Army Reserve Quotes

Yet each country had items that the other needed. The Arridi had reserves of red gold and iron in their deserts that the Toscans required to finance and equip their large armies. Even more important, Toscans had become inordinately fond of kafay, the rich coffee grown by the Arridi.

Freelance investigative reporter Danny Casolaro was looking into the Cabazon/Wackenhut projects as part of a larger conspiracy investigation at the time he was found dead in a West Virginia motel room in 1991, allegedly a suicide victim. He had told friends he was convinced that "spies, arms merchants and others were using the reservation as a low-profile site on which to develop weapons for Third World armies, including the Nicaraguan Contras.

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.

If the American people ever allow the banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers occupied. The issuing power of money should be taken from the banks and restored to Congress and the people to whom it belongs. I sincerely believe the banking institutions are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.(1)

Justice Denied Thousands of women, probably more I cannot reach them behind justice doors Many stay silent, barred just like me. Haunted by demons, faces unseen. Still by the hundreds, they continue to serve Duty and country, active and reserve. Thankless, forgotten through America's wars Scarred like their brethren, treated as foes. Volunteered to go to the shores. Died like the others, shamed to the core. Where is the dignity, long since denied? Lost in the White House of Justice Denied Women in service since beginning of time Often they're treated like victims in crime. Where is their voice, silence throughout the years? It's dead in the Senate and House, with their tears!

Almost as an article of faith, some individuals believe that conspiracies are either kooky fantasies or unimportant aberrations. To be sure, wacko conspiracy theories do exist. There are people who believe that the United States has been invaded by a secret United Nations army equipped with black helicopters, or that the country is secretly controlled by Jews or gays or feminists or black nationalists or communists or extraterrestrial aliens. But it does not logically follow that all conspiracies are imaginary. Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history. Often the term “conspiracy” is applied dismissively whenever one suggests that people who occupy positions of political and economic power are consciously dedicated to advancing their elite interests. Even when they openly profess their designs, there are those who deny that intent is involved. In 1994, the officers of the Federal Reserve announced they would pursue monetary policies designed to maintain a high level of unemployment in order to safeguard against “overheating” the economy. Like any creditor class, they preferred a deflationary course. When an acquaintance of mine mentioned this to friends, he was greeted skeptically, “Do you think the Fed bankers are deliberately trying to keep people unemployed?” In fact, not only did he think it, it was announced on the financial pages of the press. Still, his friends assumed he was imagining a conspiracy because he ascribed self-interested collusion to powerful people. At a World Affairs Council meeting in San Francisco, I remarked to a participant that U.S. leaders were pushing hard for the reinstatement of capitalism in the former communist countries. He said, “Do you really think they carry it to that level of conscious intent?” I pointed out it was not a conjecture on my part. They have repeatedly announced their commitment to seeing that “free-market reforms” are introduced in Eastern Europe. Their economic aid is channeled almost exclusively into the private sector. The same policy holds for the monies intended for other countries. Thus, as of the end of 1995, “more than $4.5 million U.S. aid to Haiti has been put on hold because the Aristide government has failed to make progress on a program to privatize state-owned companies” (New York Times 11/25/95). Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.

Ray, people will come Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh.. people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.

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.

You scan the cheering bleachers for the strange boy’s face: handsome, reserved, with the eye patch, a little dramatic, a little scary. You finally find him sitting there in the middle of the sixth row. He is wearing a dark green army jacket and is staring back at you. He looks sad and beautiful, like a watercolor in a hospital room.

instead foresee one political party in power in the U.S. government or in state governments increasingly manipulating voter registration, stacking the courts with sympathetic judges, using those courts to challenge election outcomes, and then invoking “law enforcement” and using the police, the National Guard, the army reserve, or the army itself to suppress political opposition.

The U.S. is very unlikely to suffer a take-over by our military acting independently. I instead foresee one political party in power in the U.S. government or in state governments increasingly manipulating voter registration, stacking the courts with sympathetic judges, using those courts to challenge election outcomes, and then invoking “law enforcement” and using the police, the National Guard, the army reserve, or the army itself to suppress political opposition.

Being close to him with her face in the space between his ear and his stiff army collar was like being initiated into the subterranean reserves of a fine fabric store exuding the delicacy of cambrics and linen and luxury bound in bales.

His deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics, as if their lives were his own life but a step escaped. Like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox copy, so was he always depressed in such homes by their hint of oversecurity. If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of the blame for such success into the undernourished lap, the overpsychologized loins, of the liberal academic intelligentsia. They were of course politically opposed to the present programs and movements of the republic in Asian foreign policy, but this political difference seemed no more than a quarrel among engineers. Liberal academics had no root of a real war with technology land itself, no, in all likelihood, they were the natural managers of that future air-conditioned vault where the last of human life would still exist.

And so this end in confusion, where when things stop I never get to know it, and this moving is the space, is that what is yet to be, which is for others to see filled wherever it may finally be in the frame when the last pieces are fitted and the others stop, and there will be the stopped pattern, the final array, but not even that, because that final finitude will itself be a bit of scrolling, a percent clump of tiles, which will generally stay together but move about within another whole and be mingled, with in endless ways of other people's memories, so that I will remain a set of impressions porous and open to combination with all of the other vitreous squares floating about in whoever else's frames, because there is always the space left in reserve for the rest of their downtime, and to my great-grandchildren, with more space than tiles, I will be no more than the smoky arrangement of a set of rumors, and to their great-grandchildren, I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and colored me until back to Adam, until back to when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass bits that took up the light of this world because they were made from this world, even though the fleeting tenants of those bits of colored glass have vacated them before they have had even the remotest understanding of what it is to inhabit them, and if they -- if we are fortunate (yes, I am lucky, lucky), and if we are fortunate, have fleeting instants when we are satisfied that the mystery is ours to ponder, if never to solve, or even just rife personal mysteries, never mind those outside-- are there even mysteries outside? a puzzle itself -- but anyway, personal mysteries, like where is my father, why can't I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simple even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn't stop; it simply ends. It is a final pattern scattered without so much as a pause at the end, at the end of what, at the end of this.

Adopting and extending the existing system of mamluk recruitment, he purchased thousands of young male slaves, drawn from Kipchak Turkish and, later, Caucasian stock. These boys were trained and indoctrinated as mamluk troops, and then at the age of eighteen freed to serve their masters within the Mamluk sultanate. This approach created a constantly self-rejuvenating military force–what one modern historian has called a ‘one-generation nobility’–because children born of mamluks were not regarded as being part of the martial elite, although they were permitted to enrol in the army’s second-tier halqa reserves.

If you have ever wondered why radio and television stations always have call signs beginning with W or K, the answer is that those letters were assigned to American airwaves by an international convention held in London in 1912. The United States was given the call letters A, N, W, and K. A and N were reserved respectively for the army and navy. The other two were given to public broadcasters.

Today the message most commentators take from Adam Smith is that government should get out of the way. But that was not Smith’s message. He was enthusiastic about government regulation so long as it wasn’t simply a ruse to advantage one set of commercial interests over another. When “regulation . . . is in favor of the workmen,” he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “it is always just and equitable.” He was equally enthusiastic about the taxes needed to fund effective governance. “Every tax,” he wrote, “is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty.”9 Contemporary libertarians who invoke Smith before decrying labor laws or comparing taxation to theft seem to have skipped these passages. Far from a tribune of unregulated markets, Smith was a celebrant of effective governance. His biggest concern about the state wasn’t that it would be overbearing but that it would be overly beholden to narrow private interests. His greatest ire was reserved not for public officials but for powerful merchants who combined to rig public policies and repress private wages. These “tribes of monopoly” he compared with an “overgrown standing army” that had “become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature.” Too often, Smith maintained, concentrated economic power skewed the crafting of government policy. “Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen,” he complained, “its counsellors are always the masters. . . . They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.”10

Watching him then, I simply couldn’t think of him doing anything other than winning. Loss wasn’t the norm, it couldn’t be. I didn’t have the words for it then, what it felt like to watch my cousin, whom I love and whose worries are our worries and whose pain is our pain, manage to be so good at something, to triumph so completely. More than a painful life, more than a culture or a society with the practice and perfection of violence as a virtue and a necessity, more than a meanness or a willingness to sacrifice oneself, what I felt—what I saw—were Indian men and boys doing precisely what we’ve always been taught not to do. I was seeing them plainly, desperately, expertly wanting to be seen for their talents and their hard work, whether they lost or won. That old feeling familiar to so many Indians—that we can’t change anything; can’t change Columbus or Custer, smallpox or massacres; can’t change the Gatling gun or the legislative act; can’t change the loss of our loved ones or the birth of new troubles; can’t change a thing about the shape and texture of our lives—fell away. I think the same could be said for Sam: he might not have been able to change his sister’s fate or his mother’s or even, for a while, his own. But when he stepped in the cage he was doing battle with a disease. The disease was the feeling of powerlessness that takes hold of even the most powerful Indian men. That disease is more potent than most people imagine: that feeling that we’ve lost, that we’ve always lost, that we’ve already lost—our land, our cultures, our communities, ourselves. This disease is the story told about us and the one we so often tell about ourselves. But it’s one we’ve managed to beat again and again—in our insistence on our own existence and our successful struggles to exist in our homelands on our own terms. For some it meant joining the U.S. Army. For others it meant accepting the responsibility to govern and lead. For others still, it meant stepping into a metal cage to beat or be beaten. For my cousin Sam, for three rounds of five minutes he gets to prove that through hard work and natural ability he can determine the outcome of a finite struggle, under the bright, artificial lights that make the firmament at the Northern Lights Casino on the Leech Lake Reservation.

