: by George Opacic

A middle-aged man is lying on a cardboard and newspaper nest. Several papers have been opened up across the length of a bench in the lightly manicured park. The afternoon sun dapples its way through magnificent oak trees. Butterflies move gracefully and aimlessly amongst the flower beds between some of the oaks. The bouquet rising from the flowers wafts delicately over the homeless man.

His bouquet is not so fetching. Clothing of indiscriminate style, with a black toque pulled down, a mostly hidden sweater whose plaids are more dirtied-out than washed-out, covered by a formerly light grey jacket that fits loosely around his gaunt body.

He groans and shifts on his nest. “Owww.”

A passing park attendant, with the name badge “Mitch”, notices the groans. “Willie. You ok?”

“Bugger off, Mitch.”

“Listen, man. I told you we’re here to help. That bed at the Gospel Mission…”

“Leave me alone, damnit. Don’t want no holy-rollers nattering at me all fucken day.”

Willie rolls sideways carefully to get at least one ear away from Mitch.

“Ahwww.”

“You can go through all the vowels you want, Willie. If you don’t want our help…”

Quietly, “Just bugger off.”

Mitch shrugs and saunters away toward Artists Circle, muttering, “Not sure they’d take the old grouch, anyway.”

From the bench, a muffled, “Heard that.”

Coming down the path from the Artists Circle, Willie hears the distinctive nattering of his arch enemies. He growls to himself, “If those damn holy-roller do-goodies stop here, I swear I’m gonna jump in the drink. I am. No fucken doubt about it…”

Three ladies come up to Willie’s bench to contemplate his back. As he tries to tighten into a fetal position, his back goes out entirely. “OOWWWW!”

He attempts to straighten his legs but spasms and falls awkwardly off the bench. Willie’s head bounces hard against the edge of the bench as he drops past it.

The lead lady grimaces, “Ow, I felt that.”

Another says, “That thwack was sickening!”

The third lady shakes her head, “We have to help the poor man.”

Without his bidding – as he is apparently unconscious – Willie is taken in an ambulance to a clinic; he is prodded; tut-tutted over; shot up with an experimental anti-depression drug, to which he has a bad reaction; spends the night in delirium; then, next day he is dumped surreptitiously back in the park onto a bench.

Later that day, Willie wakes up to find himself lying on a new cardboard-and-blanket nest on a different bench. His back is still sore and he now has a splitting headache; his clothes are all different and he is cold. Very cold.

Mitch comes by, holding two lidded coffee cups, and sees someone who he thinks is Willie. The body is shivering.

“Willie? Are you alright, Willie?”

With a quarter turn, Willie covers part of his exposed back. He roughly spits out, “Goddamn holy-rollers took me away again. Shot me up with something again. TELL ’EM TO LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!… Splitting headache…”

Mitch sees/smells that Willie has been cleaned up. He steps forward to pull Willie’s fresh blanket up onto his back. “Wouldn’t want the crows to peck away at your hindside, Willie.”

Showing his unappreciation for the uninvited help, Willie shifts so that the blanket falls away to uncover his back once more. As Mitch stands there for a minute, Willie begins to shiver again. He rolls ever so slowly to partially cover his back.

“What are we going to do with you, Willie? You know how I hate to load my quad with cold bodies.”

“B-b-bugger off! LEAVE ME ALONE! Don’t want your help!”

Mitch shakes his head in resignation. “I’ll just leave this extra coffee here below your head, Willie. Still hot.”

As Mitch walks away, Willie turns to peek with one eye if he is gone. Satisfied with his triumph of opposition, Willie turns to find the coffee. He captures the cup, wrapping his hand tightly around the warm sleeve. He slowly, carefully puts one foot, then the other foot down onto the grass. The freshly cleaned blanket smells like chemicals.

“Damn holy-rollers. DON’T LIKE CHEMICALS. Kill you. KILL you, damnit! Want my own blanket.” He pulls the offending blanket off with his free hand and tosses it onto the bench.

