Obama’s OSU commencement speech--Notable Snippets and some Appropriate Rebuttals
President Barack Obama came to Columbus, OH on Sunday. It was a familiar venue for him, since he visited Columbus five times in the past year, as part of his campaign to win OH, the ultimate “swing state.”This time he spoke to a packed audience in the OSU “Horsehoe” where the Ohio State Buckeyes play football in front of a larger, and certainly noisier crowd than Obama drew.
In many respects, Obama’s was a relatively typical commencement speech, exhorting the graduates to use their education to become better citizens, and to contribute to society.
In other respects, it was conspicuously missing some of the words, exhortations, admonitions and calls to action that might be expected for graduates leaving one of the nation’s largest and leading universities, into a deeply troubled job market.
There were more than a few cases where what President Obama said would have graded an Incomplete at OSU for what he didn’t say. Here are just the most glaring examples:
He said.
“….yours has become a generation possessed with that most American of ideas - that people who love their country can change it.”
What he didn’t say was that you can also do it great harm—as many of his failed initiatives to “fundamentally change America” have proven.
He went on to explain.
“For all the turmoil; for all the times you have been let down, or frustrated at the hand you've been dealt; what I have seen from your generation are perennial and quintessentially American values. Altruism. Empathy. Tolerance. Community. And a deep sense of service that makes me optimistic for our future.”
Nowhere in this statement does he even mention ambition, work ethic, achievement or a sense of responsibility. How could those vital attributes be omitted from such a phrase in a speech like this?
As we know, President Obama can “turn a phrase with the best of them,” and he did, one time in this speech when he said.
”That's what citizenship is. It's the idea at the heart of our founding - --"that as Americans, we are blessed with God-given and inalienable rights, but with those rights come responsibilities --"- to ourselves, to one another, and to future generations.”
The heart of this paragraph is his BEST LINE: --"that as Americans, we are blessed with God-given and inalienable rights, but with those rights come responsibilities…” If only that idea could have been pounded into the hearts and minds of the audience, the speech would have been a success.
As it was, the very next sentence was vintage Obama playing the “blame game.”
“But if we're being honest, as you've studied and worked and served to become good citizens, the institutions that give structure to our society have, at times, betrayed your trust.”
Of course no one can hold you responsible for anything then these big, nasty institutions have betrayed you! What utter nonsense.
Then here’s the big preemptive excuse.
And in Washington - well, this is a joyous occasion, so let me put this charitably: I think it's fair to say our democracy isn't working as well as we know it can, It could do better. And those of us fortunate enough to serve in these institutions owe it to you to do better, every single day.”
Yes, Mr. President, and these problems are in large part due to a lack of presidential leadership! Notice how Obama moves into the passive voice, third person to avoid any personal ownership of the problems,”…
I think it's fair to say our democracy isn't working as well as we know it can…”
If the first omission of important traits was not enough, here it comes again, “But I think of what your generation's traits - compassion and energy, a sense of selflessness and a boundless digital fluency - might mean for a democracy that must adapt more quickly to keep up with the speed of technological, demographic, and wrenching economic change.”
Notice again the traits not singled out as important or noteworthy: accomplishment, character, integrity, and personal values. The mere omission of these tells us a great deal about what the president (or his speech writers) believes is of paramount importance—and what is not.
Next comes a litany of how the founders made government the solution to all of our needs and aspirations, with only one small part omitted.
“And that's precisely what the founders left us: the power to adapt to changing times. They left us the keys to a system of self-government - the tool to do big and important things together that we could not possibly do alone. To stretch railroads and electricity and a highway system across a sprawling continent. To educate our people with a system of public schools and land grant colleges, including Ohio State. To care for the sick and the vulnerable, and provide a basic level of protection from falling into abject poverty in the wealthiest nation on Earth. To conquer fascism and disease; to visit the Moon and Mars; to gradually secure our God-given rights for all our citizens, regardless of who they are, what they look like, or who they love.
