Sir Valence: Prism! Where's that BABY?!

Man of Stele.

As we're blinded with a blizzard of Snowden coverage, providing us with an excuse to avert our eyes from the crumbling of the global economy and the continuation of all money flowing in increasing torrents of cash into the accounts of no-accounts, the denial of anything amiss during the all-but-ignored meeting of the Bilderburg group of Prince Machiavelli wanna-be's passes almost without notice.

As reported by the Telegraph, one of the founding members, Healy, explained the group's importance when he quipped,  “Experience has taught me that lack of understanding is the main cause of all evil in public affairs." As long as the minions of the worlds understand that their every move and their every correspondence is monitored in order to protect us from them, where's the harm? every spy agency in the world is represented at the group's meeting as well as all of the what used to be referred to as Industrialists, but that 's so old-school, their not magnates anymore either, they're simply the slimy, reptilian rulers of the world, skimming what they can in the dark and confiscating the rest via cons and gangsterism on a global scale.

 Senators Wyden and Udall warned us two years ago that we would be "stunned" if we knew what was really going on, the implication being, that now we do. To suggest that, to the contrary,  we have been given merely a little teaser-glimpse into the machinations of the uncontrollable bureaucracy scurrying around behind the scenes in order to justify their well-paid jobs, knowing full well that the prospects of their finding any other kind of employment, with such a well-conceived benefit package that makes the proles troll to bankroll their own subjugation is blithely glided over like a frozen lake with dead carcasses encased in its icy depths, is to court the accusation of "Conspiracy nutcase", even as the more that's revealed about the internal workings of the US government the more obvious it becomes that it's nothing more than a conspiracy  against the very people it courts to pay for the circus called Congress, with Obama, executive-in-thief as its current, smug, grandiloquent Ringmaster.

But as the world is bedazzled with Snowden-blindness, the huskies race onward pulling our sled ever faster toward conflagration, it's the meat the elite like to eat, and they prefer it crispy. But to say such things, to suggest that there is a rather petite elite that is behind the scenes plotting and planning for the subjugation of humanity for their own amusement and bemusement  is just not acceptable amongst the people who are, so let's tackle the issue from another level of consciousness, one that Stephen Jay Gould used as an explanation for it: The Spandrels of San Marcos.


Architecturally, you cannot put a dome onto an arch without creating a third, unplanned for structural component, called a spandrel. Mr Gould posits that language, or consciousness, is not an adaptation so much as one of these byproducts of, in this case, cerebral architecture, such that the electrical energy generated in our minds via excessive thought creates a kind of inductance, or magnetic phenomena, such as the earth's iron core generates, that has a manifestation that we have come to understand as thought, or reasoning. Whether one accepts this hypothesis or not, the idea of there being unplanned ramifications from change is, it seems to me, a sound one, and it leaves much more room for discussion of our actions going forward than merely denying that our actions caused events to turn out as they have, even though we may still disagree as to the evil intent involved right from the inception of the changes we have willfully wrought.

As an example of real life geopolitics, the Iraq War offers a good scenario. Whereas most people of the US think of the Iraq War as that misadventure instigated by chicanery and Cheney in the GW Bush Whitiehouse, that was merely the second land invasion, an invasion of a State weakened by more than a decade of aerial bombing by the US, in what is a state of War called the maintenance of a 'No Fly Zone', with NATO and the US taking turns playing the Shell No Pest Strip and shooting not only anything that dares move without permission, but the bombing of any radar installation that has the audacity to detect overflying aircraft in their own airspace. Together with the sanctions, this was the state of affairs that Bush senior left to the Clinton Presidency, in which one of the spandrels, we assume, at least, that the millions of Iraqi children that were to die because of it and whose demise Madeleine Albright considered, "Worth it" (worth what, I was never sure), was indeed an unintended consequence. This, you could argue, is where the spandrels analogy breaks down. Because whereas a biological construct that 's been formed because of an adaptation for a completely unrelated survival advantage can, should it not prove deleterious, be embraced by an organism, when the consequential spandrel is the death of children and can, once the consequences can no longer be denied, the course of action that is left unchanged, the consequence, no matter how unfortunate or decried, can nonetheless no longer be considered 'unintentional'. Just as the military 's use of the term 'Collateral Damage" uses the same construct  to hoodwink the public (that demands to be hoodwinked) into thinking that civilians killed in a drone attack are not part of the plan. But again, as in the Iraqi children, those civilian deaths may have been unforeseen by you, but they were not unforeseen by the military planners. They know full well going in that civilians will be killed, but like Ms. Albright, feel it is better to, let's see, how do they phrase it now?, to make their crimes palatable?, oh yes: ask forgiveness rather than permission, (although in truth they receive neither, because neither is actually what they want, acceptance and docility will suffice).