He wraps both hands around the warm coffee cup. Fumbling and mumbling at the “stupid lid thing,” he pries it open enough to suck out a mouthful of warm liquid. “Too much cream. Makes it cold.”

Willie starts to shiver again. He absently reaches for the blanket and wraps it around his shoulders, then shakes it down against his back, still holding the cup like a lantern in his lap. He slowly slips into a lean-forward, then jerks back. Touching the cold bench-slats, he jerks forward a bit. Willie shifts to find the right equilibrium, then slowly oscillates between the cold bench slats and leaning too far forward.

He dreams. The beach sand is sun-warmed. The bright blue sky stretches across the prairies forever. A hazy speck of darkness is way off on the horizon. Horses graze peacefully in a nearby meadow. Now someone is running through the grass, over the grass, scattering the horses in terror. The darkness flies right at Willie into his head and sticks inside, smashing around inside his mushy red head, smashing out all light, smashing…

“DADDY?”

Willie finds himself running between the oaks, past the dark pines, through the flowers, running, sweating… until he falls into a panting disorientation onto a bench.

No cardboard. No blanket.

He shivers in the shade of a dark hemlock.

Willie curls like a withering fern into a tight fetal position.

Some time later, as the evening stars are just starting to be seen in the pastel sky, one of Mitch’s co-workers waves at Mitch from across the meadow.

“Mitch!”

As Mitch nears, the co-worker points to a cold body curled up on the bench. “Know him?”

Mitch walks behind the bench to better see the heavily grizzled face of the body. “Willie. Poor old Willie… Sad case.”

“Which one isn’t?… You wanna bring the quad?”

Two Species of Homo Sapiens

MAGAs and Social Humans are two species with many similarities. Regrettably, it has been determined that they are actually quite different animals.

Social Human and MAGA Taxonomy

Physically, MAGAs and social humans are quite similar, and together, they make up the sole members of the genus h.sapiens. Their genus shares the family Hominidae with the other tailless great apes like chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans. Originally, researchers assumed social humans were just a subspecies of MAGAs.
In fact, until 1981, scientists called them proto-MAGAs. Eventually, the two species were seen as distinct. Over the years, research has continued to reveal differences between MAGAs (homo troglodytes) and social humans (true homo sapiens). Keep reading to learn more about the ecology of these two groups along with some of their key differences.

Distribution & Range

Both MAGAs and social humans may live across the continents of planet Earth. However, MAGAs generally confine themselves to a more restricted range. In fact, MAGAs are found particularly in the isolated regions known as ultracapitalist hangouts and pedophile islands.
On the other hand, social humans are found on every continent (although those scientific communities on Antarctica have been under threat from severe funding losses due to their reliance on the scientific method).

Do MAGAs and Social Humans Look Different?

At first glance, it might be hard to tell the two primates apart, but, in fact, MAGAs and social humans have a few key differences in appearance. To start, they have different body shapes. Social humans are generally seen with phone-cameras in hand,  especially when in the presence of MAGAs. MAGAs, on the other hand, are much burlier and covered from head to foot in camo and a variety of anti-personnel weapons.
Additionally, MAGAs display sexual dimorphism as the males are significantly larger and more aggressive than most (not all) females. In contrast, social human females and males are much closer in size. Their colouration differs slightly as well, with the males tending to wear subdued colours while the females add bright colour and texture to their attire.
Social humans have open, questioning minds from birth, while baby MAGAs have pronounced pale pink faces that darken with maturation. You can always tell a social human from a MAGA by their loud cries for more (milk, money, whatever)! 
 

Trait	MAGAs	Social Humans
Brain Size	Small to start and decreasing with age	Increasing through life when stimulated
Build	Thick	Various
Face Colour	White, even when black	Various

Diet

The MAGA diet consists of highly processed pseudo-food eaten hastily from cellophane wraps, along with alcohol and mostly digestible fast food.
Social humans dine (when they can afford it) on a variety of nutritious meals supplemented with coffee.

