type of inclusive economic institutions that would then allow industrialization to take root in these places. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrialization was rapidly under way in almost all the places that the French controlled, whereas places such as Austria-Hungary and Russia, which the French did not conquer, or Poland and Spain, where French hold was temporary and limited, were still largely stagnant.

I was unable to take the professional view that all successful actions were gains. Our rebels were not materials, like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting our leadership. We were not in command nationally, but by invitation; and our men were volunteers, individuals, local men, relatives, so that a death was a personal sorrow to many in the army. Even from a purely military point of view the assault seemed to me a blunder.

Much of what bureaucrats do, after all, is evaluate things. They are continually assessing, auditing, measuring, weighing the relative merits of different plans, proposals, applications, courses of action, or candidates for promotion. Market reforms only reinforce this tendency. This happens on every level. It is felt most cruelly by the poor, who are constantly monitored by an intrusive army of moralistic box-tickers assessing their child-rearing skills, inspecting their food cabinets to see if they are really cohabiting with their partners, determining whether they have been trying hard enough to find a job, or whether their medical conditions are really sufficiently sever to disqualify them from physical labor. All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves. (p. 41)

It makes no difference what your particular path is, as long as you follow it. A washerwoman who devotedly follows the way of the washerwoman is far superior to a prince who strays off the way of the prince. Having understood the meaning of life, Arjuna duly proceeds to follow his dharma as a warrior. He kills his friends and relatives, leads his army to victory, and becomes one of the most esteemed and beloved heroes of the Hindu world.

One might object that [debt peonage] was just assumed to be in the nature of things: like the imposition of tribute on conquered populations, it might have been resented, but it wasn’t considered a moral issue, a matter of right and wrong. Some things just happen. This has been the most common attitude of peasants to such phenomena throughout human history. What’s striking about the historical record is that in the case of debt crises, this was not how many reacted. Many actually did become indignant. So many, in fact, that most of our contemporary language of social justice, our way of speaking of human bondage and emancipation, continues to echo ancient arguments about debt. It’s particularly striking because so many other things do seem to have been accepted as simply in the nature of things. One does not see a similar outcry against caste systems, for example, or for that matter, the institution of slavery. Surely slaves and untouchables often experienced at least equal horrors. No doubt many protested their condition. Why was it that the debtors’ protests seemed to carry such greater moral weight? Why were debtors so much more effective in winning the ear of priests, prophets, officials, and social reformers? Why was it that officials like Nehemiah were willing to give such sympathetic consideration to their complaints, to inveigh, to summon great assemblies? Some have suggested practical reasons: debt crises destroyed the free peasantry, and it was free peasants who were drafted into ancient armies to fight in wars. Rulers thus had a vested interest in maintaining their recruitment base. No doubt this was a factor; clearly, it wasn’t the only one. There is no reason to believe that Nehemiah, for instance, in his anger at the usurers, was primarily concerned with his ability to levy troops for the Persian king. It had to be something deeper. What makes debt different is that it is premised on an assumption of equality. To be a slave, or lower caste, is to be intrinsically inferior. These are relations of unadulterated hierarchy. In the case of debt, we are talking about two individuals who begin as equal parties to a contract. Legally, at least as far as the contract is concerned, they are the same.

As an index of social change, perhaps we should follow the popularity of the slap as some sort of measure of our belief in social hierarchy. The slap carries with it all the accumulated power of the past; it uses an entire social class as its accompanying army. As we relate to each other as individuals not necessarily embedded in our respective hierarchies, perhaps we will punch each other more frequently. In some truly ironic way, that might be good news.

28.  Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated by the infinite variety of circumstances. [As Wang Hsi sagely remarks: “There is but one root-principle underlying victory, but the tactics which lead up to it are infinite in number.” With this compare Col. Henderson: “The rules of strategy are few and simple. They may be learned in a week. They may be taught by familiar illustrations or a dozen diagrams. But such knowledge will no more teach a man to lead an army like Napoleon than a knowledge of grammar will teach him to write like Gibbon.”] 29.  Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards. 30.  So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak. [Like water, taking the line of least resistance.] 31.  Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing. 32.  Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions. 33.  He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent and thereby succeed in winning, may be called a heaven-born captain. 34.  The five elements (water, fire, wood, metal, earth) are not always equally predominant; [That is, as Wang Hsi says: “they predominate alternately.”] the four seasons make way for each other in turn. [Literally, “have no invariable seat.”] There are short days and long; the moon has its periods of waning and waxing. [Cf. V. ss. 6. The purport of the passage is simply to illustrate the want of fixity in war by the changes constantly taking place in Nature. The comparison is not very happy, however, because the regularity of the phenomena which Sun Tzu mentions is by no means paralleled in war.]

