The Mushroom Theory of Power

The Mushroom theory of power: keep the people in the dark and feed them manure., something the Pentagon has been doing for years but to what degree has been a mystery, until now.

The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.

Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.

The report, issued in January 2015, identified “a clear path” for the Defense Department to save $125 billion over five years. The plan would not have required layoffs of civil servants or reductions in military personnel. Instead, it would have streamlined the bureaucracy through attrition and early retirements, curtailed high-priced contractors and made better use of information technology.

The study was produced last year by the Defense Business Board, a federal advisory panel of corporate executives, and consultants from McKinsey and Company. Based on reams of personnel and cost data, their report revealed for the first time that the Pentagon was spending almost a quarter of its $580 billion budget on overhead and core business operations such as accounting, human resources, logistics and property management.

It gets better.

The data showed that the Defense Department was paying a staggering number of people — 1,014,000 contractors, civilians and uniformed personnel — to fill back-office jobs far from the front lines. That workforce supports 1.3 million troops on active duty, the fewest since 1940.

So the plan was killed. The Pentagon imposed secrecy restrictions on the data making up the study, which ensured no one could replicate the findings. A 77-page summary report that had been made public was removed from a Pentagon website.

In a confidential August 2014 memo, McKinsey noted that while the Defense Department was “the world’s largest corporate enterprise,” it had never “rigorously measured” the “cost-effectiveness, speed, agility or quality” of its business operations.

Nor did the Pentagon have even a remotely accurate idea of what it was paying for those operations, which McKinsey divided into five categories: human resources; health-care management; supply chain and logistics; acquisition and procurement; and financial-flow management.

McKinsey hazarded a guess: anywhere between $75 billion and $100 billion a year, or between 15 and 20 percent of the Pentagon’s annual expenses. “No one REALLY knows,” the memo added.

Now if The Donald really is a business man, he would do something about this atrocious inefficiency and corruption and do it now and save money doing it because this is just the tip of the iceberg IMHO, regarding the Pentagon and it's shoddy way of doing business. F 35 anyone? Click here to view the report. Interesting without question.

And so it goes. K. Vonnegut

Circadian Rhythms

This short clip shows quick glimpses into some rhythms of nature from the flow of water to the brisk gait of a horse drawn buggy. Enjoy.

Ominous Beauty

Ominous beauty says it all regarding GW, Antarctica  and an iceberg the size of Deleware.

On Nov. 10, 2016, scientists on NASA's IceBridge mission photographed an oblique view of a massive rift in the Antarctic Peninsula's Larsen C ice shelf. Icebridge, an airborne survey of polar ice, completed an eighth consecutive Antarctic deployment on Nov. 18.

Ice shelves are the floating parts of ice streams and glaciers, and they buttress the grounded ice behind them; when ice shelves collapse, the ice behind accelerates toward the ocean, where it then adds to sea level rise. Larsen C neighbors a smaller ice shelf that disintegrated in 2002 after developing a rift similar to the one now growing in Larsen C.

The IceBridge scientists measured the Larsen C fracture to be about 70 miles long, more than 300 feet wide and about a third of a mile deep. The crack completely cuts through the ice shelf but it does not go all the way across it – once it does, it will produce an iceberg roughly the size of the state of Delaware.

Sounds like global warming doesn't it?

Along the lines of the Tooth Fairy

When an establishment newspaper like the Washington Post questions the historical existence of Jesus, you know something's rather amiss with Christianity regarding the raison d'ete for said religion who mostly likely did not exist, thus posing a disquieting existential question for all Christians to ponder as we move ever closer to Xmas 2016.

The first problem we encounter when trying to discover more about the Historical Jesus is the lack of early sources. The earliest sources only reference the clearly fictional Christ of Faith. These early sources, compiled decades after the alleged events, all stem from Christian authors eager to promote Christianity – which gives us reason to question them. The authors of the Gospels fail to name themselves, describe their qualifications, or show any criticism with their foundational sources – which they also fail to identify. Filled with mythical and non-historical information, and heavily edited over time, the Gospels certainly should not convince critics to trust even the more mundane claims made therein.

The methods traditionally used to tease out rare nuggets of truth from the Gospels are dubious. The criterion of embarrassment says that if a section would be embarrassing for the author, it is more likely authentic. Unfortunately, given the diverse nature of Christianity and Judaism back then (things have not changed all that much), and the anonymity of the authors, it is impossible to determine what truly would be embarrassing or counter-intuitive, let alone if that might not serve some evangelistic purpose.

Click here to see BRT's rather detailed take on this most interesting question if you dare. :)

SM No. 3 :)

SM No. 3 - Dec 14, Awesome! :)

Short Takes

Short takes of NE environs from VT to CT with a night visit to Bethel CT to complete this short clip. Enjoy.

It Ain't Over :)

Had to put this Garrison gem in to put the final nail in the Election From Hell for POTUS. :)

30 Trillion & Counting

The Anthropocene is alive and well, especially when seeing just how much stuff us rubes have created since this epoch has begun.

Humans have made 30 trillion tons of junk throughout modern existence. All that junk has a geological term: the technosphere, which is broken down into urban, rural, subterranean, marine, and aerial areas, Seeker reports. The goal was to quantify the scale and diversity of it all as published in a paper in The Anthropocene Review this week. The research took a lot of estimation and some hypothetical paleontology. The aerial technosphere alone, for example, holds almost one trillion tons of carbon dioxide created by human activity. But they broke it down much further than that. They called each object, like a cellphone, technofossils. Consider the cellphone: 6.8 billion phones have been made, but even those could be divided into subcategories or technospecies, like iPhone or Samsung (and then there are makes and models, too). By that example and others like it, they estimate categorizing everything would require billions of classifications. The researchers admit this is a broad stroke figure, but it’s, quite literally, a massive undertaking. They even suspect it is “bigger than the number of living species on Earth,” which is kind of a haunting thought to sit with.

Disquieting to say the least.

Tinkering with Reality/Series 1

Track 1

1 Pt. Perspective/Rev II

Undercurrent

Fake Nooze

BRT has channeled Network and George Orwell ad nauseam as both sources spoke truth to power in ways not even contemplated in today's frenzy over fake news and the mainline press who portend to "know" the truth based on unsubstantiated and anonymous "sources" who tell us rubes where fake news comes from and how to "combat" it when one faces it.

On Wednesday, U.S. congressional negotiators approved $160 million to combat what they deem foreign propaganda and the alleged Russian campaign to spread “fake news.” The measure is part of the National Defense Authorization Act and gives the State Department the power to identify “propaganda” and counter it.

This bipartisan stampede into an Orwellian future for the American people and the world’s population follows a shoddily sourced Washington Post article that relied on a new anonymous group (propornot) that identified some 200 Internet sites, including some of the most prominent American independent sources of news, as part of a Russian propaganda network.

Typical of this new McCarthyism, the report lacked evidence that any such network actually exists but instead targeted cases where American journalists expressed skepticism about claims from Western officialdom.

Consortiumnews.com was included on the list apparently because we have critically analyzed some of the claims and allegations regarding the crises in Syria and Ukraine, rather than simply accept the dominant Western “group thinks.”

Also on the “black list” were such quality journalism sites as Counterpunch, Truth-out, Truthdig, Naked Capitalism and ZeroHedge along with many political sites ranging across the ideological spectrum.

Yours truly checked out propornot and Robert Perry is right, no verification regarding the sites purported to be purveyors of fake news is given other then copious bloviation, which means slander becomes a viable response to environments as questionable as this.