Lofty Matters

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Show your Olympic spirit by purchasing Olympic Visa Gift Cards! Why buy someone just a plain gift card when you could present someone you care about with a gift card sporting Michael Phelps!

This is a great idea for birthdays, as employee or customer appreciation, or really just about anything. Hurry though…this is a limited time offer and it won’t be around for long.

Are North Americans prepared for what is facing us in the future? The American dream is slowly becoming a nightmare. Our prosperity seems to be built on the believe that exhausting the world’s resources as quickly as possible is the thing to do…without any concern about our neighbors, other life on this planet, or our children.

The rest of the world is waking up to America’s extravagant use of energy and resources and for their own survival they may begin to restrict energy transfers to the US.

An embargo placed on us by other nations?

The Diminished Food Supply in the US

Just how critically low is our food reserves right now?

November 1, 2004 inventory list of U.S.D.A. Commodity Credit Corporation [C. C. C.] owned stocks.

The C. C. C. inventory was as follows: corn - 100,000 bushels, barley -100,000 bushels, oats - 100,000 bushels, wheat [Minus quantities committed to the Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust] 2,300,000 bushels, non-fat dry milk [minus quantities committed to Dairy/ Donations] 3,700,000 pounds, cheese [minus quantities to Dairy/ Donations] 1,100,000 pounds.

The C. C. C. owned inventories are ZERO for the following commodities: butter, soybeans, sorghum, rice, honey, peanuts, canola, flax seed, sunflower oil and seed, dry peas and lentils.

Let’s do some simple math. If we add these figures and divide them by current U. S. Population we discover our food reserves can be measured in ounces!

We have less than one pound of commodity per citizen.

The “Freedom to Farm” law has a goal to get the government out of supply management and food reserves. Now companies like Cargill, Tyson, and ADM own and manage the world’s food supply and also our security.

There is no surplus of food in our world or this country. Stocks of food and fiber should be viewed as an asset, not a liability. The fact of the matter is the United States now operates with ‘a trade deficit’ with regard to agriculture. No more can “we feed the world.”

Will the world will now feed us?

We are steadily replacing a policy of agriculture trade and food reserves with the export of guns, bombs, and weapons of war.

Respect for the land and those who cultivate and harvest the bounty must be recognized and elevated. Hunger, poverty and war will continue to multiply if we stay on this present course. Why assume all the risks and suffering when there is so much more to be gained from a wise food and fiber policy?

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The 2008 Beijing Olympics might go down in history as the first ever “Web Games.” This is the first Olympics where the use of various new media platforms to broadcast the Olympics–such as video-on-demand, mobile video, and streaming Web video–has been an option…and a successful option at that. Through the first four days of the Games, usage of these platforms has been increasing every day.

Stats showing by Monday showed Web video made up about 7 percent of all the Olympic viewing.

The huge majority of Olympic viewing is still taking place on TV but there is a large part of the audience watching on the Internet instead.

NBC is still seeing huge ratings gains over the last two Olympic Games so we can infer that the online audience is not overrunning the TV audience. Instead, the network is surmising that online viewers are actually being driven to television viewing.

Mobile started on opening night with 210,333 streams. By Monday that had more than doubled to 476,062 (making up about 0.5 percent of the total Olympic audience). The Web had 4.2 million unique visitors on opening night. Compare this with 70.1 million people who watched at least six minutes of the Opening Ceremonies on television.

By Monday, the Web audience had risen to 7.8 million unique users. This comprises 7.6 percent of that day’s total audience.

The Web has created a more expectant and more demanding sports audience. People want to watch things live.

Although the Beijing Olympics is the first Olympics to be available online, highlights were produced for Athens. Visitors to NBCOlympics.com had already passed the total number of visitors recorded during the 2004 Games in Athens by only day 4 of these Olympics.