agency :: the capacity of an agent (a person or other entity) to act in a world
The concepts of individual and group agency are recurring themes around our virtual water cooler discussions of late. As eager change agents, edgeriders, and transitioners to a new world, we’re all more than blessed with big ideas. What many of us lack is the ability to reign in the ever expanding “cone of possibility” into a laser beam, pick a specific actionable project, and execute. Instead of implementing ideas, much time is wasted pitching them at each other, with no discernible path towards action.
How do we break through this inertia and start “getting shift done”??
OpenStack OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various components for a cloud infrastructure solution.
Who's behind OpenStack? Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, OpenStack has grown to be a global software community of developers collaborating on a standard and massively scalable open source cloud operating system. Our mission is to enable any organization to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware.
March 28, 2012 — CIO — Federal cybersecurity officials on Wednesday gave lawmakers a sobering warning about the vulnerabilities of critical information technology systems across the public and private sectors, describing a laundry list of threats and the challenge of keeping up with hackers who are continually seeking new methods of attack.
Appearing before a House subcommittee, cybersecurity authorities from the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Communications Commission and other government arms testified to the work their agencies are undertaking in response to the ongoing threats, both internally and in concert with the private sector, but acknowledged that the challenges remain formidable and appealed for expanded government authority to shore up the nation's digital defenses.
“Cybersecurity threats are a real and present danger to our current economy and well being,” retired Adm. James Barnett, chief of the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, told members of the Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. “No one would tolerate the level of criminality, thievery, vandalism or invasion of privacy if it were done in the physical world, and we really can no longer afford to tolerate it in cyberspace.”
Barnett and other witnesses described a wide range of threats and vulnerabilities that imperil communications networks, including weaknesses in the domain name system, or DNS, man-in-the middle attacks, route hijacking and weak spots in the supply chain.
But while there is broad agreement that the threats are severe and constantly evolving, deep divisions arise in the policy debate over what role the federal government should play in developing and overseeing the nation's digital defenses.
The Department of Homeland Security is at the center of that discussion. In the Senate, competing bills have emerged to address the cybersecurity challenge. One proposal, backed by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), would grant DHS new authorities to oversee private-sector digital infrastructure that was deemed critical. A competing bill takes a far more limited approach, focusing instead on facilitating the sharing of information about cyber threats among public and private entities. The Republicans backing that measure, the SECURE IT Act, have been sharply critical of DHS' performance on many security fronts, including cybersecurity.
Those same suspicions were on display in Wednesday's House hearing. Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.), who yesterday introduced the companion bill to the SECURE IT Act in the lower chamber, cited the department's handling of the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program, which she said has squandered hundreds of millions of dollars without measurably improving the infrastructure of the chemical sector. How, then, could DHS be trusted to oversee cybersecurity?
Phi Beta Iota: The US Government is incompetent and does not represent the public interest. The only thing dumber than giving billions of dollars to the US Army and the Potemkin Village called “Cyber-Command” is to give any amount of money to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) which is the lowest common denominator across the board. The fact is that the US Government is irrelevant to cyber-security–what expertise there is exists outside the government, and the government is the last to know anything, with nothing to contribute except hype and inflated printed money. Absent a non-violent revolution in governance, one that restores intelligence and integrity to the how of governance, what the US Government does in the cyber world is generally going to be part of the problem, not the solution.
This week, the Canary Party expects CDC to announce a new autism prevalence rate of 1 in 88. As boys are diagnosed with autism at four times the rate of girls, this translates to 1 in 54 boys. That new rate would be an increase from the previous 1 in 110 reported two years ago by the CDC’s ADDM (Autism Developmental Disabilities Monitoring) Network. This would only be the latest uptick in the autism rate reported by CDC, as the disorder was diagnosed in 1 in 10,000 in the 1960s, and the rate was virtually zero before 1930.
The Canary Party also expects federal health authorities to continue to downplay the seriousness of the skyrocketing autism rate, just as they have done for the past two decades since the rate began rising dramatically. Canary Party Chairman and autism father Mark Blaxill, drawing on his own experience working with federal agencies on autism for many years, commented, “No matter how high the autism rate soars, the CDC’s continued denial of an autism epidemic is certitude comparable to death and taxes.”
History shows us that Polio was called epidemic when the rate was only one in 2,700. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently called trampoline injuries epidemic, even though that rate was only about one in 1,200 children for the year the those injuries were reported (1996). By these measures, The Canary Party holds the position that autism should have been declared an “epidemic” many years ago. Some have offered the excuse that only infectious diseases can be called epidemic, but as the CDC has announced that obesity is epidemic in the U.S., the Canary Party believes that this leaves the agency with no good explanation for failing to characterize autism as such.