[from Some words about 'War and Peace'] For a historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of a man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men. [...] The historian has to deal with the results of an event, the artist with the fact of the event. An historian in describing a battle says: 'The left flank of such and such an army was advanced to attack such and such a village and drove out the enemy, but was compelled to retire; then the cavalry, which was sent to attack, overthrew...' and so on. But these words have no meaning for the artist and do not actually touch on the event itself. Either from his own experience, or from the letters, memoirs, and accounts, the artist realizes a certain event to himself, and very often (to take the example of a battle) the deductions the historian permits himself to make as to the activity of such and such armies prove to be the very opposite of the artist's deductions. The difference of the results arrived at is also to be explained by the sources from which the two draw their information. For the historian (to keep to the case of a battle) the chief source is found in the reports of the commanding officers and the commander-in-chief. The artist can draw nothing from such sources; they tell him nothing and explain nothing to him. More than that: the artist turns away from them as he finds inevitable falsehood in them. To say nothing of the fact that after any battle the two sides nearly always describe it in quite contradictory ways, in every description of a battle there is a necessary lie, resulting from the need of describing in a few words the actions of thousands of men spread over several miles, and subject to most violent moral excitement under the influence of fear, shame and death.

The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, can escape that terrible knowledge. Our freedom is not entirely our own; in some sense it is mortgaged from those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance. My own life of security, freedom, opportunity, and relative affluence certainly has been made possible because a grandfather fought and was gassed in the Argonne; an uncle in the Marines died trying to stop Japanese imperialism on Okinawa; a cousin in the Army lost his life at twenty-two trying to stop Hitler in France; and my father in the Army Air Force flew forty times over Japan hoping to end the idea of the expansive Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. I have spent some time these past decades trying to learn where, how, and why they and their generations fought as they did—and what our own obligations are to acknowledge their sacrifices.

If each man — apart from his religion, his culture, his epoch, and any other circumstance — has loved his neighbor, he has also loved the Lord Jesus in person. Any rapport with our brothers and sisters in any locality, any age, or any situation is, all in all, a rapport with Jesus Christ in person. Each human creature who achieves fulfillment in his human relationships is, at the same time, relating to God. For this reason, the love of neighbor is the fundamental precept of life.

Robert Daley, who at one time was the public relations and publicity director for the New York City Police Department, had written the book Target Blue. An excerpt from the book was “coincidentally” printed in New York magazine on almost the exact day our trial was to begin. One or two chapters were about the Black Liberation Army. The book was a collection of sensationalism, groundless accusations, and outright lies. The few facts that were in those two chapters were distorted beyond recognition.

For example, being a soldier means one has a certain identity. Clothing, haircut, lifestyle, all relates to the military. While in the army a soldier must obey his superiors. But when he leaves the military he takes on a new identity—the identity of a civilian. No longer is he required to dress a certain way. His former superiors have no say over his life. In the same way, before we believed, we were identified with Adam and had only our sinful or earthly nature to satisfy. But now as a believer, we are identified with Christ, and he wants us to focus on Him and serve others.

Thanks largely to the attempts to integrate women into the armed forces of many modern countries, the physical differences between the sexes have been precisely measured.[296] One study found the average U.S. Army female recruit to be 12 centimeters shorter and 14.3 kilograms lighter than her male brethren. Compared to the average male recruit, females had 16.9 fewer kilograms of muscle and 2.6 more kilograms of fat, as well as 55 percent of the upper body strength and 72 percent of the lower body strength. Fat mass is inversely related to aerobic capacity and heat tolerance, hence women are also at a disadvantage when performing activities such as carrying heavy loads, working in the heat and running. Even when the samples were controlled for height, women possessed only 80 percent of the overall strength of men. Only the upper 20 percent of women could do as well physically as the lower 20 percent of men. Had the 100 strongest individuals out of a random group consisting of 100 men and 100 women been selected, 93 would be male and only seven female.[297] Yet another study showed gthat only the upper 5 percent of women are as strong as the median male.[298]

The principles of war are the same as those of a siege. Fire must be concentrated on one point, and as soon as the breach is made, the equilibrium is broken and the rest is nothing.' Subsequent military theory has put the accent on the first clause instead of on the last: in particular, on the words 'one point' instead of on the word 'equilibrium'. The former is but a physical metaphor, whereas the latter expresses the actual psychological result which ensures 'that the rest is nothing'. His own emphasis can be traced in the strategic course of his campaigns. The word 'point' even, has been the source of much confusion, and more controversy. One school has argued that Napoleon meant that the concentrated blow must be aimed at the enemy's strongest point, on the ground that this, and this only, ensures decisive results. For if the enemy's main resistance be broken, its rupture will involve that of any lesser opposition. This argument ignores the factor of cost, and the fact that the victor may be too exhausted to exploit his success-so that even a weaker opponent may acquire a relatively higher resisting power than the original. The other school-better imbued with the idea of economy of force, but only in the limited sense of first costs-has contended that the offensive should be aimed at the enemy's weakest point. But where a point is obviously weak this is usually because it is remote from any vital artery or nerve centre, or because it is deliberately weak to draw the assailant into a trap. Here, again illumination comes from the actual campaign in which Bonaparte put this maxim into execution. It clearly suggests that what he really meant was not 'point', but 'joint'-and that at this stage of his career he was too firmly imbued with the idea of economy of force to waste his limited strength in battering at the enemy's strong point. A joint, however, is both vital and vulnerable. It was at this time too, that Bonaparte used another phrase that has subsequently been quoted to justify the most foolhardy concentrations of effort against the main armed forces of the enemy. 'Austria is our most determined enemy....Austria overthrown, Spain and Italy fall of themselves. We must not disperse our attacks but concentrate them.' But the full text of the memorandum containing this phrase shows that he was arguing, not in support of the direct attack upon Austria, but for using the army on the frontier of Piedmont for an indirect approach to Austria.