In roughly that same time period, while General George Armstrong Custer achieved world fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would become obscure in victory. But it was Mackenzie, not Custer, who would teach the rest of the army how to fight Indians. As he moved his men across the broken, stream-crossed country, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not have a clear idea of what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest idea that he would be the one largely responsible for defeating the last of the hostile Indians. He was new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would make many mistakes in the coming weeks. He would learn from them. For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, six years after the end of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a place where anarchy and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first time in its history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Great Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.

In March 1812 proposals were hatched to unite all the reserve units of the ‘second line’ into three reserve armies. In time these reserve armies would be able to reinforce Barclay, Bagration and Tormasov. In the event that the front-line armies were defeated or forced to retreat, they would be able to fall back under the cover of these rear formations.41 This plan never came to fruition and in reality reserve armies never existed in 1812. One reason for this was that Napoleon advanced more quickly than anticipated and the Russian reserve units were forced to decamp before they could form such armies.

Can he keep from throwing his hissy fit until he gets to the cauldron?” “I don’t know. You’re not impressed by his warp spasm, huh?” He grimaced. “It’s abhorrent. Total loss of control. No beauty to it, no symmetry. His eye was hanging out on his cheek like some piece of snot. No, I’m not impressed.” “I can try to keep a lid on him until we get to the cauldron.” I made a pun, but he wasn’t in the mood to notice. “No.” “What do you mean no?” “No, you’re not going with him.” I crossed my arms. “Who decided that?” He put on his “I’m alpha and I’m putting my foot down” expression. “I decided.” “You don’t get to decide. I’m not under your authority.” “Yes, you are. Without you the fight will happen, but without me and the Pack, it won’t. I command the superior force, therefore I’m in charge. You and your army of one can put yourself under my authority or you can take a walk.” “You don’t think I can do it, is that it?” “No, I want you where I can see you.” “Why?” His lip quivered with the beginning of a snarl. His face relaxed, as he brought himself under control. “Because that’s how I want it,” he said, using a slow, patience voice reserved for rowdy children and disagreeable mental patients. It drove me to the edge of reason. I really wanted to punch him.

With German tanks climbing behind the lone platoon and without any means of antitank defense, Solis seized some of the gasoline from the Francorchamps dump, had his men pour it out in a deep road cut, where there was no turn-out, and set it ablaze. The result was a perfect antitank barrier. The German tanks turned back to Stavelot-this was the closest that Kampfgruppe Peiper ever came to the great stores of gasoline which might have taken the 1st SS Panzer Division to the Meuse River. Solis had burned 124,000 gallons for his improvised roadblock, but this was the only part of the First Army's POL reserve lost during the entire Ardennes operation.

What though some suffer and die, what though they lay down their lives for the testimony of Jesus and the hope of eternal life--so be it--all these things have prevailed from Adam's day to ours. They are all part of the eternal plan; and those who give their "all" in the gospel cause shall receive the Lord's "all" in the mansions which are prepared. . . . We have yet to gain that full knowledge and understanding of the doctrines of salvation and the mysteries of the kingdom that were possessed by many of the ancient Saints. O that we knew what Enoch and his people knew! Or that we had the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon, as did certain of the Jaredites and Nephites! How can we ever gain these added truths until we believe in full what the Lord has already given us in the Book of Mormon, in the Doctrine and Covenants, and in the inspired changes made by Joseph Smith in the Bible? Will the Lord give us the full and revealed account of the creation as long as we believe in the theories of evolution? Will he give us more guidance in governmental affairs as long as we choose socialistic ways which lead to the overthrow of freedom? We have yet to attain that degree of obedience and personal righteousness which will give us faith like the ancients: faith to multiply miracles, move mountains, and put at defiance the armies of nations; faith to quench the violence of fire, divide seas and stop the mouths of lions; faith to break every band and to stand in the presence of God. Faith comes in degrees. Until we gain faith to heal the sick, how can we ever expect to move mountains and divide seas? We have yet to receive such an outpouring of the Spirit of the Lord in our lives that we shall all see eye to eye in all things, that every man will esteem his brother as himself, that there will be no poor among us, and that all men seeing our good works will be led to glorify our Father who is in heaven. Until we live the law of tithing how can we expect to live the law of consecration? As long as we disagree as to the simple and easy doctrines of salvation, how can we ever have unity on the complex and endless truths yet to be revealed? We have yet to perfect our souls, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the gospel, and to walk in the light as God is in the light, so that if this were a day of translation we would be prepared to join Enoch and his city in heavenly realms. How many among us are now prepared to entertain angels, to see the face of the Lord, to go where God and Christ are and be like them? . . . Our time, talents, and wealth must be made available for the building up of his kingdom. Should we be called upon to sacrifice all things, even our lives, it would be of slight moment when weighed against the eternal riches reserved for those who are true and faithful in all things. [Ensign, Apr. 1980, 25]

Hitler deployed four panzer groups with a total of seventeen panzer divisions and 3,106 tanks2 for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. In addition, two independent panzer battalions, Pz.Abt. 40 and Pz.Abt. 211, were deployed in Finland with 124 tanks (incl. twenty Pz.III). The 2 and 5.Panzer-Divisionen were refitting in Germany after the Greek Campaign in April 1941 and were in OKH reserve. Otherwise, the only other extant panzer units were the 15.Panzer-Division with Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel in Libya and two panzer brigades in France. No other panzer units were in the process of forming in Germany. Consequently, the OKH was committing virtually all of the available German panzer forces to Barbarossa, with negligible reserves and limited monthly production output to replace losses. In mid-1941, German industry was producing an average of 250 tanks per month, half of which were the Pz.III medium tank. Combat experience in France and Belgium in 1940 indicated that the Germans could expect to lose about one-third of their medium tanks even in a short six-week campaign, which Hitler regarded as acceptable losses. Furthermore, German industry had no tanks beyond the Pz.III or Pz.IV in advance development. The Heereswaffenamt (Army Weapons Office) only authorized Henschel and Porsche to begin working on prototypes for a new heavy tank four weeks before Operation Barbarossa began, and this program had no special priority until after the first encounters with the Soviet T-34 and KV-1 tanks in combat.

If the introduction and increase of machinery means the displacement of millions of manual by a few machine-workers, improvement in machinery means the displacement of more and more of the machine-workers themselves. It means, in the last instance, the production of a number of available wage-workers in excess of the average needs of capital, the formation of a complete industrial reserve army, as I called it in 1845, available at the times when industry is working at high pressure, to be cast out upon the street when the inevitable crash comes, a constant dead-weight upon the limbs of the working class in its struggle for existence with capital, a regulator for the keeping of wages down to the low level that suits the interests of capital. Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working class; that the instruments of labour constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the labourer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation. Thus it comes about that the evolutioni of the instruments of labour becomes at the same time, from the outset, the most reckless waste of labour-power, and robbery based upon the normal conditions under which labour functions; that machinery, the most powerful instrument for shortening labour-time, becomes the most unfailing means for placing every moment of the labourer’s time and that of his family at the disposal of the capitalist for the purpose of expanding the value of his capital.

We do not want to go to the right or left,” he said, “but straight back to our own country!” A few days later, on June 1, a treaty was drawn up. The Navajos agreed to live on a new reservation whose borders were considerably smaller than their traditional lands, with all four of the sacred mountains outside the reservation line. Still, it was a vast domain, nearly twenty-five thousand square miles, an area nearly the size of the state of Ohio. After Barboncito, Manuelito, and the other headmen left their X marks on the treaty, Sherman told the Navajos they were free to go home. June 18 was set as the departure date. The Navajos would have an army escort to feed and protect them. But some of them were so restless to get started that the night before they were to leave, they hiked ten miles in the direction of home, and then circled back to camp—they were so giddy with excitement they couldn’t help themselves. The next morning the trek began. In yet another mass exodus, this one voluntary and joyful, the entire Navajo Nation began marching the nearly four hundred miles toward home. The straggle of exiles spread out over ten miles. Somewhere in the midst of it walked Barboncito, wearing his new moccasins. When they reached the Rio Grande and saw Blue Bead Mountain for the first time, the Navajos fell to their knees and wept. As Manuelito put it, “We wondered if it was our mountain, and we felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so.” They continued marching in the direction the coyote had run, toward the country they had told their young children so much about. And as they marched, they chanted—

[...]but in Germany, where the loyalty of the army and the bureaucracy was the basis of a new feudalism, government posts were reserved, except for subordinate offices, for the nobility and the junkers. The common people were oppressed by the officials of the Crown, high and low, as much and even more than by the manorial stewards in former days. The German peasants had never known anything but serfdom, but now the middle classes, as well, lost everything they had gained in the course of the fourteenth and 95 fifteenth centuries. First of all, they were impoverished and deprived of their privileges, then they lost their self-confidence and selfrespect. Finally, out of their misery, they developed those ideals of submissiveness and unquestioning loyalty which made it possible for any cringing philistine to think of himself as the servant of a ‘higher Idea’.

