Warfare Effects Quotes

In regards to the price of commodities, the rise of wages operates as simple interest does, the rise of profit operates like compound interest. Our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.

Many Christians... find themselves defeated by the most psychological weapon that Satan uses against them. This weapon has the effectiveness of a deadly missile. Its name? Low self-esteem. Satan's greatest psychological weapon is a gut level feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, and low self-worth This feeling shackles many Christians, in spite of wonderful spiritual experiences and knowledge of God's Word. Although they understand their position as sons and daughters of God, they are tied up in knots, bound by a terrible feeling inferiority, and chained to a deep sense of worthlessness.

If you aren't destroying your enemies, it's because you have been conquered and assimilated, you do not even have an idea of who your enemies are. You have been brainwashed into believing you are your own enemy, and you are set against yourself. The enemy is laughing at you as you tear yourself to pieces. That is the most effective warfare an enemy can launch on his foes: confounding them.

To effectively combat the devil, you need to pray.

Emotional warfare is far more effective in this case than open violence.

The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history.

The most effective and enduring form of warfare against liberation is the implanting of material and intellectual needs that perpetuate obsolete forms of the struggle for existence.

Fear is a scheme that the devil uses to great effect. From my personal study, the words “do not be afraid” or “fear thee not” (depending on the Bible translation) appear over one hundred times in the Bible! The message from God is quite clear: we need not be afraid!

Power doesn’t always roar.... The art of exerting power is an art used in doses - the more hidden it is the more effective.

It's all about the ripple effects of “wealth creation”. What comes after you make it matters much more than before.

finally defeat Japanese imperialism only through the cumulative effect of many offensive campaigns and battles in both regular and guerrilla warfare,

As a side effect of modern warfare, we had the peculiar privilege of watching the destruction of our country on television.

I dispute the point that nuclear energy is 'clean' and 'cost-effective'. As I recall, when we first harnessed nuclear power it was to drop an atom bomb on a civilian population, not to save the environment. However, you must admit, the victors are never tried for war crimes.

The National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote political action and psychological warfare against states not in love with US foreign policy, is Washington’s foremost non-military tool for effecting regime change.

Conduct toward the civil population ought to be regulated by a large respect for all the rules and traditions of the people of the zone, in order to demonstrate effectively, with deeds, the moral superiority of the guerrilla fighter over the oppressing soldier.

Our task over the next few generations is to transform the world of independent states in which we live into some sort of genuine international community. If we succeed in creating that community, however quarrelsome, discontented, and full of injustice it probably will be, then we shall effectively have abolished the ancient institution of warfare. Good riddance.

Koerver reports another example of delusional thinking within the German navy. Adm. Edouard von Capelle said, on Feb. 1, 1917, “From a military point of view I rate the effect of America coming on the side of our enemies as nil.” Tuchman, Zimmermann Telegram, 139; Koerver, German Submarine Warfare, xxxiii.

Their leader had no real knowledge of warfare or tactics. I was only a stubborn man and that was my greatest advantage in this fight.

Talent attracts capital more effectively than capital attracts talent.

6.    There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. 7.    It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on. [That is, with rapidity. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close. Only

It is necessary to distinguish clearly between sabotage, a revolutionary and highly effective method of warfare, and terrorism, a measure that is generally ineffective and indiscriminate in its results, since it often makes victims of innocent people and destroys a large number of lives that would be valuable to the revolution.

Understanding the OODA loop enables a commander to compress time - that is, the time between observing a situation and taking an action. A commander can use the temporal discrepancy (a form of fast transient) to select the least-expected action rather than what is predicted to be the most effective action. The enemy can also figure out what might be the most effective. To take the least-expected action disorients the enemy. It causes him to pause, wonder, to question.

Many weeks of street fighting ensued. In his defense of Sestius against charges of violence in 56, Cicero described in graphic terms the effects of this gang warfare: “The Tiber was full of citizens’ corpses, the public sewers were choked with them and the blood that streamed from the Forum had to be mopped up with sponges.” To begin with, the cure was worse than the disease and public business once more came to a standstill. However, by the summer Clodius, while by no means defeated, was at least being contained.

With Hamas now in control of the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed a full-blown siege. Goods entering the strip were reduced to a bare minimum; regular exports were stopped completely; fuel supplies were cut; and leaving and entering Gaza were only rarely permitted. Gaza was in effect turned into an open-air prison, where by 2018 at least 53 percent of some two million Palestinians lived in a state of poverty,24 and unemployment stood at an astonishing 52 percent, with much higher rates for youth and women.25 What had begun with international refusal to recognize Hamas’s election victory had led to a disastrous Palestinian rupture and the blockade of Gaza. This sequence of events amounted to a new declaration of war on the Palestinians. It also provided indispensable international cover for the open warfare that was to come.

Baptism, then, is not what produces salvation. It 'saves' in that it reflects a heart decision: a pledge of loyalty to the risen Savior. In effect, baptism in New Testament theology is a loyalty oath, a public avowal of who is on the Lord’s side in the cosmic war between good and evil. ... Early baptismal formulas included a renunciation of Satan and his angels for this very reason. Baptism was—and still is—spiritual warfare.

Over decades in power, the CCP had constructed a multilayered system for stifling dissent in China based on the Soviet psychological warfare technique of Zersetzung, which translates roughly to “psychological decomposition.”[96] The regime’s threats instill fear of open discourse about reality, resulting in self-censorship. To avoid the cognitive dissonance of this silence, individuals willfully play down the evidence before their own eyes. The collective psychological effects are deceptively enormous.

Blitzkrieg was a new and dynamic form of warfare, which applied the power of the tank, the aircraft, and the radio to devastating effect.

intergenerational warfare has not replaced class warfare. The very high concentration of capital is explained mainly by the importance of inherited wealth and its cumulative effects:

terrorism is nothing more than a form of psy­chological warfare, as acts of terrorism have no intrinsic military value aside from their effects on the psyches of the target populations.

The National Endowment for Democracy, an agency created by the Reagan administration in 1983 to promote political action and psychological warfare against states not in love with US foreign policy, is Washington’s foremost non-military tool for effecting regime change. The NED website listed sixty-five projects that it had supported financially in recent years in Ukraine.

George Bernard Shaw once said: “Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.” When liberals make the argument that capitalism is the cause of all of our problems, they are either speaking out of abject ignorance or being totally disingenuous to protect their own political interests. We have not had true free-market capitalism in this country on any wide scale. Where we have had economic successes in this nation’s history, it has been those times when people have done something outside of the government’s involvement. Every single time the federal government has been involved, it has created chaos, waste, and corruption. The historical record is overwhelmingly one of gross incompetence.

Atro had once explained to him how this was managed, how the sergeants could give the privates orders, how the lieutenants could give the privates and the sergeants orders, how the captains... and so on and so on up to the generals, who could give everyone else orders and need take them from none, except the commander in chief. Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. "You call that organization?" he had inquired. "You even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency--a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?" This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. "But that only works when the people think they're fighting for something of their own--you know, their homes, or some notion or other," the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the Army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so.