Thus we see how Barack Obama arrives at lines like “You didn’t build that!” He never even considers or mentions the free enterprise economic system that generated the wealth, which made most of the preceding benefits possible . Then he continues in defense of his idea of government as the ultimate virtuous solution.
“Still, you'll hear voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's the root of all our problems, even as they do their best to gum up the works; or that tyranny always lurks just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule is just a sham with which we can't be trusted.”
News bulletin to the graduates: government is often sinister, it is frequently dysfunctional (in so many ways), and under Barack Obama it has been tending toward tyranny, and often can't be trusted.
Finally, in his most glaring deception, he talks about opportunities, jobs and their future. He never once acknowledges that their generation faces the most difficult struggle to find jobs that anyone has ever imagined in this country’s recent history. This is his WORST SERIES OF LINES.
“And where we're going should give you hope. Because while things are still hard for a lot of people, you have every reason to believe that your future is bright.”
Of course you wont be able to find the kind of jobs you imagined, to pay off the huge debts, which we have made it easy or you to incur via Federal government student loans.
“You are graduating into an economy and a job market that are steadily healing.”
Steadily and slowly healing, Mr. President. It will be nearly impossible to find the good paying jobs for so many of those who studied the fun, easy, and low-value curricula instead of the hard, high value ones.
Next comes the “disclaimer,” behind which he can hide—uncertainty.
”Still, if there is one certainty about the decade ahead, it's that things will be uncertain. Change will be a constant, just as it has been throughout our history. …. But more than anything, what we will need is political will…”
Right. In his view “political will” is an imperative; one which is required to harness the efforts of those who will work hard and accomplish important things and use their accomplishments and wealth for your benefit. After all, it’s only fair!
This was another rollicking Obama oratory, punctuated with rhetorical gems, and filled with equal parts of false hopes, half-truths and serious omissions.
The good news is that relatively few of the graduates listened closely enough to recognize the points I gleaned from the text of the speech. They just wanted to get out of there and party.
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A smorgasbord of topics that affect Americans
When you have the rich timeliness of TheBrennerBrief writers to feast on, I am sitting wondering what I can add to this. Then I realized it: a lot of people like to go through buffets or “smorgasbords” (not so many of them are called that any more) because they want a taste of a variety of things.
Then they can decide what they want more of, and usually find it without difficulty. Thus, I plan to bring you that “buffet sampler” of things that will affect you, most Americans—and me—in the coming months and years.
Drug Companies in Distress—Consumers Benefit—For Now?
Two of the giants of the US pharmaceutical industry are reeling from patent expirations on blockbuster drugs, which contributed billions in profits for many years. The good news for consumers is that lower cost generic replacement drugs will reduce prescription outlays. Last year, Pfizer’s huge selling cholesterol-lowering drug, Lipitor, saw its patent protection expire. Now generic atorvastatin (the drug’s technical name) sells for a fraction of the cost.
This year Merck will lose is protection for Zocor, another cholesterol-lowering statin drug, costing it billions in profits. In a second blow to Pfizer, its anti-depressant drug, Zoloft will lose patent coverage mid-year 2013.
While this seems like good news for consumers, and helps hold down spiraling medical costs, there’s a dark side to expirations. The drug companies must find new, highly profitable drugs to pay for expensive research on still newer remedies. Make no mistake, these companies make handsome profits on patented drugs, but a sizable part of the revenue goes to fund research on breakthrough drugs.
Without that revenue, if the research is slowed, so are the breakthroughs that have extended life expectancy and improved the quality of life for millions of people. Finding successful new drugs is a little bit like drilling for oil. You have an idea where to look, but once you start exploring, there is a high likelihood that you will have many failures before finding the one success.
Generics are supposed to work the same as the brand names, but when low price/cost become the criteria, there are risks of formulations that don’t deliver the same amount of medication at the same rate. Be careful. Plus, pharmaceutical companies may be a great target for criticism, but life without their breakthrough drugs would be grim for many people and shorter for others.
