Values and American Leaders

In recent years, we've all watched politicians constantly talking about values during their campaigns. But when they talk about values, they tend to quickly focus on topics like abortion, gay marriage, guns - and most recently, the evils of trying to provide healthcare to all Americans.  Get real!

Let's talk about real values like honesty, compassion, respect, courage, caring for others, ...  Those are the important universal values we should be pursuing and talking about. Listening to many of these politicians and business leaders, you can see right through the fake imagery they are trying to project as they fight to retain power, position, and wealth. That's what they really value - for themselves.

When we talk about values, it should not be about glorifying the pursuit of money and power for self serving reasons. We all know that power and money can be used to accomplish much good for many people. It's those leaders who lose sight of that and use it for selfish purposes that we need to challenge.

For example, why do business leaders who took the country to the brink of financial disaster get to keep their positions, receive bonuses, pay no penalties, and never even apologise to the millions of citizens they hurt?

Why do we let polticians get away with shutting down the government and taking us to the brink of financial disaster - basically not doing their job - and get away without paying any penalty, without apologising to the people of this country they are supposed to represent?

Why do radio and TV talk show hosts who spew hateful remarks and sow discontent get so much air time? And why do we soak up their drivel? In many other countries they would not be allowed on the air.

Why do whistleblowers who expose corruption in the public and private sectors get villified by the government and corporate leaders?  Have you noticed that many of the radio an TV talk show hosts jump on the bandwagon along with those officials and organizations whose corrupt practices have been exposed.

We need to publically stand up and challenge those who think these evil practices are acceptable.

To further illustrate my point, I recently picked up an issue of Time magazine. The main topics covered in the issue included:

• A move to create a federal law protecting wonen's access to abortions, regardless of state laws

• A story on the relatively low turnout to date by uninsured Americans to purchase coverage under the Affordable Care Act

• Comments about Governor Christie's apology for his staff causing the traffic jam on the bridge between NY and New Jersey

• The conflict in S. Sudan related to control over revenues related to the flow of oil out of that country

• A story related to how the Catholic Church hierarchy dealt with known pedophile priests

• A news story on the chemical spill into the rivers of West Virginia and the lack of oversight by the government

• Coverage of Detroit's bankruptcy and cutting workers pension to pay off corporate creditors

• Mississippi state 'for-profit' prisons finding new ways to ensure the ails remain full and the companies running them remain profitable

• News about both the government and the private sector collecting masive amounts of private data on citizens behaviour for various purposes

• A major story on citizens unable to find out how and why hospitals are charging them outrageous fees for treatment

There were other news stories covering the ongoing efforts by big corporations in their fight to restrict the power of unions, the upcoming run by Hillary Clinton for the Presidency and the big donors lining up on either side, the legalization and taxation of the marijuana industry, and more.

Look at the list of stories and what do you see. Battles to gain or retain power, increase the wealth of some at the expense of many, ... Who is on what side of the issues? Who is battling for the rights and needs of all our citizens, e.g. Pensions, healthcare for all, fairness, equality, justice.

Think carefully about the issues and the values of the people on each side? Too often leaders in the public and private sector push the 'hot button' issues, run slick ads and slogans, and divert you from the truth about their real values and interests. If you get led astray by those leaders who put their self serving interests in gaining noteriety, personal power and wealth ahead of the people, America will unfortunately suffer tremendously over the long term.

Again, for those of us who believe in God and universal principles like love, justice, righteousness - and that's the vast majority of us - we must publically stand up and challenge those leaders who are obsessed with power and wealth and have become the cause of so much evil in this world.

So, having said all that, what else do we all need to do to keep America strong? What tangible things can we do to keep our government, economic system, and way of life safe from those who are currently putting it at risk? We must do better.

Redefining Our Purpose as Civilization Keeps Evolving

Think Type 1 Civilization

 
Let's take a quick stroll through history. Civilizations have generally advanced when radically new ways of communicating and sharing ideas have emerged. One of the first major advances occurred when mankind learned to speak. People started to gather togther and socialize around the campfire. Tribes began to emerge and form. Civilization on Earth was born.

This was followed many centuries later by the next major advancement, the creation of the written word. This in turn led to the start of commerce and the creation of the first nation-states, e.g. Egypt, Greece, China. Over the next many centuries, ships and roads allowed commerce to spread and written ideas to be communicated and shared with others across great distances. Civilization continued to slowly but steadily advance.

Jump forward a thousand years through the Dark Ages to the 1400's and the invention of the printing press. Knowledge and ideas were able to be shared on a much wider scale than ever before. The Bible and many other great works were suddenly available to more than just the select few. The pace of innovation and change around the world began to slowly pick up speed. Kingdoms started falling and the Protestant Reformation radically disrupted civilization and the status quo.