Education without excellence in techniques means action will not be timely or effective. But techniques without education means tactics will be formulistic, rigid, and predictable to the enemy.

The multifaceted nature of the strong points of the enemy in this brutal warfare calls for nothing less than a global scale collaborative response that is stubbornly radical, yet humanely civil.

Every negative complex of emotion conceals a conflict, a problem or dilemma made up of contradictory or opposing motives or desires. Self-observation must recover these emotional seeds of the dramatization of life if real control of habits is to occur. Otherwise, mere control of habits will itself become a form of dramatized conflict or warfare with the motives of our lives. Food desires, sex desires, relational desires, desires for experience and acquisition, for rest, for release, for attention, for solitude, for life, for death, the whole pattern of desires must come under the view of consciousness, the aspects of the conflicts must be differentiated, and habits must be controlled to serve well-being or the pleasurable and effective play of Life. This whole process is truly possible only in the midst of the prolonged occasion of spiritual life in practice, since the mere mechanical and analytical attempts at self-liberation and self-healing do not undermine the principal emotion or seat of conflict, which is the intention to identify with a separate self sense and to reject and forget the prior and natural Condition of Unqualified or Divine Consciousness.

In 1870, came the victory of the short-service troops of Prussia over the long-service troops of France, where conscription had but recently been reintroduced in a partial form and as a supplementary measure. That obvious contrast carried more weight into the world than all the other factors which tilted the scales against France. As a result, universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared democratic, it provided autocrats, hereditary or revolutionary, with more effective and comprehensive means of imposing their will, both in peace and war. Once the rulp of compulsory service in arms was established for the young men of a nation, it was an obvious and easy transition to the servitude of the whole population. Totalitarian tyranny is the twin of total warfare—which might aptly be termed a reversion to tribal warfare on a larger scale.

The first step in effectively fighting the battle is to get out of God’s way. The second step is to stay out of His way. And the third step is to never get in God’s way again so that the first and second step become completely irrelevant.

The present awful possibilities of nuclear warfare may give way to others even more dreadful. Literally and figuratively, we are running out of room. At long last, we begin to feel the effects of the finite, actual size of the Earth in a critical way. This is the maturing crisis of technology. In the years between now and the beginning of the next century, the global crisis will probably develop far beyond all earlier patterns. When or how it will end—or to what state of affairs it will yield—nobody can say. It is a very small comfort to think that the interests of humanity might one day change, the present curiosity in science may cease, and entirely different things may occupy the human mind. Technology, after all, is a human excretion, and should not be considered as something Other. It is a part of us, just like the web is part of the spider. However, it seems that the ever-accelerating progress of technology gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity, a tipping point in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them cannot continue. Progress will become incomprehensibly rapid and complicated. Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement, and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.

Conspiracy theories have long been used to maintain power: the Soviet leadership saw capitalist and counter-revolutionary conspiracies everywhere; the Nazis, Jewish ones. But those conspiracies were ultimately there to buttress an ideology, whether class warfare for Communists or race for Nazis. With today’s regimes, which struggle to formulate a single ideology – indeed, which can’t if they want to maintain power by sending different messages to different people – the idea that one lives in a world full of conspiracies becomes the world view itself. Conspiracy does not support the ideology; it replaces it. In Russia this is captured in the catchphrase of the country’s most important current affairs presenter: ‘A coincidence? I don’t think so!’ says Dmitry Kiselev as he twirls between tall tales that dip into history, literature, oil prices and colour revolutions, which all return to the theme of how the world has it in for Russia. And as a world view it grants those who subscribe to it certain pleasures: if all the world is a conspiracy, then your own failures are no longer all your fault. The fact that you achieved less than you hoped for, that your life is a mess – it’s all the fault of the conspiracy. More importantly, conspiracy is a way to maintain control. In a world where even the most authoritarian regimes struggle to impose censorship, one has to surround audiences with so much cynicism about anybody’s motives, persuade them that behind every seemingly benign motivation is a nefarious, if impossible-to-prove, plot, that they lose faith in the possibility of an alternative, a tactic a renowned Russian media analyst called Vasily Gatov calls ‘white jamming’. And the end effect of this endless pile-up of conspiracies is that you, the little guy, can never change anything. For if you are living in a world where shadowy forces control everything, then what possible chance do you have of turning it around? In this murk it becomes best to rely on a strong hand to guide you. ‘Trump is our last chance to save America,’ is the message of his media hounds. Only Putin can ‘raise Russia from its knees’. ‘The problem we are facing today is less oppression, more lack of identity, apathy, division, no trust,’ sighs Srdja. ‘There are more tools to change things than before, but there’s less will to do so.

The true goal of all spiritual practices is to keep yourself fooled, to maintain the self-deception, to see what's not and not see what is. That's why the stated goals are always unverifiable and ill-defined: its not about attaining them, its about pursuing them. Who wants to wake up? When we have a little itch that threatens to awaken us in the night, we want to scratch the itch and make it go away. not let it evict us from our slumbers. Same thing here. In this sense. spiritual practice—meditation. for instance—is one hundred percent effective. If a spiritual practice satisfies your urge to do something spiritual. if it makes you think you're making progress. if it scratches your itch without disturbing your slumber, then it's doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing.

Russia gains by August 13, the US loses; they were the same story, two ends of a seesaw. A new, more effective means of warfare. Instead of taking lives and destroying property, which was the old way, you won by simply changing what people thought about the United States.

PROPAGANDA-A ONE-SIDED WEAPON The asymmetrical situation has important effects on propaganda. The insurgent, having no responsibility, is free to use every trick; if necessary, he can lie, cheat, exaggerate. He is not obliged to prove; he is judged by what he promises, not by what he does. Consequently, propaganda is a powerful weapon for him. With no positive policy but with good propaganda, the insurgent may still win. The counterinsurgent is tied to his responsibilities and to his past, and for him, facts speak louder than words. He is judged on what he does, not on what he says. If he lies, cheats, exaggerates, and does not prove, he may achieve some temporary successes, but at the price of being discredited for good. And he cannot cheat much unless his political structures are monolithic, for the legitimate opposition in his own camp would soon disclose his every psychological maneuver. For him, propaganda can be no more than a secondary weapon, valuable only if intended to inform and not to fool. A counterinsurgent can seldom cover bad or nonexistent policy with propaganda.

In effect, the human being should be considered the priority objective in a political war. And conceived as the military target of guerrilla war, the human being has his most critical point in his mind. Once his mind has been reached, the "political animal" has been defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets.

in American corporate capitalism, that when we create a business and grant it the same rights as a human (what 'incorporating' means), while not holding it to any moral restrictions except for "survive at all costs and make your shareholders rich," what you have effectively created is an institutionalized psychopath.