When Husni Zaim seized power from Shukri al-Quwatli on 30 March 1949, Syria's economy was a parlous state and its army had been beaten the previous November by the Israelis. Zaim knew that he needed to take action on both fronts fast. After overthrowing al-Quwatli bloodlessly, he set out to open peace talks with the Israelis and mend relations with the French via a currency agreement and an arms deal that would pave the way for renewed French influence in the former mandate. But Zaim's reign did not last long. One hundred and thirty-seven days after he had taken power, on 14 August he too was overthrown and executed.

This raises a novel question: which of the two is really important, intelligence or consciousness? As long as they went hand in hand, debating their relative value was just a pastime for philosophers. But in the twenty-first century, this is becoming an urgent political and economic issue. And it is sobering to realise that, at least for armies and corporations, the answer is straightforward: intelligence is mandatory but consciousness is optional. Armies and corporations cannot function without intelligent agents, but they don’t need consciousness and subjective experiences. The conscious experiences of a flesh-and-blood taxi driver are infinitely richer than those of a self-driving car, which feels absolutely nothing. The taxi driver can enjoy music while navigating the busy streets of Seoul. His mind may expand in awe as he looks up at the stars and contemplates the mysteries of the universe. His eyes may fill with tears of joy when he sees his baby girl taking her very first step. But the system doesn’t need all that from a taxi driver. All it really wants is to bring passengers from point A to point B as quickly, safely and cheaply as possible. And the autonomous car will soon be able to do that far better than a human driver, even though it cannot enjoy music or be awestruck by the magic of existence.

What we so often forget is that God has honored the woman by giving her value in relation to God—not in relation to men. But as Western feminism erases God from the scene, there is no standard left—except men. As a result, the Western feminist is forced to find her value in relation to a man. And in so doing, she has accepted a faulty assumption. She has accepted that man is the standard, and thus a woman can never be a full human being until she becomes just like a man. When a man cut his hair short, she wanted to cut her hair short. When a man joined the army, she wanted to join the army. She wanted these things for no other reason than because the “standard” had it.

In the natural order men are all equal and their common calling is that of manhood, so that a well-educated man cannot fail to do well in that calling and those related to it. It matters little to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or the law. Before his parents chose a calling for him nature called him to be a man. Life is the trade I would teach him. When he leaves me, I grant you, he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a priest; he will be a man. All that becomes a man he will learn as quickly as another. In vain will fate change his station, he will always be in his right place. "Occupavi te, fortuna, atque cepi; omnes-que aditus tuos interclusi, ut ad me aspirare non posses.

The goal of Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee was to investigate all things related to German science. Target types ran the gamut: radar, missiles, aircraft, medicine, bombs and fuses, chemical and biological weapons labs. And while CIOS remained an official joint venture, there were other groups in the mix, with competing interests at hand. Running parallel to CIOS operations were dozens of secret intelligence-gathering operations, mostly American. The Pentagon’s Special Mission V-2 was but one example. By late March 1945, Colonel Trichel, chief of U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch, had dispatched his team to Europe. Likewise, U.S. Naval Technical Intelligence had officers in Paris preparing for its own highly classified hunt for any intelligence regarding the Henschel Hs 293, a guided missile developed by the Nazis and designed to sink or damage enemy ships. The U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) were still heavily engaged in strategic bombing campaigns, but a small group from Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, was laying plans to locate and capture Luftwaffe equipment and engineers. Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels. Sometimes, the members of these parallel missions worked in consort with CIOS officers in the field.

Would the fate of China have been different if Stilwell had been allowed to reform the army and create an effective combat force of 90 divisions? ... This assumption might have been true if Asia were clay in the hands of the West. But the"regenerative idea," stilwell's or another's, could not be imposed from the outside. The Kuomintang military structure could not be reformed without reform of the system from which it sprang and, as Stillwell himself recognized, to reform such a system "it must be torn to pieces." In great things, wrote Erasmus, it is enough to have tried. Stilwell's mission was America's supreme try in China. He made the maximum effort because his temperament permitted no less: he never slackened and he never gave up. Yet the mission failed in its ultimate purpose because the goal was unachievable. The impulse was not Chinese. Combat efficiency and the offensive spirit, like the Christianity and democracy offered by missionaries and foreign advisers, were not indigenous demands of the society and culture to which they were brought. Even the Yellow River Road that Stilwell built in 1921 had disappeared twelve years later. China was a problem for which there was no American solution. The American effort to sustain the status quo could not supply an outworn government with strength and stability or popular support. It could not hold up a husk nor long delay the cyclical passing of the mandate of heaven. In the end, China went her own way as if the Americans had never come.

