Happy New Year and Happy New Decade!!!

Happy New Year!

Reality TV Travel Adventure - Casting Call for Video Submissions - Journey of a Lifetime

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:


Screaming Flea Productions, Inc. and Stamp-It Productions, Inc.

Enter agreement to produce Pilot Episode for http://www.journeyofalifetime.com/

“The proven Production capacity of an industry leader, Screaming Flea Productions, teamed with a visionary reality TV travel adventure show concept positions this to be a breakout show for 2012.”

Del Mar, California, 2010 - It is with great excitement that Stamp-It Productions, Inc. (http://www.JourneyofaLifetime.com), a Premier Young Adult Reality TV Travel Adventure Show, has entered into an Agreement with Screaming Flea Productions from Seattle regarding the selection of user-submitted videos to be reviewed, judged and a finalist selected as the Pilot Episode for the show.



Are you looking to experience your own Journey of a Lifetime? If you are, and you’re prepared to share it with a broad audience through our new reality TV travel entertainment series, then we want to hear your story. Submit your contestant application and prepare to be whisked away by the Journey of a Lifetime team and be taken on your dream trip.



Screaming Flea and Stamp-It both know how hard it is to become a bona-fide international traveler. That's why they’ve teamed up in making it a little bit easier for the i-Generation to travel the globe. This partnership has announced today that they are holding an on-line contest to find the most compelling stories from young adults around the globe. To enter, contestants just have to register at http://www.JourneyofaLifetime.com, create a short video clip that shows why their “Journey of a Lifetime” deserves to be the selected contestant winner, and upload it at http://www.JourneyofaLifetime.com.



Like many reality TV shows, this contest will rely in part on the voting public to help choose the winner. Anyone who wants to participate can view the contestants' video clips and vote for their favorites online at http://www.JourneyOfALifetime.com. The top twelve highest ranked entrants may be named finalists, subject to review by the Casting Committee, and given a chance to win their own “Journey of a Lifetime.”



Unlike hit TV shows Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Amazing Race and American Idol, which focus on contestants that have one particular issue or kind of talent, Journey Of A Lifetime encourages a much broader range of applicants. Aspiring international travelers can submit a video of themselves explaining why their story deserves to become a winner for Journey of a Lifetime.



The CEO of Stamp-It Productions, Kendell Lang, believes the timing couldn’t be better. “This is an incredible story of young adults coming together to impact their peers and positively influence their culture. I am proud to help them implement their vision and let other young adults know that there is much more to travel than just MTV’s Spring Break or Girls Gone Wild. These are passionate and caring young adults who have a heart to share some of life’s blessings which they’ve experienced by giving back.”



Matt Chan, CEO of Screaming Flea, asks the questions, “How has travel impacted your life? What is unique about your story that would be compelling to our audience? What is that special emotional connection that this Journey of a Lifetime represents for you?”



About Screaming Flea Productions, Inc.

Seattle based Screaming Flea Productions has been producing network television for over a decade and has built a national reputation by producing creative, innovative, and original productions across all genres.

Screaming Flea Productions is one of the country’s leading producers of non-fiction television. Their clients span over fifteen different networks, both domestic and international. www.sfpseattle.com



Screaming Flea produced the current reality TV hit, HOARDERS, which has 40 episodes and a third season currently being broadcast on A&E Networks. A&E states that Hoarder’s is, “the network’s best ever season opener for any original A&E series among adults 18-49 and 25-54.” Compulsive Hoarding is a serious mental disorder affecting millions of Americans, their friends and families. Like eating disorders or alcoholism, hoarding afflicts the rich, the poor, the young, the old, doctors, stay at home moms, and computer nerds.



About Stamp-It Productions, Inc.

Stamp-It Productions is a new media entertainment company that captures the cultural change of young adults seeking purpose in their life by producing compelling travel entertainment leading to self-discovery delivered via digital media like iPod, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter; the social networking websites that our target audience uses to receive its content. Stamp-It Productions, Inc. is a young adult travel entertainment organization that encourages social interaction through the production and peer sharing of unique travel experiences. We are a Community Content Production Company focused on delivering high-quality travel content for television, DVD, broadband, web and wireless delivery. Our flagship product is the new reality TV show called Journey of a Lifetime.