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.

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order,

The intellectual justification for transphobia on the left is usually framed as concern about a mythological 'trans ideology', which is individualist, bourgeois and unconcerned with class struggle. As we've seen, however, the majority of trans people are working class, and the oppression of trans people is specifically rooted in capitalism. In short, capitalism across the world still relies heavily on the idea of different categories of men's work and women's work, in which "women's work" (such as housework, child-rearing, and emotional labour) is either poorly paid or not paid at all. In order for this categorization to function, it needs to rest on a clear idea of how to divide men and women. Capitalism also requires a certain level of unemployment to function. If there were enough work to go round, no worker would worry about losing their job, and all workers could demand higher wages and better conditions. The ever-present spectre of unemployment, on the other hand, enables employers to dictate conditions. Equally, in terms of severe crisis this 'reserve army' of unemployed people can be called into employment as and when the economy requires it. This system of deliberate unemployment needs ways to mark who will work and who will be left unemployed. In our society this is principally achieved through race, class, gender, and disability. Social exclusion and revulsion at the existence of trans people usefully provides another class of people more likely to be left in the ranks of the unemployed (even more so if they are trans and poor, black, or disabled - which is why unemployment is highest among these trans people).

Jamie used the time away from me to do some soul-searching. She finally also did something she’d thought about for a long time. She walked into an Army recruitment office in Nashville and joined the military. She didn’t discuss it with me beforehand. Instead she called and said, “I’m joining the Army. It’s active duty and I’m going to be a truck driver with an airborne contract.” Shocked, I blurted out, “You’re going to do what? No you’re not.” “What do you mean? I’m gonna be a truck driver in a convoy.” I knew she was referring to a seventies country song she likes. Only this wasn’t a country song, this was real life. “Are you crazy? This is not a game. You will hate being a truck driver. You don’t even know if you’ll like being in the military. Go National Guard or Reserves and see if you like it.” “They said I’m already in. Basic is not for another few months but I’m in and I can’t change it.” “Yes you can. You are not in yet. You are not in the military. That was just a recruiter telling you that. Why aren’t you going in as an officer? You have a degree. You can make more money.” She seemed annoyed that I was raining on her parade, but I think it was also dawning on her that maybe I was right and she hadn’t done the research. “They told me that it’s not really that much more.” I explained to her, “They are lying to you. It is a lot more.” I had no problem with her joining the military. If that’s what she wanted to do, I supported it. But I was going to make sure she made the smartest moves she could make if that was in fact what she wanted to do with her life. I certainly wasn’t going to let her be talked into a lower-paid, higher-risk job.

So what did you and Landon do this afternoon?” Minka asked, her soft voice dragging him back to the present. Angelo looked up to see that Minka had already polished off two fajitas. Damn, the girl could eat. “Landon gave me a tour of the DCO complex. I did some target shooting and blew up a few things. He even let me play with the expensive surveillance toys. I swear, it felt more like a recruiting pitch to get me to work there than anything.” Minka’s eyes flashed green, her full lips curving slightly. Damn, why the hell had he said it like that? Now she probably thought he was going to come work for the DCO. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t, not after just reenlisting for another five years. The army wasn’t the kind of job where you could walk into the boss’s office and say, “I quit.” Thinking it would be a good idea to steer the conversation back to safer ground, he reached for another fajita and asked Minka a question instead. “What do you think you’ll work on next with Ivy and Tanner? You going to practice with the claws for a while or move on to something else?” Angelo felt a little crappy about changing the subject, but if Minka noticed, she didn’t seem to mind. And it wasn’t like he had to fake interest in what she was saying. Anything that involved Minka was important to him. Besides, he didn’t know much about shifters or hybrids, so the whole thing was pretty damn fascinating. “What do you visualize when you see the beast in your mind?” he asked. “Before today, I thought of it as a giant, blurry monster. But after learning that the beast is a cat, that’s how I picture it now.” She smiled. “Not a little house cat, of course. They aren’t scary enough. More like a big cat that roams the mountains.” “Makes sense,” he said. Minka set the other half of her fourth fajita on her plate and gave him a curious look. “Would you mind if I ask you a personal question?” His mouth twitched as he prepared another fajita. He wasn’t used to Minka being so reserved. She usually said whatever was on her mind, regardless of whether it was personal or not. “Go ahead,” he said. “The first time we met, I had claws, fangs, glowing red eyes, and I tried to kill you. Since then, I’ve spent most of the time telling you about an imaginary creature that lives inside my head and makes me act like a monster. How are you so calm about that? Most people would have run away already.” Angelo chuckled. Not exactly the personal question he’d expected, but then again Minka rarely did the expected. “Well, my mom was full-blooded Cherokee, and I grew up around all kinds of Indian folktales and legends. My dad was in the army, and whenever he was deployed, Mom would take my sisters and me back to the reservation where she grew up in Oklahoma. I’d stay up half the night listening to the old men tell stories about shape-shifters, animal spirits, skin-walkers, and trickster spirits.” He grinned. “I’m not saying I necessarily believed in all that stuff back then, but after meeting Ivy, Tanner, and the other shifters at the DCO, it just didn’t faze me that much.” Minka looked at him with wide eyes. “You’re a real American Indian? Like in the movies? With horses and everything?” He laughed again. The expression of wonder on her face was adorable. “First, I’m only half-Indian. My dad is Mexican, so there’s that. And second, Native Americans are almost nothing like you see in the movies. We don’t all live in tepees and ride horses. In fact, I don’t even own a horse.” Minka was a little disappointed about the no-horse thing, but she was fascinated with what it was like growing up on an Indian reservation and being surrounded by all those legends. She immediately asked him to tell her some Indian stories. It had been a long time since he’d thought about them, but to make her happy, he dug through his head and tried to remember every tale he’d heard as a kid.

The phone rang. It was a familiar voice. It was Alan Greenspan. Paul O'Neill had tried to stay in touch with people who had served under Gerald Ford, and he'd been reasonably conscientious about it. Alan Greenspan was the exception. In his case, the effort was constant and purposeful. When Greenspan was the chairman of Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, and O'Neill was number two at OMB, they had become a kind of team. Never social so much. They never talked about families or outside interests. It was all about ideas: Medicare financing or block grants - a concept that O'Neill basically invented to balance federal power and local autonomy - or what was really happening in the economy. It became clear that they thought well together. President Ford used to have them talk about various issues while he listened. After a while, each knew how the other's mind worked, the way married couples do. In the past fifteen years, they'd made a point of meeting every few months. It could be in New York, or Washington, or Pittsburgh. They talked about everything, just as always. Greenspan, O'Neill told a friend, "doesn't have many people who don't want something from him, who will talk straight to him. So that's what we do together - straight talk." O'Neill felt some straight talk coming in. "Paul, I'll be blunt. We really need you down here," Greenspan said. "There is a real chance to make lasting changes. We could be a team at the key moment, to do the things we've always talked about." The jocular tone was gone. This was a serious discussion. They digressed into some things they'd "always talked about," especially reforming Medicare and Social Security. For Paul and Alan, the possibility of such bold reinventions bordered on fantasy, but fantasy made real. "We have an extraordinary opportunity," Alan said. Paul noticed that he seemed oddly anxious. "Paul, your presence will be an enormous asset in the creation of sensible policy." Sensible policy. This was akin to prayer from Greenspan. O'Neill, not expecting such conviction from his old friend, said little. After a while, he just thanked Alan. He said he always respected his counsel. He said he was thinking hard about it, and he'd call as soon as he decided what to do. The receiver returned to its cradle. He thought about Greenspan. They were young men together in the capital. Alan stayed, became the most noteworthy Federal Reserve Bank chairman in modern history and, arguably the most powerful public official of the past two decades. O'Neill left, led a corporate army, made a fortune, and learned lessons - about how to think and act, about the importance of outcomes - that you can't ever learn in a government. But, he supposed, he'd missed some things. There were always trade-offs. Talking to Alan reminded him of that. Alan and his wife, Andrea Mitchell, White House correspondent for NBC news, lived a fine life. They weren't wealthy like Paul and Nancy. But Alan led a life of highest purpose, a life guided by inquiry. Paul O'Neill picked up the telephone receiver, punched the keypad. "It's me," he said, always his opening. He started going into the details of his trip to New York from Washington, but he's not much of a phone talker - Nancy knew that - and the small talk trailed off. "I think I'm going to have to do this." She was quiet. "You know what I think," she said. She knew him too well, maybe. How bullheaded he can be, once he decides what's right. How he had loved these last few years as a sovereign, his own man. How badly he was suited to politics, as it was being played. And then there was that other problem: she'd almost always been right about what was best for him. "Whatever, Paul. I'm behind you. If you don't do this, I guess you'll always regret it." But it was clearly about what he wanted, what he needed. Paul thanked her. Though somehow a thank-you didn't seem appropriate. And then he realized she was crying.