Then came the 1800's and the invention of the steam engine and the telegraph. Steamboats and steam powered trains allowed ideas, information, and goods to be shared faster. The telegraph allowed communication to really speed up. These inventions set the stage for the transition from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age of the 20th century.

The first half of the 1900's saw the invention and mass production of cars, airplanes, electricity, telephones, the radio, and television. The pace of innovation accelerated and all aspects of our civilization were disrupted as new ideas, inventions, information and knowledge were shared as never before. The stage was set for the transition into the Information Age of the 21st century and globalization.

Computers, digital telecommunications, software, fiber optics, satellites, robotics, the Internet, nanotechnology and so much more are all contributing to the quantum leap forward we are now in the process of taking together, sharing information and knowledge on a global scale. Innovation and the rate of change continues to increase with each passing day.

Today, someone can come up with a new idea, share it with millions on the Internet, and see the idea rapidly transformed into action and reality within days or weeks. Something that took decades if not centuries to ocurr can now happen almost overnight. Talk about a dramatic change of pace! But you ain't seen nothing yet.

Are we prepared for where this is taking us all? Probably not. Are we ready for the death of nation states? For every human having the ability to access all the world's knowlege? Having the capability to replace body organs and living for many hundreds of years, tapping into unlimited sources of energy, colonizing other planets in our solar system, and...

We are on the threshold of moving from a Type 0 civilization to a Type I civilization. (see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale  )

A Type 0 civilization extracts its energy, information, raw-materials from crude organic-based sources (i.e. food/wood/fossil fuel/books/oral tradition); pressures via natural disaster, natural selection, and societal collapse creates extreme risk of extinction; it's capable of orbital spaceflight; societies that fail to improve social, environmental and medical understanding concurrently with other advancements, frequently accelerated their own extinction.

A Type I civilization extracts its energy, information, and raw-materials from fusion power, hydrogen, and other "high-density" renewable-resources; is capable of interplanetary spaceflight, interplanetary communication, megascale engineering, and interplanetary colonization, medical and technological singularity, planetary engineering, world government and trade, and stellar system-scale influence; but are still vulnerable to possible extinction

A Type II civilization extracts fusion energy, information, and raw-materials from multiple solar systems; it is capable of evolutionary intervention, interstellar travel, interstellar communication, stellar engineering, and star cluster-scale influence; the resulting proliferation and diversification would theoretically negate the probability of extinction.

A Type III civilization extracts fusion energy, information, and raw-materials from all possible star-clusters; it's capable of intergalactic travel via wormholes and intergalactic communication, galactic engineering and galaxy-scale influence.

A Type IV civilization extracts energy, information, and raw-materials from all possible galaxies; it's effectively immortal and omnipotent with universal-scale influence, possessing the ability of theoretical time travel and instantaneous matter-energy transformation and teleportation, moving entire asteroid belts and stars, creating alternate timelines, ...

We are facing the need to revisit and redefine our purpose as humans and the world we live in as we continue to transition into a more advanced Type 1 civilization during the remainder of the 21st century.

What are some of the basic questions we need to be asking ourselves right now? How do we incorporate and strengthen our faith in God as we continue to transition to a Type 1 civilization? Think about this and share your constructive ideas with us.

* Check out this video by Michio Kaku: The Birth-Pangs of a Planetary Civilization 

Musings on America at the start of the New Year - 2014

The past decade was a wild ride.  At the end of the Bush administration, we found ourselves engaged in two wars and were facing a massive meltdown of our economy. We all knew whoever became President was going to have quite a job on their hands. We also knew it was going to take years to 'fix' things and get us out of the deep hole we had dug for ourselves as a country.

Six years into President Obama's administration we are finally climbing out of the hole and things are looking up. The President has presided over the long and painful recovery from the massive financial crisis he inherited, now referred to as "The Great Recession".  The economy is back on track, unemployment is down below 7%, and the trillion dollar deficits that were run up to pay the bills that had come due from the war years and the collapse of the financial sector have been dramatically cut and are back under control.

The war in Iraq is over and our troops are entering the final phase of withdrawal from Afghanistan. Despite the urging by political 'war hawks' that wanted to get our country more actively involved in Libya, Syria, and Iran – the President has successfully managed to walk through  these mine fields and keep us out of another costly war. His reputation has been tarnished, but he has handled these major international challenges fairly well.

In the meantime, the President has overseen our country's move towards energy independence, pursuing a balanced approach that allowed for more drilling for oil and natural gas, while also encouraging the growth of alternative energy industries, e.g. wind, solar.  The country also is in the process of implementing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also derisively labeled Obamacare by his opponents.  This is a uniquely American version of universal health care – a market-based universal health insurance program for all citizens.

