Excepts from the book, 'Win-Win or Lose' by Bill Bonner. The email offer came unsolicited. I came close to biting, but found a free PDF of the e-book offered with the financial newsletter. The offer doesn't make full sense to me anyway. A $199 value for $49, and automatic renewal at $129 per year. The main theme is a planned controlled demolition of the economy currently underway which will render money — at least cash — obsolete ('The Great Reset'). Go figure. But it did turn me on to the author, Bill Bonner. Oddly, his book 📖 is out of print and unavailable, yet reviews are glowing. I like that a wealthy man is unpretentious and down to earth. Haven't read his book yet, but scanned, and so far the impression is favorable. This turn of my attention isn't totally irrelevant to my central focus of expanding spiritual awareness. Where is the dividing line, anyway, between spiritual and non-spiritual? Bill, besides connecting the dots of what's going on in the world, writes about cooperation, a natural outcome of human spiritual evolution, and a way of living that is close to my heart. Copied from the PDF, here is the Table of Contents of Bill's book, and some of the introduction: CHAPTER 1 IN THE BEGINNING CHAPTER 2 ON COOPERATION AND WIN-WIN CHAPTER 3 WHAT CIVILIZATION IS NOT CHAPTER 4 WHAT KIND OF GAME ARE WE PLAYING? CHAPTER 5 WIN-WIN… OR LOSE CHAPTER 6 FAKE NEWS CHAPTER 7 WIN-LOSE MONEY CHAPTER 8 GOVERNMENT – THE ULTIMATE WIN-LOSER CHAPTER 9 THE DEEP STATE CHAPTER 10 DECIVILIZING AMERICA *** INTRODUCTION “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” – Voltaire HISTORY DOESN’T TELL US who made the first falafel… or how Cleopatra felt when Marc Antony kissed her on the lips. But it does tell us that the Elamites slew the people of Uruk and the Amorites slew the Sumerians. Then, the people of Uruk slew the people of Kish. Or was it the other way around? In any case, at least the Bible is clear about it: Cain slew Abel. And take a look at the Kennewick Man, a human skeleton discovered in Washington State in 1996. He lived around 9400 B.C. He died when another human shot him with an arrow. The royal tomb at Ur, one of the oldest cities in the world, shows the pattern was already well developed in 2600 B.C. Discovered at that site during the original excavation in 1922 was a wooden box with a frieze carved into it. This “Standard of Ur” depicts an army of soldiers, horses, and war chariots attacking an unidentified enemy. Soldiers are run down by the chariots. Others are led before the king to be sent into slavery, tortured, or executed. On a stone stele discovered not far away in southern Iraq, it is recorded that Eannatum, king of Lagash, conquered the city of Umma. On this “Stele of the Vultures,” as it is called, we see the victorious phalanx marching over the bodies of the defeated enemies… with buzzards picking at the severed heads underfoot. That was in 2450 B.C. By then, this sort of thing had already been going on for at least a thousand years… and it was just beginning. Another stele from 200 years later shows the victory of Naram- Sin, an Akkadian monarch and the grandson of King Sargon of Akkad. He fought the Lullubi, a people with an unknown language, thought to be pre-Iranian, who had come down from the Zagros mountains. He won, of course. Otherwise, the stele would be dedicated to the Lullubi king. There he is, Naram-Sin, larger than life, leading his warriors to victory… with the enemy pleading for mercy. These are among the first records of civilized warfare. Alert readers will be quick to notice that “civilized warfare” is oxymoronic. That contradiction is at the heart of the present work. When you set out to write a book, you know where you begin. But you don’t know where you will end up. As you think and study, your ideas evolve. As the philosopher Yogi Berra put it: “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.” Sometimes, you end up somewhere you hadn’t intended to go. But often, it is where you ought to be. My goal was to attack the crooked timber of mankind with a chainsaw. I intended to write a book called “The Public Spectacle.” In it, I would cut into the lurid and fantastic space where public life takes place. We all spend a good deal of our lives there… Newspapers and TV shows are devoted to it… It controls many of our thoughts… It takes up our time and money… It kills millions, imprisons millions, and shackles hundreds of millions to the toxic illusions of public life. But few people have done much careful thinking about it. Not that I was going to approach the subject in a serious or academic way; that was far more work than I was prepared to undertake. But at least I could make the chips fly and have a few laughs. The resulting book is not the product of diligent scholarship or even careful study. Don’t be surprised to find loose ends and contradictions. And don’t hold your breath for precision, either. As you get deeper into the book, you will find out why.... *** The book PDF can be downloaded from Whole Human: https://www.wholehuman.emanatepresence.com/blog/win-win-or-lose 
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