For more information about becoming a BECOMING A CONTESTANT visit http://www.JourneyofaLifetime.com or to schedule a video casting call with Kendell Lang, please contact by email at Kendell.Lang@journeyofalifetime.com or by phone at (866) 347-3321.



“Do you have a dream that has become the backdrop of your imagination? A place that is calling to you? When you close your eyes and envision yourself "anywhere else but here," where is that anywhere else? Can you hear the people; what language are they speaking? Can you smell the air; what is that savory sensation? Can you feel the sun, the wind, the rain; how does it caress your skin? Can you see your dream of travel; can you see it come true? Can you see yourself in that dream; how has it changed you; how has it nourished you; how has it enlightened you; how has it become part of your soul? Journey of a Lifetime is about answering those questions and allowing the audience to really see how travel can impact lives. Journey of a Lifetime (http://www.JourneyofaLifetime.com) is your next reality TV travel adventure.”



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A Short History of Thanksgiving

A friend of mine wrote an email to me with the following, thanks Mike:

The Mayflower set sail from England on September 6, 1620,
Captained by Christopher Jones. Originally destined for the mouth
of the Hudson River, to join the English Jamestown Settlement in
Virginia, it landed instead in Provincetown, on Cape Cod,
Massachusetts due to harsh winter storms around the southern tip
of Cape Cod, 66 days later. 102 passengers set sail on that
voyage,
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_passengers_on_the_Mayflower)
two people died and one child was born en route. The majority of
the passengers (37) were members of a partisan religious group,
the Leiden Congregation, who were being actively sought out and
persecuted in England for daring to disagree with the Church of
England on some of its tenants. They fled England to Amsterdam in
1607 and eventually to Leiden, Holland, in search of religious
freedom. The members of the Leiden Congregation were referred to
as "Saints", and the others as "Strangers". The Strangers were
likely members of the Church of England, but wanted to "purify"
the Church of its "worldliness and corruption" and hence were
identified as "Puritans". Others aboard included those looking
for economic gains, some hired by English businesses to set up new
outposts and claims, some family servants and 5 men hired to stay
one year. To establish legal order and to quell increasing strife
within the ranks, the settlers wrote and signed the Mayflower
Compact.

Arriving in winter on Cape Cod, food stores depleted, the
passengers and crew sent out parties to find food. They found
food stores (mostly corn) buried in mounds by the local Indian
tribe, the Nausets. Finding food in these strange buried mounds,
they inadvertently desecrated some sacred burial mounds of the
Nausets, which led to "an encounter" at First Encounter Beach,
Plymouth. Governor William Bradford later writes in "History of
Plymouth Plantation", "only enough corn was taken to survive,
paying the locals back in six months, which they gladly received".
The passengers and crew remained on the Mayflower throughout the
winter. In March of 1621, the settlers departed the ship, only to
have an "astonishing visit" from an Abenaki Indian who spoke
English! He returned several days later with another Indian,
Squanto, a member of the Pawtuxet tribe, who had been kidnapped by
an English sea captain, sold into slavery, escaped to London and
later returned to his native land. Only 53 passengers survived
that first winter, the rest dying of scurvy, pneumonia and
tuberculosis.

The survivors built shelter and homes and begin to plant crops in
the spring, as was their English custom. Squanto taught the
weakened settlers how to cultivate corn, extract sap from maple
trees, avoid poisonous plants and fish the local streams. He also
helped them forge an alliance with the local Wampanoag tribe.
After the harvest, in the autumn of 1621, the settlers had a
celebration as was their English custom, which they called
Thanksgiving. They sent hunters out to collect game for the
feast, called "fowlers". Finding significant waterfowl, they
returned with enough fowl to feed the entire settlement for a
week. They also found large numbers of wild turkey which they
also hunted and brought to the feast. The fledgling colony also
invited its native allies with whom they had forged a bond, the
Wampanoag tribe. The King of the Wampanoag tribe, King
Massasoy(i)t, and 90 of his people joined the settlers in their
feast, and bestowed five slain deer upon the Captain and Governor
of the settlement. The second celebration of Thanksgiving was not
until the autumn of 1623, after a "Providential rainfall"
following a year of drought, and was proclaimed a "Religious
Celebration" by Governor Bradford. But the settlers were not yet
referred to as "Pilgrims".