MAGA vs. Social Human Behaviour

The most dramatic differences between MAGAs and social humans lie in their social behaviours. Not only fascinating from an ecological perspective, but it can also give us clues to human evolution.
In the field of evolutionary anthropology, scientists attempt to answer questions such as why are there MAGAs in the first place? MAGA and social human behaviour can help us understand if certain behaviours are part of our genome or learned through societal pressures.

Social Structure

Both live in social groups of mixed males and females, with social humans occupying much larger groups. Both groups use a fission-fusion structure in which smaller teams reunite at night to eat and sleep.
However, there are several key divergences in how they interact between ages and genders. MAGA organizations have a clear hierarchy of males that defend territories which shrink as nomenclatures devolve. For instance, one day a MAGA group will include desirable individuals of brown skin who are working for MAGA, while the next day those brown people are termed immigrant terrorists and are removed to a detention facility with their children then deported to an inhospitable gulag.
On the other hand, wild social humans are less strict with their territory borders and operate under a more matriarchal society. These trends in social structure are built on the social bonds (or lack thereof) between individuals.

MAGA Society

For MAGAs, the relationships between males define the group structure. A classic example of natural selection, MAGAs compete for power in the group which translates to more chances to mate and pass on their offspring.
The more dominant alpha males intimidate younger males and have more offspring (though they may, in fact, not be from their genetic linkage). However, this fierce competition comes at a violent cost. Male MAGAs are known to commit paedophilia, femicide and infanticide to increase their chances of having an erection. Most older MAGA adults with white hair are left to scrounge the streets. 

Social Human Society

In contrast, female social humans run the show in most communities, whether formally or informally. In general, social human society has much more interaction between genders and ages, and female bonds are critical. While young males stay with their natal groups, many adolescent females disperse to find a new group.
In the quest to become accepted, the new female will pamper the higher-ranking females. Sexual behaviour between females and between males my occur, and this new female will use socio-sexual behaviours to eventually bond with the non-related female social humans.  

Communication

Both species have communication modalities that can become complex. However, MAGAs have lower-pitched voices, primarily consisting of barks and grunts. Social humans have higher-pitched or more rapid voices, and their vocalizations can extend for long periods of ceaseless interactions. 

Tool Use

One of the most well-known facts about these groups is their creative tool use. 
MAGAs have been observed with a plethora of weapons in indiscriminate use while in public.

Social humans have been seen to use tools including cellphones and pens. Due to the nature of their habitat, wild social human populations are overstudied. They study themselves endlessly, placing their observations in repositories called libraries and digitally on social media in overflowing amounts. This excess of verbiage is completely ignored by the MAGA group.

Conservation

Unfortunately, the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species lists both MAGAs and social humans as endangered. The primary reason is overheating of the planet’s biosphere and depletion of critical minerals in favour of the non-real concepts termed capitalism and wealth accumulation.
While all species deserve protection, certainly we owe it to social humans and MAGAs alike to treat our shared planet with more thoughtfulness.
Conservation efforts to protect both these species have garnered the attention of a number of social humans, however, slowing the devastating effects of climate change and habitat destruction being caused by MAGAs is decreasing in response due to the fight for survival of these two amazing species.

Respectfully submitted,
Alliance of the Responsible Biosphere Entities of Planet Earth (ARBEPE)

: with apologies to https://www.earth.com/earthpedia-articles/chimpanzees-vs-bonobos-whats-the-difference/ 

by George Opacic

Eve and Sam were sitting in a cafeteria at the local mall. Eve gazed around at the colourful displays of food outlets taking up the perimeter of an area that was a quarter hectare of tables and chairs. Throughout the middle of the area, couples sat interspersed, lost among the maze of yellow plastic tables, sitting on hard blue plastic seats that were cleverly designed to be more-or-less comfortable for a maximum of fifteen minutes.

Smells were not overwhelming. There were the usual whiffs of salty sweet semi-edible food items.