Still, there was hope of progress. In March 1865, Congress created an organization, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had a range of responsibilities including the reallocation of abandoned Southern land to the newly emancipated. The bureau’s charge was to lease forty-acre parcels that would provide economic self-sufficiency to a people who had endured hundreds of years of unpaid toil. Already, in January 1865, Union general William Tecumseh Sherman had issued Special Field Order No. 15, which, to take some of the pressure off his army as thousands of slaves eagerly fled their plantations and trailed behind his troops, “reserved coastal land in Georgia and South Carolina for black settlement.” Less than a year after he issued the order, forty thousand former slaves had begun to work four hundred thousand acres of this land.36 Then, in July of the same year, the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau, General Oliver O. Howard, issued Circular 13, fully authorizing the lease of forty-acre plots from abandoned plantations to the newly freed families. “Howard was neither a great administrator nor a great man,” noted W.E.B. Du Bois, “but he was a good man. He was sympathetic and humane, and tried with endless application and desperate sacrifice to do a hard, thankless duty.”37 Howard made clear that whatever amnesty President Johnson may have bestowed on Southern rebels did not “extend to … abandoned or confiscated property.”38 Johnson, however, immediately rescinded Howard’s order, commanding the army to throw tens of thousands of freedpeople off the land and reinstall the plantation owners.39 While this could have come from a simple ideological aversion to land redistribution, that was not the case and, for Johnson, not the issue; who received it was. Beginning in 1843, when he was first elected to the U.S. Congress, and over the next nineteen years, Johnson had championed the Homestead Act,

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.

David had gone to Moab across the Jordan and had appealed to its king through the ancient custom of providing sanctuary for the enemies of your adversaries. Since David was himself an adversary of both Saul and the Philistines, then he was a de-facto ally of Moab. David also claimed his Moabite ancestry through his great grandmother, Ruth, the wife of Boaz. David painted himself as a hybrid of both Israelite and Moabite lineage. During the journey, David had gathered several hundred more followers and a few prophets, including Gad the Seer and other warriors who supported his anointed claim to the throne. David formed his mightiest gibborim warriors into special units he called his “Three” and his “Thirty.” The Three were his three chiefs over all the regular armed forces; Jashobeam, Eleazar and Shammah. The Thirty were his supreme army council, veterans responsible for the organization and management of internal army regulations. They commanded the militia reserves with a readiness for quick and mobile engagements. Each of these men was chosen based upon personal feats of courage or faith.

These divisions and heavy weapons might or might not suffice for the task at hand, but the total represented the best that the Wehrmacht could do. Of the armored complement on the Western Front-2,567 tanks and assault guns-Army Group B and OKW reserve had been given 2,168. About a third of this latter total would have to be left for the time being with the Fifteenth Army to shore up the right-wing defenses in the Roer sector. Some four hundred tanks and assault guns were all that remained to German divisions on the rest of the long Western Front.

One day, many years after the siege was lifted and the war was over, two nutritionists met by chance. They introduced themselves. One, Alexei Bezzubov, had worked at Leningrad’s Vitamin Institute, seeking out new sources of protein for the hungry. The other, as it turned out, was Ernst Ziegelmeyer, deputy quartermaster of Hitler’s army, the man who’d been assigned to calculate how quickly Leningrad would fall without food deliveries. Now these two men met in peace: the one who had tried to starve a city, and the other who had tried to feed it. Ziegelmeyer pressed Bezzubov incredulously: “However did you hold out? How could you? It’s quite impossible! I wrote a deposition that it was physically impossible to live on such a ration.” Bezzubov could not provide a scientific, purely nutritive answer. There was none. Instead, he “talked of faith in victory, of the spiritual reserves of Leningraders, which had not been accounted for in the German professor’s

China is shown as an invading army of two hundred million (Rev. 9:16 and 16:12–“the Kings of the east”). When Revelation was written, the total population of the world was only a fraction then, of the number of soldiers in this prophesied future mega-army. No other nation in the world then, or for that matter now, could mount such an army, except China’s reserve armies today.

while it is true capital’s deployment and redeployment of labor power overturns all barriers, an increasingly intensified competitive struggle within the working class determines who can sell her labor power and who will be forced into the reserve army of labor. There is nothing about this process that implies equality of opportunity among wage slaves, nor any tendency toward homogenization of their wages. With the improvement in the productivity of labor, wages fall and competition between workers becomes increasingly fierce precisely because this struggle is a matter of life and death for each of them. It only makes sense to assume that those workers who enjoy special advantages arising from purely historical causes, will employ these advantages with the utmost ruthless urgency as conditions of the class as a whole deteriorate. To lose in this competition means hunger and homelessness for the worker and for her family.

the Army contracts private carriers to handle the overflow.  In the Gulf War, they even had to resort to forcing major airline companies to cough up planes to make ends meet, under a compulsive federal system known as the Civilian Reserve Airfleet Program (my favorite government acronym of all time). 

The German army appeared today to have taken its greatest gamble of the war, staking everything on a single desperate offensive to halt the allied march on Berlin now. Decisive failure in this big push, observers believed, might lead to a German military collapse and the final defeat of the Wehrmacht west of the Rhine. The full scope and purpose of the enemy’s winter offensive is still obscured by military censorship on both sides of the front, but field dispatches hinted strongly that the battle now swirling along the Belgian border may prove to be the last great action of the western war … All accounts indicated the Nazis have finally committed the cream of their armored reserves to this offensive, and the German home radio service boasted that the long-silent Adolf Hitler personally planned and ordered the attack.

Key Apache Adversaries—U.S. Military Figures and Civilian Apache Agents Clum, John P.—born 1851. Civilian Apache agent at the San Carlos and Fort Apache reservations. Nicknamed “Turkey Gobbler” by the Apache for his strutting nature. Later became mayor of Tombstone, Arizona. His claim to fame was being the only person to successfully “capture” Geronimo. Died in 1932. Crook, General George—born 1828. Called America’s “greatest Indian fighter.” He was the first to use Indian scouts and was crucial in ending the Apache Wars. Called Nantan Lupan (“the Tan Wolf”) by the Apache, he advocated for Apache rights while at the same time becoming one of Geronimo’s greatest adversaries. Crook negotiated Geronimo’s “surrender” at the Cañon de los Embudos. He died in 1890. Gatewood, Lieutenant Charles B.—born 1853. A latecomer to the Apache Wars, Gatewood used scouts but failed to bring in Victorio. However, Gatewood would ultimately negotiate the terms of Geronimo’s final surrender to General Nelson A. Miles in 1886. He died in 1896. Miles, General Nelson A.—born in 1839. Civil War veteran best known for accepting Geronimo’s final surrender. Fought Sioux and Cheyenne Indians after the Battle of Little Big Horn. He died at the age of eighty-five in 1925 and was buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Sieber, Al—born 1843. A German-American, he served as the army’s chief of scouts during the Apache Wars. Died in 1907.

There is a famous quote from Dwight Eisenhower (who himself called it a statement he had heard long before in the army) that “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” In a normal life context, just as on the battlefield, things seldom go exactly as planned. However, when you have thought through the logistics, you can pivot more easily than if you’ve never even pondered the possibilities. When we are thinking of pleasurable plans, as opposed to military campaigns, there’s an even better argument for planning: anticipation accounts for the bulk of any happiness associated with an event. If I have made a reservation at The French Laundry for a date in August (something that turns out to require being on the reservation system right when it opens months before), I will spend much time

War stripped of its passions. its phantasms. its finery. its veils. its violence. its images; war stripped bare by its technicians even. and then reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics. as though with a second skin. But these too are a kind of decoy that technology sets up before itself. Saddam Hussein's decoys still aim to deceive the enemy. whereas the American technological decoy only aims to deceive itself. The first days of the lightning attack. dominated by this technological mystification. will remain one of the finest bluffs. one of the finest collective mirages of contemporary History (along with Timisoara). We are all accomplices in these fantasmagoria. it must be said, as we are in any publicity campaign. In the past. the unemployed constituted the reserve army of Capital; today. in our enslavement to information. we constitute the reserve army of all planetary mystifications.

