The First Circle

This clip is not about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's, The First Circle but rather the first circle(s) seen by man, first the Sun, then the Moon and lastly by rain drops falling into water. Enjoy.

FUBAR inc.

A week ago, BRT stated that the actions of the MIC is bankrupting the country with endless wars and untold waste at unimaginable scale. Factor in ineptness and the inability to manage money at any  reasonable level whatsoever describes the defense department black hole where, beyond its event horizon, nobody ever sees just how much of a FUBAR the Pentagon truly is.

Simulation of gravitational lensing by a black hole,
which distorts the image of a galaxy in the background.

Now retired, Andy sometimes visits his neighborhood library, which uses RFID smart labels, or radio frequency identification, allowing it to know where all its books are at all times.

Meanwhile, the Air Force, which has a $156 billion annual budget, still doesn’t always use serial numbers. It has no idea how much of almost anything it has at any given time. Nuclear weapons are the exception, and it started electronically tagging those only after two extraordinary mistakes, in 2006 and 2007. In the first, the Air Force accidentally loaded six nuclear weapons in a B-52 and flew them across the country, unbeknownst to the crew. In the other, the services sent nuclear nose cones by mistake to Taiwan, which had asked for helicopter batteries.

“What kind of an organization,” Andy asks, “doesn’t keep track of $20 billion in inventory?”

It gets better.

Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath. Meet the Gordian knot of legend, brought to life in modern America.

AT THE TAIL end of last year, the Department of Defense finally completed an audit. At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate.

Sounds like healthcare doesn't it?

Energy's gotta go somewhere, right? :)

Yours truly has always felt that the conjectured singularity in the center of a black hole was not possible given that energy can neither be created or destroyed, only transformed thanks to the 1st law of thermodynamics. With this in mind, scientists are starting to change their view of this notion to the possibility black holes are, in fact, worm holes, supporting the concept that everything is entangled, thus giving rise to reality, something truly astounding without question.

Loop quantum gravity is a difficult mathematical theory that has resisted the making of testable predictions inside black holes. However, Abhay Ashtekar and Javier Olmedo at Pennsylvania State University and Parampreet Singh at Louisiana State University have applied loop quantum gravity to the center of black holes. They claim that the result is not a singularity.

Their calculation predicts that space-time is curved very strongly near the center of the black hole. The result is that space-time continues into a region in the future that has the structure of a white hole. A white hole is like a black hole in reverse, meaning that unlike a black hole, which pulls matter in, a white hole shoots matter out.

Energy's gotta go somewhere, right? :)

It takes a little sweat ... :)

Something revolutionary is rare, something commonsensical and revolutionary at the same time is even rarer, especially when it comes to monitoring bodily processes noninvasingly, a notion whose time as come as seen by tech developed by the University of Cincinnati.

Making a revolutionary biosensor takes blood, sweat and tears.

And saliva, naturally.

University of Cincinnati professor Jason Heikenfeld examined the potential of these and other biofluids to test human health with tiny, portable sensors for the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Heikenfeld develops wearable technology in his Novel Device Lab in UC's College of Engineering and Applied Science. His lab last year created the world's first continuous-testing device that samples sweat as effectively as blood but in a noninvasive way and over many hours.

With luck, the era of painful finger pricks to draw blood will become a thing of the past. :)

Gharials - Extremely cool crocs. :)

Gharials are extremely cool crocs without a doubt, something that most people don’t even know it exists.

The gharial, also known as the gavial, is an extremely rare fish-eating crocodile. It’s estimated there are less than 200 individuals in the wild. Native to the Indian subcontinent, this unique crocodilian faced a massively population decline. Currently, the species is limited to only 2% of their historical range.

Cool without question, right? :)

Slip Sliding Away ...

Yours truly loves America, a country loaded with amazing talent, resources and the ability to do great things is now in crisis because endless war is killing our great nation, something that has to be corrected or all is lost as seen by Ike's last great speech depicting the dangers of the Military Industrial Complex, a danger that is destroying our nation as we speak.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist." Dwight Eisenhower

Summing it up ...

According to an investigative report by Open the Government, among the items purchased during the last month of the fiscal year when government agencies go all out to get rid of these “use it or lose it” funds: Wexford Leather club chair ($9,241), china tableware ($53,004), alcohol ($308,994), golf carts ($673,471), musical equipment including pianos, tubas, and trombones ($1.7 million), lobster tail and crab ($4.6 million), iPhones and iPads ($7.7 million), and workout and recreation equipment ($9.8 million).

So much for draining the swamp.

Anyone who suggests that the military needs more money is either criminally clueless or equally corrupt, because the military isn’t suffering from lack of funding—it’s suffering from lack of proper oversight.

Where President Trump fits into that scenario, you decide.