Elevated levels of sound originating from high speakers issued whining muzak, reverberating off concrete and terrazzo and steel.

Eve shook her head. “The perfect vision of civilization.”

“Huh?” Sam was used to her firm views on everything. He politely mumbled, “What do you mean, dear?” Then went back to munching on his donut.

Encouraged, Eve carried on. “Well, here we are in a building that could easily hold three or four hundred people and there’s, what, twenty couples and a few singles sitting at all these seats. Why did they make this place so friggen big?”

The spicy language woke Sam up. “You know, you’re absolutely right. They should just crunch it all back to the coffee shop it used to be. I remember going to that old place with you when…”

Distracted, she gazed at Sam’s wrinkled face and smiled sweetly. “You still remember that?”

He nodded strongly. “Clearly. Anything after that, however, has become a grey blur.”

Eve tried to slap his arm but he was too quick. Grinning, he leaned over to kiss her cheek. “I do remember some of the good parts.”

“No, seriously, Sam. This place has grown way too big and there’s no reason for it!”

Sam leaned back, not really wanting to engage in a complex topic; but, “Blame it on bloat.”

“Bloat? What are you…”

“Bureaucratic bloat. It’s inevitable. It’s like a ratchet. Turn it a little and it won’t come back down. Each click takes it further along, inevitably more and more.”

Eve shrugged. “What are you blathering on about now?” She knew he’d get to some complicated point.

“Ok. My proposal is that when humans get together into an organization, they can do great things. But then, bureaucratic bloat takes them to extremes. Ratcheting up whatever they were doing, higher with every success. Until it finally grows so large it either collapses or begins to eat itself. It’s like…”

Eve pretended to snore.

“Well, you brought this up. So let me finish my thought.”

Eve nodded. “Sorry, dear. Carry on.”

“Ok. So, we want to build something impressive… like a pyramid…”

Eve pretends to be surprised. “Are we in need of a pyramid? We’ve hardly got room in our backyard for a pool.”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Listen. If we were going to build anything as complicated as a pyramid, we have to put a team together. And then get all them sorted and resources organized and all that stuff. Right?”

“For the sake of argument I’ll just say yes.”

“Right. And then we build it. Then along comes someone else who wants to build another pyramid. Ok? So what’s he going to do? He’s not going to just build one the same size. He’s going to build it bigger!”

Eve smiled prettily. “Of course, dear. Anyone would do that.”

…………………………..

Is Bloat a Bureaucracy Problem?

The question of why bureaucracies get bigger over time has been looked into, but bureaucratic bloat still keeps happening and it is taking more resources to pay for itself

What’s the problem?

Financial and other resources that are being expended on organizations’ administrative staff could be better directed to original corporate objectives

As an example, before the 1980s, colleges and universities in North America used to direct their financial resources toward academics, which sounds reasonable

75 to 85% of their income went to the learning side of organizations’ budgets

Now, that has fully reversed: administrative expenses take 80 to 90%, with academic requirements getting the residue

This is a general tendency seen across many types of bureaucracies, private and public

However, the answer is not to say, “Get rid of bureaucracies!”

Bureaucratic Bloat

Bureaucracies are good

Bureaucracies are bad

They are good when they enable a larger group of people to address the need to plan and organize for moderately to highly complex tasks

They are bad when the process of organizing and doing the tasks becomes subservient to the needs of the planners

Inventing processes that helps those planning tasks to the detriment of those doing them – such as filling out forms and following procedures that do nothing to help along the completion of tasks, but rather collect unimportant data which only the planners feel is needed – this produces useless work

Then, when more staff are hired to accomplish the useless data collection, that becomes bloat

Bureaucracies

The concept of bureaucracies has been around for a very long time – that’s how the pyramids, ziggurats and Toltec temples were built

It allows:

• Effective organization of labour
• Clarity of roles
• Structure and stability
• Efficient use of resources
• Employing people such that each person’s skills and capabilities are appropriately applied toward the organization’s objectives

But, yes, things can go off-kilter

Nevertheless, that is no reason to entirely throw out the concept – it can be corrected

Why Does the Budget Bloat?

