Americans Owe $1 Trillion on Their Homes?!

This is an interesting graph. It shows that Americans increased their mortgage debt by 500% between 1996 and 2006, from $200 billion, to $1 trillion. That can't be a good thing. I was surprised to see that the consumer credit amount owed has been pretty steady. I wonder if that's because people keeping buying their toys using home equity lines of credit (or borrowing in their house to pay down credit card debt, only to go max out their cards again).

Reducing Your Risk of Alzheimer's Disease

The following tips came from Erik Janson. He was featured on the January 8, 2008 episode of Radio Liberty. He spoke about the various studies that show high levels of aluminum in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. Alzheimer's is the #7 killer in America.

• Switch to aluminum free baking powder. It's easy to find in the grocery store.
  
• Don't wrap foods, especially acidic foods in aluminum foil.
  
• Some brands of American cheese and non-dairy creamer use aluminum. Avoid these.
  
• Many cities add it to their drinking water. He didn't talk about water filters, but they'd be worth looking into. He also mentioned that your skin would absorb aluminum through bathing, so look into shower filters as well.
  
• Throw out all your aluminum pots, pans, and utensils.
  
• Only buy soda in glass bottles. Aluminum cans are lined with plastic to reduce it leaching into acidic soda, but the plastic isn't always applied properly.
  
• Drink wine, eat lots of fruits, vegetables, blueberries, and spice your food with turmeric (in curry powder) to help chelate aluminum from your body.
  
• Avoid antiperspirants with aluminum.
  
• Consider taking alpha-lipoic acid to help prevent Alzheimer's. If a relative already has it, look into giving him or her 600-800 mg daily to slow the progression of the disease.
  
• Taking fish oil reduces your risk by 50%. It also helps Alzheimer's patients.
  
• One study showed that patients that took 200% of the RDA of zinc slowed the progression of Alzheimer's disease by 8-9 months.
  
• Finally, make sure to take the RDA of folic acid daily.
  

Recruiting for Your Ron Paul Meetup Group

This article on the lesssons learned from the Wyoming caucus suggests that whenever we meet a fellow Ron Paul supporter, we make sure to get their contact info and follow up with him or her, with the goal of getting a new meetup group member. Our local meetup group started in May and is up to 400 members.

Consumers vs Citizens

Have you ever noticed that the media always refers to us as "consumers" rather than "citizens?" Dictionary.com defines a "consumer" as a person who consumes things. The define "consume" as

1. to destroy or expend by use; use up.
2. to eat or drink up; devour.
3. to destroy, as by decomposition or burning: Fire consumed the forest.
4. to spend (money, time, etc.) wastefully.
5. to absorb; engross: consumed with curiosity.

In contrast, here is the definition of "citizen"

1. a native or naturalized member of a state or nation who owes allegiance to its government and is entitled to its protection (distinguished from alien).
2. an inhabitant of a city or town, esp. one entitled to its privileges or franchises.
3. an inhabitant, or denizen: The deer is a citizen of our woods.
4. a civilian, as distinguished from a soldier, police officer, etc.

I especially like how the word consumer originated from a word that meant "squanderer."

So, as far as the media is concerned, Americans waste their time and money, destroy, and use up things. We aren't entitled protection from our government - that sounds too biblical, the idea of God allowing governments to protect people's rights.

On second thought, maybe the media is right. Governments take away our rights better than they protect them. And our whole culture is based on the "consumer" mindset. Why, if mothers stayed home, they wouldn't pay as much taxes! And then the day cares, restaurants, maids, etc. wouldn't have as much work and pay as much taxes!

"Oh," you say "but if mothers stayed home and did these things, where would all the newly unemployed people work?" It's funny how people worry about unemployment. There will always be work that needs to be done...even if nobody is hiring. A mother's work is never done, and neither is a city's work ever done. The trick must be to find a need and find a way to get paid for filling it.