A few scrapes, my ass,” she muttered, wringing her shaking hands. Constance shoved a bulb of garlic at her. “They’re Highlanders, dear. They’ll get themselves stabbed, dragged through a briar patch, thrown over a cliff, and punched in the face all before breakfast and call it ‘a fair interesting morn’.’ Now, peel those and put the cloves in the hot water.” The older woman nodded toward the steaming kettle a maid had deposited on the hearth. “Garlic water cleans wounds better than plain water and keeps infection away.” She latched onto the competence Constance radiated. While calming her with brisk assurances that all would be well, the older woman deftly deployed a small army of castle servants on various missions relating to “doctoring a bone-headed Highland husband.

[Chang Yu relates the following anecdote of Kao Tsu, the first Han Emperor: “Wishing to crush the Hsiung-nu, he sent out spies to report on their condition. But the Hsiung-nu, forewarned, carefully concealed all their able-bodied men and well-fed horses, and only allowed infirm soldiers and emaciated cattle to be seen. The result was that spies one and all recommended the Emperor to deliver his attack. Lou Ching alone opposed them, saying: “When two countries go to war, they are naturally inclined to make an ostentatious display of their strength. Yet our spies have seen nothing but old age and infirmity. This is surely some ruse on the part of the enemy, and it would be unwise for us to attack.” The Emperor, however, disregarding this advice, fell into the trap and found himself surrounded at Po-teng.”] 19.  Thus one who is skillful at keeping the enemy on the move maintains deceitful appearances, according to which the enemy will act. [Ts’ao Kung’s note is “Make a display of weakness and want.” Tu Mu says: “If our force happens to be superior to the enemy’s, weakness may be simulated in order to lure him on; but if inferior, he must be led to believe that we are strong, in order that he may keep off. In fact, all the enemy’s movements should be determined by the signs that we choose to give him.” Note the following anecdote of Sun Pin, a descendent of Sun Wu: In 341 B.C., the Ch’i State being at war with Wei, sent T’ien Chi and Sun Pin against the general P’ang Chuan, who happened to be a deadly personal enemy of the later. Sun Pin said: “The Ch’i State has a reputation for cowardice, and therefore our adversary despises us. Let us turn this circumstance to account.” Accordingly, when the army had crossed the border into Wei territory, he gave orders to show 100,000 fires on the first night, 50,000 on the next, and the night after only 20,000. P’ang Chuan pursued them hotly, saying to himself: “I knew these men of Ch’i were cowards: their numbers have already fallen away by more than half.” In his retreat, Sun Pin came to a narrow defile, with he calculated that his pursuers would reach after dark. Here he had a tree stripped of its bark, and inscribed upon it the words: “Under this tree shall P’ang Chuan die.” Then, as night began to fall, he placed a strong body of archers in ambush near by, with orders to shoot directly they saw a light. Later on, P’ang Chuan arrived at the spot, and noticing the tree, struck a light in order to read what was written on it. His body was immediately riddled by a volley of arrows, and his whole army thrown into confusion. [The above is Tu Mu’s version of the story; the SHIH CHI, less dramatically but probably with more historical truth, makes P’ang Chuan cut his own throat with an exclamation of despair, after the rout of his army.] ] He sacrifices something, that the enemy may snatch at it. 20.  By holding out baits, he keeps him on the march; then with a body of picked men he lies in wait for him. [With an emendation suggested by Li Ching, this then reads, “He lies in wait with the main body of his troops.”] 21.  The clever combatant looks to the effect of combined energy, and does not require too much from individuals.

The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton, time is absolute: “Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equitably and without relation to anything external.” The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function, he must observe its ironclad, inviolate laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must heed deadlines, dates, days, and hours. He moves within the rigors of time and cannot exist outside them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat—time annihilates him. Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences time, its shape, course, and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors ). Time is even something that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in a battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being). Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even nonexistence, if we do not direct our energy toward it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.

The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn’s relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot. Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape. Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? A case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.

When equal sacrifices are required, equal rights must be given likewise. This has been such commonplace of thought for a hundred and twenty years that one is ashamed to find it still in need of emphasis. I any case, if this principle is applied in an army, and the great saying about the Marshal’s baton that every recruit carries in his knapsack is not an mere empty phrase, everybody feels that he is in his place, whether he is born to command or to obey. If I give any offence by this, I may add that this would be an army composed entirely of Fahnenjunker. Democratic sentiments? I hate democracy as I do the plague – besides, the democratic ideal of an army would be one consisting entirely, not of Fahnenjunker, but of officers with lax discipline and great personal liberty. For my taste, on the contrary, and for that of young Germans in general to-day, an army could not be too iron, too dictatorial, ad too absolute – but if it is to be so, then there must be a system of promotion that is not sheltered behind any sort of privilege, but opened up to the keenest competition. If we are to come to grief in this war it can only be from moral causes; for materially, whatever any one may say, we are strong enough. And the decisive factor will be the defects of leadership; or to express it more accurately, the relation in which officers and men stand to each other. It would not be for the first time in our experience, and it would be another proof that peoples too (for it is on the shoulders of the whole people, not jsut the ruling class) always repeat the same mistakes just as individuals do. The battle of Jena is an instance. This defeat should not be regarded as a great disaster, but as a just and well-deserved warning of the fate to cut loose from an impossible state of affairs; for in that battle a new principle of leadership encountered and overthrew an antiquated one. Every war that is lost is lost deservedly. One must always bear that in mind if one wishes to be the winner.

