Monday – what?

Seemed a quiet weekend  to me – dunno what my neighbor spread on his farm last week but it got dust ALL OVER every vehicle, so my main project was determining their original colors via washing. Mission accomplished – but you know, with a stock of clean cars, torrential rain has gotta be on the way – even if the weather apps say otherwise.

Someone in the comments followed up on a couple of columns I have done in the past and reported that DoD/DoW failed their annual audit. Again. While consistent, it’s a bit alarming that one of the biggest money-suckers in government hasn’t passed an audit since they were mandated in 2018.

The DoD Office of Inspector General (OIG) released its Independent Auditor’s Reports as part of the DoD’s FY 2025 Agency Financial Report, which includes the Agency-Wide Financial Statements for FY 2025.

The OIG issued a disclaimer of opinion, meaning that the auditors could not obtain sufficient, appropriate audit evidence to support an opinion. The DoD Agency-Wide opinion is the culmination of a larger effort to audit, oversee, and consider the results of the audits of nearly 30 Department Components.  DoD IG

Rumors that the internal financial controls are run by Minnesota Somalis are NOT TRUE. You don’t want to know how much they paid me to say that…

Remember all the Cat IV folks that miraculously became eligible to serve by going through boot camps and remedial grammar school? Great numbers… except for one little detail.

The Army and Navy counted scores earned after enlistees attended their respective preparatory programs, the Future Soldier Preparatory Course and Future Sailor Preparatory Course, instead of the marks recruits received when they first signed up, a Dec. 11 report by the Department of Defense Inspector General said.

So instead of reporting the actual numbers, they reported the after-action numbers. May not seem like a big deal, but Congress capped the number who could go through training with the substandard initial scores at 4%.

Using original test scores, the Navy’s Category IV enlistments would have totaled 11.3% of fiscal year 2025 accessions as of March 31, compared to 7.2% under the recalculated rate. The report said the Army also exceeded 10%, although it did not specify the exact figure.

The branches can exceed that limit with approval from the secretary of defense, who must notify the House and Senate armed services committees within 30 days. Category IV enlistments exceeding 10% trigger additional statutory requirements, including formal notification to Congress and the use of mandatory preparatory programs.  Military Times

I’m just trying to figure out whether they have two groups of people jiccing the numbers, one doing training stats and the other money? Or is there just one scary supergroup who can make your budget vanish or reappear? Truthfully, there is a THIRD option… incompetence.

Gonna end with an item only tenuously military – a young lad who outsold Elvis and was in “The Wackiest Ship in the Army”.  Needless to say, I mean Ricky Nelson. (That out-sold Elvis is true – he didn’t spend time in uniform like Elvis did. Asthma. Once Elvis ETSed, though…)

Anyone over about 45 has heard the popular trope about his death – that somebody (him? His band?) was freebasing cocaine on the plane. Open flames being a poor idea at altitude for a reason, the plane crashed and the former teen idol died New Years Eve, 1985. Well, if you thought that? You’re wrong. I certainly was.

Nelson was 45 when he and six others died during the crash-landing of his band’s aircraft on December 31, 1985. The plane, a Douglas DC-3, caught fire mid-flight near De Kalb, Texas. Both pilots survived the crash.

But Nelson’s sons Matthew and Gunnar Nelson write in their forthcoming book, What Happened To Your Hair, the rumors were nothing but fiction.

As they write in their new book, the cocaine rumor was nothing more than a “completely fabricated conspiracy” they claim was started by a journalist at the time.

The brothers — identical twins who shot to fame in their own right after launching hard rock duo Nelson in the early 1990s — detail that the journalist was “apparently walking around the smoldering wreckage of the plane in a farmer’s field just outside of Texarkana about a week after the crash, talking to one of the investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board.

They continue: “The reporter saw them (luggage – ed.)  and asked, ‘Will you be checking for free-basing cocaine on the plane?’ to which the NTSB man answered, ‘We check for everything.'”People

Based on that, the reporter wrote a sensationalist headline blaming the crash on coke – and many still think so today. In this case – Joe can say it AIN’T so.

And you thought making up news was more recent…

Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Army, Hollywood, Navy, None