A Lack of Material Resources Contributes to the Decline o...

First and foremost, the price of war has gone up dramatically. The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms. Secondly, while the price of war soared, its pro

 It Takes a Network to Defeat a Network

...the 9/11 attacks were carried out by one network on another network: al Qaeda against the U.S. financial and political system. Yet it was not the immediate damage of the terrorist attacks that inflicted the real cost on the United States so much as the unintended consequences of the national security state’s response. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in August 2002, before it was even clear that Iraq was to be invaded, the political scientist John Arquilla presciently pointed out the fla...

 Forage on the Enemy

作戰: 故不盡知用兵之害者，則不能盡知用兵之利也。善用兵者，役不再籍，糧不三載，取用于國，因糧于敵，故軍食可足也。國之貧于師者遠輸，遠輸則百姓貧，近于師者貴賣，貴賣則百姓財竭，財竭則急于丘役，力屈財殫，中原內虛于家，百姓之費，十去其七，公家之費，破車罷馬，甲冑矢弩，戟楯蔽櫓，丘牛大車，十去其六。 Waging War: It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted...

 Emulate Water

虛實: 夫兵形象水，水之形，避高而趨下：兵之形，避實而擊虛；水因地而制流，兵因敵而制勝。故兵無常勢，水無常形；能因敵變化而取勝，謂之神。故五行無常勝，四時無常位，日有短長，月有死生。 Weak Points and Strong:...: Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards. So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak. W...

 All War is Based on Deception

兵者，詭道也。故能而示之不能，用而示之不用，近而示之遠，遠而示之近。利而誘之，亂而取之，實而備之，強而避之，怒而撓之，卑而驕之，佚而勞之，親而離之。攻其無備，出其不意，此兵家之勝，不可先傳也。 All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away;when far awa...

 The Evolving View of Science and Evil

Daedalus begins with an artillery bombardment on the Western Front, the shell bursts nonchalantly annihilating the human protagonists who are supposed to be in charge of the battle. This opening scene epitomizes Haldane's hard-headed view of war. And likewise at the end, when the biologist in his laboratory, "just a poor little scrubby underpaid man groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultramicroscopic," is transfigured into the mythical figure of Daedalus, "conscious of his ghastly mission ...

 Intellectual Leaders Have Fewer Deaths in War

Now that the presidency of George W. Bush is over, the theory that we are better off with unintellectual leaders is just embarrassing, and the reasons for the embarrassment may be quantified. Measuring the psychological traits of public figures, to be sure, has a sketchy history, but the psychologist Dean Simonton has developed several historiometric measures that are reliable and valid (in the psychometrician’s technical sense) and politically nonpartisan.208 He analyzed a dataset of 42 pr...

 The Big and the Little

And Mallow laughed joyously, "You've missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself. You've missed everything, and understood nothing. Look, man, the Empire can replace nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They've calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole sectors of the Galaxy. Their generators are gigantic because they thought in gigantic fashion. "But we, – we , our little Foundation, our single world almost with...

 Resistance to World Government

The case for World Government as Hamilton and Einstein presented it is logically compelling. Fortunately or unfortunately, World Government has a fatal defect. Nobody wants it. At the time when Einstein preached World Government most seriously, he was bitterly attacked by Soviet scientific colleagues as well as by patriotic American politicians. "By the irony of fate," the Soviet scientists proclaimed, "Einstein has virtually become a supporter of the schemes and ambitions of the bitterest fo...

 War is the Price of Diversity

The state of the world today is not essentially different from the state of the world in 1948. We are still faced with the same choices that we were facing in 1948. On the level of fundamental principles, we are faced with a choice between unity and diversity. The unity of mankind, or the diversity of nations and political institutions. National sovereignty is the contemporary expression of the ancient human tradition which divided us into {202} tribes, each jealously guarding its independe...