The President has also pushed forward with a number of other significant initiatives that will bear fruit over the coming decade. These include the Open Government and Open Data initiatives that are giving rise to many new 'Big Data' and Data Analytics companies. The Health Information Technology (HITech) Act is going to have a major impact on health care delivery and patient care across the U.S. as the country makes an unprecedented investment in health IT solutions, e.g. Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems and Health Information Exchange (HIE) networks.

Despite the many hysterical and ridiculous claims by many of the President's critics, his administration did not take away our guns. He did not move to enslave white people. He did not destroy the free market or capitalism. Despite continued claims that he is not an American, that he was born in Kenya, is a believer in Islam, …  Reasonable and sane people know he is in fact an American, was born in the state of Hawaii, and is a practicing Christian – and has been shown to have great family values.

Despite the supportive tone of this blog, the President deserves some criticism for a number of major shortcomings or failures.  Like many, I disagree with his policies allowing the National Security Administration (NSA) to have almost unlimited authority to collect data on the activities of all U.S. citizens. I think our country's policy of using of drones to kill people in whatever countries we choose is extremely unwise and will come back to haunt us. We still don't have Immigration Reform and many changes to our education system are needed to lower costs and improve our country's ability to compete in the 21^st century.

But when it's all said and done, this President and his administration has been good for the country.  We know the Tea Party activists and many citizens across the South will never stop speaking out opposing him and his policies no matter what – and that's alright – that's America. 

My hope – and the hope of most American – is that our next elected President will continue to build on the foundation that has been laid. Both Congress and the next President need to work better together to further strengthen and unify this country as we continue to complete the transition from the 'Industrial Age' of the 20^th century to the 'Information Age' of the 21^st century.

Privatizing Key Government Functions – Good or Bad?

Privatization deals affecting everything from parking meters to child welfare to public water systems are often negotiated in secret, carried out with little oversight, and subject to massive cost overruns and corruption. For example -

A recent study by "In the Public Interest" found that 65% of state and local for-profit prison contacts studied include quotas, which require state and local governments to maintain a high occupancy level in private facilities. These clauses provide incentives to keep prison beds filled, which run counter to many states’ public policy goals of reducing the prison population and increasing efforts for inmate rehabilitation.

In 2012, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the country, sent a letter to 48 state governors offering to buy up their public prisons. CCA offered to buy and operate a state’s prison in exchange for a 20 year contract, which would include a 90% quota for the entire term or a requirement that taxpayers pay for unused beds. While no state took CCA up on its offer, many existing prison privatization contracts contain such occupancy guarantees, with some as high as 100%.

Is it a good idea to contract out the U.S. prison system? Or are we just fostering a justice system run by corporations that want to imprison our citizens in order to make money? I believe we imprison a much higher percentage of people in the U.S. than any other countries – see latest figures.

What do you think about continued efforts to contract out many key functions previously performed by government? National Defense? Law Enforcement? Prisons? Public Schools? Is this good for the future of America?

The 'Internet of Everything (IoE)' will have major implications for the U.S.

The numbers are staggering.  Gartner predicts that the total economic value add for the Internet of Things (IoT) will be $1.9 trillion dollars in 2020, spread across all industries – especially in healthcare. McKinsey Global Institute pegs the potential economic impact at $2.7 trillion to $6.2 trillion by 2025. IDC put the Internet of things technology and services spending at $4.8 trillion in 2012 and expects the market to be $8.9 trillion in 2020.  Cisco Systems has published a white paper entitled "Embracing the Internet of Everything To Capture Your Share of $14.4 Trillion". Key to this rapidly evolving market are open standards and open source technology.

Background

The 'Internet of Things' refers to the equipping of all physical objects in the world with some form of minuscule identifying devices or computer sensors that can be inter-connected or networked together.

However, as the sensors embedded in these 'things' are enhanced and add new capabilities like context awareness, increased data processing power, and more sophisticated communications features, what we currently refer to as the Internet of Things (IoT) is morphing into something called the Internet of Everything (IoE).  The definition of these terms continue to evolve as development and implementation of the concepts and technologies move forward.

The Internet currently connects anywhere from 10 to 15 billion devices. That equates to less than 1 percent of  'things'. According to ABI Research, by 2020 more than 30 billion devices will be wirelessly connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), or the Internet of Everything (IoE). By 2050, there will be trillions of inter-connected 'things' not only all around us, but also 'inside' us.

According to McKinsey & Company, "the widespread adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) will take time, but the time line is advancing thanks to improvements in underlying technologies. Advances in wireless networking technology and the greater standardization of communications protocols make it possible to collect data from these sensors almost anywhere at any time." They peg the potential economic impact of IoT at $2.7 trillion to $6.2 trillion by 2025.