The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance in both global and domestic affairs is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture, and not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique. Opposition to material inequality is maligned as "class warfare," while race, gender or sexual inequalities are dismissed as merely cultural, private, or trivial. This rhetorical separation of the economic from the political and cultural arenas disguises the upwardly redistributing goals of neoliberalism—its concerted efforts to concentrate power and resources in the hands of tiny elites. Once economics is understood as primarily a technical realm, the trickle-upward effects of neoliberal policies can be framed as due to performance rather than design, reflecting the greater merit of those reaping larger rewards.

As Christians we face two tasks in our evangelism: saving the soul and saving the mind, that is to say, not only converting people spiritually, but converting them intellectually as well. And the Church is lagging dangerously behind with regard to this second task. If the church loses the intellectual battle in one generation, then evangelism will become immeasurably more difficult in the next. The war is not yet lost, and it is one which we must not lose: souls of men and women hang in the balance. For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence. Thinking about your faith is indeed a virtue, for it helps you to better understand and defend your faith. But thinking about your faith is not equivalent to doubting your faith. Doubt is never a purely intellectual problem. There is a spiritual dimension to the problem that must be recognized. Never lose sight of the fact that you are involved in spiritual warfare and there is an enemy of your soul who hates you intensely, whose goal is your destruction, and who will stop at nothing to destroy you. Reason can be used to defend our faith by formulating arguments for the existence of God or by refuting objections. But though the arguments so developed serve to confirm the truth of our faith, they are not properly the basis of our faith, for that is supplied by the witness of the Holy Spirit Himself. Even if there were no arguments in defense of the faith, our faith would still have its firm foundation. The more I learn, the more desperately ignorant I feel. Further study only serves to open up to one's consciousness all the endless vistas of knowledge, even in one's own field, about which one knows absolutely nothing. Don't let your doubts just sit there: pursue them and keep after them until you drive them into the ground. We should be cautious, indeed, about thinking that we have come upon the decisive disproof of our faith. It is pretty unlikely that we have found the irrefutable objection. The history of philosophy is littered with the wrecks of such objections. Given the confidence that the Holy Spirit inspires, we should esteem lightly the arguments and objections that generate our doubts. These, then, are some of the obstacles to answered prayer: sin in our lives, wrong motives, lack of faith, lack of earnestness, lack of perseverance, lack of accordance with God’s will. If any of those obstacles hinders our prayers, then we cannot claim with confidence Jesus’ promise, “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it”. And so I was led to what was for me a radical new insight into the will of God, namely, that God’s will for our lives can include failure. In other words, God’s will may be that you fail, and He may lead you into failure! For there are things that God has to teach you through failure that He could never teach you through success. So many in our day seem to have been distracted from what was, is and always will be the true priority for every human being — that is, learning to know God in Christ. My greatest fear is that I should some day stand before the Lord and see all my works go up in smoke like so much “wood, hay, and stubble”. The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but knowledge of God. People tend naturally to assume that if God exists, then His purpose for human life is happiness in this life. God’s role is to provide a comfortable environment for His human pets. But on the Christian view, this is false. We are not God’s pets, and the goal of human life is not happiness per se, but the knowledge of God—which in the end will bring true and everlasting human fulfilment. Many evils occur in life which may be utterly pointless with respect to the goal of producing human happiness; but they may not be pointless with respect to producing a deeper knowledge of God.

Universal peace-time conscription was adopted by almost all countries as the basis of their military system. This ensured that wars would grow bigger in scale, longer in duration, and worse in effects. While conscription appeared democratic, it provided autocrats, hereditary or revolutionary, with more effective and comprehensive means of imposing their will, both in peace and war. Once the rule of compulsory service in arms was established for the young men of a nation, it was an obvious and easy transition to the servitude of the whole population. Totalitarian tyranny is the twin of total warfare —which might aptly be termed a reversion to tribal warfare on a larger scale.

Given the profound alienation of modern society, when combat vets say that they miss the war, they might be having an entirely healthy response to life back home. Iroquois warriors did not have to struggle with that sort of alienation because warfare and society existed in such close proximity that there was effectively no transition from one to the other.

warfare would be waged west of the Mississippi as it had been earlier against the Abenakis, Cherokees, Shawnees, Muskogees, and even Christian Indians. In the Civil War, these methods played a prominent role on both sides. Confederate regular forces, Confederate guerrillas such as William Quantrill, and General Sherman for the Union all engaged in waging total war against civilians. The pattern would continue in US military interventions overseas, from the Philippines and Cuba to Central America, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The cumulative effect goes beyond simply the habitual use of military means and becomes the very basis for US American identity. The Indian-fighting frontiersmen and the “valiant” settlers in their circled covered wagons are the iconic images of that identity. The continued popularity of, and respect for, the genocidal sociopath Andrew Jackson is another indicator. Actual men such as Robert Rogers, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, and David Crockett, as well as fictitious ones created by James Fenimore Cooper and other best-selling writers, call to mind D. H. Lawrence’s “myth of the essential white American”—that the “essential American soul” is a killer.

There was another reason why the dollar's hegemony grew: the intentional impoverishment of America's working class. A cynic will tell you quite accurately that large quantities of money are attracted to countries where the profit rate is higher. For Wall Street to exercise fully its magnetic powers over foreign capital, profit margins in the United States had to catch up with profit rates in Germany and Japan. A quick and dirty way to do this was to suppress American wages. Cheaper labour makes for lower costs, makes for larger margins. It is no coincidence that, to this day, American working class earnings languish below their 1974 level. It is also no coincidence that union-busting became a thing in the 1970s, culminating in Ronald Reagan's dismissal of every single unionised air traffic controller. A move emulated by Margaret Thatcher in Britain who pulverised whole industries in order to eliminate the trade unions that inhabited them. And faced with the Minotaur's sucking most of the world's capital into America, the European ruling classes reckoned that they had no alternative but to do the same. Reagan had set the pace. Thatcher had shown the way. But it was in Germany and later across continental Europe that the new class war - you might call it universal austerity - was waged most effectively.

Although these firms deploy units that are often much smaller in manpower relative to their client’s adversaries, their effectiveness lies not in their size, but in their comprehensive training, experience, and overall skill at battlefield judgment, all in fundamentally short supply in the chaotic battlefields of the last decade.14 Utilizing coordinated movement and intelligent application of firepower, their strength is their ability to arrive at the right place at the right moment. The fundamental reality of modern warfare is that in many cases such small tactical units can achieve strategic goals.

Now when the Pharisees heard it [that Jesus had delivered a man possessed by a blind and mute spirit] they said, “This fellow does not cast out demons except by Beelzebub, the ruler of the demons.” (Matthew 12:24) The Pharisees made a terrible accusation! They said, in effect, “He can cast out demons because He is in league with the ruler of the demons.” Jesus answered them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself will not stand. If Satan casts out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand? (Matthew 12:25–26)

But the greatest danger could spring from the chaos of a dysfunctional democracy, compounded by relentless party warfare, which, Washington warned, would erode faith in the effectiveness of self-governance and open the door to a demagogue with authoritarian ambitions. 'The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.

