kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with sun tzu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what maskturbator panic looks like

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

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

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

In brief, Sun Tzu talks about two things in this chapter: the importance of getting in and out quickly if there is going to be combat and knowing to mine the enemy for resources instead of one's own forces.

One and Done

Never, says Sun Tzu, should you involve your armies in a protracted, long series of campaigns. "One who excels in employing the military does not conscript the people twice or transport provisions a third time." Either make war quick and efficient or don't bother, which is to say Sun Tzu feels about war like I have always felt about shopping.

A great example of the abject failure of a long campaign is the measures that have been taken against the economic damage of COVID shutdowns, otherwise known as stimulus checks. The war would have been over had government and the mainstream media taken a different turn in 2020. COVID, a disease which at its most lethal kills far fewer people than cancer or diabetes any given year, could have been exposed as a nothingburger as early as April 2020. Instead, we Americans were peppered with a fusillade of "free" money, the cost of which is the current recession which may well become a new Great Depression. Not only was the relief badly aimed, it was a disguise for leftist government grift to fund ridiculous ventures such as modern art museums and gender reassignment surgeries in Muslim nations.

"No country ever benefitted from prolonged warfare" cautions Sun Tzu. Onlookers watching the collapse of the American empire take note of the shambles all around us: America has been at war to exploit new territories long before 1776, and look where that got us. The leaders of China don't seem to be willing to learn from American mistakes. Hell-bent on becoming the next Great World Power, they have gone to war with both their own citizenry and their land, raking both over the coals in the name of Progress. The greedy CCP takes paving paradise to put up a parking lot to a whole new level: the ghost city. Ghost cities are the eerie vision of China at war with itself, gaming and cannibalizing the strength of its own people in order to display the ever-less-convincing trompe d'loeil version of power.

For All The Young People Out There: A Warning

To take it down to a more personal level, I would advise any person considering college right now to heed Sun Tzu's advice in this chapter, and that is to make college short and sweet. College, now more than ever, is a war to cheat you (and this includes your parents and your future self) out of as much money as possible for a tiny scrap of education you probably won't be able to use. Personally, I had to invent my job as a music teacher after the long fight to graduate with a Bachelor's of Music in 1995. Nobody else I know teaches in their field. My high school friend who got a Musical Theater degree ended up translating German textbooks. Another art degreed friend ended up in retail management. Yet another had a degree in Communications, whatever the hell that means, and had every job from car rentals to banking. Most of the people I started musical college with did not make it to year four. The college was gleeful to rob them of their money in exchange for no degree and a bunch of debt, of that I am sadly confident. Not that they could use the degree anyway. If you go to college, do it as quickly as possible. Or just don't go. If I had it to do all over again, I would have taken a couple years at my local community college or in this day an age, a cheaper online college, and then finished the degree while already working as a private music teacher, for instance teaching out of my parent's home or driving to student's homes. What I would not do would be to obtain a Masters or a PhD. College is such a racket these days that I think most people should steer clear of it, lest they be trapped in the unending cycle of undischargeable debt by the time they are my age.

When Empires Overreach

"The State is impoverished when it transports provisions far off." The more I see of the decaying American Empire, the more I understand the genius of medieval Japan. Isolationism has its benefits. Staying local concentrates power.

Speaking of staying home, one of the primary reasons the salary class embraced the Coronapocalypse with such enthusiasm was because it put an end to the supercommutes of a majority of its members. A supercommuter is a person who commutes an hour or more to work each way. Supercommuting is a way of life for the working poor and lower middle classes, but over the years it crept into salary class life as well. Unlike the salary classes, the working poor and lower middle classes did not get to stay at home past the initial months of the Plandemic (if they got to stay at home at all) because their jobs involved "essential" activities such as driving a truck or working a cash register at the grocery store or more typically they could not afford a hiatus in pay.

To this day, unionized Chicago teachers have refused to step back into their classrooms, ostensibly because they're scared of COVID. Yeah, right. It has nothing to do with chaotic schools as babysitting operations/low security prisons for materialistic, shiftless, violent young adults with no better place to be and chips on their shoulders.

For the average salary class woman who actually loved her husband, the Coronapocalypse represented the first break the poor guy had gotten since his college days. The man who barely graced his family with his presence every other weekend suddenly was not a ghost anymore. All those business trips, golf games, business dinners, and supercommutes got cancelled. Suddenly the Big Cheese breadwinner was home, real, and involved with the children he sired. Isolation has its benefits.

Every person who has the luxury of working from home saves a ton of money: travel of any sort is expensive and time consuming. A long commute, Sun Tzu would say, impoverishes our State.

My issue with the above teachers and salary class telecommuters is their dishonesty. If only they would just admit it: they like having three extra hours a day and getting paid the same amount of money. Instead they give us a steaming dish of sanctimony with sides of fear porn and mask theater. Increasingly, we see peeks at a scheme that made salary class lives more pleasant and comfortable by design with little thought for the human expense.

Starve and Plunder Your Enemy 101: How Much Is Too Much?

"Thus the wise general will secure foodstuffs from his enemy." The salary classes have done this, except the enemy was the corporations they work for and/or draw stock benefits from in a parasite/host relationship. The salary class finally managed to turn the tables with COVID. Instead of the salariman or salariwoman being drained of vitality by his or her long commute and grueling office environment, the flow of the company's resources changed direction. The etheric power at home is now isolated in a bubble of apparent safety and not fed upon by a parasitic boss at the end of a long train or auto commute. The trouble here is that by reversing the flow of etheric resources, several albatrosses have been created. One is the empty office: what to do with the giant, empty commercial space where office workers used to congregate? What about the surrounding economies, such as the restaurants that served the office workers? What of the economies that had little or nothing to do with the office workers, such as Broadway entertainers or the little chess club that barely eked out an existence in the best of times? Starving the enemy and forcing his resources to flow to you stops making sense when you wake up and realize you've made a *glass factory of the land you intended to colonize. Just saying.

Sun Tzu suggests we assimilate our enemy and (eventually) treat them well -- it worked for Genghis Khan! Such a strategy avoids the blundering idiocy I mention in the above paragraph. Treat your client states well. Don't be like China, the US, or the salary class: overextended, thoughtless, doomed.

*"glass factory" is American slang for the aftermath of detonating a nuclear bomb

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

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

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

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

Sun Tzu opens the first chapter with:

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

Life Is A Battlefield

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

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

Friends, Enemies, Frenemies

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

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

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

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

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

Picking Your Battles

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

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

The Karate Kim

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

Discipline, Political Correctness, and Slimebaggery

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

The Jewish Woman Who Was Like Donald Trump

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

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

Good Business Practices

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

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

The Lies of War

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

A Point of Contention and of Agreement

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

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

In Conclusion

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

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