Gartner predicts that the Internet of Everything (IoE) will add $1.9 trillion to the global economy by 2020. It is expected that the numbers related to IoE will continue to climb over the next several decades given falling costs, adoption of open standards, emergence of innovative open hardware solutions, and the growth of cloud computing.

IDC put the Internet of things technology and services spending at $4.8 trillion in 2012 and expects the market to be $8.9 trillion in 2020. IDC said the installed base of things connected will be 212 billion by the end of 2020, including 30.1 billion connected autonomous things. Intelligent systems will be installed and collecting data by this point.

'Open Source' and the Internet of Everything (IoE)

Jim Zemlin recently wrote an excellent article entitled Open Source Tears Down Walled Gardens to Connect 'Internet of Everything'. He states that "a big impediment to the Internet of Everything’s economic promise and technology advances is interoperability -- the ability to intelligently share information across electronic devices and systems regardless of product brand." Bottom line, IoE doesn’t work unless 'everything' works together.

According to Zemlin, "Open source is the ideal, neutral staging area for collaboration that can provide the interoperability layer needed to make the Internet of Everything a reality. When everyone jointly develops and uses the same freely available code, companies can develop innovative services on top of it and get them to market faster."

Apparently many others agree with that conclusion. Witness the emergence of the AllSeen Alliance, a non-profit consortium of major corporations dedicated to driving the widespread adoption of products, systems and services that will enable the 'Internet of Everything', built upon an open, universal development framework and supported by

Members of the Alliance are helping to build the next wave of connected smart TVs, appliances, automobiles, and home automation - the 'Internet of Things' or the 'Internet of Everything' -  by using 'open source' AllJoyn software to develop interoperable devices, apps and consumer services.
Members include many of the world’s leading technology companies, manufacturers and service providers, e.g. Panasonic, Qualcomm, Sharp, Sears, LG Electronics, Google, Cisco.

Another reason open source will play a key role in the IoE revolution is that much of the consumer electronics world have already adopted and embedded the Linux operating system in their devices.

Companies have recognized that it is both impractical and too costly for any one of them to try and write their own proprietary code for the millions of different systems that will make up the Internet of Everything.

• Qualcomm, which reported almost $7 billion in profits on $25 billion in sales over this past year is investing considerable resources into IoE technology and solutions- to make the "digital sixth sense" a reality. • Intel is determined not to miss the Internet of Things (IoT) movement.  Under CEO Brian Krzanich, Intel is pursuing a new family of chips especially suited for 'wearables' and other small devices. Read about Intel's 'open source' Galileo computer and Quark chips. • IBM has teamed up with wireless sensor builder Libelium to offer an IoT starter kit that would let customers deploy dozens of different sensor applications. The kit integrates Libelium's Waspmote wireless sensor platform with IBM's Mote Runner software and 6LoWPAN. • Cisco has unveiled the nPower chip, a super-fast processor designed to funnel the enormous volumes of data that the Internet of Things (IoT) will generate.

 Final Observations & Conclusions

The Internet of Everything (IoE) is going to create new markets and a new economy for the 21st century. Estimates of the dollar value associated with IoE are all over the place – but all figures mentioned are staggering. They run from $1.9 trillion to more then $14 trillion over the next decade.

According to a white paper by Gartner, the verticals that are leading its adoption are manufacturing (15%), healthcare (15%), and insurance (11%).

Even as industries continue to move rapidly forward with plans to build the Internet of Everything (IoE), arguments are being made that not enough thought is being given to privacy, security, ethics, and the potential for a great number of unintended negative consequences. The need for more public debate about issues like this seems obvious, given the many recent revelations about NSA's unauthorized spying on American citizens. The potential for abuse of the technology by governments and private companies is very real.

Finally, it appears that for the Internet of Everything(IoE) to bring real value, U.S. industry should continue to adopt and build on open standards. To move things along and keep costs down, the industry should also continue to use 'open source' software such as - embedded operating systems software (Linux, Android);  network infrastructure (IPv6); web software (Java, LAMP stack);  cloud infrastructure (OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus); M2M software stacks (Mango, DeviceHive, Mihini); RFID software (OpenBeacon, Fostrak); database systems (Hadoop,  HBase, Mongo, NoSQL ).

With the Internet of Everything (IoE), we are now diving headlong into the 21st century and the 'Information Age'.   P.S. - If you thought things have been changing rapidly, think again. It's about to get real wild.

Other Selected IoT / IoE Links

AllSeen Alliance AllJoyn Software Eclipse M2M Solutions Internet of Things - Europe Internet of Things (IoT) Events Internet of Things (IoT) World Forum

MQ Telemetry Transport Protocol Ninja Block Ohmage OpenXC Smarter Objects Project           Web of Things