30% Down Payments for <680 Credit Score

The Orange County Register is reporting that many home buyers with credit scores of less than 680 have to pay an extra fee if they don't have a down payment of at least 30%.

The new FICO-based fees vary from 0.75 to 2 percent of the loan amount and are in addition to the 0.25 percent fee on all loans. Hence the maximum combined fees, for someone with a FICO less than 620, would be $9,382.50, or 2.25 percent of $417,000....

Separately, Fannie said beginning Jan. 15 it will lower by 5 percent the total amount it is willing to fund against the value of a home in "declining" housing markets. For example, if it previously allowed 100 percent of the value of a home, it will only allow 95 percent.

I'm glad to see an inkling of common sense coming into all of this. I applaud all moves that reduce the risk of taxpayers bailing Fannie Mae out. Of course, if the federal government wasn't involved in backing mortgages (totally unconstitutional), the housing bubble wouldn't be as bad. If a bank can sell off a mortgage to the government, what incentive do they have to make sure they only lend to buyers that will actually pay the money back? People are generally more careful investing their own money than they are investing other people's (taxpayer) money.

Safe Sippy Cups?

Dr. Mercola issued a warning about nalgene water bottles having endocrine disrupters in them (chemicals that mimic or prevent proper use of hormones by your body). I've heard some plastics leach these chemicals into our food more than others. One of the things on my mental list of health improvements to make is to stop storing our leftovers in plastic all the time. I'd also like to find a safe sippy cup for our son to use. He does pretty well drinking from glass cups, but I'm not going to hand him a glass in the car. If you know of a non-breakable yet safe sippy cup, let me know.

Homeschooler Produced Movie Coming Soon

Come What May is an interesting looking movie produced by homeschoolers that will supposedly be released this spring. I was pleased to see in the preview that the female lead character told the male lead character "The man I give my heart to is the man I'm going to marry." It's nice to see movies reflecting the move away from the dating model by many Christians. I'm also hoping that the characters in the movie are appropriately dressed. My husband and I are so sick of all the skin shown everywhere.

Arboursculpture = Crazy Trees!

And I thought espaliering trees was unusual. Take a look at these tree sculptures!

Honey May Treat Scars

One of the nutrition groups I'm on had a thread about honey. Two members have had success treating cuts and reducing scars by applying honey to the area daily and then covering with a bandaid. I've never tried it, but it's cheap enough to try. They didn't mention the type of honey used, but my guess is that they used raw honey.

Exercise Doesn't Help You Lose Weight?

In Good Calories, Bad Calories, Gary Taubes mentions several human and animal studies done with exercise. It wasn't until the 1960s that the media and doctors started pushing exercise as a way to lose weight. Before that, people used their common sense - when you exercise and burn more calories, your appetite increases and you eat enough to make up for what you burned off!

Am I discouraging exercise? Not at all - it's still good to be in shape. Weight lifting helps increase your muscle mass, which is a good thing. We all feel sorry for old ladies who are so weak they can't carry a small stack of dishes. Weight-bearing exercise also supposedly helps maintain bone mass.

My main reason for this post is that if exercise doesn't help lose weight (and keep it off), then we need to change our goals if we want to stick with it. If you join a gym next week because you want to lose weight and it doesn't seem to help, you'll drop out by the end of January, like millions of other Americans.

If, however, you lift weights to get stronger, that's a realistic goal, and also easy to track. If you run, ride bikes, or play sports because you sleep better or are in a better mood, those are also good goals. It's hard to force yourself to workout to lose weight if it doesn't seem to work. But if you focus on the immediate and obvious benefits, I think you might be able to keep your resolution to work out this year.

Campaign for Ron Paul From Home

We've been helping out this week with the Ron Paul letter campaign. So far, we've sent out about 500 letters. Obviously we didn't hand write each, but I did sign each letter and we hand addressed the envelopes. Next weekend, we're having a letter stuffing party with people from our church. We hope to get 400 ready to mail in two-three hours.