In 1840, someone likely resurrecting the original phrase of
William Bradford, describing the "Saints" that had left Leiden for
the New World as "Pilgrims", who had quoted Hebrews 11:13-16 of
the Old Testament: "These all died in faith, not having received
the promises, but having seem them afar off, and were persuaded of
them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers
and pilgrims on the earth..."

George Washington issued the first Thanksgiving proclamation by
the national government of the United States. In it, he called
upon Americans to express their gratitude to God for the happy
conclusion to the country's war of independence and the successful
ratification of the U.S. Constitution. Some Presidents thereafter
proclaimed Thanksgivings and others did not. In 1827, a noted
editor and prolific writer of the time, Sarah Josepha Hale, author
of "Mary had a little lamb", began a campaign to establish
Thanksgiving as a national holiday. President Abraham Lincoln
proclaimed the final Thursday in November to be a national
holiday, a day of Thanksgiving in 1863. In it, he entreated all
Americans to: "ask God to commend to His tender care, all those
who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the
lamentable civil strife, and to heal the wounds of the nation".
It remained that day until 1839 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt
moved it up a week, to spur retail sales during the Great
Depression. It became known then as "Franksgiving", and due to
significant opposition, Roosevelt finally acquiesced, reluctantly
signing a Bill marking the fourth Thursday of November the
official day of Thanksgiving, in 1941.

Nearly 90% of American households serve turkey on Thanksgiving.
Parades have also become an integral part of Thanksgiving, since
1924, starting with New York based Macy's department store.
Beginning in the mid 20th century, and possibly before, the
President has "pardoned" one or two turkeys a year, sparing their
harvesting and sending them to a retirement farm. This year,
Obama pardoned four turkeys, none of whom was Rod Blagojevich. In
stately and (ambiguously) religious form, President Obama said:
"This is not the hardest Thanksgiving America has ever faced. But
as long as many members of our American family (sic) are hurting,
we've got to look out for one another". "And as long as many of
our friends and neighbors are looking for work, we've got to do
everything we can to accelerate this recovery and keep our economy
moving forward". A truly inspirational "God bless America".

Quantitative Easing Part 2 - Printing Money is NOT THE SOLUTION!

This gives you a very clear picture of what the FED is trying to do with a less than cleverly disguised printing of money called QE2, or Quantitative Easing. See if this makes any sense to you:



Here's another one for you:

Social Media Marketing and Social Media Broadcasting Roast Video

There has been so much mis-information about the appropriate use of Social Media that it's no wonder you get a hilarious clip like this making fun of social media networking.

One Night In Bangkok - Social Media Marketing Worldview

So after a grueling (but cheap) flight from San Diego, I arrived in Bangkok. It was 1am, so I went straight to the Banyan Tree Bangkok hotel where I am staying. It is located in the central business and embassy district on South Sathon Road, and is about a 40 minutes' drive from Suvarnabhumi International Airport.

Can't go anywhere without a desk at which to work! :)

the sitting area

the living room, sitting area

the give you this incredibly frangrant jasmine wrist floral upon arriving, gives the room a great fragrance!

Man was this bed a welcome sight for sore eyes after 30 hours of travel!

View from the room (left)

View from the room, center

View from the room, right

View from the room 57 stories up, you can see the shadow of my building going across the street

The coming destruction of the dollar - why George Soros really is a spooky dude

Whether you love him or hate him, the reality is that Glenn Beck does his homework. And the homework he has done on George Soros is truly frightening. To see the documented participation this "Sith lord" has had in the destruction of four (4)[...yes, that's right, 4!!!] world currencies, is a harbinger of what's coming for the U.S. dollar.