Stranger's Park by Stewart Stafford Up the empty, welcoming path, Half grass/gravel in composition, Past ruined cottage foundations, And tree trunk with vaginal cleft. Swings sway, empty playground, Birds serenading wraith children, Roundhead bins stand as sentries, Keeping errant litter off the grass. Army truck and wailing ambulance, Shatter the tranquility as they pass, Blaring car horn joins the cacophony, Turning on my heel, I journey home. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

Most federal entities and employees are neither necessary nor proper to carry out the legitimate federal functions prescribed by the Constitution. Why does the Federal Government need 2.1 million civilian employees?324 This figure does not include uniformed military members or the U.S. Postal Service. Why is this cloud of locusts four times larger than the U.S. Army, when the Tenth Amendment reserves most government functions to the States? These federal organizations are reminiscent of the American colonists’ complaint, in the Declaration of Independence, that King George III had “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

By their readiness to do more than their colleagues, agency workers can be used by management to reduce the ‘comfort zones’ of permanent employees, as a personnel manager explained in an interview. In the average firm, moreover, the permanent staff experience precarious employment as a means of social discipline that bridges the internal and external labour markets; this has altered the ‘reserve army’ mechanism on the labour market.71 In the past, it was the unemployed who filled the ranks of the capitalist reserve army, exerting an external structural pressure on wages and working conditions. Precarious employment now internalizes this function within the firm. The agency workers may be inside the firm, but they have one foot outside of it in unemployment, so their mere presence reminds the permanent staff that their future might also become less secure.

Trick #1 for Farming Humans is the ability to invisibly commit crime. Chapter 1, Page 9, Ring of Gyges Trick #2 for Farming Humans is to allow professionals to create rigged systems or self serving social constructs. Chapter 4, page 28 (Lawyers who serve corporate interests are often incentivized to assist in harming the society to increase their own security. SEC, Bernie Madoff, Corporations as invisible friends, Money laundering assistance) Trick #3 in Farming Humans is making it legal for insider manipulation of public markets for private gain. (Boeing CEO) page 32 Trick #4 for Farming Humans is Justice prefers to look only down…rarely up towards power. Chapter 5, page 33. Trick #5 for Farming Humans is “let us create the nation’s money”. What could go wrong? Found in Chapter 7 on page 38. Trick # 6 in the game of Farming Humans, to create something which gives a few men an elevated status above the rest. Southern Pacific Railroad taxes, to Pacific Gas and Electric deadly California fires, to Boeing aircraft casualties. Paper “persons” cannot be arrested or jailed. Trick #7 for Farming Humans is a private game of money creation which secretly “borrowed” on the credit backing of the public. Chapter 9, page 51. Federal Reserve. Trick #8 for Farming Humans is seen in the removal of the gold backing of US dollars for global trading partners, a second default of the promises behind the dollar. (1971) Chapter 15, page 81 Trick #9 for Farming Humans is being able to sell out the public trust, over and over again. Supreme Court rules that money equals speech. Chapter 16, page 91. Trick #10 for Farming Humans is Clinton repeals Glass Steagall, letting banks gamble America into yet another financial collapse. Chapter 17, page 93. Trick #11 for Farming Humans is when money is allowed to buy politics. Citizens United, super PAC’s can spend unlimited money during campaigns. Chapter 18, page 97. Trick #12 for Farming Humans is the Derivative Revolution. Making it up with lawyers and papers in a continual game of “lets pretend”. Chapter 19, page 105. Trick #13 for Farming Humans is allowing dis-information to infect society. Chapter 20, page 109. Trick #14 for Farming Humans is substitution of an “advisor”, for what investors think is an “adviser”. Confused yet? The clever “vowel movement” adds billions in profits, while farming investors. Trick #15 for Farming Humans is when privately-hired rental-cops are allowed to lawfully regulate an industry, the public gets abused. Investments, SEC, FDA, FAA etc. Chapter 15, page 122 Trick #16 for Farming Humans is the layer of industry “self regulators”, your second army of people paid to “gaslight” the public into thinking they are protected.

Unemployment, too, has taken on new meaning. It is no longer a strategy of capital (the reserve army of labour). It is no longer a critical factor in the play of social relationships - if it were, since the danger level was passed long ago, it would necessarily have sparked unprecedented upheavals. What is unemployment today? It too is a sort of artificial satellite, a satellite of inertia, a mass with a charge of electricity that cannot even be described as a negative charge, for it is static: I refer to that increasingly large portion of society that is deepfrozen. Beneath the accelerating pace of the circuits and systems of exchange, beneath all the frenzied activity, there is something in us - in each of us - that slows down to the point where it fades out of circulation. This is the inertia point around which the whole of society eventually begins to gravitate. It is as though the two poles of our world had been brought into contact, shortcircuiting in such a way that they simultaneously hyperstimulate and enervate potential energies. This is no longer a crisis, but a fatal development - a catastrophe in slow motion.

The cheekiest of land speculators, or the most conscienceless of newspaper correspondents, could not say a word in behalf of that infernal region, which it would be the acme of exaggeration to term "land." But some of our old Indian scouts said it was Arabia Felix compared with what lay between us and the Powder river. Why the government of the United States should keep an army for the purpose of robbing the Indians of such a territory, is an unsolvable puzzle. It is a solemn mockery to call the place "a reservation," unless dust, ashes and rocks be accounted of value to mankind. Not even one Indian could manage to exist on the desert tract over which

COL Nicholas Young Retires from the United States Army after More than Thirty -Six Years of Distinguished Service to our Nation 2 September 2020 The United States Army War College is pleased to announce the retirement of United States Army War College on September 1, 2020. COL Young’s recent officer evaluation calls him “one of the finest Colonel’s in the United States Army who should be promoted to Brigadier General. COL Young has had a long and distinguished career in the United States Army, culminating in a final assignment as a faculty member at the United States Army War College since 2015. COL Young served until his mandatory retirement date set by federal statue. His long career encompassed just shy of seven years enlisted time before serving for thirty years as a commissioned officer.He first joined the military in 1984, serving as an enlisted soldier in the New Hampshire National Guard before completing a tour of active duty in the U.S, Army Infantry as a non-commissioned officer with the 101st Airborne (Air Assault). He graduated from Officer Candidate School in 1990, was commissioned in the Infantry, and then served as a platoon leader and executive officer in the Massachusetts Army National Guard before assuming as assignment as the executive officer of HHD, 3/18th Infantry in the U.S. Army Reserves. He made a branch transfer to the Medical Service Corps in 1996. COL Young has since served as a health services officer, company executive officer, hospital medical operations officer, hospital adjutant, Commander of the 287th Medical Company (DS), Commander of the 455th Area Support Dental, Chief of Staff of the 804th Medical Brigade, Hospital Commander of the 405th Combat Support Hospital and Hospital Commander of the 399th Combat Support Hospital. He was activated to the 94th Regional Support Command in support of the New York City terrorist attacks in 2001. COL Young is currently a faculty instructor at the U.S. Army War College. He is a graduate of basic training, advanced individual infantry training, Air Assault School, the primary leadership development course, the infantry officer basic course, the medical officer basic course, the advanced medical officer course, the joint medical officer planning course, the company commander leadership course, the battalion/brigade commander leadership course, the U.S. Air War College (with academic honors), the U.S. Army War College and the U.S. Naval War College (with academic distinction).

The idea of women as a reserve army of labour is double-sided, in a sense. Women are a spare resource for employers in times of expansion; they are also a spare resource for politicians to call upon in times of recession. When it ceases to be convenient to spend money on public services, responsibility is handed back to those two euphemisms for unpaid female labour, 'the community' and 'the family.

The Meeker Massacre, as newspapers across the country labeled it, gave Governor Pitkin an opportunity to make a special announcement to the press about the Ute threat: “My idea is that, unless removed by the government, they must necessarily be exterminated.” He pointed out “The advantages that would accrue from the throwing open of twelve million acres of land to miners and settlers. . . .” In August 1881 the U.S. Army force-marched virtually all of the Colorado Utes 350 miles to a reservation on a desolate stretch of land near Roosevelt, Utah.

In the course of the 1960s, the left adopted almost wholesale the arguments of the right,” observed Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a domestic policy adviser to all three of the decade’s presidents. “This was not a rude act of usurpation, but rather a symmetrical, almost elegant, process of transfer.” Exaggerating for effect—but not to the point of inaccuracy—Moynihan remembered that by decade’s end, “an advanced student at an elite eastern college could be depended on to avow many of the more striking views of the Liberty League and its equivalents in the hate-Roosevelt era; for example that the growth of federal power was the greatest threat to democracy, that foreign entanglements were the work of demented plutocrats, that government snooping (by the Social Security Administration or the United States Continental Army Command) was destroying freedom, that the largest number of functions should be entrusted to the smallest jurisdictions, and so across the spectrum of this viewpoint.”2 Driven primarily by the expanding war in Vietnam, this new current on the left took up individualistic and anti-statist themes that were once the province of the right. Another part of this convergence was the rise of the economics profession. The new economics appeared a success on its own terms; growth had picked up across the Kennedy years. By 1965, GNP had increased for five straight years. Unemployment was down to 4.9 percent, and would soon drop below the 4 percent goal of full employment. As James Tobin reflected, “economists were riding the crest of a wave of enthusiasm and self-confidence. They seemed, after all, to have some tools of analysis and policy other people didn’t have, and their policy seemed to be working.”3 With institutional economics a vanquished force, most economists accepted the tenets of the neoclassical revolution: individuals making rational choices subject to the incentives created by supply and demand. Approaching policy with an economic lens cut across established political lines, which were often the creation of brokered coalitions, habit, or historical precedent. Economic analysis was at once disruptive, since it failed to honor these accidental accretions, and familiar, since it spoke a market language resonant with business-friendly political culture.4 Amid this ideological confluence, Friedman continued his dour rumblings and warnings. Ignoring the positive trends in basic indicators of economic health, from inflation to unemployment to GDP, he argued fiscal demand management was misguided, warned Bretton Woods was about to collapse, predicted imminent inflation, and castigated the Federal Reserve’s basic approach. Friedman’s quixotic quest—and the media attention it generated—infuriated many of his peers. Friedman, it seemed, was bent on fixing economic theories and institutions that were not broken.