Behind Garber’s desk was a man I had never seen before. He was a colonel. He was in BDUs. His tape said: Willard, U.S. Army. He had iron-gray hair parted in a schoolboy style. It needed a trim. He had steel-rimmed eyeglasses and the kind of gray pouchy face that must have looked old when he was twenty. He was short and relatively squat and the way his shoulders failed to fill his BDUs told me he spent no time at all in the gym. He had a problem sitting still. He was rocking to his left and plucking at his pants where they went tight over his right knee. Before I had been in the room ten seconds he had adjusted his position three times. Maybe he had hemorrhoids. Maybe he was nervous. He had soft hands. Ragged nails. No wedding band. Divorced, for sure. He looked the type. No wife would let him walk about with hair like that. And no wife could have stood all that rocking and twitching. Not for very long. I should have come smartly to attention and saluted and announced: Sir, Major Reacher reports.

In Bergotte’s books, which I constantly reread, the sentences were as clear to me as my own thoughts, I perceived them as distinctly as the furniture in my room and the carriages in the streets. Everything was easily visible, if not as one had always seen it, then certainly as one was accustomed to see it now. But a new writer had just started to publish work in which the relations between things were so different from those that connected them for me, that I could understand almost nothing in his writing.... Only I felt that it was not the sentence that was badly constructed, but that I myself lacked the energy and agility to see it through to the end. I would make a fresh start, working really hard to reach the point where I could see the new connections between things. At each attempt, about half-way through the sentence, I would fall back defeated, as I did later in the army in horizontal bar exercises... From then on I felt less admiration for Bergotte, whose transparency struck me as a shortcoming.

. In Bergotte’s books, which I constantly reread, the sentences were as clear to me as my own thoughts, I perceived them as distinctly as the furniture in my room and the carriages in the streets. Everything was easily visible, if not as one had always seen it, then certainly as one was accustomed to see it now. But a new writer had just started to publish work in which the relations between things were so different from those that connected them for me, that I could understand almost nothing in his writing.... Only I felt that it was not the sentence that was badly constructed, but that I myself lacked the energy and agility to see it through to the end. I would make a fresh start, working really hard to reach the point where I could see the new connections between things. At each attempt, about half-way through the sentence, I would fall back defeated, as I did later in the army in horizontal bar exercises... From then on I felt less admiration for Bergotte, whose transparency struck me as a shortcoming.

exulansis n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or mere foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your story, until it feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land. Latin exulans, exile, wanderer, derived from the Latin name of the Wandering Albatross, diomedea exulans, who spend most of their life in flight, rarely landing, going hours without even flapping their wings. The albatross is a symbol of good luck, a curse, and a burden, and sometimes all three at once. Pronounced “ek-suh-lan-sis.” la cuna n. a twinge of sadness that there’s no frontier left, that as the last explorer trudged his armies toward the last blank spot on the map, he didn’t suddenly turn for home, leaving one last island unexplored so we could set it aside as a strategic reserve of mystery. Latin lacuna, an unfilled space or hole + Spanish la cuna, cradle. Pronounced “lah koo-nuh.

Bigotry disturbs me, too," I said, "but prejudice and segregation alone do not constitute the root of all evil. There are many nonracial elements common to humanity as a whole that create problems from the cradle to the grave regardless of race, creed, color, or previous condition of servitude." "But when you add a black face to all that," said Simple, "you have problem's mammy. White folks may be unemployed in this American country, but they get the first chance at the first jobs that open up. Besides, they get seniority. Maybe some white folks cannot read or write, but if they want to go to Ole Miss to learn to read or write, they can go without the President calling up the United States Army to protect them. Sure, white folks gets sick, but they don't have to creep in the back door of the hospital down South for treatment like we does. And when they get old, white folks have got more well-off sons and daughters to take care of them than colored folks have. Most old white folks when they get sick can suffer in comfort, and when they die they can get buried without going in debt. Colored folks, most in generally, do not have it so easy. I know because I am one.

