"The Global Consciousness Project, also known as the EGG Project, is an international multidisciplinary collaboration of scientists, engineers, artists and others continuously collecting data from a global network of physical random number generators located in 65 host sites worldwide. The archive contains over 10 years of random data in parallel sequences of synchronized 200-bit trials every second."
Posted by Warm Southern Breeze on Friday, December 13, 2019
Recently, the Washington Post published the results of a lengthy, in-depth, years-long investigation into the War in Afghanistan, which were published only after even more years of prolonged court battles.
See: The Afghanistan Papers A secret history of the war
At war with the truth
U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it, an exclusive Post investigation found.
“A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.
“The documents were generated by a federal project examining the root failures of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history. They include more than 2,000 pages of previously unpublished notes of interviews with people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid workers and Afghan officials.
“The U.S. government tried to shield the identities of the vast majority of those interviewed for the project and conceal nearly all of their remarks. The Post won release of the documents under the Freedom of Information Act after a three-year legal battle.
“It took three years and two federal lawsuits for The Post to pry loose 2,000 pages of interview records.
“In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare.
“With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.
News of the Washington Post’s news was widespread, and numerous news reporting outlets and agencies reported on and shared the Post’s findings. One such outlet was The Guardian.
See:
Afghanistan papers reveal US public were misled about unwinnable war
“Hundreds of confidential interviews with key figures involved in prosecuting the 18-year US war in Afghanistan have revealed that the US public has been consistently misled about an unwinnable conflict.
“Transcripts of the interviews, published by the Washington Post after a three-year legal battle, were collected for a Lessons Learned project by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), a federal agency whose main task is eliminating corruption and inefficiency in the US war effort.
“The 2,000 pages of documents reveal the bleak and unvarnished views of many insiders in a war that has cost $1tn (£760bn) and killed more than 2,300 US servicemen and women, with more than 20,000 injured. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have died in the conflict.” …
Imagine that… ONE TRILLION dollars wasted down a rat hole, and being lied to about it all. What could we have done with that money? What would an extra $20 Billion looked like to each of the 50 states? That’s how much they would’ve had were it divvied up that way. Or, expressed another way, that’s a little over $3000 for every man, woman, and child now residing in the United States.
Oh… how about improved our national infrastructure?
Or, how about improved delivery of healthcare to our citizen-residents, their families, children, and elderly?
Or, how about improving and shoring up Social Security Trust Fund? That one could be more easily and readily accomplished by making it a “HANDS OFF!” account, and forbidding use/disbursement of its money for any other purpose than for claims upon it, thus making is solvent into perpetuity. But, Congress likes to use that money as a practical “slush fund” to pay for things that they don’t have the guts to raise taxes to pay for. THAT MUST CHANGE!!
But, nearly 20 years ago, exactly one day BEFORE the now-infamous day of September 11, 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld delivered an address which was broadcast live throughout all DOD installations worldwide, was published on the DOD website, and was entitled “Bureaucracy to Battlefield.
“The technology revolution has transformed organizations across the private sector, but not ours, not fully, not yet. We are, as they say, tangled in our anchor chain. Our financial systems are decades old. According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions. We cannot share information from floor to floor in this building because it’s stored on dozens of technological systems that are inaccessible or incompatible.
We maintain 20 to 25 percent more base infrastructure than we need to support our forces, at an annual waste to taxpayers of some $3 billion to $4 billion. Fully half of our resources go to infrastructure and overhead, and in addition to draining resources from warfighting, these costly and outdated systems, procedures and programs stifle innovation as well. A new idea must often survive the gauntlet of some 17 levels of bureaucracy to make it from a line officer’s to my desk. I have too much respect for a line officer to believe that we need 17 layers between us.”
The Department of Defense (DOD), aka the Pentagon, has long been fraught with fraud, waste, and abuse. For all practical purposes, they have been an unaccountable agency of the United States Government, which has not been responsible in handling taxpayers’ money. That is borne out by Secretary Rumsfeld’s remarks made September 10, 2001.
In response, Congress passed legislation requiring the DOD to be accountable, and to make an accounting annually. As reported by NPR in “Pentagon Announces First-Ever Audit Of The Department Of Defense” by Bill Chappell on December 8, 2017, in response to the law mandating they become fiscally responsible, the Pentagon had long been reticent, reluctant, and recalcitrant in performing such a task.
“The Defense Department has famously never been audited, despite receiving hundreds of billions of dollars annually and having more than $2.2 trillion in assets.
“For the Pentagon to get to this point, it has been, as they say, a process. The U.S. government established requirements for each agency to present financial statements back in the 1990s. But for more than 20 years, the Department of Defense has lagged other agencies that were following modern accounting standards, reporting what they received and spent.
“In 2010, Congress included a requirement in the National Defense Authorization Act that gave the military “an extra seven years to clean up the books and get ready,” as Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa said last year. That set a new deadline to be ready for an audit by September 2017.
