“Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren,” Obama said in a 2006 floor speech that preceded a Senate vote to extend the debt limit. “America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.”

Obama later joined his Democratic colleagues in voting en bloc against raising the debt increase.

Now Obama is asking Congress to raise the debt ceiling, something lawmakers are almost certain to do despite misgivings about the federal debt. The ceiling already has been hiked three times in the past two years, and the House took action earlier this year to raise the ceiling to $13 trillion.

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(Editor’s note: This is complete and utter claptrap propaganda.   Speculation is caused by the availability of easy credit money via the system of fractional reserve banking which the Fed manages.  Real leaders take responsibility for the failure of the group instead of blaming it on their followers.)

LONDON (Reuters) – Another global financial crisis is inevitable because human nature always reverts to “speculative excesses” during a period of sustained prosperity, former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said.

“The crisis will happen again but it will be different,” he told BBC Two’s “The Love of Money” television series.

“That is the unquenchable capability of human beings when confronted with long periods of prosperity to presume that that will continue,” he said.

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The Crystal Cave of Giants was accidentally discovered in 2000 by miners working in the silver and lead mine at Naica, Mexico. It lies almost 300 meters (900 feet) below the surface of the Earth and it contains the largest crystals known in the world, by far. The largest crystals are over 11 meters long (36 feet) and weigh 55 tons.

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For those  of you who’ve already seen Lindsey Williams’ “The Energy Non-Crisis” and are familiar with the ideology of the international elite, you know that their most powerful tool for manipulating the public into compliance is the creation of shortages – artificial scarcity.  Thanks to a lot of practice, they’ve really honed this ability into an art.

Unfortunately, these manipulated shortages are not limited solely to oil or dollars.  Credible sources like Lindsey Williams are reporting that the elite are now targeting our food supply:

Remember, this isn’t just any person shouting his opinion from the radio rooftops.  This is Lindsey Williams, a former insider who called oil at below $50 per barrel back last year right before the drop, when  it was still selling at nearly $150 per barrel.  If you want to verify this for yourself,  click on the link below and listen to this older interview video segment when he was on Butch Paugh’s radio show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f8b3AGHyfo

You may be wondering why I’m giving you a direct link to Youtube instead of simply embedding the video.  The reason is so you can look to the upper right-hand corner and take note of the Youtube time stamp: July 11th, 2008.  The interview purportedly took place on the 9th, but unless the uploader has figured out how to hack Youtube (unlikely), this video couldn’t have been uploaded before 11th and thus it validates Williams’ claim of prior knowledge.

And in case you wanted to verify for yourself that Williams’ shot-calling matches up with the timing of the price decline, you can examine the below chart:



So if Lindsay Williams was right before…is there a reasonable chance he could be right again?  On the chance that he is right and a food shortage is coming down the pipe, what is the potential impact on you and your family?  Are you willing to take that risk?

This doesn’t mean you need to go hog-wild and spend thousands on a stockpile of dehydrated food (though it certainly wouldn’t hurt.)  All you have to do is keep a larger cache of food on hand than you normally do.  Instead of storing a week’s worth of food in your pantry, store a month’s worth.  If you have a 30-day supply on hand for every member of your family, including non-perishables like canned food, that should be sufficient based on the information we have now.

It doesn’t have to be anything special, it can simply be more of the food you already eat.  Now, if more information is released down the line that would indicate an increased likelihood or severity of crisis, at that point you’ll want to think about adjusting your preparations accordingly.

Finally, don’t forget the water – you can’t live without it.  It is recommended that you keep at least one five-gallon bucket of clean water on-hand for each member of your family and the proportional amount of water purification tablets (or the more economical alternative, “Polar Pure” iodine crystal solution).

And, please, let me be clear about one thing: this isn’t fear-mongering.  Fear is a waste of energy and totally optional in these situations – but so is preparing for them.  Don’t be scared, be prepared.  Fear is a weapon people use to control us.  Don’t let them.

Delta developed an audacious plan to come at bin Laden from the one direction he would never expect.

“We want to come in on the back door,” Fury explains. “The original plan that we sent up through our higher headquarters, Delta Force wants to come in over the mountain with oxygen, coming from the Pakistan side, over the mountains and come in and get a drop on bin Laden from behind.”

But they didn’t take that route, because Fury says they didn’t get approval from a higher level. “Whether that was Central Command all the way up to the president of the United States, I’m not sure,” he says.

The next option that Delta wanted to employ was to drop hundreds of landmines in the mountain passes that led to Pakistan, which was bin Laden’s escape route.

“First guy blows his leg off, everybody else stops. That allows aircraft overhead to find them. They see all these heat sources out there. Okay, there a big large group of Al Qaeda moving south. They can engage that,” Fury explains.

But they didn’t do that either, because Fury says that plan was also disapproved. He says he has “no idea” why.

“How often does Delta come up with a tactical plan that’s disapproved by higher headquarters?” Pelley asks.

“In my experience, in my five years at Delta, never before,” Fury says.