Grant believed that generous terms were essential to pacification. In Grant's eyes, the surrender was a triumph of right over wrong: proof of the moral and material superiority of the North's free-labor democratic society over the South's slave-labor autocratic one. Grant's hope, in extending clemency, was to change hearts and minds--to effect Confederate repentance and submission. In Lee's view, by contrast, the United States' victory was one of might over right, attributable to brutal force, not to skill and virtue. Although Lee rejected the option of guerrilla warfare as impractical and dishonorable, he did not admit moral defeat or counsel submission.

This crucial functional role for alcohol and other intoxicants is slowly gaining wider acceptance in the anthropological community. 131 Proponents of the beer before bread hypotheses rightly emphasize how the increased cohesiveness and scale of intoxicant-using cultures would give them a distinct advantage in competition with other groups, allowing them to cooperate more effectively in work, food production, and warfare. 132 The inexorable pressure of cultural group selection would, in this way, encourage and disseminate the cultural use of intoxicants in the manner that we actually observe in the historical record, and that is completely inconsistent with any hijack or hangover theory of intoxication.

Richard and I seemed really to be at the end of our rope, for he had done what he could for me, and it had not worked out, and now he was going away. It seemed to me that he was sailing into the most splendid of futures, for he was going, of all places! to France, and he had been invited there by the French government. But Richard did not seem, though he was jaunty, to be overjoyed. There was a striking sobriety in his face that day. He talked a great deal about a friend of his, who was in trouble with the U.S. Immigration authorities, and was about to be, or already had been, deported. Richard was not being deported, of course, he was traveling to a foreign country as an honored guest; and he was vain enough and young enough and vivid enough to find this very pleasing and exciting. Yet he knew a great deal about exile, all artists do, especially American artists, especially American Negro artists. He had endured already, liberals and literary critics to the contrary, a long exile in his own country. He must have wondered what the real thing would be like. And he must have wondered, too, what would be the unimaginable effect on his daughter, who could now be raised in a country which would not penalize her on account of her color. And that day was very nearly the last time Richard and I spoke to each other without the later, terrible warfare. Two years later, I, too, quit America, never intending to return.

Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

Governments such as that of the United States that draw sharp distinctions between warfare and law enforcement and between domestic and overseas legal authorities will experience great difficulty, and may find it impossible to act with the same agility as irregular actors who can move among these artificial categories at will. Capabilities that combine policing, administration, and emergency services, backed up with military-style capabilities so that police can deal with well-armed adversaries—capabilities traditionally associated with constabulary, gendarmerie, carabinieri, or coast guard forces—may be more effective against these hybrid threats than civil police forces alone, and less destructive than unleashing the military.

The monstrous effects on Korean civilians of the methods of warfare adopted by the United Nations — the blanket fire bombing of North Korean cities, the destruction of dams and the resulting devastation of the food supply and an unremitting aerial bombardment more intensive than anything experienced during the Second World War. At one point the Americans gave up bombing targets in the North when their intelligence reported that there were no more buildings over one story high left standing in the entire country … the overall death toll was staggering: possibly as many as four million people. About three million were civilians (one out of every ten Koreans). Even to a world that had just begun to recover from the vast devastation of the Second World War, Korea was a man-made hell with a place among the most violent excesses of the 20th century.

We treat politics as a sport, political parties as the teams we root for, and political leaders as our favorite sports stars. But we forget that politics is not an entertainment sport. In sports, rivalry between fans of opposing teams is "Them vs Us", but in politics such rivalry becomes "Us vs Us". Political outcomes have far greater effect on our life than sports outcomes. In a democracy, "we, the people" are supposed to be the kings, not the pawns. We are the examiners and watchdogs of the political system, not the fans. We should step back from our blind loyalty to a party, and start taking an educated stand. Instead of forming our opinions based on hearsay and emotions, we should form our opinions based on hard facts. The time has come to stop being loyal to any political party, and start being loyal to our country and its betterment.

Law in seventeenth-century Maryland forbade the use of the words “papist” (Catholic) or “round-head” (Puritan), fighting words in the Old World whose effects were muted here by methods still familiar to us. We learned early to live with diversity, at least by the standards of the time. It is useful to remember that the terrible Thirty Years War (1618–1648) was fought among European Christians during the early period of European settlement in America, and that New En gland was largely populated by British Protestant refugees of religious oppression and warfare in Protestant Britain. What might look like homogeneity in nostalgic retrospect was felt and acted upon as intolerable difference justifying enormity in these cultures of origin. Our national ancestors generally managed, by the standards then prevailing, to avoid encouraging the same conflicts here.

The qualities of a successful military strategist will change from person to person, but there are a central few that all of them need. These include, above all else, strategic judgment, but also stamina, interpersonal skills and a feel for people; an ability to energize, inspire and motivate; the ability to communicate effectively orally and in writing; a degree of personal presence and charisma; a sincere love of servicemen and women; an ability to be tough when needed, but also compassionate when that is appropriate; fortitude in the face of adversity and the capacity to stay calm in the midst of chaos; an ability to deal with setbacks, missteps and mistakes; a sense of what leadership style is required to bring out the best in those immediately below, and also for the organization collectively. A great strategic leader also needs to be able to foresee how a conflict will end.

Looking at a situation like the Israel-Palestine conflict, Americans are likely to react with puzzlement when they see ever more violent and provocative acts that target innocent civilians. We are tempted to ask: do the terrorists not realize that they will enrage the Israelis, and drive them to new acts of repression? The answer of course is that they know this very well, and this is exactly what they want. From our normal point of view, this seems incomprehensible. If we are doing something wrong, we do not want to invite the police to come in and try and stop us, especially if repression will result in the deaths or imprisonment of many of our followers. In a terrorist war, however, repression is often valuable because it escalates the growing war, and forces people to choose between the government and the terrorists. The terror/repression cycle makes it virtually impossible for anyone to remain a moderate. By increasing polarization within a society, terrorism makes the continuation of the existing order impossible. Once again, let us take the suicide bombing example. After each new incident, Israeli authorities tightened restrictions on Palestinian communities, arrested new suspects, and undertook retaliatory strikes. As the crisis escalated, they occupied or reoccupied Palestinian cities, destroying Palestinian infrastructure. The result, naturally, was massive Palestinian hostility and anger, which made further attacks more likely in the future. The violence made it more difficult for moderate leaders on both sides to negotiate. In the long term, the continuing confrontation makes it more likely that ever more extreme leaders will be chosen on each side, pledged not to negotiate with the enemy. The process of polarization is all the more probably when terrorists deliberately choose targets that they know will cause outrage and revulsion, such as attacks on cherished national symbols, on civilians, and even children. We can also think of this in individual terms. Imagine an ordinary Palestinian Arab who has little interest in politics and who disapproves of terrorist violence. However, after a suicide bombing, he finds that he is subject to all kinds of official repression, as the police and army hold him for long periods at security checkpoints, search his home for weapons, and perhaps arrest or interrogate him as a possible suspect. That process has the effect of making him see himself in more nationalistic (or Islamic) terms, stirs his hostility to the Israeli regime, and gives him a new sympathy for the militant or terrorist cause. The Israeli response to terrorism is also valuable for the terrorists in global publicity terms, since the international media attack Israel for its repression of civilians. Hamas military commander Salah Sh’hadeh, quoted earlier, was killed in an Israeli raid on Gaza in 2002, an act which by any normal standards of warfare would represent a major Israeli victory. In this case though, the killing provoked ferocious criticism of Israel by the U.S. and western Europe, and made Israel’s diplomatic situation much more difficult. In short, a terrorist attack itself may or may not attract widespread publicity, but the official response to it very likely will. In saying this, I am not suggesting that governments should not respond to terrorism, or that retaliation is in any sense morally comparable to the original attacks. Many historical examples show that terrorism can be uprooted and defeated, and military action is often an essential part of the official response. But terrorism operates on a logic quite different from that of most conventional politics and law enforcement, and concepts like defeat and victory must be understood quite differently from in a regular war.

