History Lessons: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 43-45

The most important scene in the Netflix documentary "Behind the Curve" (2018) is toward the end where an actual scientist laments the rise of the Flat Earth conspiracy theory stating that every person who bought into it represents a loss. Every person that spent hundreds of hours researching the mathematics trying to find a hole in gravitational theory could have spent that time on a worthwhile discovery. One group of people in that documentary spent 10k dollars on a laser gyroscope and then encased in basalt (to block wifi interference) to prove that Earth was flat only to find out that even then it showed the Earth as being round. This represents not only a loss of time and effort, but also the money. 

People like Cooper make me sad. They are not bad writers; indeed, they impart a sense of urgency and panic that could be better spent somewhere else. Cooper would have made a good historical writer if only he wasn't caught up in this kind of nonsense. Allen would have made a good investigator if only he could have been pointed at real problems instead of trying to prove that liberals funded the Soviet Union. 

Cooper is going to tell us the history lesson of the document "Quiet Weapons for Quiet Wars" and after years of grading first year college students I can see that there is some talent here. It's a brief spark, but it is present if only he could stop tripping over himself to brag about how much he knew about this years ago. 

"The original purpose of Operations Research was to study the strategic and tactical problems of air and land defense with the objective of effective use of limited military resources against foreign enemies (i.e., logistics). 

It was soon recognized by those in positions of power [THE COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS] that the same methods might be useful for totally controlling a society."

Quick reminder, bold or [bracketed] writing are Cooper's words as he is commenting on someone else's document (allegedly). 

This is the spark that I am talking about, he's setting the stage here. It's like how the very first Star Wars movie begins in the middle of the action. We don't know who the empire is, who the rebels are, or what this message is but we are in. Is Operations Research a thing? No idea, but then he trips over himself to use a technical word "logistics." If you don't know, "logistics," is the L in SHIELD; basically, it means the ability to move and supply a war effort. As Dan Carlin pointed out in his podcast concerning the Pacific War, that the American submarine effort did not target warships or troops; it sunk their logistics network. The adage, according to Carlin, is that amateurs study tactics, professionals study strategy, while experts study logistics. For example, I can beat any computer at chess because I'll just unplug the machine. That's attacking logistics. 

I don't know why Cooper is using that word, in context it does not make sense. Studying the ways to fight a foreign enemy via tactics and strategy is not the study of logistics. However, he presses on to discuss that the operations research was then recognized by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as being a way to control a society. 

The CFR is an ancient name in this era of Q-Anon and "Illuminati Confirmed." Even by Cooper's time the name had faded into memory. I mentioned this in the Allen book, because the Allen book made it popular, but it is just the Illuminati/Mason/Q-Anon/International Zionists/Bilderberg Group with a different name. They are basically all synonyms for each other. The CFR is the group Goldwater thought was running the country when he ran for president (giving us the "Goldwater Rule"). It's always nice when these works throw it back like this. How the CFR is going to use military style shipping to control a society is the question Cooper is going to have to answer though. 

Our history lesson is much shorter than I would have thought. It begins with the invention of the relay computer which is then replaced by the electronic computer in 1946, then improved with the "simplex method of linear programming" in 1947. This is all to study economic data in order to know precisely when "society would arrive for capitulation." 

Capitulation is the process of surrendering which means that Cooper either doesn't know what the word means, or he doesn't know what the word "arrive" means. 

I say this because he's trying to tell the story that the CFR used the new computing technology, funded through Airforce at Harvard, to analyze economic data and take over the country. Yet, he never explains how they took over, just that they did. 

Cooper is one of those people that collects a lot of facts but has no idea what to do with them. I'm sympathetic to his plight as I am also one of those people. I have a trivia app on my phone that supplies me with endless little facts of the world that I have no use for, but I doom scroll through it once a day. It is more impressive that Cooper has this apparent need since the internet is in its infancy when this book is being written, but Cooper is aware that the MASER is something real. The MASER is like the LASER only instead of light it uses electromagnetic waves. Cooper claims that the maser is used by "they" to create fusion from sea water. Cooper likes facts, but he lacks the patience to delve into them, because this is just not a thing that happened. He then ties unlimited electrical energy with social energy and then drops the entire claim. I'm sure he will circle back to it. 

The quiet war was declared in 1954 by the Bilderberg group, Cooper repeats, using the computer, maser, and the quiet weapons. All of this surround the energy sciences and the private attempt to dominate American society for a private utopia. 

But wait...who is in charge? Cooper has name dropped the Illuminati in the beginning of the chapter, the CFR, and now the Bilderberg Group. We spent a year discussing the Illuminati with the Robison book, while I just mentioned above that the CFR and the Bilderberg Group are basically synonyms. In reality the CFR is a political think tank (they have a magazine you can subscribe to and an office in NYC) while the Bilderberg Group is an annual conference of political and economic leaders. In the conspiracy world they are the boogey men, the ultimate evil, the "they" of "that's how they get you." I said earlier that the names are synonyms, but Cooper is discussing them as though they were entirely separate entities. This is interesting because it means that they co-exist and once you get all powerful entities co-existing like this, the shit gets weird and difficult to follow (e.g. Marvel's Eternals). It makes me curious to know which of these powers lives in Orthanc, which lives in Bara-dur, and which delved Angband.