The military wouldn’t tell 60 Minutes who rejected the plans or why.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/10/02/60minutes/main4494937.shtml

If you haven’t noticed the recent changes over at YouTube, you haven’t been paying attention.

YouTube is fast-becoming a lite version of the popular – and apparently lucrative – commercial video site Hulu.com.  Even as you read this, user-generated content at YouTube is being systematically de-emphasized.  Video ratings are being removed or hidden, user-generated videos are being moved behind licensed corporate content, while user channels with large audiences are finding their accounts suspended for minor copyright violations and other technicalities.

Has YouTube suddenly forgotten its roots and turned against its users?  In a way, yes.  But, like it or not, YouTube is a business and eventually all start-ups must stand profitably on their own two feet.  Instead, according to a recent report by Credit Suisse, YouTube is on track to lose over $470 million this year.

Credits Suisse projects revenue of only $240 million against $711 million in costs, 51% of which coming from bandwidth charges alone and another 36% from licensing fees.  The problem, unfortunately, lies in what exploded YouTube in popularity and enabled it to capture a 41% market share: user-generated content.  YouTube, it seems, can’t make money off of it and this non-monetizable content is growing at an exponential rate compared to the licensed content which it has been able to monetize successfully.

This has led to what some are calling “the Hulu-ization of YouTube” or simply, “HuluTube.”  Google, which owns YouTube, has seemingly made the executive decision to model the reportedly profitable Hulu by increasing the amount of the monetizable licensed content on its site and cracking down on user-generated, money-sucking content.  One problem: Some users have noticed, and they’re making a big racket.

Many alternative monetizations strategies have been offered by web users across the net hoping to avert the gradual disintegration of  the YouTube community, but perhaps the more immediate solution doesn’t lie on the monetization side at all.

Could the answer instead lie with reducing bandwidth costs?

According to the Credit Suisse numbers, $360 million of YouTube’s $470 million deficit – fully 76% of the shortfall – is due to bandwidth charges.   When you’re running a video sharing site, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

But the big revolution of  Web 2.0 wasn’t simply user-generated content – it was also cost decentralization.  Suddenly, users created content for you.  They ranked that content for you.  And, if necessary, they flagged any content that was objectionable for you.  All of these are services that YouTube doesn’t pay for, at least not directly.  They are user contributions to the community.

Isn’t it about time to let that same community start contributing bandwidth?  Hasn’t the Bittorrent community already solved this dilemma?  Why not model them?  Why not marry asynchronous video streaming with cooperative distribution?

The Bittorrent technology, as described on bittorrent.org:

“Cooperative distribution can grow almost without limit, because each new participant brings not only demand, but also supply. Instead of a vicious cycle, popularity creates a virtuous circle. And because each new participant brings new resources to the distribution, you get limitless scalability for a nearly fixed cost.”

Just like that, you’re scalable.  No more exponentially rising bandwidth costs sounding the death-knell on your P&L.

Of course, YouTube would still need to stream some video from their own servers.  But most of the bandwidth usage could now be decentralized and spread out among the user base.  This would most likely require YouTube to develop a new hybrid technology which would be able to take advantage of cooperative distribution while simultaneously allowing video streaming on demand.  But if Google doesn’t have the brainpower and the money to get that done, who does?

And the same could well be said for their ability to elicit user participation with the new technology.  Might it be time to cash-in some of that hard-earned goodwill and market share before it is very likely squandered in a well-intentioned but possibly short-sighted drive for profitability?

I imagine most netizens understand that YouTube is still a business and no reasonable person expects it to continue operating at a loss indefinitely.  But by failing to fully explore and implement Web 2.0 decentralization, Google is unnecessarily punishing the very users who put the “You” in YouTube.

UPDATE:  Bittorrent has already developed a streaming version of their technology that’s been out since 2007:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/17/bittorrent-is-now-streaming-movies-with-ads-but-wheres-the-good-stuff/

In fact, Bittorrent’s creator had this to say in an interview earlier that year:

TorrentFreak: Is there a future for BitTorrent in the development of streaming online content. For example, would it be possible for video streaming sites like YouTube to use (a modified version of) BitTorrent?

Bram Cohen: Yes, we’ve developed a streaming version of BitTorrent. Stay tuned for more details around the middle of this year.

http://torrentfreak.com/interview-with-bram-cohen-the-inventor-of-bittorrent/

A reasonable person would have to assume that Bram Cohen has talked to YouTube or Google about implementing this new technology…so why isn’t it happening?

The suit by MLSMK Investments Co., a Palm Beach, Florida- based partnership, claims the New York-based bank learned of the fraud in September 2008 after investigating why funds that invested with Madoff hadn’t suffered steep losses in the global sell-off.

The bank “quietly liquidated its entire $250 million cash position” with a fund that had invested with Madoff while continuing to provide fee-generating services to Madoff’s business, according to the complaint.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=amEEjbn8B.3E

Meditation alters brain patterns in ways that are likely permanent, scientists have known. But a new study shows key parts of the brain actually get thicker through the practice.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10031664/