Hazor'im bedim'a - berina yiqtsoro

If our soldiers are not overburdened with money, it is not because they have a distaste for riches; if their lives are not unduly long, it is not because they are disinclined to longevity.

There is another problem we must overcome: money. The cost of living, of running, is different than the cost of waging war. It is easier to run than it is to fight, monetarily. To wage a war, we must need weapons, we must need training. This requires money.

It is money, unfortunately, that we do not have. It would be nice if we had some unseen benefactor, but we do not. Most of us live day-to-day, with some money saved, but only enough to live on. Some of us take menial jobs for money under the table, some of us scam or outright steal. To live off the grid is to find alternate sources of money.

So this is just another complication we must overcome.

And, to bring us around again to The Art of War, there are five essentials for victory:

1. When to fight and when not to fight.
2. How to handle both superior and inferior forces.
3. Having an army "animated with the same spirit."
4. Taking the enemy unprepared.
5. Not to be interfered with by the sovereign.

Of those, the fifth is the easiest to check mark off, since we have no sovereign. But we must learn the others, especially ways we can take the enemy unprepared.

And every eye 

Gaz'd as before some brother of the sky.

I know they are watching me. The Panopticon. They have cameras hidden all over the country; tiny cameras, easily hidden, and spread throughout major cities. The government agency rejected their solution -- apparently, even they didn't believe it -- but in the process of observing runners and proxies, they got a glimpse of the Slender Man (or "were exposed to the Slender Man meme-complex," as they put it) and so refused to give up on their "counter-meme" idea.

I think they went insane. I think, looking through all that footage, thousands of hours of footage of runners being stalked, haunted by the distortion of the Slender Man, made them quite mad. But even so, they do not appear to want to harm anyone; instead, they only wish to brainwash us into believing the Slender Man does not exist.

But that, too, is a story we should not tell ourselves. No matter how hard it gets, we should not retreat into fantasy and tell ourselves its real.