The Cuban Military includes the army, air and air defense forces, navy and various youth groups and reserve components. As a United Military Force it is called the “Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias – FAR” or “The Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces.” “FAR” extends into the civilian sector controlling 60% of the economy. Because of the overlapping interests, it is difficult to separate the various military branches which have been and are still controlled by Raúl Castro. In his speeches he frequently has stressed the military as the people's partner in the operation of the country. The General Officer’s, have duties that extend beyond their responsibilities to the military. Prior to the 1980’s, the Cuban military depended on the Soviet Union to support them and in return, Cuba supported the Soviet Union militarily in Africa, South America and the Middle East. Throughout the 1980’s, the amount of military equipment they received gave Cuba the most formidable military in Latin America. Because of corruption and drug trafficking by the Cuban army in 1989, a move was instituted by Raúl Castro to rout out the offenders, executing some and reassigning others to the Ministry of Interior, which became part of a much smaller army. Presently Cuba has deepened its military training program with China. The Cuban military has been reduced to 39,000 troops however the Territorial Militia Troops, the Youth Labor Army, and the Naval Militia, now more defensive in nature, still retains the potential to make any enemy invasion costly.

The whole form of the movement of modern industry depends,” Marx writes, “upon the constant transformation of a part of the laboring population into unemployed or half-employed hands.”[70] This “surplus population,” as Marx termed it, was a “necessary product,” one that even enhanced capital by being “the lever of capitalist accumulation.”[71] It provides capitalists the well-known “industrial reserve army” that helps control other laborers. Its mere existence conveys many employers’ not-so-subtle whisper: “Don’t forget, we can exploit you as we will, since there are so many more we can hire, and usually for lower wages.

From the Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker Behind “The Exciting Story of Cuba” It was on a rainy evening in January of 2013, after Captain Hank and his wife Ursula returned by ship from a cruise in the Mediterranean, that Captain Hank was pondering on how to market his book, Seawater One. Some years prior he had published the book “Suppressed I Rise.” But lacking a good marketing plan the book floundered. Locally it was well received and the newspapers gave it great reviews, but Ursula was battling allergies and, unfortunately, the timing was off, as was the economy. Captain Hank has the ability to see sunshine when it’s raining and he’s not one easily deterred. Perhaps the timing was off for a novel or a textbook, like the Scramble Book he wrote years before computers made the scene. The history of West Africa was an option, however such a book would have limited public interest and besides, he had written a section regarding this topic for the second Seawater book. No, what he was embarking on would have to be steeped in history and be intertwined with true-life adventures that people could identify with. Out of the blue, his friend Jorge suggested that he write about Cuba. “You were there prior to the Revolution when Fidel Castro was in jail,” he ventured. Laughing, Captain Hank told a story of Mardi Gras in Havana. “Half of the Miami Police Department was there and the Coca-Cola cost more than the rum. Havana was one hell of a place!” Hank said. “I’ll tell you what I could do. I could write a pamphlet about the history of the island. It doesn’t have to be very long… 25 to 30 pages would do it.” His idea was to test the waters for public interest and then later add it to his book Seawater One. Writing is a passion surpassed only by his love for telling stories. It is true that Captain Hank had visited Cuba prior to the Revolution, but back then he was interested more in the beauty of the Latino girls than the history or politics of the country. “You don’t have to be Greek to appreciate Greek history,” Hank once said. “History is not owned solely by historians. It is a part of everyone’s heritage.” And so it was that he started to write about Cuba. When asked about why he wasn’t footnoting his work, he replied that the pamphlet, which grew into a book over 600 pages long, was a book for the people. “I’m not writing this to be a history book or an academic paper. I’m writing this book, so that by knowing Cuba’s past, people would understand it’s present.” He added that unless you lived it, you got it from somewhere else anyway, and footnoting just identifies where it came from. Aside from having been a ship’s captain and harbor pilot, Captain Hank was a high school math and science teacher and was once awarded the status of “Teacher of the Month” by the Connecticut State Board of Education. He has done extensive graduate work, was a union leader and the attendance officer at a vocational technical school. He was also an officer in the Naval Reserve and an officer in the U.S. Army for a total of over 40 years. He once said that “Life is to be lived,” and he certainly has. Active with Military Intelligence he returned to Europe, and when I asked what he did there, he jokingly said that if he had told me he would have to kill me. The Exciting Story of Cuba has the exhilaration of a novel. It is packed full of interesting details and, with the normalizing of the United States and Cuba, it belongs on everyone’s bookshelf, or at least in the bathroom if that’s where you do your reading. Captain Hank is not someone you can hold down and after having read a Proof Copy I know that it will be universally received as the book to go to, if you want to know anything about Cuba! Excerpts from a conversation with Chief Warrant Officer Peter Rommel, USA Retired, Military Intelligence Corps, Winter of 2014.

Aside from having been a ship’s captain and harbor pilot, Captain Hank was a high school math and science teacher and was once awarded the status of “Teacher of the Month” by the Connecticut State Board of Education. He has done extensive graduate work, was a union leader and the attendance officer at a vocational technical school. He was also an officer in the Naval Reserve and an officer in the U.S. Army for a total of over 40 years. He once said that “Life is to be lived,” and he certainly has. Active with Military Intelligence he returned to Europe, and when I asked what he did there, he jokingly said that if he had told me he would have to kill me." Peter Rommel USA-ret

Hannibal had no other sure source of reserves but the Gauls of Italy: he was dependent upon them, and the whole success of the expedition was dependent upon him staying alive. His hopes at this time must also have been geared to the possibility of seducing away from Rome the Latin allies, who in many respects formed the bulk of her armies. If he could shatter the confederation that held these states together he could deprive Rome of a principal source of manpower and isolate her. For this reason, both now and in the future, he was careful to make a distinction among the prisoners that he took: Romans were reduced to slave status, but the allies were treated kindly and, whenever possible, sent back to their homes with the message that the Carthaginian had no enmity against them. His war was against Rome.

Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this

Military force is another element of power. It provides a nation the capability to impose it's will on another nation through the threat or use of violence. Military force also provides a state the capability to resist another's coercive actions. The types of military forces required will depend on the state's physical characteristics and its enemies' capabilities. A landlocked state has little need for a navy. If a nation's opponent has a strong air force, then the nation should have strong air defenses. The size and composition of military force available will dictate the types of operations a state may conduct. A landlocked power with no navy will never dominate the seas. A state without an air force or navy today will have great difficulty projecting and sustaining military forces over great distances. A strong army with no ability to move to another area has little impact on foreign policy, except on protecting its homeland. The technological sophistication of its weaponry versus that of an opponent's will provide a state an advantage or disadvantage in projecting its will. All other things being equal, a state weapons that can kill an opponent's soldiers faster and more efficiency that those of the opponent's has an advantage. Of course, rarely are all other things equal. Technological superiority can provide an advantage, but it cannot guarantee success. Technology will also affect the state's ability to sustain its forces. Commonality of the civilian and military technological base will enhance logistical capabilities by making it easy for civilian industry to provide military forces the equipment needed. The location of military forces with respect to the theater of war and the enemy is another component of military power. If the military forces are near their warfighting positioning, their deterrent and warfare capabilities are greater. The degree of civilian control and willingness to employ military force prescribes the manner in which a state may employ its military power. This point relates to the national will element of power. If the will to employ the military force available does not exist, the military force has no utility. No power results from the simple existence of the military force. Power results from the will to use military power, or at least an enemy's perception of the willingness to do so, and the capability of that military force to defeat all enemy. Available reserves limit the duration of combat a state can endure. Once all the trained or trainable men and women are casualties, a state cannot continue. A state's manpower pool always serves as a limit on the size of the military force it can raise.

However, after several false starts and with the lessons of history fading, America, too, would finally create a permanent central bank, in 1914. For political reasons it could not be called that so it was named the Federal Reserve. Proving the wisdom of the founding generation and several thereafter, the era of central banking in America corresponds almost perfectly with the era of government-business collusion, inflation, boom-and-bust cycles, protracted depressions, military alliances, military bases abroad, foreign wars, standing armies, and massive debt left for future generations.

Automation, which is both the most advanced sector of modern industry and the epitome of its practice, obliges the commodity system to resolve the following contradiction: The technological developments that objectively tend to eliminate work must at the same time preserve labor as a commodity, because labor is the only creator of commodities. The only way to prevent automation (or any other less extreme method of increasing labor productivity) from reducing society’s total necessary labor time is to create new jobs. To this end the reserve army of the unemployed is enlisted into the tertiary or “service” sector, reinforcing the troops responsible for distributing and glorifying the latest commodities; and in this it is serving a real need, in the sense that increasingly extensive campaigns are necessary to convince people to buy increasingly unnecessary commodities.