APRIL 10 BREAK THE CURSE OF WITCHCRAFT AND SORCERY MY CHILD, I have loved you with an everlasting love, and because I love you, I have turned the curses of witchcraft and sorcery from the enemy into a blessing for you. I will help you according to My mercy, that you may know that it was by My hand that I have blessed what the enemy has cursed in your life. I will stand at your right hand and save you from those who condemn you. You will be a blessing to those among whom you were cursed. I am determined to do good to you and your household. Do not fear. But speak the truth to your neighbor, and give truth, justice, and peace to all you meet. PSALM 109:28–31; ZECHARIAH 8:13–16 Prayer Declaration Father, in Your name, I break and release myself from all spoken curses and negative words spoken against me by others, and I bless them. No evil curses of witchcraft or sorcery will have any effect upon my life, for You have broken the curse and have turned it into a blessing for my life through Your precious Son, Jesus.

Leaders, some of whom are politicians in this book while others are soldiers, must be able to master four major tasks.2 Firstly, they need comprehensively to grasp the overall strategic situation in a conflict and craft the appropriate strategic approach – in essence, to get the big ideas right. Secondly, they must communicate those big ideas, the strategy, effectively throughout the breadth and depth of their organization and to all other stakeholders. Thirdly, they need to oversee the implementation of the big ideas, driving the execution of the campaign plan relentlessly and determinedly. Lastly, they have to determine how the big ideas need to be refined, adapted and augmented, so that they can perform the first three tasks again and again and again. The statesmen and soldiers who perform these four tasks properly are the exemplars who stand out from these pages. The witness of history demonstrates that exceptional strategic leadership is the one absolute prerequisite for success, but also that it is as rare as the black swan.

The term terrorism is widely misused. It is utilized in its generic sense as a form of shorthand by governments and the media and is applied to a variety of acts and occurrences that approximate terrorism in form but not in substance or, worse yet, that have no real resemblance to terrorism at all. Terrorism, if nothing else, is violence, or threats of violence, but it is not mindless violence, as some observers have charged. Usually, when employed in a political context, it represents a calculated series of actions designed to intimidate and sow fear through-out a target population in an effort to produce a pervasive atmosphere of insecurity, a widespread condition of anxiety. A terrorist campaign that causes a significant threshold of fear among the target population may achieve its aims. In some instances, terrorism is potentially a more effective, especially from a cost-benefit perspective, strategy that conventional or guerrilla warfare, however, the goal of terrorism is not to destroy the opposing side but instead to break its will and force it to capitulate.

If there was any consistency to his opinions, it was the consistent lack of consistency, and if he had a worldview, it was a view that proclaimed his lack of a worldview. But these very absences were what constituted his intellectual assets. Consistency and an established worldview were excess baggage in the intellectual mobile warfare that flared up in the mass media’s tiny time segments, and it was his great advantage to be free of such things. He had nothing to protect, which meant that he could concentrate all his attention on pure acts of combat. He needed only to attack, to knock his enemy down. Noboru Wataya was an intellectual chameleon, changing his color in accordance with his opponent’s, ad-libbing his logic for maximum effectiveness, mobilizing all the rhetoric at his command. I had no idea how he had acquired these techniques, but he clearly had the knack of appealing directly to the feelings of the mass audience. He knew how to use the kind of logic that moved the great majority. Nor did it even have to be logic: it had only to appear so, as long as it aroused the feelings of the masses.

Conflict can be seen as time-competitive observation-orientation-decision-action cycles. Each party to a conflict begins by observing. He observes himself, his physical surroundings and his enemy. On the basis of his observation, he orients, that is to say, he makes a mental image or “snapshot” of his situation. On the basis of this orientation, he makes a decision. He puts the decision into effect, i.e., he acts. Then, because he assumes his action has changed the situation, he observes again, and starts the process anew. His actions follow this cycle, sometimes called the “Boyd Cycle” or “00DA Loop.” If one side in a conflict can consistently go through the Boyd Cycle faster than the other, it gains a tremendous advantage. By the time the slower side acts, the faster side is doing something different from what he observed, and his action is inappropriate. With each cycle, the slower party’s action is inappropriate by a larger time margin. Even though he desperately strives to do something that will work, each action is less useful than its predecessor; he falls farther and farther behind. Ultimately, he ceases to be effective.

The Russian goal was to quickly harness the power of personal access that social media gives and craft metanarratives and distribute in such a way that the enemy population can be turned against their own government. Opinion polls, news coverage, and street talk can be shifted by changing the perception of the populace. Social media not only weaponizes opinion, it gives the attacker the ability to act as puppeteer for an entire foreign nation. Two Russian information warfare officers wrote a treatise describing the combat effects of weaponized news and social media: “The mass media today can stir up chaos and confusion in government and military management of any country and instill ideas of violence, treachery, and immorality, and demoralize the public. Put through this treatment, the armed forces personnel and public of any country will not be ready for active defense.”1 Additionally, the Russians make no distinction between using these activities in wartime and “peace.” The Russian Federation will deploy information warfare and propaganda persistently in a constant effort to keep adversaries off balance. When it comes to information warfare, such distinctions of peacetime and wartime fade away.

Although there is no precise word for it in Japanese, a sort of "vicarious seppuku" was practiced during the Sengoku Jidai (The Era of Warfare) with the aim of saving the lives of many by the sacrifice of one life, often that of the most responsible person. For example, when Hideyoshi was warring with Mori Motonari, he decided to try to effect a reconciliation with the latter. At that time, Hideyoshi had under siege one of Mori's castles, which was commanded by Shimizu Muneharu. Hideyoshi offered to spare the rest of the garrison if Lord Mori would have Shimizu commit seppuku, to which Mori agreed. Connected to this episode is a moving example of junshi: On the eve of Shimizu's seppuku, his favorite vassal Shirai sent a request that Shimizu visit his room. When Shimizu arrived, Shirai apologized for having his master visit his humble quarters and explained that he had wanted to reassure his master that seppuku was not difficult and that he, Shimizu, should not be concerned about what he would have to do on the morrow. So saying, Shirai bared his abdomen to show that he himself had completed the act of seppuku only a moment before Shimizu's arrival. Shimizu gave Shirai his deepest thanks for his loyal devotion and assisted him in kaishaku, i.e., he beheaded him with his sword.