When he reached home Prince Andrei began thinking of his life in Petersburg during those last four months, as if it were something new. He recalled his exertions and solicitations, and the history of his project of army reform, which had been accepted for consideration and which they were trying to pass over M silence simply because another, a very poor one, had already been prepared and submitted to the Emperor. He thought of the meetings of a committee of which Berg was a member. He remembered how carefully and at what length everything tele-ing to form and procedure was discussed at those meetings, and how sedulously and promptly all that related to the gist of the business was evaded. He recalled his labours on the Legal Code, and how painstak-ingly he had translated the articles of the Roman and French codes into Russian, and he felt ashamed of himself. Then he vividly pictured to himself Bogucharovo, his occupations in the country, his journey to Ryazan, he remembered the peasants, and Dron the village elder, and mentally applying m them the Personal Rights he had divided into paragraphs, he felt astonished that he could have spent so much time on such useless work.

Army studies indicate that if a wounded soldier arrives alive at a combat support hospital where surgeons and nurses can treat him, the chances of his surviving are extremely high—greater than 90 percent. “Surviving,” of course, doesn’t necessarily entail keeping arms or legs or retaining the ability to function independently back home. The leading cause of preventable death on the battlefield is bleeding. Having a leg blown off by an IED, for instance, can be fatal if quick steps are not taken to control the blood loss. Even deadlier is internal bleeding, a problem for which medics generally don’t have a good answer. A soldier who is bleeding internally needs to be evacuated and delivered to a surgeon immediately if he is to have any hope of survival. The second-leading cause of preventable death is something called tension pneumothorax. If a bullet punctures a soldier’s lung, air can leak from that hole into the “pleural space,” or cavity outside the lungs. That air can build up and eventually interfere with the functioning of the heart. This can be a relatively simple problem to correct: a medic can simply stick a big needle in the soldier’s chest to relieve the pressure in the pleural space.

The idea which had long ago and often occurred to him during the period of his active service, that there was and could be no sort of military science, and that therefore there could not be such a thing as military genius, seemed to him now to be an absolutely obvious truth. “What theory and science can there be of a subject of which the conditions and circumstances are uncertain and can never be definitely known, in which the strength of the active forces engaged can be even less definitely measured? No one can, or possibly could, know the relative positions of our army and the enemy's in another twenty-four hours, and no one can gauge the force of this or the other detachment. Sometimes when there is no coward in front to cry, ‘We are cut off!' and to run, but a brave, spirited fellow leads the way, shouting ‘Hurrah!' a detachment of five thousand is as good as thirty thousand, as it was at Schöngraben, while at times fifty thousand will run from eight thousand, as they did at Austerlitz. How can there be a science of war in which, as in every practical matter, nothing can be definite and everything depends on countless conditions, the influence of which becomes manifest all in a moment, and no one can know when that moment is coming.

Because he was good!’ Smiley snapped, and there was a startled silence everywhere, while he recovered himself. ‘Vladimir’s father was an Estonian and a passionate Bolshevik, Oliver,’ he resumed in a calmer voice. ‘A professional man, a lawyer. Stalin rewarded his loyalty by murdering him in the purges. Vladimir was born Voldemar but he even changed his name to Vladimir out of allegiance to Moscow and the Revolution. He still wanted to believe, despite what they had done to his father. He joined the Red Army and by God’s grace missed being purged as well. The war promoted him, he fought like a lion, and when it was over, he waited for the great Russian liberalisation that he had been dreaming of, and the freeing of his own people. It never came. Instead, he witnessed the ruthless repression of his homeland by the government he had served. Scores of thousands of his fellow Estonians went to the camps, several of his own relatives among them.’ Lacon opened his mouth to interrupt, but wisely closed it. ‘The lucky ones escaped to Sweden and Germany. We’re talking of a population of a million sober, hard-working people, cut to bits. One night, in despair, he offered us his services. Us, the British. In Moscow. For three years after that he spied for us from the very heart of the capital. Risked everything for us, every day.

In Bergotte’s books, which I constantly reread, the sentences were as clear to me as my own thoughts, I perceived them as distinctly as the furniture in my room and the carriages in the streets. Everything was easily visible, if not as one had always seen it, then certainly as one was accustomed to see it now. But a new writer had just started to publish work in which the relations between things were so different from those that connected them for me, that I could understand almost nothing in his writing.... Only I felt that it was not the sentence that was badly constructed, but that I myself lacked the energy and agility to see it through to the end. I would make a fresh start, working really hard to reach the point where I could see the new connections between things. At each attempt, about half-way through the sentence, I would fall back defeated, as I did later in the army in horizontal bar exercises... From then on I felt less admiration for Bergotte, whose transparency struck me as a shortcoming... The writer who had supplanted Bergotte in my estimation sapped my energy not by the incoherence but by the novelty – perfectly coherent – of associations I was not used to making. Because I always felt myself falter in the same place, it was clear that I needed to perform the same feat of endeavour each time. And when I did, very occasionally, manage to follow the author to the end of his sentence, what I discovered was always a humour, a truthfulness, a charm similar to those I had once found reading Bergotte, only more delightful.

This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. But this was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern. If the development of the great instruments of the state, as institutions of power, ensured the maintenance of production relations, the rudiments of anatomo- and bio-politics, created in the eighteenth century as techniques of power present at every level of the social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army, schools and the police, individual medicine and the administration of collective bodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development, and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence on the respective forces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit, were made possible in part by the exercise of bio-power in its many forms and modes of application. The investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive management of its forces were at the time indispensable.