For any administration, there is a strong impetus to get bigger

Particularly if the administration is successful

The main reason is a simple progression:

If goals are successfully achieved, managers are rewarded with further responsibilities

In order to approach new goals, more resources are requested

With each success, the process repeats:

>  Success increases responsibility which requires further resources

With administrative success, the budget automatically bloats

Other Reasons

It may be:

• Honestly feeling that one’s control needs to be extended
• Micromanagement attitude, extending to a need to control
• Inflation of the budget resulting from success/mergers/etc.
• Aggrandizement of an organization’s authority figures

Honestly

If a manager does well in achieving assigned goals, that can legitimately become a feeling that others are not able to accomplish, or even fully understand, the goals, the organizational need for them, or the process needed to fulfill the goals

This feeling becomes hardened with ongoing “successes”

On hardening, it becomes a goal in itself:

“Since others are not competent enough, I am the only one who should be in charge of this process”

Micromanagement

The inability to allow others to make their own decisions regarding how procedures should be done

This is a trait which is very difficult to overcome by micromanagers themselves:

• “If this is to be done right, I have to be sure they do it just as I tell them to”

The result is that staff will soon take zero initiative, simply waiting for the boss to tell them what to do

Inflation of the Budget

Without strict oversight by a board of directors or enlightened CEO, budgets tend to increase in areas where the process goals have been successfully achieved

This is primarily seen in goals that are central to the organization such as those with metrics that are easy-to-collect or to-understand

For instance, profit, or in the number of products or services provided

Where budget inflation occurs, it can often be traced back to inappropriate organizational objectives:

• Focus on the number of products/services or organizational profit, rather than long-term organization viability, customer satisfaction or to the client base or community

Aggrandizement of Authority

Diligent supervision is good; micromanagement is not good

A manager who has an inflated sense of self-worth will automatically try to grab more areas of responsibility to bring them under their own control

This is the super-extension of micromanagement – a need to CONTROL

It may go beyond control of procedures, to be a desire for control of as many processes and people as possible

Burnout or psychosis is too often the final outcome for such a manager

And bankruptcy can be the company outcome

Strategic Objectives

Strategy

In business, strategy can be defined as being about “shaping the future” and is the human attempt to get to “desirable ends with available means“: Max McKeown (2011)

Strategic objectives define the path to be taken in general, and explain why that path ought to be taken

Critical Thinking

The process of analyzing available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to make sound conclusions or informed choices: Wikipedia

Metrics

As an assistance to strategic thinking, metrics are the numbers that management calculates from on-going processes, which are then used in their analysis to make objective decisions

Objective decisions

Making operational or strategic decisions based on facts, first, rather than on opinions or past practice

Strategic objectives

Describe the outcomes to be achieved by the end of the planning horizon and set the benchmarks for success

Measuring With Metrics

If a company determines that its strategy is to “make a profit of 30%”, as an objective, they do not give themselves a path to do that, nor a way of knowing why they are doing that

“Money” is not a strategy; it is only a supporting metric that may show the pace of approaching a goal

Metrics measure actions rather than explain them – they only show the pace at which the organization is moving, not the direction or purpose

It is corporate Strategy that defines a path toward an objective, answering why, and therefore giving a long term trajectory or purpose to the actions

Curves and Control

Institutions of higher learning have been changing

The changes have been incremental, just like a virus that infects one person, who then coughs the infection to 1.2 people, and the increases multiply…

And there’s the comparison to a “contained situation”, where the curve rises only moderately, if at all

The situation where we see a logarithmic rise is good if it is our income, but bad if it is a viral infection

You know that movie

In Colleges or universities, control of the academic side has been usurped by administrators who “specialize” in areas like curriculum development and no longer trust the educators – who are expert teachers – to do such development

Control has been flipped from academic professionals to administrative technocrats