Dismiss this research as conspiracy theory at your own peril...you have been warned and I only reiterate to "do your own research...know why you believe what you believe" not because someone else tells you so.

I didn't fully understand why Glenn was using a Star Wars reference when talking about George Soros, but then I did a little research on my own. Turns out that "Sith Lord" was a title that was conferred on a powerful master of Sith knowledge. Before Darth Bane established the Rule of Two, The Brotherhood of Darkness made all force-sensitive members Sith after training them, to make the members believe themselves to be equal. (hhmmm...everyone equal, redistribution of wealth...heard that before) This strategy was created to prevent the Sith from killing each other, which is the natural order of the dark side of the force, thus violating the natural order. Bane saw this and cleansed the order by killing all of the order and created the Rule of Two; two Sith, one master to embody the power and one to crave it.

If you understand that the current path we're on all starts with George Soros. Once you know George Soros, you really don't need to go much further and the Star Wars analogy to the Sith Order makes total sense. George Soros is the guy who started Center For American Progress. Center For American Progress is the group funded by George Soros that selected John Podesta, and John Podesta selected the Obama Administration and the current White House team. This is where Van Jones went back, to the Center For American Progress. Just do a little reading on the research Glenn has put together on George Soros and his investment in Petrobras.

Read more at GlennBeck.com

To be fair, you also need to read the left perspective and how they respond to Glenn Beck. Read this story called "Progressive Hunter" to understand more about the opposition to Glenn Beck.

In an incredibly insightful piece laid out below, Ton Coumans lays a well constructed argument that supports the possibility of the coming destruction of the dollar. Instead of denying that this could even be a possibility, that just gives power to those who don't want you asking the right questions or being prepared for what they've already put in motion. The right questions are more like, "what does someone like George Soros have to gain by the destruction of the dollar?" or "what is it that the Obama Administration really believes they are accomplishing?" When you start thinking like the people in power (who could care less about the Constitution and America), then you reframe the questions and the answers (previously unthinkable to you and I) beging to make sense.

Author Dinesh D’Souza has a new book out entitled The Roots of Obama’s Rage. In brief, the book is about Barack Obama’s youth and formative experiences that ideologically made him the man he is today. Obama has been the most successful Leftist since President Lyndon Johnson, and maybe FDR, in pushing a radical agenda of socialist encroachment on the American way of life. Instead of denying the reality of what is happening all around us, if you start to ask the question, "what does he believe he's accomplishing with all this?" then you start to get to a frame of reference where from Obama's perspective everything has a purpose. Obama definitely rejects the American dream and the American way of life, but that statement doesn't make sense to Patriotic Americans unless you try and understand why that is the case. Obama has done little or nothing to advance a color-blind society, but rather seems obsessed on some level with skin color and is fanning the flames of racism instead of contributing to solutions. If you understand WHY Obama needs this controversy to continue, then you begin to understand why all these pieces are starting to make sense - only from his perspective.

1914 All Over Again?
By Ton Coumans

I am not one for art, statues or monuments. Most of these objects fail to touch me but every now and then I bump into something that sticks in my mind. Last summer I was drawn to the monument in the picture below, which stands on a square in Nevers - a beautiful city on the river Loire in France. I spent quite a long time studying it and I eventually took some pictures that, for some reason, I regularly review at home.

You will have recognized that this is a monument commemorating the tribulations of the First World War. There is a lot of symbolism in the statue but it is the French soldier's sorrowful stare that won't let me go. What trauma has he lived through? France eventually battled its way to an armistice (not victory) in 1918 after having incurred 1.7 million dead (one in 28 of the population) and over 4 million wounded. Everyone will see something different, but for me this monument is whispering; my God, what have we done?

http://dailyreckoning.com/files/2010/10/DRUS10-16-10-1.jpg

The uncanny thing is that before the outbreak of World War I, most Europeans expected the future to provide an endless stream of good fortunes, to the point of being bored by the prospect. In fact many soldiers such as the one represented by the statue, just four years earlier, were swept up by the bizarre spirit of 1914 that took hold of the peoples of Europe.