When their patriotic neighbors came to the reservation to sign them up for the army, proud Catawbas seized on the opportunity to shine once again.

I’m a Muslim migrant woman, I’m heading to the Senate on Monday, and there’s nothing Senator Fraser Anning can do about that.” Once inside the Senate, Mehreen did not mince her words. She said some of Australia’s politicians were “creating and fanning racial divisions.” Her position in politics has led to accusations that Mehreen is not “Australian enough” to serve the country. Mehreen’s response? “But how can I be Australian enough? Do I need to point to my love of cricket? My career in the public service? My husband’s role as major in the army reserves?” People of color in white-dominant societies are often forced to walk the lines of “enough.” Not quite brown enough, never quite assimilated enough, to the point that we feel, well, like we can never be enough. Mehreen refuses to play that game. “Instead of being accepted because this is our home, we are asked to apologize for every action of someone who looks like us. We are subject to rules that white people never will be . . . for some, we will never be Australian enough.

the Knights Templar were pirates and thieves who secretly excavated Solomon’s Temple in the first century A.D. under the disguise of protecting travelers from being attacked by Muslim armies. The Templars, who many believe were the creators of Freemasonry (and later the Illuminati), became the first international bankers and used the treasure they essentially stole from the ruins of what was Solomon’s Temple (along with the knowledge of fractional reserve banking) to become the wealthiest organization of their time.

Additionally, visitors can learn some interesting lessons in military logistics since a section of George Spangler’s acreage behind the hospital site served as a camp for some of the Army of the Potomac’s Reserve Artillery.8

Each commander, Red Army soldier and political commissar should understand that our means are not limitless. The territory of the Soviet state is not a desert, but people - workers, peasants, intelligentsia, our fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, children. The territory of the USSR which the enemy has captured and aims to capture is bread and other products for the army, metal and fuel for industry, factories, plants supplying the army with arms and ammunition, railroads. After the loss of Ukraine, Belarus, Baltic republics, Donetzk, and other areas we have much less territory, much less people, bread, metal, plants and factories. We have lost more than 70 million people, more than 800 million pounds of bread annually and more than 10 million tons of metal annually. Now we do not have predominance over the Germans in human reserves, in reserves of bread. To retreat further - means to waste ourselves and to waste at the same time our Motherland . . . This leads to the conclusion, it is time to finish retreating. Not one step back! Such should now be our main slogan.” —Josef Stalin

workers have few options but to consent to managers’ demands that they work hard, especially when unemployment is high and there is a sizable reserve army of unemployed workers ready to take one’s job.

Anayansi Corey has a teaching history at the elementary level and is currently a Spanish tutor. She's received her Teaching Credential with an emphasis in Bilingual Cross-Cultural Education in Spanish from the California State University of Hayward. As she completed her degree, Anayansi also served in the US Army Reserves, attending drill weekends a least once per month. Her personal goals include traveling and spending time with her family, including a safari in Africa and visiting Asia countries.

finished their compulsory training under universal service and were between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-four were classed as reserves. Upon mobilization the youngest classes filled out the regular army units to war strength; the others were formed into reserve regiments,

On the military level, the first period of reforms was marked by the introduction of conscription along with a fixed period of military service introduced in 1843 and based on the Prussian Conscription Law of 1814. The Ottoman military was then divided into five Imperial Armies garrisoned in different regions of the Empire. The military service was established as a period of five years between the ages of 20 to 25 along with an additional seven years of reserve duties. The first and second military reforms also saw the emergence of a new, more educated class of middle to high ranking officers and cadets, who progressively became involved in the Ottoman palace politics, as illustrated by the May 1876 coup (see the First Constitutional Era). The

What is the life of one person worth? Although the Supreme leader Kim Jong-un is not suicidal, life to him is relatively cheap, after all he had his half-brother murdered. The countries population of almost 25 million people is harshly subjugated and the military consists of 5,200,000 men and women both active and in the reserves. Although his military ranks as 25th of the worlds military powers, it is the development of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems that makes Kim Jong-un so dangerous. It is estimated that they have about a dozen nuclear devices that could most likely be delivered as far as Japan. Of course their future targets, including the United States are more ambitious. In contrast to their troop strength, the United States has 1,400,000 personnel under arms, South Korea has only 624,465 and China has 2,333,000 personnel. Our advantage is primarily technical, however regardless of our superiority in battlefield technology, oil which they get from China, remains the lifeblood of their supporting economy and army. North Korea has threatened to fire missiles at the U. S. military bases in Okinawa and Guam. The reality of a war is that we would most likely win such a conflict but at a very high cost. The biggest losers of a war on the Korean Peninsula would be South Korea, North Korea and the United States in that order. If there were to be a winner it would be Russia. What are we thinking? Perhaps we should come up with a better strategy.

What’s wrong, Mom?” Anna asked. Mom looked like she’d been crying, but she said, “Nothing, sweetie.” “Who is Dad talking to?” I asked. I knew she’d protect us from whatever was happening, so I went straight for facts. If I gathered enough facts I could figure it out on my own. “Some friends of his from work.” “Uncle Jack?” I asked. Jack wasn’t an uncle but we called him that. He was my dad’s foreman in the roofing business. “No, honey. From the Army. His old work.” It was September 11, 2001, and the call he’d made was to his commanding officer in the Reserve. I’d figure that out later. And I’d learn that he’d done ROTC through college, then served with the Fifth Special Forces Group in Desert Storm. I’d learn that his shoulder injury had come from shrapnel embedded in his rotator cuff. I’d learn, just from watching him, from listening to him talk to his buddies, about Ranger School. Jump school. The Ranger Battalions. The Scroll. The Creed. That Rangers lead the way. But I didn’t know any of that then. I knew my dad as a roofer. A fisherman. A lover of Pearl Jam and Giants baseball. He was the guy who launched me over the waves on the beach, and who bench-pressed Anna because it made her giggle in a way that nothing else did. He was my mom’s best friend, with some additional elements like kissing that seemed pretty gross because, you know, I was six. But I learned something new about him that morning. I learned that when bad things happened, my dad stepped forward first. I learned he was a hero. A real one. And that I wanted to be like him

The men knew that their own conduct was turning brutal. “I have to say that the war has changed me a lot,” Aronov wrote. “War does not make people tender. On the contrary, it makes them reserved, rather coarse, and very cruel. That’s a fact.”4

I served our country in its military for a total of 40 years 6 months and 7 days. At a time when we have fake news and people have accepted that lies are as valid as the truth all I can say is that my DD-214 shows that I served and retired from the United States Naval Reserve, before joining the United States Army in its Military Intelligence Corps, and served as such until retiring in 1987. I personally don’t know of anyone else that actually served in two branches of our military and retired from each, and although I frequently receive thanks for my service it is appreciated but not necessary. What is however necessary, is that we as citizens give a long hard look at where we are going as a nation. Yes, our infrastructure needs repair and our people need good jobs. We certainly want to feel secure but we definitely don’t need one man to fix our Constitution, which by the way is not broken! We do not need a crude iron fist to run our country! What we do need is a clear understanding of where we are going and what our country stands for…. “The pursuit of happiness” for “We the People!” Our government is based on a system of checks and balances, not the blind following of an autocrat. That’s been tried before and failed each time. Let’s not go down that “Rabbit hole!” Stand up and protect our democracy and cherish our freedom! What we have is priceless! Don’t let anyone take that away from us…. “Stand up for what is right!

Disdain of the reserves was augmented by the new doctrine of the offensive which, it was felt, could only be properly inculcated in active troops. To perform the irresistible onslaught of the attaque brusquée, symbolized by the bayonet charge, the essential quality was élan, and élan could not be expected of men settled in civilian life with family responsibilities. Reserves mixed with active troops would create “armies of decadence,” incapable of the will to conquer.

Bowes collected many honorary titles in his life: his real title, “major,” was often suspected of being a trump-up, but it was genuine enough—he had held that rank in the U.S. Army Reserve during World War I. In retrospect, the show produced few stars of the first magnitude (Beverly Sills, Frank Sinatra, and Robert Merrill were the best-known Amateur Hour winners). “To be sure, minor talents have been discovered,” Radio Guide conceded. “But even the best half-dozen performers who have moved up in the entertainment world through the Amateur Hour still are not averaging more than $100 a week. Compare this figure with Major Bowes’ own income of something like $40,000 a week, and compare that with the $40–60 earned by players in his units. It’s something to think about.

The reproduction of the working class involves not only work in the factory but also work in the home and in the community of homes. [...] Accumulation means accumulation of the reserve army as well as the active army, of those who worked at reproducing the class as well as those who produced other commodities (besides labor-power). The "factory" where the working class worked was the society as a whole, a social factory. The working class had to be redefined to include nonfactory workers.