Trump may turn out to be, as policy analyst Stan Collender warned, “the biggest deficit- and debt-increasing president of all time.”

Rest assured, however, that if Trump gets his way—to the tune of a $4.7 trillion budget that digs the nation deeper in debt to foreign creditors, adds $750 billion for the military budget, and doubles the debt growth that Trump once promised to erase—the war profiteers (and foreign banks who “own” our debt) will be raking in a fortune while America goes belly up.

This is basic math, and the numbers just don’t add up.

It's time to take back our country before it's too late

War Games ...

Seems Russia and China have caught up to America regarding war even though we spend way more on defense than they do.

To whit ...

In war games simulating a high-end fight against Russia or China, the U.S. often loses, two experienced military war-gamers have revealed.

"In our games, when we fight Russia and China, 'blue' gets its ass handed to it," David Ochmanek, a RAND warfare analyst, explained at the Center for a New American Security on Thursday, Breaking Defense first reported. U.S. forces are typically color-coded blue in these simulations.

"We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary," he said.

Some specifics as to why this scenario rings true.

The simulated war games showed, the "red" aggressor force often destroys U.S. F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters on the runway, sends several Naval fleets to the depths, destroys US military bases, and through electronic warfare, takes control of critical military communication systems. In short, a gruesome, if simulated, annihilation of some of the most modern of US forces.

“In every case I know of,” said Robert Work, a former deputy secretary of defense with years of wargaming experience, “the F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky, but it gets killed on the ground in large numbers.”

So, as Russia and China develop fifth-generation fighters and hypersonic missiles, “things that rely on sophisticated base infrastructures like runways and fuel tanks are going to have a hard time,” Ochmanek said. “Things that sail on the surface of the sea are going to have a hard time.”

So when neocons like Bill Kristol, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton bloviate on how "easy" it would be to wax Russia and China in a fire fight, just channel Nam where the VC did a number on the US without having any high end tech like that of the US back in the day. Makes one think real hard about this don't you think?

Playing the long game ...

Yours truly has been fascinated by the rapid rise of China as nascent superpower thanks, in large part, to the largesse of the US in encouraging its corporations to offshore manufacturing to China back in the 1980s, something that has, and is, compromising the US in ways that truly boggle the mind. If that's not enough food for thought, a very good and wise Hong Kong friend of mine, who knows far more about this subject than this rube, generously sent BRT his take on what is happening to America when inept politicians encounter an adversary who plays the long game in the pursuit of global dominance as we move further into the 21st century.

To whit.

China’s industrial development plan named “Made in China 2025” aims to make China largely self-sufficient by 2025 in certain technologies Chinese leaders expect will drive the “4th industrial revolution”. The plan’s longer term goal is global dominance in these technologies by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. 

Already, China has claimed sovereignty over, and militarized the South China Sea in contravention of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and in defiance of a ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague which has determined that China’s territorial claim is illegal. The tepid response to China’s blatant power grab by the United States and the western international community is an ominous harbinger of what’s to come with China’s ascendancy on the world stage.

Equally alarming is the increasingly strident tones of China’s calls for the reunification of Taiwan, again met with no substantive response by America or the western powers. The lack of a firm stance by America prompts the question: Will the United States live up to the security assurances accorded to Taiwan in the event of a military attack by China?

Across the globe, from Latin America to Africa and Asia, China’s strategy of building and financing infrastructure projects with the objective of gaining influence and control continues unabated under its Belt and Road Initiative.

These and other moves by China lend credence to the theory that it is pursuing a highly focused, methodical and relentless strategy to achieve global supremacy and displace America by its target date of 2049. 

The center piece of the game plan is to undermine and sabotage American interests and influence in Asia. To achieve this objective China is manipulating the puppet regime of North Korea and deploying its leader, Kim Jong Un, as a foil against President Donald Trump.

For its part, the current administration is playing right into China’s hands by retreating from the world, leaving behind a vacuum of leadership which the Chinese are only too happy to fill.

Any questions?

What if ...

Yours truly has often thought about this but Aeon fleshed out this idea big time. :)

Our ingrained understanding of the daily movements of the Sun, Moon and stars from the vantage point of Earth can make it eerily transporting to see unfamiliar celestial objects floating above the landscape in sci-fi films and TV shows. This imaginative short video is perhaps more surreal still, combining mundane, roadside scenes with the peculiar spectacle of planets from our solar system replacing the Moon in the dusk sky. The physics of it all is, of course, a bit creative, but the planets are shown at the same distance from Earth as the Moon. The result, in addition to the intriguing, almost ominous visuals, is a striking sense of the scale of our nearest planetary neighbors – many of which more usually appear as mere pinpricks or bright dots in our familiar night sky.

Stellar to a fault IMHO. :)

Late winter 2019

A Zen Space

Sherwood yet again

Dividing line

Prelude to snow

Composite II