Why Carbs Make You Fat

I've been reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. It's a fascinating book about how modern diet advice is all wrong. He discusses the studies done in the last 140 years that demonstrate that carbohydrates, especially grains and sugars raise insulin levels, which then makes (or keeps) you fat. Doctors still advise people exercise, eat less, and eat a high carb/low fat diet, despite all the human and animal studies that show these strategies never work in the long run.

Oh yes, you may lose some weight at first, but you'll be hungry and eventually put the lost weight back on. In fact, usually you'll wind up even heavier, because your body lowered its metabolism while you were dieting, and after you stop, you'll gain weight more easily.

It is important also to know that the fat cells of adipose tissue are "exquisitely sensitive" to insulin, far more so than other tissues in the body. This means that even low levels of insulin, far below those considered the clinical symptom of hyperinsulinemia (chronically high levels of insulin), will shut down the flow of fatty acids from the fat cells. Elevating insulin even slightly will increase the accumulation of fat in the cells. The longer insulin levels remain elevated, the longer the fat cells will accumulate fat, and the longer they'll go without releasing it.

Moreover, fat cells remain sensitive to insulin long after muscle cells become resistant to it. Once muscle cells become resistant to the insulin in the bloodstream, as Yalow and Berson explained, the fat cells have to remain sensitive to provide a place to store blood sugar, which would otherwise accumulate to toxic levels or overflow into the urine and be lost to the body....

(page 393)

Did Fleas Spread Smallpox?

An articles on the politics of vaccines questions the traditional view of how smallpox was spread.

Dr. Campbell’s belief, based on his observations and experience, was that smallpox was spread by bed bugs, a pest most of us haven’t had to experience in our lifetimes but is making a comeback. That the bed bug could be a vector makes logical sense given what we know about the spread of smallpox to Native American populations via blanket distributions. Viruses do not live for long periods of time absent a host; unlike bacteria which can lay dormant for decades while retaining viability. Bed bugs, like fleas, offer a convenient host for a virus and can live for weeks without food in unwashed bedding. Campbell’s work has been mostly ignored by the establishment medical community and the press.

The Housing Bubble

My new favorite blog is the Housing Bubble Blog. I have learned a tremendous amount there in the last few months. During the summer, we had been praying for wisdom about if we should buy a house or continue renting. I think finding the HBB was an answer to prayer.

The Mortgage Bailout Isn't for the Peons

The recently proposedmortgage bailout was actually designed to protect the banks, not citizens facing foreclosure. The way I understand it, banks rarely hold mortgages themselves. Instead, they sell the right to collect the payments, keeping a commission for themselves. They have little incentive to make sure loan applicants can afford the payments, since they are just the middlemen. Hence, a large pecentage of loan applications in the last two years lied about the applicants income, stating they earned more than they did.

Mortgages are then pooled together and sold as bonds to pension funds, governments, etc. Bonds are rated, according to their security, just as insurance companies are rated. Unfortunately, the bond rating agencies have also lied to the public and rated many bonds much higher than they deserved. In recent months, some have gone from high ratings to junk status overnight, once the fraud was revealed.

Now the investors that bought these bonds thought they were a relatively safe investment. If you were investing the money for people's pensions and retirement, you wouldn't buy bonds that involved fraud, would you? No, you'd want to buy bonds that contained mortgages that people could actually afford to pay back.

What I just learned is that when fraud is discovered, the bond owners can sue the bank to make the bank buy the bond back. After all, the bank is the one that helped the loan applicant committ fraud. The article in the link describes how there has been so much fraud in the industry, that if the bond owners start demanding the banks buy back the bonds (because they are worth much less than they were told), all the banks in the country together can't afford to buy them back.

So the bailout looks like it was designed to reduce the bond owners ability to sue for fraud. It has little to do with saving people from foreclosures. If the bailout doesn't go through, I wonder if the banks will hope the Fed speeds up the money printing presses enough to try and inflate their way out of it. Either we, you and I will pay the price.