THE PENTAGRAM … ER… PENTAGON IS MISSING MORE BILLIONS
Need
a few billion dolllars for your black budget? A few covert operations
projects? Then you need to hire the Pentagon to manage your ledgers. Mr.
V.T found this article, and it seems that the Pentagram is missing a
few more billions of dollars:
$45 Billion in Tax Dollars Goes Missing in Afghanistan
Now, if you're like me, the idea of missing billions in Afghanistan
conjurs all sorts of images, most of them having to do with opium
poppies and drug trade, a point driven home by the fact that the article
conveniently frames an American soldier and some poppies in the picture
at the beginning.
But the real story is here:
"The auditors said DOD handed over data only for $21
billion of the total $66 billion it spent rebuilding the war-torn
country. But unlike most cases of missing money in Afghanistan (of which
there are plenty), the auditors don’t blame this on corruption or
waste—but rather on accounting issues."
And here:
"Out of the total amount DOD has spent in Afghanistan,
more than $57 billion has gone to the Afghan Forces – but the Pentagon
can only account for about $17 billion."
And finally, here:
"Early this year, the watchdogs released a scathing
report revealing the Pentagon had no way to verify whether the annual
$300 million going to the Afghan Police Force was ending up in the right
hands."
Of course, a mere forty-five billion dollars is but pocket change, compared to the missing 2.3 trillion dollars
former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced was missing one
day prior to the 9/11 operation. But then, as now, the problem lay with
the accounting for the missing funds, and efforts were made in Congress -
to little avail - to find out what companies held the contracts to
manage the Pentagon's databses, and where the money was.
High octane speculation will tell you where it is, and what is going
on: need some money for your black projects? Invade a defenseless and
backward nation, establish contracts to "rebuild the infrastructure" and
"grow democracy," inflate the costs of all those contracts, and run the
excess money back into the black budget, while cooking the books and
claiming that there is simply an endemic accounting dyslexia in
Washington. Couple this with hidden bond markets, fraudulent soverign
securities (thank you Prime Minister Tanaka), mortgage fraud,
non-existent and massively rehypothecated bullion, manipulated foreign
exchange and other kinds of markets, illegal drug trade, and one has all
the ingredients for a huge system designed to vacuum wealth from the
overt global economy to funnel it into a covert one.
The question is, why would one need such enormous sums of money, over such a long period of time?
I suspect many of you have guessed at various answers to that
question already, and I suspect that your answers will be much the same
as mine.
SAY IT ISN’T SO! TEACHERS AND TESTERS CAUGHT FIXING STANDARDIZED TEST SCORES! THE HORROR! THE SCANDAL!
Regular
readers here know that every now and then I have to rant about the
deplorable state of Amairikun edgykayshun and the blockheads running it
(they're the ones usually with Ed.D. behind their names). Well, today's
rant is brought to us courtesy of my Transhumanism co-author,
Dr. Scott D. deHart who, as opposed to Ed.D's, has a real doctorate in a
real academic discipline from a real, though small and unaccredited
foreign academic institution, and who spotted this one on Faux News and
decided to share it. I have to pass it along to all of you watching the
2016 (s)election theater get underway. As you probably guessed from the
title of this article, the subject concerns cheating on one of
Amaircuh's (I'm following the Webstir's Dickshunairee spelling here) many standardized tests:
Jail for 9 of 10 ex-educators in Atlanta test-cheating case
Let's not (sic) some things from this article; first, this:
"All but one of 10 former Atlanta public school educators
were sentenced to jail time Tuesday in a widespread conspiracy to
inflate student scores on the state's standardized tests, and the judge called the case 'the sickest thing that's ever happened in this town.'" (Emphasis added)
Well, silly me, I would have thought General Sherman's march on
Atlanta was the sickest thing to happen to the town, but I digress.
And then, this:
"Former Superintendent Beverly Hall was among those
indicted, but she did not stand trial because her lawyers argued
successfully that she was too sick. She died from complications of
breast cancer."
Now, the impression left by these two statements is that such
corruption in the education and testing "business" is a one of a kind
thing, even though it extended all the way up to a superintendent. We're
left with the unstated proposition that this must be something unique
to Atlanta, and therefore, possibly to big corrupt city governments and
school districts. It's a one off; a hit and miss thing. It is not,
therefore, the system itself, and Amairicuh's intoxication with the
trappings of pseudo-education - teacher certification, doctors of
"education" (I won't mince words here: it's a pseudo-discipline, and its
practitioners, without exception, are fast-talking quacks), and a
Russo-Soviet philosophy of bureaucracy befitting the progressivist and
quasi-Marxist principles from which all this claptrap began (a
philosophy of bureaucratic agency that would make Trotsky blush, that
philosophy being "why have just one bureaucrat when three can do the job
so much more inefficiently?")... it is not any of this that is at
fault. No sir. The problem is not the system. This is an isolated case. Nothing to see here. Move along.
