Phi Beta Iota: In response to a recent request, we have provided the ordering information for the Golden Candle pins (roughly a dollar each in quantity) and have found an improved lower cost but much smaller (3″ versus 6″ diameter) Golden Candle Holder that we recommend should anyone wish to replicate the concept of the award for their own purposes.
Pin Source
To order the pins, communicate withPinSource and make reference to OSS.Net, Inc. prior orders. They already have the art and specifications for the master pin (the original) and the tribal pins with outer rings as follows:
Academic Gold; Civil Society Brown; Commercial Gray; Government Red; Law Enforcement Black; Military Olive Drab; Media Orange; Non-Profit UN Blue.
I held a bi-partisan vote today, with me representing the Democratic Party while I represented the Republican Party. Strict ballot access controls ensured a unanimous outcome — the new Virtual President of the United States of America is Robert David Steele, or for Latinos, Roberto David de Steele y Vivas.
Over the next 45 days, on Tuesdays and Thursdays I will announce one critical policy decision, always in the context of a balanced budget and always with the public interest in mind — this is not going to be pretty, but 45 days from today, every American will be able to compare my virtual track record with the actual track record of those seeking re-election, or in the case of a tiny handful that overcame enormous obstacles, those seeking election for the first time.
Phi Beta Iota: Steele's posts will be buried among 5,999 other bloggers posting twice weekly. The search bar at Huffington Post works well. You can also, if you wish, click on the fan logo at this first point, to automatically receive an email alert with the exact URL for each additional post as it appears.
Robert David STEELE Vivas Click Here to See Personal Page
ON INTEGRITY
1. Integrity is not just about honor–it is about wholeness of view, completeness of effort, and accuracy or reliability of all of the elements of the whole.
2. Industrial-Era Systems do not adapt because they lack integrity and continue to pay for doing the wrong things righter–the Pentagon is a classic example of such as system.
3. In the 21st Century, intelligence, design, and integrity are the triad that matters most. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth is the non-negotiable starting position for getting it right, and this is crucially important with respect to the sustainability of the Earth as a home for humanity.
Click on Image to Enlarge
4. Integrity at the top requires clarity, diversity, and BALANCE–it makes no sense for a Secretary of Defense to continue to screw over the 4% that take 80% of the casualties, spending 80% of the Pentagon budget on the 20% that do not take casualties (occupants of really big expensive things that do not actually go into harm's way).
5. Integrity can be compounded or discounted. It is compounded when public understanding demands political accountability and flag officers ultimately understand that they have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, not support the chain of command. It is discounted when flag officers are careerists, ascribe to rankism, and generally betray the public interest in favor of personal advancement.
6. Integrity is ultimately a natural attribute of large groups, and emerges from self-organizing over time. The Declaration of Independence from the United Kingdom is one example; the break-up of the Balkans another; the pending secession of Hawaii and Vermont from the United STATES of America a third. Legitimate grievances give the aggrieved the moral high ground–this is a power no government can repress.
7. Universal access to connectivity and content is a means of accelerating both public access to the truth, and the power of the public to off-set “rule by secrecy,” which inherently lacks integrity across the board.
EXCUSES most commonly heard:
1) I work for the government, we serve the public, I consider myself part of the government, not part of the public, and indeed, choose not to vote or otherwise be active as a citizen.
2) The public elects the politicians, they appoint the leadership, serving the chain of command is how one serves the public.
RIPOSTE:
1) Citizenship trumps occupational role. Every employee is supposed to be a citizen first, a public servant second. They swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution, that includes a responsibility to protect the public from predatory government actions – the recent assassination of a US citizen without due process is a reprehensible example of what happens with uniformed officers and civil servants become morally disengaged.
2) Information asymmetries between the public and the government are such that a democracy demands whistle-blowers and open government. Rule by secrecy is a form of tyranny, a means of avoiding accountability, and ultimately a clear and present danger to the Constitution, the Republic, and the public interest. Because of their Oath, it can be said that government employees have a special responsibility to detect and confront fraud, waste, and abuse – and certainly to disobey and declare illegal orders and plans or programs inconsistent with the Constitution, such as wars not authorized by Congress, or assassinations not based on the rule of law.
In brief, all of our government employees have been “coping out” and failing to live up to their fullest potential as citizens and human beings. To be silent and complacent is to be a slave, not a citizen. Any employee of the government that fails to think about the Constitution and their role in defending the Constitution at every level on every day across every issue area, is failing to honor their Oath of office.
A sample of a documentary that shows the creative heart that sustains a community regardless of what happens. Grass roots democracy in action. Updated version.
Phi Beta Iota: Industry colleagues point out that Ballmer took over at the top while Jobs came back in at the bottom. Our own view is that a convergence is occurring that will be settled between the personal device and the cloud–who comes up with the most secure reliable personal device (e.g. an eye-screen with earpiece/mike and voice or virtual keyboard or pointer) and the most global affordable mix of call centers, intelligence centers, and M4IS2 softwares, services, and sense-making within the cloud. Google and Oracle and IBM (and their Brazilian, Chinese, and Russian counterparts) are on the same court, but none of them are truly focused on the end game: a World Brain with a Global Game in which we connect all humans to all information in all languages….an open self-organizing world in which profit comes from cost avoidance, truth, reconciliation, and non-zero outcomes.
America's Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution
By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 – August 2010 issue of American Spectator
EXTRACT 1: They [the bi-opoly two parties] think, look, and act as a class.
EXTRACT 2: The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”
Ms. Carol Dumaine is one of a very small number of individuals who have sought to pursue what Gifford Pinchot calls “intrapreneurship,” but on a global scale.
She first came to international attention when she pioneered Global Futures Partnership, an analytic endeavor seeking to enhance outreach and cross-fertilization across varied communities of practice.
She received the following recognition from the emergent M4IS2 community in 2002:
Global Futures Partnership, Central Intelligence Agency OSS '02: 21st Century Emerging Leadership Award. Global Futures Partnership, Central Intelligence Agency. Under the leadership of Carol Dumaine with her extraordinary vision, the Global Futures Partnership has created strategic learning forums bringing the rich perspectives of the outside world into the classified environment in a manner never before attempted. This official but revolutionary endeavor nurtures an outside-in channel for integrating a diversity of perspectives. It is a vanguard toward a future in which the lines between national and global intelligence, and between governmental and nongovernmental intelligence, are blurred into extinction.
She is interested in the areas of “knowledge ecosystems,” “ecologies of innovation,” and “collective intelligence” for applicable models, practices and theories which may be useful to prototyping a new capacity for “strategic intelligence” in energy and environmental security.
Carol Dumaine is a graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and has a Master's degree from Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
On the left is her May 2009 presentation to the International Security Forum in Geneva, and on the right, a March 2009 presentation at the Institute for Environmental Security of the Brookings Institute.
Carol Dumaine Geneva May 2009Carol Dumaine, March 2009, Brookings