Once people believed her careful documentation, there was an easy answer—since babies are cute and inhibit aggression, something pathological must be happening. Maybe the Abu langur population density was too high and everyone was starving, or male aggression was overflowing, or infanticidal males were zombies. Something certifiably abnormal. Hrdy eliminated these explanations and showed a telling pattern to the infanticide. Female langurs live in groups with a single resident breeding male. Elsewhere are all-male groups that intermittently drive out the resident male; after infighting, one male then drives out the rest. Here’s his new domain, consisting of females with the babies of the previous male. And crucially, the average tenure of a breeding male (about twenty-seven months) is shorter than the average interbirth interval. No females are ovulating, because they’re nursing infants; thus this new stud will be booted out himself before any females wean their kids and resume ovulating. All for nothing, none of his genes passed on. What, logically, should he do? Kill the infants. This decreases the reproductive success of the previous male and, thanks to the females ceasing to nurse, they start ovulating. That’s the male perspective. What about the females? They’re also into maximizing copies of genes passed on. They fight the new male, protecting their infants. Females have also evolved the strategy of going into “pseudoestrus”—falsely appearing to be in heat. They mate with the male. And since males know squat about female langur biology, they fall for it—“Hey, I mated with her this morning and now she’s got an infant; I am one major stud.” They’ll often cease their infanticidal attacks. Despite initial skepticism, competitive infanticide has been documented in similar circumstances in 119 species, including lions, hippos, and chimps. A variant occurs in hamsters; because males are nomadic, any infant a male encounters is unlikely to be his, and thus he attempts to kill it (remember that rule about never putting a pet male hamster in a cage with babies?). Another version occurs among wild horses and gelada baboons; a new male harasses pregnant females into miscarrying. Or suppose you’re a pregnant mouse and a new, infanticidal male has arrived. Once you give birth, your infants will be killed, wasting all the energy of pregnancy. Logical response? Cut your losses with the “Bruce effect,” where pregnant females miscarry if they smell a new male. Thus competitive infanticide occurs in numerous species (including among female chimps, who sometimes kill infants of unrelated females). None of this makes sense outside of gene-based individual selection. Individual selection is shown with heartbreaking clarity by mountain gorillas, my favorite primate. They’re highly endangered, hanging on in pockets of high-altitude rain forest on the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There are only about a thousand gorillas left, because of habitat degradation, disease caught from nearby humans, poaching, and spasms of warfare rolling across those borders. And also because mountain gorillas practice competitive infanticide. Logical for an individual intent on maximizing the copies of his genes in the next generation, but simultaneously pushing these wondrous animals toward extinction. This isn’t behaving for the good of the species.

CYBERPOWER is now a fundamental fact of global life. In political, economic, and military affairs, information and information technology provide and support crucial elements of operational activities. U.S. national security efforts have begun to incorporate cyber into strategic calculations. Those efforts, however, are only a beginning. The critical conclusion...is that the United States must create an effective national and international strategic framework for the development and use of cyber as part of an overall national security strategy. Such a strategic framework will have both structural and geopolitical elements. Structural activities will focus on those parts of cyber that enhance capabilities for use in general. Those categories include heightened security, expanded development of research and human capital, improved governance, and more effective organization. Geopolitical activities will focus on more traditional national security and defense efforts. Included in this group are sophisticated development of network-centric operations; appropriate integrated planning of computer network attack capabilities; establishment of deterrence doctrine that incorporates cyber; expansion of effective cyber influence capabilities; carefully planned incorporation of cyber into military planning (particularly stability operations); establishment of appropriate doctrine, education, and training regarding cyber by the Services and nonmilitary elements so that cyber can be used effectively in a joint and/or multinational context; and generation of all those efforts at an international level, since cyber is inherently international and cannot be most effectively accomplished without international partners.

Harvard University biologist David Haig has spent the last few years systematically debunking the notion that the relationship between a mother and her unborn child is anything like the rose-tinted idyll that one usually finds on the glossy covers of maternity magazines. In fact, it is anything but. Pre-eclampsia, a condition of dangerously high blood pressure in pregnant women, is brutally kick-started by nothing short of a foetal coup d’état. It begins with the placenta invading the maternal bloodstream and initiating what, in anyone’s book, is a ruthless biological heist – an in utero sting operation to draw out vital nutrients. And I’m not just talking about baby Gordon Gekkos here – I’m talking about all of us. The curtain-raiser is well known to obstetricians. The foetus begins by injecting a crucial protein into the mother’s circulation which forces her to drive more blood, and therefore more nourishment, into the relatively low-pressure placenta. It’s a scam, pure and simple, which poses a significant and immediate risk to the mother’s life. ‘The bastard!’ says Andy. ‘Shall we get some olives?’ ‘And it’s by no means the only one,’ I continue. In another embryonic Ponzi scheme, foetal release of placental lactogen counteracts the effect of maternal insulin thereby increasing the mother’s blood sugar level and providing an excess for the foetus’s own benefit. ‘A bowl of the citrus and chilli and a bowl of the sweet pepper and basil,’ Andy says to the waiter. Then he peers at me over the menu. ‘So basically what you’re saying then is this: forget the Gaddafis and the Husseins. When it comes to chemical warfare it’s the unborn child that’s top dog!’ ‘Well they definitely nick stuff that isn’t theirs,’ I say. ‘And they don’t give a damn about the consequences.’ Andy smiles. ‘So in other words they’re psychopaths!’ he says. BABY