How Bloat Happens

Incrementally:

• A program coordinator becomes too busy with administration, so an assistant is needed
• The assistant needs more resources
• With more administratively effective outcomes, more tasks and duties are assigned
• Busy departments are cloned…

Subversively:

• An administrator, to increase their power/authority/income, continually pushes the envelope of the Budget by hiring more staff and accumulating more resources

Criticism of the Bloat Concept

An insulting analysis of the past twenty years of data was posted 18 February 2020, on the website called Higher Education Strategy Associates, http://higheredstrategy.com/administrative-bloat-2020-edition/:

…the typical story we hear about administrative bloat concerns the huge numbers of administrative and support staff (henceforth, “A&S Staff”) hired, in contrast to the ranks of the professoriate, which are constantly decimated by predatory managers and… (yadda yadda…)

Aside from dismissing the concerns so rudely, the author, Usher, uses the cute trick of presenting data from exactly after the change started to become so pronounced

Academic Bloat

Surprisingly, Usher attempts to hide the numbers in plain sight

And yet, there they are – the data for “Instruction” and “Academic” are just above “Library” (these 3 being the learning side of a university), while the administrative cost categories sit increasingly higher above

So What

By shuffling limited fiscal resources from the organizational Budget’s academic side, to the administration side:

Direction of the institution’s academic offerings shifts to:

Courses that are determined to be supportive of the Budget’s objectives rather than academic objectives

Academic advice and direction of the institution becomes progressively subservient to technocratic control

Academic input to administration is progressively determined to be without value; then it is,

Classed in negative terms such as “conflict of interest” and “counter to the long-term interests of the students”

All of which marginalizes those whose work has been the very reason for the institution to exist

Thus creating a Certificate Factory mentality,

Which opens the door to commercial funding, putting the institution into the fiscal pockets of special interests

Knuckling Under

Why would an academic succumb to the incremental eating away of an institution’s academic principles?

Those with tenure may be:

• Short sighted as to the implications of handing over administrative functions
• Not capable of administrative functions nor sufficiently trained in the tasks or the implications for not doing them
• Mislead by promises of simple technocratic assistance

Those without tenure may be:

• Fiscally in need of the position, so not willing to be seen as disruptive
• Not trained in academic duties, so are easy to manipulate
• Believing that cooperation will lead to advancement

Other Industries

Of course there is a wide variation among the various industries with respect to the way that bureaucratic bloat may happen

It depends on factors such as:

• Professionalism of the organization’s leadership
• How focused the leadership is on objectives
• Initial business acumen of the founder(s)
• Regulatory environment
• Pressure by shareholders for continuing dividend increases

An Airline As a Corporation

Advancement in any field is so often a combination of diligent technical and scientific detective work combined with cross-functional seeding of ideas, along with outright luck

The airline industry has been evolving and, regrettably, that evolution has been driven by more than simply technological improvement

With every incident or tragic crash, new procedures were instituted (see, for instance, the ongoing story in Aviation Herald – https://avherald.com/)

This has worked for the betterment of commercial piloting, which is now a two-person job: one pilot doing the flying with the other doing communications and switch flipping, etc.

In practice, there is no major domo “boss” – they alternate periods of hands-on-stick control and each can propose actions that may be needed in cases of an unusual situation (but certainly, there is a Captain)

If that has been found to be the best course of action for airliners, why not for corporations?

Can Bloat Be Corrected?

Yes

Unfortunately, the further along that bureaucratic bloat has occurred in an institution, the harder it is to undo the damage

It calcifies processes

Breaking free takes supreme, diligent effort and an enlightened staff

The breaking-free process must be done by the CEO’s direct approval and by HR’s active engagement

Without creating even more bureaucratic bloat.

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted,

“Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The woman below replied, “You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”

“You must be an engineer,” said the balloonist.

“I am,” replied the woman, “how did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help so far.”

The woman below responded, “You must be in Management.”

“I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”

“Well,” said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you are going.  You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air.  You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault.”