But if you think that such tinkering with the scores is unique to
Atlanta or that it's something in Atlanta's drinking water, think again.
In 2009, a former mandarin of the testing "industry," Todd Farley, who
had served a stint at the notorious Educational Testing Service (the
Frankenstein brainchild of James Bryant Conant and Henry Chauncey)
published a book that I recommend readers here read if you are concerned
about just the effects of standardized testing alone on Amairicun edgykayshun (leaving out certification, Doctors of Edubabble, group leaders, facilitators and all the other nonsense and quackery that goes with it). That book's title says it all: Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry (San Francisco: Berrett-Hoehler Publishers, Inc.: 2009).
Farley documents an "industry" rife with corruption and score
tinkering, from his days at the very bottom of the rung, entering test
scores into computers, all the way up to the upper reaches of Chauncey's
monster. The fun thing about the book is reading all the
pseudo-academic terms that were invented to cover these "score
adjustments," or (to employ a term from physics massively out of
context), "renormalization." (The technical jargon in edubabblese is
almost as bad: "recalibration.") One may summarize these "techniques" as
simply being a case of "when the results don't match the predicted
statistical model, make the results fit." Of course, the devil is in the
details, and Farley's book has those in abundance, including run-ins
with a bureaucratic persona who, in spite of the changes of name, sex,
age, parentage, and location, remains the same across all contexts:
there to preserve his(or her) job, and to ensure that the "results" fit
the "rubric" dictated by some regional Education Soviet.
The bottom line here, as elsewhere, is that Amairicuh's grand
experiment with progressivism in education - with bloated bureaucrats
drawing enormous salaries while teachers are faced with more busywork,
state and federal requirements, filling out reports, attending useless
and (deliberately intended) mind-numbing time-wasting meetings, while
adjunct professors barely make a living and are paid on a semester basis
(imagine having to budget your day to day living when your
paycheck only comes once every four months!), and without benefits - its
big name universities whose academic standards are questionable... all
of it, all of it, is going to come crashing down around their heads for one simple reason: real
education can be had elsewhere, and at a fraction of the cost. And no,
I'm not talking about "online education" either. I'm talking about the
real human interaction with those teachers and professors that can
change lives by motivating people to think for themselves, and to
challenge the status quo. Amairicun edgycayshun has simply become a
gatekeeper for a variety of orthodoxies and collectives, nothing more,
orthodoxies from "the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid, aligned it with
optical precision, using copper saws and diorite slurry", to "string
theory is the only accepted theory in current physics," "Lee
Harvey Oswald acted alone," or (one of my favorites that I heard from an
education student when I taught European history in college), Adolf
Hitler started World War Two because he had a bad childhood and an
abusive alcoholic father. The few remaining teachers and professors of
any real intelligence and moral fiber and grit in the Amairicun system -
from kindergarten to the post-graduate level - all have their own
horror stories like this. "Gender" has replaced "sex" on forms (a gross
misuse of the term gender), "it's" is now the possessive of "it,"
"quote" (a verb) is acceptable in Amairicun English for "quotation" (the
noun), The Ukraine has become simply "Ukraine" because of some
silly linguistic pandering for political purposes because some
Ukrainians are upset about the way the English language works, and on
and on it goes. And, of course, the main Dummycrook and Republithug
presidential contenders, Billary Clinton and Jeb of the famous shrubbery
dynasty, are both on board with the next program of nonsense, Common Core.
Or, to summarize the grand failure that has been Amairicun
edgycayshun since Dewey, Conant, Chauncey and their ilk succeeded in
inflicting their "vision" upon the rest of us, in the words of a friend
of mine, "Are we really surprised that this happens? And for those who
do not cheat, the reality is that it is a failure to teach students
anyhow - it is memorization by repetition - short term memory (the
quickest dropped), and thus cheating the actual purpose of "education"
which is more in the asking of questions leading to self discovery and
experience as opposed to teaching FOR tests, taking practice tests,
gathering information that is to be tested on and teaching for the test.
At the end, what matters is the score, not so much how one arrives at
it nor concern for what becomes knowledge that is useful."
And that's the bottom line: cheating and fraud are endemic to this
system. Or, to put it plainly enough so that even a graudate of an
education program or a Doctor of Edubabble can understand it, the system
is fraudulent from top to bottom.
Of course, maybe I'm being optimistic that such people can understand
the meaning of "fraud" and their own narcissistic roles in perpetuating
it.
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