Babel led to an explosion in the number of languages. That was part of Enki's plan. Monocultures, like a field of corn, are susceptible to infections, but genetically diverse cultures, like a prairie, are extremely robust. After a few thousand years, one new language developed - Hebrew - that possessed exceptional flexibility and power. The deuteronomists, a group of radical monotheists in the sixth and seventh centuries B.C., were the first to take advantage of it. They lived in a time of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, which made it easier for them to reject foreign ideas like Asherah worship. They formalized their old stories into the Torah and implanted within it a law that insured its propagation throughout history - a law that said, in effect, 'make an exact copy of me and read it every day.' And they encouraged a sort of informational hygiene, a belief in copying things strictly and taking great care with information, which as they understood, is potentially dangerous. They made data a controlled substance... [and] gone beyond that. There is evidence of carefully planned biological warfare against the army of Sennacherib when he tried to conquer Jerusalem. So the deuteronomists may have had an en of their very own. Or maybe they just understood viruses well enough that they knew how to take advantage of naturally occurring strains. The skills cultivated by these people were passed down in secret from one generation to the next and manifested themselves two thousand years later, in Europe, among the Kabbalistic sorcerers, ba'al shems, masters of the divine name. In any case, this was the birth of rational religion. All of the subsequent monotheistic religions - known by Muslims, appropriately, as religions of the Book - incorporated those ideas to some extent. For example, the Koran states over and over again that it is a transcript, an exact copy, of a book in Heaven. Naturally, anyone who believes that will not dare to alter the text in any way! Ideas such as these were so effective in preventing the spread of Asherah that, eventually, every square inch of the territory where the viral cult had once thrived was under the sway of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism. But because of its latency - coiled about the brainstem of those it infects, passed from one generation to the next - it always finds ways to resurface. In the case of Judaism, it came in the form of the Pharisees, who imposed a rigid legalistic theocracy on the Hebrews. With its rigid adherence to laws stored in a temple, administered by priestly types vested with civil authority, it resembled the old Sumerian system, and was just as stifling. The ministry of Jesus Christ was an effort to break Judaism out of this condition... an echo of what Enki did. Christ's gospel is a new namshub, an attempt to take religion out of the temple, out of the hands of the priesthood, and bring the Kingdom of God to everyone. That is the message explicitly spelled out by his sermons, and it is the message symbolically embodied in the empty tomb. After the crucifixion, the apostles went to his tomb hoping to find his body and instead found nothing. The message was clear enough; We are not to idolize Jesus, because his ideas stand alone, his church is no longer centralized in one person but dispersed among all the people.

This affords a reason why God suffers his dear children to fall into temptation, be cause he is able to outshoot Satan in his own bow, and in the thing wherein he thinks to outwit the Christian to be above him.  God will not only be admired by his saints in glory for his love in their salvation, but for his wisdom in the way to it.  The love of God in saving them will be the sweet draught at the marriage-feast, and the rare wisdom of God in effecting this, as the curious workmanship with which the cup will be enamelled.

Warfare effectively brought the antimalarial campaign to a halt as medical personnel were conscripted and as the collapse of the international supply of quinine deprived the movement of its chief tool.

And George Kennan, at the age of ninety-three, warned that “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.” He feared it could be the beginning of a new cold war, and in this he was prophetic. Kennan knew that empires do not vanish into thin air.

American intelligence knew little about Iraq, and much of what it knew was wrong. The CIA didn’t begin to imagine that Saddam could be overthrown and then operate from underground, nor did it foresee the insurgency that followed, and the ripple effect of that fighting, inspiring jihadists across the Middle East and North Africa. The consequences of that ignorance have been immense. Roughly half a million people have died, including fifteen thousand American combatants and contractors, in the name of the war on terror. Estimates of the financial toll run from $3 trillion to $6 trillion; in today’s dollars, World War II cost about $4 trillion. And in Iraq, the only winners of the war have been Iran, whose military commanders gained political power and prestige in Baghdad while working with jihadists to kill American troops, and Russia, which has forged a regional alliance of convenience with the Iranians.

Larry Diamond, a prominent American political sociologist, wrote in January 2015. “There is a growing sense, both domestically and internationally, that democracy in the United States has not been functioning effectively.” Voter turnouts were sinking. The cost of election campaigns was crushing. The role of dark money in politics was surging. Public trust in government was fading. Comity, courtesy, the consideration that the other person might have a point, were dying. Conspiracy theories were trending. Talking heads were shouting. Everyone was arguing with everybody

With the end of the American Revolution, ambitious European and American planters and woud-be planters flowed into the lower Mississippi Valley. They soon demanded an end to the complaisant regime that characterized slavery in the long half century following the Natchez rebellion, and Spanish officials were pleased to comply. The Cabildo - the governing body of New Orleans - issued its own regulations combining French and Spanish black codes, along with additional proscriptions on black life. In succeeding years, the state - Spanish (until 1800), French (between 1800 and 1803), and finally American (beginning in 1803) - enacted other regulations, controlling the slaves' mobility and denying their right to inherit property, contract independently, and testify in court. Explicit prohibitions against slave assemblage, gun ownership, and travel by horse were added, along with restrictions on manumission and self-purchase. The French, who again took control of Louisiana in 1800, proved even more compliant, reimposing the Code Noir during their brief ascendancy. The hasty resurrection of the old code pleased slaveholders, and, although it lost its effect with the American accession in 1803, planters - in control of the territorial legislature - incorporate many of its provisions in the territorial slave code. Perhaps even more significant than the plethora of new restrictions was a will to enforce the law. Slave miscreants faced an increasingly vigilant constabulary, whose members took it upon themselves to punish offenders. Officials turned with particular force on the maroon settlements that had proliferated amid the warfare of the Age of Revolution. They dismantled some fugitive colonies, scattering their members and driving many of them more deeply into the swamps. Maroons unfortunate enough to be captured were re-enslaved, deported, or executed.

Angst may have replaced fear and physical pain in modern societies, yet, without depreciating the merits of traditional society or ignoring the stresses and problems of modernity, this change has been nothing short of revolutionary. People in pre-modern societies struggled to survive in the most elementary sense. The overwhelming majority of them went through a lifetime of hard physical work to escape hunger, from which they were never secure. The tragedy of orphanage, child mortality, premature death of spouses, and early death in general was inseparable from their lives. At all ages, they were afflicted with illness, disability, and physical pain, for which no effective remedies existed. Even where state rule prevailed, violent conflict between neighbors was a regular occurrence and, therefore, an ever-present possibility, putting a premium on physical strength, toughness, and honor, and a reputation for all of these. Hardship and tragedy tended to harden people and make them fatalistic.

Up to 95 percent of the original Native American population, estimated at roughly twenty million people, disappeared after the invasion of European colonizers. While there was direct violence toward Native Americans, many of these deaths can be attributed to the introduction of smallpox. Smallpox is a virus that is spread when one comes into contact with infected bodily fluids or contaminated objects such as clothing or blankets. The virus then finds its way into a person's lymphatic system. Within days of infection, large, painful pustules begin to erupt over the victim's skin. In school curriculums, this has often been taught as an unfortunate tragedy, an accidental side effect of trade, and therefore a reason to claim that the Europeans did not commit genocide. However, in recent years, many historians have recognized that the spreading of smallpox was an early form of biological warfare, one which was understood and used without mercy from at least the mid-1700s. Noted conversations among army officials include letters discussing the idea of "sending the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes" and using "every stratagem to reduce them." Another official, Henry Bouquet, wrote a letter that told his subordinates to "try to Innoculate [sic] the Indians, by means of Blankets, as well as to Try Every other Method, that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race." They followed through on their plan, giving two blankets and a handkerchief from a Smallpox Hospital alongside other gifts to seal an agreement of friendship between the local Native tribes and the men at Fort Pitt, located in what is now western Pennsylvania.