The very successes of the megamachine re-enforced dangerous potentialities that had hitherto been kept in check by sheer human weakness. The inherent infirmity of this whole power system lies exposed in the fact that kings, exalted above all other men, were constantly cozened, flattered, and fed with misinformation-zealously protected from any disturbing counterbalancing 'feedback.' So kings never learned from either their own experience or from history the fact that unqualified power is inimical to life: that their methods were self-defeating, their military victories were ephemeral, and their exalted claims were fraudulent and absurd. From the end of the first great Age of the Builders in Egypt, that of the Sixth Dynasty Pharaoh, Pepe I, comes corroborative evidence of this pervasive irrationality, all the more telling because it issues from the relatively orderly and unbedevilled Egyptians: The army returned in safety After it had hacked up the land of the Sand Dwellers ...After it had thrown down its enclosures... After it had cut down its fig trees and vines... After it had cast fire into all its dwellings... After it had killed troops in it by many ten-thousand. That sums up the course of Empire everywhere: the same boastful words, the same vicious acts, the same sordid results, from the earliest Egyptian palette to the latest American newspaper with its reports, at the moment I write, of the mass atrocities coldbloodedly perpetrated with the aid of napalm bombs and defoliating poisons, by the military forces of the United States on the helpless peasant populations of Vietnam: an innocent people, uprooted, terrorized, poisoned and roasted alive in a futile attempt to make the power fantasies of the American military-industrial-scientific elite 'credible.

In September 1999, the Department of Justice succeeded in denaturalizing 63 participants in Nazi acts of persecution; and in removing 52 such individuals from this country. This appears to be but a small portion of those who actually were brought here by our own government. A 1999 report to the Senate and the House said "that between 1945 and 1955, 765 scientists, engineers, and technicians were brought to the United States under Overcast, Paperclip, and similar programs. It has been estimated that at least half, and perhaps as many as 80 percent of all the imported specialists were former Nazi Party members." A number of these scientists were recruited to work for the Air Force's School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas, where dozens of human radiation experiments were conducted during the Cold War. Among them were flash-blindness studies in connection with atomic weapons tests and data gathering for total-body irradiation studies conducted in Houston. The experiments for which Nazi investigators were tried included many related to aviation research. Hubertus Strughold, called "the father of space medicine," had a long career at the SAM, including the recruitment of other Paperclip scientists in Germany. On September 24, 1995 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that as head of Nazi Germany's Air Force Institute for Aviation Medicine, Strughold particpated in a 1942 conference that discussed "experiments" on human beings. The experiments included subjecting Dachau concentration camp inmates to torture and death. The Edgewood Arsenal of the Army's Chemical Corps as well as other military research sites recruited these scientists with backgrounds in aeromedicine, radiobiology, and opthamology. Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland ended up conducting experiments on more than seven thousand American soldiers. Using Auschwitz experiments as a guide, they conducted the same type of poison gas experiments that had been done in the secret I.G. Farben laboratories.

In fact, properly speaking, no parish priest has any convictions on politics. At the back of his mind, he regards the state as an enemy that has usurped the temporal power of the Pope. Being an enemy, the state must be exploited as much as possible and without any qualms of conscience. Because of this innate and perhaps unconscious hostility to the state as an institution, the parish priest cannot see that it is the duty of a citizen to endeavour to make political life as morally clean as possible. He cannot see that the community as a whole must always come into the forefront of every citizen's political consciousness and that personal interests must be sacrificed to the interests of the nation. No. The parish priest regards himself as the commander of his parish, which he is holding for His Majesty the Pope. Between himself and the Pope there is the Bishop, acting, so to speak, as the Divisional Commander. As far as the Civil Power is concerned, it is a semi-hostile force which must be kept in check, kept in tow, intrigued against and exploited, until that glorious day when the Vicar of Christ again is restored to his proper position as the ruler of the earth and the wearer of the Imperial crown. This point of view helps the parish priest to adopt a very cold-blooded attitude towards Irish politics. He is merely either for or against the government. If he has a relative in a government position, he is in favour of the government. If he has a relative who wants a position and cannot get it, then he is against the government. But his support of the government is very precarious and he makes many visits to Dublin and creeps up back stairs into ministerial offices, cajoling and threatening. He is most commonly seen making a cautious approach to the Education Office, where he has all sorts of complaints to lodge and all sorts of suggestions to make. Every book recommended by the education authorities for the schools is examined by him, and if he finds a single idea in any of them that might be likely to inspire thought of passion, then he is up in arms at once. Like an army of black beetles on the march, he and his countless brothers invade Dublin and lay siege to the official responsible. Woe to that man.

Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.