Ginger Taylor, Executive Director of The Canary Party, echoes the questions that autism parents have been asking for years: “How did we go from one in 10,000 children born 50 years ago being diagnosed with autism to 1 in 88 diagnosed today? Why do the Centers for Disease Control refuse to call the avalanche of autism diagnoses in the U.S. anything more than an “urgent public health concern?” Why is the federal agency downplaying a national emergency with special wording created just for autism – Urgent Public Health Concern – a label that is not used to describe any of the thousands of other disorders and conditions the agency tracks? When dozens of published research papers and multiple congressional hearings have shown that the primary causes of autism are environmental, and include vaccines and their components, why has CDC failed to offer any advice to new parents on how to decrease the chance of a child developing autism? Why has CDC chosen not to even attempt to identify which children are the subset vulnerable to these environmental exposures so that they can be handled with greater care?”
As China is expected to rise to the status of a financial superpower within the next 8 years and eclipse the US economy by 2020, Africa becomes center stage in the greatest currency war the world has seen since the 1930s, which is now shifting into overdrive.
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, collectively known as the BRICS nations, are moving forward with their plan to unseat the US dollar from its throne as the global trade currency and to replace it with a Chinese-denominated “super-sovereign” international currency.
Click on Image to Enlarge
This Geo-political game to establish global monetary dominance is by no means limited to the attack on the US dollar. Instead this is merely the first strike of a concerted campaign of worldwide economic warfare that will soon follow which seeks to bring the United States and its western allies to their knees.
Ultimately the BRICS collective is staging a coup to overthrow the current global financial regime that has been dominated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the last global currency war was won at the end of World War II.
The attack comes partially in retaliation for the latest round of quantitative easing in which we witnessed the Federal Reserve deliberately printing trillions of dollars in an attempt to jump-start the U.S. economy by forcing investors back into the U.S. stock market by devaluing the US dollar.
Phi Beta Iota: One third of the global economy is transnational crime, and one third System D or “off the books” entrepreneurial information economics routing around governments. Now that we know the final third is legalized crime, it becomes much easier to understand why two thirds of the brain power on the planet has opted out of the legalized crime world that favors the 1%.
Several things characterize countries of the Third Word, whatever precisely “Third World” means.
The first is corruption. America is rotten with it, but American corruption is distinct from corruption in, say, Guatemala or Thailand, being less visible and better organized.
Several major differences exist between the usual corruption in the Third World and that in America. In most of the Third World, corruption exists from top to bottom. Everyone and everything is for sale. Bribery amounts to an economic system, like capitalism or socialism. By contrast, in the United States, graft flourishes mostly at the level of government and commerce. You don’t (I think) slip an admissions official at Harvard twenty grand to accept your shiftless and dull-witted slug of a misbegotten offspring. Nor do you pay a local judge to drop dope charges against your teenager. And in the Guatemalas and Egypts of the planet, corruption tends to be personal. The briber and the bribed act as individuals.
All might find this interesting from the perspective that a Judge did not buy into a government claim that clearly showed a lack of integrity on its part. While the Administration can bluster all it wants about other people, it appears that it doesn't want that right extended to its population…..
DETROIT – A federal judge on Tuesday gutted the government's case against seven members of a Michigan militia, dismissing the most serious charges in an extraordinary defeat for federal authorities who insisted they had captured homegrown rural extremists poised for war.
U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts said the members' expressed hatred of law enforcement didn't amount to a conspiracy to rebel against the government. The FBI had secretly planted an informant and an FBI agent inside the Hutaree militia starting in 2008 to collect hours of antigovernment audio and video that became the cornerstone of the case.
“The court is aware that protected speech and mere words can be sufficient to show a conspiracy. In this case, however, they do not rise to that level,” the judge said on the second anniversary of raids and arrests that broke up the group.
Roberts granted requests for acquittal on the most serious charges: conspiring to commit sedition, or rebellion, against the United States and conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. Other weapons crimes tied to the alleged conspiracies also were dismissed.
“The judge had a lot of guts,” defense attorney William Swor said. “It would have been very easy to say, ‘The heck with it,' and hand it off to the jury. But the fact is she looked at the evidence, and she looked at it very carefully.”
The trial, which began Feb. 13, will resume Thursday with only a few gun charges remaining against militia leader David Stone and son Joshua Stone, both from Lenawee County, Mich. They have been in custody without bond for two years.
Prosecutors said Hutaree members were antigovernment rebels who combined training and strategy sessions to prepare for a violent strike against federal law enforcement, triggered first by the slaying of a police officer.
But there never was an attack. Defense lawyers said that highly offensive remarks about police and the government were wrongly turned into a high-profile criminal case that drew public praise from Attorney General Eric Holder, who in 2010 called Hutaree a “dangerous organization.”