Commanders have to remember that a lesson is not learned when it is identified, only when it has been incorporated in the big ideas, communicated effectively and actually implemented.

Vietnam was thus one of the most tragic cases of successive strategic leaders not correctly performing the four tasks of strategic leadership – to get the big ideas right, to communicate them effectively, to oversee their implementation and to determine how to refine them and do it all again – at

The enemy loves my busyness because he knows what "busy" really means: "Being Under Satan's Yoke." It's not a glamorous distraction, but it's highly effective in removing me from the front lines of spiritual warfare.

If now -- and this is my idea -- there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would remain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clotheswashing, and windowwashing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation. Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not, as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one's life. I spoke of the "moral equivalent" of war. So far, war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until and equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way. But I have no serious doubt that the ordinary prides and shames of social man, once developed to a certain intensity, are capable of organizing such a moral equivalent as I have sketched, or some other just as effective for preserving manliness of type. It is but a question of time, of skilful propogandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic opportunities. The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree if its imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state. We should be owned, as soldiers are by the army, and our pride would rise accordingly. We could be poor, then, without humiliation, as army officers now are. The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as part history has inflamed the military temper.

There is absolutely no indication that, faced with the need to learn more effective methods of siege warfare, the Spartans adapted.

When you are going through a dark time, one side effect can be to forget the power and the goodness of God. When God isn’t doing what you think He should, it is easy to focus on the problem, and it suddenly becomes larger than the solution—which is God Himself.

Church growth is 60% prayers and 40% methods and principles, according to Dr. Yonggi Cho - the Pastor of the world largest church. There must be deliberate, systematic prayer warfare strategy. We are dealing with well organized, structured enemy with levels and layers of satanic authorities. “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph 6:12). The Guerilla Warfare structure headed by Satan is comprised of the following levels - Principalities, Powers, Rulers of Darkness, Spiritual Wickedness in High Places. CITY-TAKING PRAYER STRATEGIES To effectively check mate, confront, preempt and demobilize this satanic structure, the following prayer strategies are recommended. The aim of the strategy outlined below is to uproot the gates of the enemy from every stratum of our community and households and to actually take the battle to the gates of the enemy.

Cold reading is a subset of what we call the "Barnum effect." Named after circus tycoon P. T. Barnum, it's where you make a general, hazy statement that could apply to almost anyone that someone will personalize as if it were specific to them.

You can not be an effective psychological combatant and still cherish beliefs in hard religion, pseudo-science, or superstitions. Belief in these things make your targets more vulnerable; you should be exploiting them, not falling for them yourself.

Most famous for his work the Art of War, Sun Tzu is credited for creating empathetic warfare, whereby understanding an enemy would inevitably lead to their defeat. The book is a treatise on the formation, equipping, training, and leading of an army. Sun Tzu’s work delves into many non-military aspects of life, as he believed that knowledge was the most effective weapon

It has been my experience that when I am having difficulties with someone in my home through their rebellion or whatever, the most effective way of dealing with the situation is to get on my face before the Lord and ask Him to deal with me. Almost always, the Holy Spirit shows me some area of my life that is not totally pleasing to Him. As I deal with that area, I find that the Lord is then free to deal with the problem in the other person’s life without my ever having to talk to them.

The leveling effects of fairness concerns were significantly mediated by regime type. In World War I, the democracies of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada were prepared to “soak the rich,” whereas more autocratic systems such as Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia preferred to borrow or print money to sustain their war effort. The latter, however, later paid a high price through hyperinflation and revolution, shocks that likewise compressed inequality. Especially during World War I, before a common template for funding mass mobilization warfare had been established, the mechanisms of leveling therefore varied considerably between countries.

The Project for the New American Century praised a 1992 strategic white paper that Wolfowitz had written for Cheney, back when Cheney had been Defense Secretary during the first Iraq war, stating, ‘The Defense Policy Guidance drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for maintaining U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.’ That 1992 policy paper was ordered buried by Bush. It became far too hot, after a copy was leaked to the New York Times in early 1992. It had called for precisely the form of preemptive wars, to ‘preclude’ a great power rival, that George W. Bush made official as U.S. National Security Strategy, the Bush Doctrine, in September 2002. Cheney and company now restated that 1992 imperial agenda for America in the post-Cold War era. They declared that the U.S. ‘must discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership, or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.’ The PNAC group were not content only to dominate the earth, where they proposed Washington create a ‘worldwide command and control system.’ They also called for creation of ‘U.S. space forces’ to dominate space, and effect total control of cyberspace, as well as to develop biological weapons, ‘that can target specific genotypes and may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool.’ Biological warfare as a politically useful tool? Even George Orwell would have been shocked.

Often, genuine relief from diabolical attacks can be attained by making a good sacramental Confession, praying daily deliverance prayers, fasting, and leading a sacramental life. These are effective, proven remedies. All levels of demonic affliction require such remedies.

But why does this all matter? Why is the math of arrows and swords relevant to understanding why you might have a boss, a boss’s boss, and a boss’s boss’s boss at work? For a simple reason: as ranged weapons became more common, the dynamics of warfare started to dramatically favor societies with more soldiers. If a few hundred people got together and formed an army under the rule of a single chief, egalitarian bands of twenty to eighty members just couldn’t compete. And when humans get together in larger groups, flat societies become impossible. Put enough people together, and hierarchy and dominance always emerge. It’s an ironclad rule of history. Some people had to learn this the hard way. Bands that stubbornly stuck to the old ways of flat society started to get wiped out by those who joined together and embraced chiefs. Plus, on the battlefield itself, having leaders (generals) with formal power over their soldiers was much more effective than a ragtag bunch of soldiers making their own decisions. It was the opposite of the !Kung hunting rituals. To win a war, you didn’t want to insult your best and bravest. You needed to elevate your best fighters, not cut them down to size.

Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. —1 JOHN 4:4, KJV

Demolishing Strongholds: Effective Strategies for Spiritual Warfare.

civil wars look entirely different today. Those who wage war against their governments in the twenty-first century tend to avoid the battlefield entirely; they know they will almost certainly lose in a conventional war against a powerful government. Instead, they choose the strategy of the weak: guerrilla warfare and terrorism. And, increasingly, domestic terror campaigns are aimed at democratic governments. Terror can be effective in democracies because its targets—citizens—have political power: They can vote against politicians who are unable to stop the attacks. The Provisional IRA, Hamas, and the Tamil Tigers all believed that the more pain they inflicted on average citizens, the more likely governments would be to make concessions to the terrorists in exchange for peace. Either way, extremists benefit: They either convince the incumbent leader to pursue policies more favorable to the extremists (no gun control, stricter immigration policies), or they convince enough voters to elect a more extreme leader who is ideologically closer to them. Terror is also surprisingly easy to pull off in democracies, where there is more freedom of movement and less surveillance. There are also numerous constitutional constraints against labeling domestic groups terrorists, giving them more leeway than foreign terrorists would have.