The source video says: Competing in the World Bowling Men's Championships in Abu Dhabi, UAE, Team USA's Bill O'Neill threw what looked like a perfect strike. However, one the pins bounced around and stood up in place, making it the strike that didn't count. Instead, O'Neill had to shoot the spare, which he made.

So it appears it counts as a spare.

Yeah, that lion cat is amazing!
>> ^Crosswords:

>> ^Morganth:
Please tell me the box is postmarked 'Abu dhabi'

Beat me to it by 5 minutes. Also OH SHIT A LION cat

>> ^Morganth:

Please tell me the box is postmarked 'Abu dhabi'


Beat me to it by 5 minutes. Also OH SHIT A LION cat

Please tell me the box is postmarked 'Abu dhabi'

Damn, a ruby looks good next to my name.

Regarding channels, from a serious point of view, I was thinking about middleeast as a channel. I grew up in Abu Dhabi and still have family in Dubai and have always been attached to the place. However, I think it'll get mixed up with Islam too much - not that it should, Islam is a religion, Middle East is a place. But I still think it'd be a pain to moderate from that point of view.

Really wished I was here in time to create videogames.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'plane, race, air' to 'racing, planes, race, air, red bull, air race, g force, speed, abu dhabi, 2009' - edited by kulpims

Robert Fisk's article is here. The basket of currencies to replace the US dollar in the oil market would be comprised of "...[the] Chinese yuan, the Euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar."

I don't have a link, but I can give you an excerpt from David Strahan's book "The Last Oil Shock":

"In 1985 Kuwait's proved reserves - the most stringent definition - leapt by almost half, from 64 gigabarrels (billion barrels) to 90Gb, and in 1988 they rose again to 92Gb. That same year Abu Dhabi's proved reserves almost tripled to 92Gb, matching Kuwait exactly, and then Iran raised the bidding by one, increasing its proved reserves from 49 to 93Gb, while Iraq more than doubled, from 47Gb to a nice round 100, and Venezuela also jumped by over 100 per cent from 25 to 56Gb. Finally in 1990 Saudi Arabia raised its proved reserves by a whopping 88Gb, from 170 to 258Gb.

So in the space of five years OPEC reserves had risen by 305 billion barrels, despite the fact that no significant discoveries had been made. Most independent observers find this utterly incredible, not only because of the sheer enormity of the revisions, but also because of other suspicious coincidences.

It was Dr Colin Campbell, the grad old man of peak oil, who first spotted them. He noticed that in 1984, just before the game of leapfrog started, Kuwait's declared reserves were 64Gb, and by that year it had produced 21,5Gb, meaning that the total discovered was 85,5Gb. The following year Kuwait increased its 'reserves' to 90Gb, and the closeness of the two figures led Campbell to suspect that Kuwait had simply started declaring the total oil it had ever discovered - including all the oil it had already produced - rather than its remaining reserves.

What was even more suspicious to Campbell was the fact that Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Iran all declared nearly identical reserves, which he interprets purely as the result of quote competition. 'It is absolutely inconceivable that three separate countries should have exactly the same number!' [...] More suspicious yet, many of the new reserve figures subsequently remained unchanged for many years, despite the fact that OPEC countries were producing billions of barrels every year."

>> ^flavioribeiro:
>> ^J-Rova:
He's questioning why the government gave up the ability to control the money supply. And if you want "checks and balances," The Federal Reserve consists of an entire board - not just Ben Bernanke.
Do you know who controls the Fed? The Fed is not a public institution. It's a cartel of private banks.


We shall consult the omnipotent Wikipedia:
"'The Federal Reserve System is not "owned" by anyone and is not a private, profit-making institution. Instead, it is an independent entity within the government, having both public purposes and private aspects."

Cartel? Like drugs? Oil? :-P And of course it's a bunch of banks! They have all the information! Would you rather it be a collection of... say, hospitals, making all the same decisions? I can picture that - "Well, Mr. Bernanke, there were an unusually high number of influenza cases this year, sooo ahh, let's see.... ahh, fuck it - we recommend contracting the money supply to prevent inflation." ???? HAH!

Since mid-2007, Bernanke has been hiking rates for people who were solvent, and lowering for the ones who were not.

Hiking and lowering rates at the same time, for specific people? I'm not sure where you got that.

Just recently Citibank had to borrow billions from Abu Dhabi at a 14% interest rate because they needed long term funds so desperately that borrowing from the Fed wasn't an option. Yesterday (Feb 14th) the Fed received a request of $268 BILLION dollars in TOMO/TAF (read: short-term) loans from depository institutions (source). That's more than 1/3 of the Fed's whole open market reserves, so only $66 billion were given out. Since the beginning of January, the big banks no longer have their own reserves. Their current reserves are composed of cash borrowed from the Fed.

People borrowed money they couldn't afford to borrow, and lenders allowed them to do it. They all miscalculated some of the risks involved, and it finally started biting some people in the ass. This is NOT the Fed's fault! The part about the reserves is one of the mechanisms the Fed has at its disposal to manage the problem.
I'm not denying that there is indeed a problem (housing market bubble, etc). I'm only denying that the Fed is to be held accountable for the problem; however, they have the means to fix it. Hence, the drastic interest rate cuts somewhat recently, etc.

Everything connected to the Fed is secretive, and not even members of Congress with the highest clearance can find out what's going on.
Is this bad?

I must admit, I wasn't prepared for the amount of scrutiny drawn from a rant on the absurdity of the ideas in this video.

>> ^J-Rova:
He's questioning why the government gave up the ability to control the money supply. And if you want "checks and balances," The Federal Reserve consists of an entire board - not just Ben Bernanke.

Do you know who controls the Fed? The Fed is not a public institution. It's a cartel of private banks.

Despite the fact that the economy is beyond complex (every action has both good & bad consequences, which are incredibly far-reaching), the Fed knows what it's doing.

Recent events clearly show that the Fed either does NOT know what it's doing, or knows and is acting contrary to the United States' best interest by following a political agenda. The Fed's policy of low interest rates created the current housing bubble, and it's laughable to claim that this was good planning.

Since mid-2007, Bernanke has been hiking rates for people who were solvent, and lowering for the ones who were not. He's made the problems worse by breaking the people who actually could pay their bills, which in turn caused more trouble for the ones who were insolvent to begin with. We have a huge amount of foreclosures and still no one knows what the hell is going on with the big depository institutions.

Just recently Citibank had to borrow billions from Abu Dhabi at a 14% interest rate because they needed long term funds so desperately that borrowing from the Fed wasn't an option. Yesterday (Feb 14th) the Fed received a request of $268 BILLION dollars in TOMO/TAF (read: short-term) loans from depository institutions (source). That's more than 1/3 of the Fed's whole open market reserves, so only $66 billion were given out. Since the beginning of January, the big banks no longer have their own reserves. Their current reserves are composed of cash borrowed from the Fed.

All this shows that there are very big players in trouble out there, but we have no way of knowing who they are. Everything connected to the Fed is secretive, and not even members of Congress with the highest clearance can find out what's going on.

I could go on for hours about the amount of BULLSHIT that Bernanke puts forth, but I won't. The information is out there, so I suggest you use your "background in economics" to find it.

Any politician who tries to challenge the independence of the Federal Reserve loses whatever he was running for. It is believed that this is why Bush Sr. lost to Clinton, because he pressured the Fed for lower interest rates (which is a BIG NO-NO), as you can see in the following link.

This is ridiculous once you consider that Greenspan helped implement GWB's policy of artificially low interest rates and deficit spending which ultimately led to the mess we're in.