Pros: Cheaper generic drugs for millions, lower health care costs
Cons: Less to revenue to fund research and find the next generation of life-saving drugs
Don’t Make Customers Wait to Give You Their Money
So said Sam Walton, whose mantra was embodied by stores opening more checkout lanes any time the lines stretched back to the main cross aisle. He was right, and now other retailers are finally discovering it. Grocer Kroger has developed a sophisticated measurement system using military type infrared cameras to track how long it takes to check out.
Kroger has even advertised its speedy checkouts and they seem to be a hit with consumers. That’s now surprise to McDonald’s executives who have known for years that the time to serve customers matters a lot to time-stressed people. Giving fast (and courteous) service may cost a little more, but it pays big dividends for such companies.
Walmart is poised to take the next big leap: begin your checkout while you shop, using your smartphone. Scan & Go is the new system being tested, in which the bar codes on items can be scanned with your smartphone as you put them in your basket. That reduces checkout to scanning your smart phone and paying the bill. Of course there’s a lot of detail work between now and a wider roll out. Errors, fraud, mistake correction, and many more details remain to be addressed.
But one of these days, the time to check out will be embedded into your shopping time…assuming you use the system right, and you trust it, and it trusts you; but those are big assumptions.
Pros: Improving worker productivity but shifting the work to customers.
Cons: Mistakes will be made, and fixing them will be a big job.
Privacy—What’s That?
When George Orwell wrote his memorable novel 1984 decades ago, the term “Big Brother is Watching You” became part of the vernacular. Now it is true. Unfortunately, it is not just “Big Brother.” It might be any of a large group of marketers, scammers, thieves and market researchers. Some have legitimate reasons to “watch you.” Others have far more evil intentions.
The growth of smartphones and tablets, of free WiFi and fast cellular networks have brought “always on, anywhere” connectivity into a reality. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the “bad guys” have access to you, your data and your private information too—unless you hare hyper vigilant and very technologically savvy and watchful.
The same technology that lets you know where you are and where you are going can do the same thing for others—shadowing you. Is that good? Not quite. Is it preventable? Barely. The more Apps, Cookies and Contacts you load onto your devices, the easier it is to “bug you” with code that tells the “bad guys”—and “Big Brother”—where you are and what you are doing.
The era of personal privacy is about over, and we are giving it up for the sale of convenience, communications, and entertainment. The problem is, once gone, no one knows how to regain it. If everything about you is “out there,” it stays there “forever.” Youth and teens are just beginning to get this—but probably too late. Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other social networks already contain too much private, personal data. As these grow, it only gets worse.
A whole new field will soon emerge—how to protect your remaining privacy, and how to “reboot” your on-line identity to regain some semblance of privacy again. It won’t be easy, but as demand grows, it will come. Watch for it. You read it here.
Pros: You can be always in touch, anywhere, any times, with anyone
Cons: You will no longer have any secrets or privacy, as you will be available to find, track, interrupt, (and attack!)—Any time, any where, by almost any one
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The Right Metrics & The Wrong Conclusions
There are many such issues that surround reporting of employment. Initial claims for unemployment of over 300,000 sound so large, but no one points out that during the same time frame probably 3 million Americans changed jobs. The 300,000 kind of figure is a “net” figure, of those folks who lost jobs but didn’t find new ones.
Unfortunately we are in a 24/7 news cycle, where fact checking is done less often and with more bias, and the “old” news media (the TV networks) and many of the more liberal networks (CNN, MSNBC, et. al.) no longer simply report the news. The “spin it,” biasing it to fit the ideology they support. Is this wrong? Perhaps—unless the person seeing or hearing that distorted reporting agrees with the conclusion or is totally clueless about the distortion (more often the case).
We live in a world of non-stop government reporting, but many of the most important ones are then “revised” about a month later. The problem is that too many people reacted to the initial “estimate” and barely notice the revision, which can swing the conclusions to a whole different direction.
Clearly this whole measurement concept is not simple or easy, but measurements are still very, very important. They help us assess progress, know how we are doing, and even let us know what is, or isn’t “success.” When a measurement is done wrong, or measures the wrong thing, or somehow, because of error, provides leads to the wrong conclusion, it is seldom recognized until later (like the government’s revisions). In the meantime, we make decisions based on that measurement—wrong decisions usually.