So this is where it gets tricky. At what juncture in the planning was the spandrel recognized, and even darker, was the spandrel the reason for concocting the plan in the first place? Or Was it instead just a coincidence that Marvin Bush was in Kuwait shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union? And that Haliburton was testing their technology in the Bakken of North Dakota in 1987, only to find that although the technology worked better than they dreamed, it was prohibitively expensive, and somehow ended up in Kuwait with Marvin Bush and Dyncorps, while Cheney is Sectretary of State, and subsequently, as reward for all his subterfuge, named CEO of Halliburton, and his ambassador, John D. Negroponte, who became Deputy Secretary of State, second in command to Condoleezza Rice in the U.S. Department of State during the GW regime, was advising Saddam that the US had no major problems with his attacking Kuwait as, known to all these parties, Haliburton was supplying the Royal family with technology to extend the lifetime of the depleting Burgan field by using their very expensive, but ultimately worthwhile, horizontal drilling expertise, to drill across the border underground, thereby siphoning oil from the Iraqi fields.

The timing of this audacious move was, I would also posit, not coincidental; for the dissolution of the Soviet Union was accomplished, not because of rabid anti-communism, but because of oil geopolitics and the demand equation of not having access to enough to get western demockracies through the years ahead without Russia and the reserves elsewhere in the world, an access that was untenable with the Russian Army ready to defend their satellites from US predations on their sovereign resources. That this downfall would be cheered worldwide was not even a question, but as I watched the Gay pride celebrations after the recent SCOTUS decision about marriage legality for same-sex couples, it reminded me of those days in the waning penultimate decade of the 20'th Century when the people were exhibiting such rabid, maniacal triumphalism that it sent a chill down my spine and a warning to my head. A warning that said this was the end, not only of Communism, but of Liberalism: of workers' rights the world over, because with Communism swept into 'the dustbin of history', labor would be helpless to stand up to the grim scythe of Capitalists' job and benefits destruction.

Yet what I feared was not even close to the true debauchery that was to take place and in which we are in the middle of still. I had no notion that the US would become the Champion of Torture, the King of Surveillance, the Premier of Centrally planned economies, the Pariah of State Sovereignty and the purveyor of a 'right makes right' doctrine of international piracy and gangsterism. That the slide to totalitarianism would, far from being thwarted by the US, would be instead embraced and championed by, not only its politicians, but the citizens themselves. This had been the least of my concerns. This has all been a roller coaster ride on which I've been screaming to get off while the rest of the world's been whooping and hollering in hysterical abandon as we speed toward an intoxicating smash-up that we'll someday call one hell of a ride. One that those who survive, will, Asiana Airlines-like, be the first in line to get the ticket for the next one even as the wreckage lays smoldering on the runway, while the dead and  wounded get blamed for their own misfortunes.

In this we're confronted with the ultimate spandrel. The spandrel of civilization in which the very edifice that we've constructed to provide a bulwark against the depredations and onslaughts of a heartless and uncaring Nature, destroying all of man's predators in the process, have instead  or concurrently, perhaps even inevitably, built into it the demon of our own demise, taking over the need to kill from nature, and transferring it to our government and leaving it hidden in dark corners where no one dare look (except the NSA: that Nazty Stasi Agency ... they look everywhere).