The "Spirit of 1914" which seems to have infected the passions of most of the European populations is described as a reckless urge for adventurism under the flag of nationalism. Young men in all countries volunteered to leave their prosperous lives behind and take up a fight with their European neighbors. It is difficult to comprehend the spirit of 1914. All those men lusting for adventure and the glory of battle and no one was sensing danger.

There were only a handful of people, too few to sway the opinion, that realized what lay ahead. A useless and long-forgotten quote by one of them reads: "If the scientific nations of Europe were to wage war on one another they would be thoroughly sick of it before it was finished". That quote is by Sir Winston Churchill who at the time was 37 years old and First Lord of the Admiralty. He had seen the power of artillery and machine guns in the Sudan and the Boer War and repeatedly warned against armed conflict in Europe, to no avail.

Europe had been at peace for 40 years and the millions of men that charged off to battle had no way of being able to imagine what war would be like, until they found themselves mugged by reality and stuck in the horrors of trench warfare "In Flanders Fields". That was obviously not where they had wanted the free market to take them, as Bill Bonner might assess. Nemesis, the Goddess of divine retribution, had finally found a way to sink her teeth into Europe, having waited patiently in the background during the 40 years of the Belle Epoch.

The question now is, do we stand at a similar point in history where we expect the future to provide expanding, effortless wealth, and have we been swept up by the spirit of 2006; flipping houses and living high on mortgage equity withdraws and debt? Does Nemesis have a special surprise for us and what could that be? We are in a global de- leveraging process, which is painful, but is it, in itself, truly destructive? I contend that if we are to "fall deep" there will need to be some kind of major breakdown of cooperation or even "conflict amongst peoples" resulting in a major lose-lose event that sinks the physical economy. What could that be?

In the run up to WWI, an influential book was written by General Von Bernhardi titled Germany and the next War. The book manifests Germany's frustration and militancy. Von Bernhardi proclaims that, with her scientific and intellectual achievements, Germany should have a more prominent role in world affairs, more colonial trophies with access to petroleum reserves. Germany's GDP had passed that of Great Britain and France and they now wanted more respect. France and Great Britain were maneuvering as best they could to keep Germany (a perceived threat) out of the game. Bernhardi's book also argues that war was not only a justifiable means to achieve that goal but even an obligation of Germany's leadership.

And now in 2009 we witness the wide distribution of a book titled Unhappy China, which expresses China's frustrations with their current position. The similarity in tone is uncanny. China is on its way to become the second economy of the world, yet China is not "embraced" as a member of the G8 and has almost no influence in the IMF and World Bank. China is frustrated with the West's meddling in internal affairs and with the humiliation endured by the Olympic torch run that was, in their perception, disgraced by demonstrations.

All the maneuvering by the West now is to keep China out of the game and treat them as a potential threat. Does this have automatic conflict baked into it? All out "kinetic" war does not seem realistic and more something of the past century. We have since organized the UN Security Counsel to regulate conflicts involving the use of force. But do we have adequate global institutions for monetary policy? I judge that today every government and their symbiotic Central Bank feels they have the right and obligation to use monetary policy to the advantage of their own short-sighted wealth preservation and power games. Could the conflict of the twenty-first century revolve around currency wars? Should we rephrase Churchill's warning to state, "If the financially developed nations of the world were to wage a war of competitive currency devaluation on one another, they would be thoroughly sick of it before it was finished". Could competitive currency devaluation be the bear market surprise mechanism that pits countries and peoples against one another?

The First World War is remembered for the senseless slaughter of trench warfare. Will this period be remembered for disruptive impoverishment of currency warfare? It does seem to have the potential to breed distrust and breakdown cooperation between the nations. It also has a runaway nature since it invites tit for tat exchanges. It is inherently instable because the currency that moves first and fast could have the advantage. But does it have the destructive power to sink our global physical economy? Let's hope that some years from now we will not find ourselves sorrowfully staring at the horizon and whispering; my God, what have we done.

Regards,

Ton Coumans
for The Daily Reckoning