Investors react and often over-react, to government reports on employment, on GDP growth, on the balance of trade, and so forth. Markets soar or plummet from these reactions. And then, 30-45 days later, a revision comes along that says, in effect, “Whoops, we got it wrong.”
Some mistakes in “metrics” sometimes go uncorrected—or unnoticed—for a long, long time. Have you been ill and had a temperature lately? You probably compared your temperature to “normal” which you were taught for years was 98.6 F. Wrong! The correct human body temperature is closer to 98.25 F (and that’s an average, because there are variations from person to person). The 98.6 F reading was developed in 1868, when Carl Wunderlich published a seminal paper on body temperature in 25,000 adults. But his study was done using imprecise measuring devices and techniques of that era, yet it has been widely accepted over 100 years. Considering how many medical decisions are made based on this metric, it is downright amazing that this error has not caused huge problems. Or maybe it has, and we just don’t know it.
Have you even used a map that was not to scale and been confused by the distorted perspective it gave you? Have you owned a car with a speedometer was wrong—and you got a ticket for speeding without realizing you were speeding?
It has been proven time and again that simply observing something causes it to change. So does measuring it. Heisenberg’s Uncertainly Principle in physics warns us that two related things cannot both be measured accurately, simultaneously.
“Forewarned is forearmed,” or so the old saying goes. The most important message of this brief article is to make sure the metrics you choose are measuring what you want to measure—and doing it accurately (to the best level possible.)
There are ways to verify most metrics and the results they yield. (e.g.,Unemployment data can be found at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm.)
The first way to check metrics is to apply “common sense.” Is that result reasonable? Another is to find historical comparisons. A third is by a “check point” or a reference standard. For many years, factories and industries kept “standards” in the form of physical objects that had been carefully verified to be correct. The U. S. government even established a “Bureau of Standards.” They did this because gauges and measuring devices can be damaged or simply get out of adjustment. If you weigh yourself, and don’t believe the reading, you usually look for another scale—but make sure it’s an accurate one.
Time for the world is kept on very precise atomic clocks and is called “coordinated universal time” (UTC) and often referred to as Greenwich Mean Time or “Zulu” time. Since communications signals cross many time zones, an accurate, standardized measure of time is critical.
Somewhere, somehow, all metrics—and those reporting them--need to be understood more deeply and then checked and rechecked regularly. Whatever you are doing to meet or to use, some predetermined metric, stop every now and then and check to see that the metric is accurate—and the right one—and that it is measuring what is really important. If you base conclusions on the right measurements and use them correctly, you will be surprised how much better your decision-making becomes.
In conclusion, if you believe the data that the jobless situation in the US is improving, then your conclusion is probably OK. If you believe that the problem is getting a lot better, then go back to that bls.gov table and notice that about 14% of Americans are either unemployed or underemployed, and I’ll bet you they don’t think things are much better!
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Cyber-attacks Hit American companies again
In a message posted to Schwab's website, Walt Bettinger, president and CEO of Charles Schwab, explained the site's slow performance was a result of a "'denial of service' attack penetrated by a third party." Bettinger said that no client accounts or data was compromised.Charles Schwab & Co. has been suffering from denial-of-service attacks, blocking access to the site for two hours on Tuesday and slowing the online operations of the financial services firm intermittently on Wednesday.
"Based on the history of denial of service attacks on other companies, we anticipate these attacks may continue against our industry — and us — for some time," Bettinger acknowledged. "We will continue to work with the industry and law enforcement to ensure our web sites are available without interruption."
One in five data breaches are the result of cyberespionage, Verizon says
Verizon's data breach investigations report covering 2012 includes information on cyberespionage-related breaches for the first time
Lucian Constantin
(IDG News Service)April 22, 2013
While the majority of data breaches are the result of financially motivated cybercriminal attacks, cyberespionage activities are also responsible for a significant number of data theft incidents, according to a report that will be released Tuesday by Verizon.