This army contained 16 divisions, three per corps, but with a fourth division in VIII Corps. Each division could muster around 15,000 men, so the total, with corps troops and the Army reserve, came to some 400,000 men. To this can be added, for the initial onslaught on the German line, two divisions from VII Corps of Third Army, the 46th and the 56th, who would attack the salient at Gommecourt, north of Fourth Army line. More than half the soldiers in this force had never been in action before.

The Skull Valley reservation is ringed by toxic and hazardous waste facilities (Figure 1). To the south lies the Dugway Proving Grounds, where the US Army tests chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and other weapons and trains elite members of the US armed forces in their use. To the west is the Utah Test and Training Range, a vast swath of desert the US Air Force uses for target practice by bombers, the testing of cruise missiles, and air-to-air combat training for fighter jets. North and west of the reservation a private company, Enviro Care, landfills 93 percent of the nation's Class A, low-level nuclear waste. East of the reservation sit the Tooele Army Depot, one of the largest weapons depots in the world, and the Deseret Chemical Depot, which until recently was home to nearly 50 percent of the nation's aging stockpile of chemical weapons. From 1996 to 2012 the US Army worked around the clock to incinerate over a million rockets, missiles, and mortars packed with sarin, mustard gas, and other deadly agents.

When she arrived in Castine the USS Comfort was a tired, World War II vintage Hospital Ship. Her keel had been laid as a Maritime Commission C1-B hull, which was most frequently used in the construction of troop ships. Built by the Consolidated Steel Corporation in Wilmington, California, she was launched on March 18, 1943. As the USS Comfort (AH-6), a naval hospital ship, she served in the South Pacific during World War II, having a U.S. Navy crew and an Army medical staff. In 1945, the USS Comfort took part in the battle of Okinawa, and was struck by a kamikaze pilot, killing 28 of the ship’s personnel, including six nurses, and wounding 48 additional people. When she was decommissioned and struck from the Naval Vessel Register, her title was retained by the U.S. Army. Not being needed, she was taken up to the Hudson River Reserve Fleet near Bear Mountain in New York. In 1949 her title was returned to the Maritime Commission, who on August 24, 1953, assigned her to Maine Maritime Academy for use as a training ship.

One afternoon, in the suffocating damp heat of a Washington summer, I was taken to learn about the American game of baseball. The game remained something of a mystery to me, but I learned more about the actual separation between the white and black races. In the stadium I and my white escort were seated on the side reserved for whites, and on the opposite side of the stadium were seats for the blacks, of whom there were many more than the whites. In buses, too, separation of the races was strictly enforced, with whites at the front and blacks at the back. The public toilets were strictly separate. No Afro-American would think of entering a hotel or restaurant frequented by whites; the division was absolute. Blacks had their own eating and sleeping places. And of course, all schools were segregated. There was nothing like this in Baghdad. While there were very few black students in both the boys’ and the girls’ schools, they were treated just like the rest of us and many real friendships developed between the two. This easy relationship existed although it had been only a few years since Ottoman days, when Iraqis were able to buy black slaves openly, a practice that was banned when the British army arrived in 1917. Yet here in the United States, the Land of Liberty and Equality, at least in the southern states, no white man could sit down in a restaurant and have a meal with a black friend. Though this discrimination no longer existed legally, it was clearly still in practice in the nation’s capitol.

AND SO THE Kiowa and the Comanche lived and raided and hunted out on the long rolling plains while the telegraph and the railroad approached from the east, bringing news of the corruptions of Washington and the Communards of Paris and the street fighting there. Samuel Hammond still refused to issue the orders that would have sent the army after the Kiowa and Comanche and bring them back by force to the reservation. So a band of Comanche rode down on Ledbetter’s Salt Works west of Fort Belknap. The men left the hot salt pans and retreated behind a palisade and charged their small field cannon. They knew they had no help from either the Rangers or the army nor would they go back to where they had come from in the southern states, now an occupied country, and so they fought until they ran out of ammunition. Jiles, Paulette. The Color of Lightning: A Novel (pp. 288-289). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.

Someone at the Admiralty mentioned that the Dutch barges known as schuyts, which had flat bottoms and crews of three, might be very suitable for taking people off beaches. As many as forty of them had arrived in the previous weeks from the Netherlands and were in the Thames estuary. Ramsay gave orders to have them requisitioned and manned by crews from the naval reserve.  He also took what turned out to be a critical decision. He ordered 80,000 cans of drinking water and sent them to Dunkirk to special dumps, and set guards on them. It turned out to have a vital significance in keeping the army alive.

What is an Indian?", asked Commissioner Thomas Morgan two years after the Wounded Knee massacre. And his answer, "blood and land". He was right, but not in a way he understood. If the U.S. army and government had spent more in the ruthless elimination of the tribes, root and branch, as Sherman hoped, then strangled off their resources as Congress wanted, the "Indian problem" would have been solved. But nothing is straightforward in American history, not even ruthlessness and the nation's better angels prevented total genocide. Their hearts were right but their methods were mad. To save the Indian, they reasoned, they must kill the Indian inside. Thus began decades of social engineering rivaling the darkest visions of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. The reservation was the laboratory where new and often contradictory policies were introduced and tested much like those classic social experiments where lab rats are shocked and rewarded but always randomly. Each era had its own philosophy. Assimilation, reeducation, christianization and termination of the tribes. Yet the purpose of each was similar. Strip the Indian of his "Indian-ness", then reshape him as an idealized american, stamped and milled as if in a machine. It is easy to see why the young rebels of AIM felt such loathing for the BIA and Washington. In the parlance of the counter-culture, they saw it as "the machine". How does one survive in such a world? The machine is overwhelming and unstoppable, larger than any one woman or man. Black Elk saw it early, though he never used such dystopian terms. Perhaps the only true defense is the most intimate, preservation of one's soul. Seen that way, his life is more than just another tale of Indian vs. white, it becomes instead a parable of modern man.

In the camp of the coalition the contest with Caesar was looked on as so completely decided by the battles of Dyrrhachium that it only remained to reap the fruits of victory, in other words, to seek out and capture the defeated army. Their former over-cautious reserve was succeeded by an arrogance still less justified by the circumstances; they gave no heed to the facts, that they had, strictly speaking, failed in the pursuit, that they had to hold themselves in readiness to encounter a completely refreshed and reorganized army in Thessaly, and that there was no small risk in moving away from the sea, renouncing the support of the fleet, and following their antagonist to the battlefield chosen by himself.

Sergeant Dix told me that at Fort Bragg they found that two to three days of constant tension was what it took to figure out if a soldier was going to break. Most who made it to the Special Forces Qualification Course could take anything the Army cared to throw at them for forty-eight hours. But by day three, with reserves depleted and nothing but misery on the horizon, a soldier’s core became exposed. His baseline ability. His essence. Superficially, this was evidenced by the decision to quit or continue, a temptation the drill sergeants dangled every time they spoke.  The real game, of course, was mental. Beating the Q boiled down to a soldier’s ability to disassociate his body from his mind, his being from his circumstance. This was relatively easy during the mindless procedures — the hikes, runs, and repetitive drills that form the backbone of military training. Disassociation became much tougher, however, when the physical activity was paired with judgment calls and problem solving. If a soldier could engage his higher-order thinking while simultaneously ignoring the pain and willing his body to continue beyond fatigue, then he had a chance at making it to the end. If he couldn’t, then the strength of his back, heart, and lungs didn’t matter.  Dix had concluded that the Q-Course was as much about self-discovery as a prestigious shoulder patch.  Katya was in that discovery phase now.  The big question was what we’d do if she decided to quit. She broke the silence after a few miles. “Do you ever get used to it?” “The killing?” “Yes.” “We’re all used to killing — just not people. We kill when we spray for bugs, or squash a spider, or buy a leather bag, or order a hamburger. I don’t think of the individuals I’ve killed as people any more than you thought of the last steak you ate as Bessie.

By 1863, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia could no longer subsist on its own where it fought, drawing foodstuffs from the Carolinas, Georgia, and even East Tennessee. Beyond supporting local garrisons, those regions were reserved for Lee’s use.

In his study of the relationship among the dawn, fairies, and Fortune, J. H. Grisward10 has shown that Morgue, Arsile, and Maglore, who emerge in Adam de la Halle’s Jeu de la feuillée, and Fortune function as the two faces of fate: the first three reserve their gifts for those they have chosen, and the latter has been, since birth, blind, deaf, and dumb (verses 771ff.). They are inclined to favor those who honor them, which implies a rite. This rite happens to take place on the spring or autumn equinox, dates on which the Wild Hunt also appeared. We can accept that the rapproachment we have noted did take place, because the apparition of the Mesnie Hellequin and that of fairies that visit homes falls into the jurisdiction of the same liturgy, is based on the same belief, and shares a temporal kinship: all the dates denote a turning point and refer back to the notion of beginning.

army, which was hardly designed to fight imperial German divisions in the trenches of Europe, the Athenian phalanx was never intended to face anything like Spartan hoplites, but was perfectly capable as a seaborne force for putting down recalcitrant tributary allies. In addition, there were reserves of imperial manpower far from Attica that were safe from Spartan ground intrusions—what King Archidamus worried about as the “plenty of the other land” out of his army’s reach.50