REVEALED: Google funded virus research carried out by Wuhan-linked scientist Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance for over a decade

Hexagram 33, WITHDRAWAL or RETREAT — So precious, so revered for answering every general's lifelong wish, a win against competitors without enduring the uncertainty, expense and often career-ending embarassment of kinetic war.

(No fingerpointing. It's all in our World Canon, narratives free for the lifting, taken from here, from there. Everyone can play, with anyone's ball we choose.)

Dating back 6,000 years, the Yi's Hexagram 33 "THUN is the hexagram of the sixth month... suggested to King Wen* the growth of small and unprincipled men in the state, before whose advance superior men were obliged to retire, [and] how 'when small men increase in power, the necessity of the times requires superior men to withdraw before them.'" [* Wen & Son: 11th-century BC, arranged hexagrams in their present order, wrote earliest commentaries] — I Ching: Book of Changes; translated by James Legge, 1899; reprinted 1964. Less than 50%.

Special added bonus for clarity: Two(!) passages from Confucius's Analects, both involving a charismatic, beloved father (a leader, a fatherland, some cherished patrimony...) undermined by lesser men. Next, if the sons are unified, the organization continues to thrive—if, however, the unprincipled ones are secure in their posts as manager-influencers and unelected 'deep state', the edfice crumbles.

Illustrative of the phenomenon, this arrangement of trigrams represents a mountain laboriously rising up, the sky easily retreating from reach. Mind the volcanoes.

Expenditures for costly armaments, the bad taste in everyone's mouth after... versus box-lunches for border jumpers, say, even funding endowments for silly fields of study or bankrolling breakaway, negative-imagery art.

Meanwhile chastising competitors for infractions centuries back—and, vital to the game, maintaining a steady current of incremental improvements and rigidly enforced order at home, while silencing every kind of dissent or possible source of future disunity.

Success.