Verizon's 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) covers data breaches investigated during 2012 by the company's RISK Team and 18 other organizations from around the globe, including national computer emergency response teams (CERTs) and law enforcement agencies. The report compiles information from more than 47,000 security incidents and 621 confirmed data breaches that resulted in at least 44 million compromised records.
In addition to including the largest number of sources to date, the report is also Verizon's first to contain information on breaches resulting from state-affiliated cyberespionage attacks. This kind of attack targets intellectual property and accounted for 20% of the data breaches covered by the report.
In more than 95% of cases the cyberespionage attacks originated from China, said Jay Jacobs, a senior analyst with the Verizon RISK team. The team tried to be very thorough regarding attribution and used different known indicators that linked the techniques and malware used in those breaches back to known Chinese hacker groups, he said.
However, it would be naive to assume that cyberespionage attacks only come from China, Jacobs said. "It just so happens that the data we were able to collect for 2012 reflected more Chinese actors than from anywhere else."
The more interesting aspects of these attacks were the types of tactics used, as well as the size and industry of the targeted organizations, the analyst said.
"Typically what we see in our data set are financially motivated breaches, so the targets usually include retail organizations, restaurants, food-service-type firms, banks and financial institutions," Jacobs said. "When we looked at the espionage cases, those industries suddenly dropped down to the bottom of the list and we saw mostly targets with a large amount of intellectual property like organizations from the manufacturing and professional services industries, computer and engineering consultancies, and so on."
A surprising finding was the almost fifty-fifty split between the number of large organizations and small organizations that experienced breaches related to cyberespionage, the analyst said.
"When we thought of espionage, we thought of big companies and the large amount of intellectual property they have, but there were many small organizations targeted with the exact same tactics," Jacobs said.
There is a lot of intelligence-gathering involved in the selection of targets by these espionage groups, Jacobs said. "We think that they pick the small organizations because of their affiliation or work with larger organizations."
In comparison to cyberespionage, financially motivated cybercrime was responsible for 75% of data breach incidents covered in the report and hacktivists were behind the remaining 5%.
One noteworthy finding of this report is that all threat actors are targeting valid credentials, Jacobs said. In four out of five breaches, the attackers stole valid credentials to maintain a presence on the victim's network, he said.
This will hopefully start to raise some questions about the widespread reliance on single-factor password-based authentication, Jacobs said. "I think if we switch to two-factor authentication and stop being so reliant on passwords, we might see a decrease in the number of these attacks or at least force the attackers to change" some of their techniques.
Fifty-two percent of data breach incidents involved hacking techniques, 40% involved the use of malware, 35% the use of physical attacks -- for example ATM skimming -- and 29% the use of social tactics like phishing.
The number of breaches that involved phishing was four times higher in 2012 compared to the previous year, which is probably the result of this technique being commonly used in targeted espionage campaigns.
Despite all the attention given to mobile threats during the past year, only a very small number of breaches covered by the Verizon report involved the use of mobile devices.
"For the most part, we are not seeing breaches leverage mobile devices as of yet," Jacobs said. "That's a pretty interesting finding that's kind of counter-intuitive in light of all the headlines saying how insecure mobile devices are. That's not to say they're not vulnerable, but the attackers currently have other easier methods to get the data."
The same holds true for cloud technologies, Jacobs said. While there have been some breaches involving systems that are hosted in the cloud, they were not the result of attacks exploiting cloud technologies, he said. "If your site is vulnerable to SQL injection, it doesn't matter where it's hosted -- in the cloud or locally. The kind of breaches we're seeing would occur regardless of whether the system would be in the cloud or not."
The Verizon report includes a list of 20 critical security controls that should be implemented by companies and which are mapped to the most prevalent threat actions identified in the analyzed dataset. However, the level to which every company should implement each control depends on the industry they're part of and the type of attacks they're likely to be more exposed to.
THAT'S A LOT OF THINK ABOUT…SO YOU CAN SEE WHY IT WAS "ON MY MIND." NOW IT'S ON YOUR MINDS TOO…
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