“In January, the Government Accountability Office said, “serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense (DOD) that have prevented its financial statements from being auditable.” The agency listed the Defense Department as its prime example of major impediments to attempts to render an opinion on the U.S. government’s financial statements.
“To carry out the audit, the Pentagon says it will deploy 2,400 auditors to go over records and examine bases, property and weapons of a federal department that had a budget of $590 billion last year.”
Unsurprisingly, the Pentagon failed their first audit, which, as reported by Defense News November 15, 2018, was conducted in part, “in collaboration with the comptroller’s office, was actually 21 different audits done by a collection of auditing teams.
“Over 1,000 auditors from outside firms, as well as 150 from DoD OIG, visited over 600 DoD locations, requested over 40,000 documents, and tested over 90,000 sample items, per a department fact sheet,” and overall found that “only 5 of the 21 individual audits checked received a fully passing grade, with two more receiving an ok grade.”
Findings of the Pentagon’s second-ever audit which was completed this year (2019), was also reported by numerous news reporting agencies, including Federal News Network, which wrote on November 18, 2019, that “The results of the Pentagon’s second-ever full financial audit are a decidedly mixed bag: Although officials were able to point to some areas of significant progress in managing the Defense Department’s finances over the past year, overall, auditors are uncovering new problems faster than the department is fixing them.
“At this time a year ago, auditors had made 2,410 separate findings and recommendations during the department’s first-ever financial audit. In the 2019 financial report DoD issued Friday evening, officials said 556 of those had been resolved. But besides the more than 1,800 problems the department is still wrestling with from 2018, auditors made more than 1,300 new findings during the course of the latest audit.
“In addition, the audit turned up a larger number of material weaknesses this year.
“Auditors define those as broad and serious management problems that make it at least possible that the department will misstate its overall financial positions to the public and to Congress. Last year, there were 20 material weaknesses; in the latest audit, there are 25, including newly identified high-risk areas involving the military services’ privatized housing programs and the F-35 program.”
The infamous F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is the DOD’s most cost-overrun program, ever, and as reported by National Interest August 21, 2018, “The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is estimated to be the most expensive weapons system in human history, based on its projected lifetime cost of $1.5 trillion dollars ($406 billion for the aircraft, the rest in lifetime operating costs)—and that’s before we factor in the endless cost overruns.”
The cost to taxpayers thus far, over 14 years of development, is well over
On July 22, 2015, National Review wrote that, “The biggest threat [to U.S. national defense and security] comes from the F-35 — a plane that is being projected to suck up 1.5 trillion precious defense dollars. For this trillion-dollar-plus investment we get a plane far slower than a 1970s F-14 Tomcat, a plane with less than half the range of a 40-year-old A-6 Intruder, a plane whose sustained-turn performance is that of a 1960s F-4 Phantom, and a plane that had its head handed to it by an F-16 during a recent dogfight competition. The problem is not just hundreds of billions of dollars being wasted on the F-35; it is also about not having that money to spend on programs that would give us a far bigger bang for the buck.”
“The report, an update to its 2020 budget and delivered on Friday, noted that the cost of the F-35 program grew by $25 billion in 2018, and is the “main driver” of a four percent increase in overall military spending.”
Depending upon configuration, the per-unit costs of the aircraft range from over $188 Million to $299 Million each.
As well, distributed manufacturing of the F-35 has created a scenario in the nation’s small, rural, and often-impoverished communities in which good-paying jobs are announced which are directly tied to manufacture of its various parts. Imagine the very real effects to citizens when they read such headlines as Military Contracts Announced to Bring 300 New Jobs to Area. While that’s a fictitious headline, the idea it conveys is very real, and is precisely how Lockheed Martin and the Congress planned its manufacture, so that its effects would be felt throughout the nation.
America’s military budget is, by far, the single-largest military budget of any nation the world over. Here’s a chart showing the comparison.
Simply put, the United States’ military budget is an unsustainable, and unnecessary expense. Its size is grotesquely out of whack with every other nation the world over, bar none.
The late Dwight David Eisenhower was Supreme Allied Commander during WWII, and became a 2-term Republican President after retiring from military service. In his televised farewell address to the nation January 17, 1961, which has become known as the “Military Industrial Complex speech,” he stated in Section IV, in part that,
“A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
“Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
“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.
“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
“In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite.
“It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”
We are now arrived at the point which Eisenhower prophetically warned about.
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
“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.
“We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
That too, must change, for it has a corrupting influence which usurps power from the people, and assigns authority, not merely inequitably, but unrighteously and unjustly, by ceding power to corporations rather than people, and permitting money to become a tool used by corporations to bribe the Congress, and other political entities, to purchase what they want, despite the greater, overwhelming needs of The People. It is, in essence, a surreptitious usurpation of the Constitution and its principles, by ceding control to corporations. Sold to the highest bidder.
Needless to say, that is a corrupt practice.
That too, should change, and in order for our nation to not merely survive, but thrive, it must.
POTUS Dwight David Eisenhower, official portrait May 29, 1959 Dwight D. Eisenhower, White House portrait painted by James Anthony Wills, 1967
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