If my opinion that substance requires a true unity were founded only on a definition I had formulated in opposition to common usage, *then the dispute would be only one of words*. But besides the fact that most philosophers have taken the term in almost the same fashion, distinguishing between a unity in itself and an accidental unity, between substantial and accidental form, and between perfect and imperfect, natural and artificial mixtures, I take things to a much higher level, and setting aside the question of terminology, *I believe that where there are only beings by aggregation, there aren't any real beings*. For every being by aggregation presupposes beings endowed with real unity, because every being derives its reality only from the reality of those beings of which it is composed, so that it will not have any reality at all if each being of which it is composed is itself a being by aggregation, a being for which we must still seek further grounds for its reality, grounds which can never be found in this way, if we must always continue to seek for them. I agree, Sir, that there are only machines (that are often animated) in all of corporeal nature, but I do not agree that *there are only aggregates of substances, there must also be true substances from which all the aggregates result. We must, then, necessarily come down to the atoms of Epicurus and Cordemoy (which are things you reject along with me), or else we must admit that we do not find any reality in bodies; or finally, we must recognize some substances that have a true unity. I have already said in another letter that the composite made up of the diamonds of the Grand Duke and of the Great Mogul can be called a pair of diamonds, but this is only a being of reason. And when they are brought closer to one another, it would be a being of the imagination or perception, that is to say, a phenomenon. For contact, common motion, and participation in a common plan have no effect on substantial unity. It is true that there are sometimes more, sometimes fewer, grounds for supposing that several things constitute a single thing, in proportion to the extent to which these things are connected. But this serves only to abbreviate our thoughts and to represent the phenomena. It also seems that what constitutes the essence of a being by aggregation is only a mode (*maniére d'être*) of the things of which it is composed. For example, what constitutes the essence of an army is only a mode of the men who compose it. This mode therefore presupposes a substance whose essence is not a mode of substance. Every machine also presupposes some substance in the pieces of which it is made, and there is no plurality without true unities. To put it briefly, I hold this identical proposition, differentiated only by the emphasis, to be an axiom, namely, *that what is not truly* one *being is not truly one* being *either*. It has always been thought that one and being are reciprocal things. Being is one thing and beings are another; but the plural presupposes the singular, and where there is no being still less will there be several beings. What could be clearer? [[I therefore believed that I would be allowed to distinguish beings by aggregation from substances, since these beings have their unity in our mind only, a unity founded on the relations or modes [*modes*] of true substances. If a machine is one substance, a circle of men holding hands will also be one substance, and so will an army, and finally, so will every multitude of substances.]]." —from_Letters to Arnauld_

If my opinion that substance requires a true unity were founded only on a definition I had formulated in opposition to common usage, *then the dispute would be only one of words*. But besides the fact that most philosophers have taken the term in almost the same fashion, distinguishing between a unity in itself and an accidental unity, between substantial and accidental form, and between perfect and imperfect, natural and artificial mixtures, I take things to a much higher level, and setting aside the question of terminology, *I believe that where there are only beings by aggregation, there aren't any real beings*. For every being by aggregation presupposes beings endowed with real unity, because every being derives its reality only from the reality of those beings of which it is composed, so that it will not have any reality at all if each being of which it is composed is itself a being by aggregation, a being for which we must still seek further grounds for its reality, grounds which can never be found in this way, if we must always continue to seek for them. I agree, Sir, that there are only machines (that are often animated) in all of corporeal nature, but I do not agree that *there are only aggregates of substances, there must also be true substances from which all the aggregates result. We must, then, necessarily come down to the atoms of Epicurus and Cordemoy (which are things you reject along with me), or else we must admit that we do not find any reality in bodies; or finally, we must recognize some substances that have a true unity. I have already said in another letter that the composite made up of the diamonds of the Grand Duke and of the Great Mogul can be called a pair of diamonds, but this is only a being of reason. And when they are brought closer to one another, it would be a being of the imagination or perception, that is to say, a phenomenon. For contact, common motion, and participation in a common plan have no effect on substantial unity. It is true that there are sometimes more, sometimes fewer, grounds for supposing that several things constitute a single thing, in proportion to the extent to which these things are connected. But this serves only to abbreviate our thoughts and to represent the phenomena. It also seems that what constitutes the essence of a being by aggregation is only a mode (*maniére d'être*) of the things of which it is composed. For example, what constitutes the essence of an army is only a mode of the men who compose it. This mode therefore presupposes a substance whose essence is not a mode of substance. Every machine also presupposes some substance in the pieces of which it is made, and there is no plurality without true unities. To put it briefly, I hold this identical proposition, differentiated only by the emphasis, to be an axiom, namely, *that what is not truly* one *being is not truly one* being *either*. It has always been thought that one and being are reciprocal things. Being is one thing and beings are another; but the plural presupposes the singular, and where there is no being still less will there be several beings. What could be clearer? [[I therefore believed that I would be allowed to distinguish beings by aggregation from substances, since these beings have their unity in our mind only, a unity founded on the relations or modes [*modes*] of true substances. If a machine is one substance, a circle of men holding hands will also be one substance, and so will an army, and finally, so will every multitude of substances.]]." —from_Letters to Arnauld_

Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th