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POPSDIY soap – cleaning up your act Half way recipes (in which you take a pure form of soap and spruce it up) can be easy to do at home. You can use Castille soap to make several varieties of body wash. Here is one recipe: Vanilla Almond Soap 1/3 cup whole almonds 1 4-ounce bar Castille soap 1/4 cup distilled water 1 tablespoon almond oil 1/8 teaspoon vanilla essential oil Grind the almonds in a food processor or coffee grinder. Using a cheese grater or a knife, shred the bar of Castille soap. Boil the water and add the shredded soap, stirring until you get a nice gooey texture. Reduce to a simmer and then add in the almond grinds, oil and vanilla. You can spoon the soap into molds (ice cubes can make little gift soaps) and let it sit for around five hours until it hardens.
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POPS Thomas Sowell: Random Thoughts
But what this means is that even the record-breaking federal deficit understates the government's real financial liabilities, because agencies like FDIC and the Federal Housing Authority are likely to need increased amounts of money to keep going. An e-mail from a reader says that liberals like to take the moral high ground, even though their own moral relativism means that there is no moral high ground. I doubt whether the man responsible for the massacre at Fort Hood will pay with his life for the lives that he took. He may well be free again someday. We can only hope that he does not get a hero's welcome when he arrives in some terror-sponsoring country, the way the Lockerbie bomber did. A recent study by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights showed that, after the housing boom and bust, blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asian Americans and American Indians all reduced their subprime mortgage loans. Only politicians seem not to have learned anything from the economic disaster ...
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POPSBank can't prove it owns the mortgage, Judge writes off $460k debt This is why Rep. Kaptur was telling people facing eviction to squat in their own homes , refuse to be evicted, and make the bank demonstrate in court that the debt is legitimate . Possession is 9/10 of the law. I predict that this is the first tremble of a massive shock-wave about to move through our economy.
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POPSIs the Economy Recovering? The Curious Case of 1920 vs. 1929 The basic questions we need to ask here are: 1. Why do economies recover? 2. Are we recovering? Q. Why do economies recover? A. They recover because bad investments made during the bubble are liquidated, valuable capital is no longer being wasted on them, new capital is formed from savings, and profitable enterprises attract new capital to expand. Low real interest rates caused by increased savings encourage borrowing, manufacturers use the capital to make new machines, producers of consumer goods buy them, cash goes through the system, consumers see things are getting better, more consumer goods are produced, and consumers buy them. It has to happen this way or the recovery will fail. The difficult part of a recovery is ugly. Bankrupt firms need to fail so that valuable capital resources are not wasted on their continuing activities. This means that unemployment rises (10.2% now) and business bankruptcies are high. Trillions of dollars of asset values are wiped out.
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POPSTown Hall protesters are nativists, not racists More: Just consider how utterly stupid and idiotic conservatives seem to serious Democrats when they smugly tell each other that progressives and Democrats are all really “fascists” because they support a variety of mild social-democratic polices. Within their closed ideological bubble the conservatives feel quite certain that they have achieved a deep psychological insight by recognizing that latent Adolph Hitlers lie just beneath the surface of everyone from Teddy Kennedy to Robert Redford and Jane Goodall. They actually sit around and pat themselves on the back for their penetrating aptitude at psychological analysis. This is exactly how stupid progressives and Democrats appear to culturally conservative Americans when they label as “racism” beliefs that these Americans know are in reality vastly different and more complex.
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POPSGenius: Mortgage Program Will Spend $3,000,000 per Loan Repair Three million mortgages are believed to be eligible for HAMP with 500,000 in a trial phase. The trial was supposed to last three months, but it has since been stretched to five months . The Doctor believes that many of these "repaired" loans will simply re-default. Why? For one reason, the underwriting (courtesy of TurboTax Tim) for the program uses "stated income", not verified income. These are the very same "liar's loans" that helped trigger the mortgage meltdown! Examining the chart, of the 50,130 trial modifications entered into in May, only 1,711 (or only 3%) resulted in a permanent modification! As The Huffington Post reported a few days ago, the low number of permanent modifications is still appallingly low ("HAMP will come nowhere close to keeping up with foreclosures"). Among the reasons for the low conversion rate: failure to make timely payments (doh!), failure to assemble necessary documentation (like income verification), and other . . .
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POPSDeath As Timeless Reality Death is ultimately just another transformation, from one configuration of matter and energy into another. But unless you can stand outside the arena of change, death represents an end point, an extinction. To escape death ultimately means escaping the worldview that gives death its terrible sense of closure and finality. Adapted from Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 1998).
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POPSAt 10% Unemployment America Still Doesn't Have Enough Workers But of course, it's really not much a paradox at all. After years and years of a housing bubble, we have millions of Americans trained in some capacity relating to housing, and those skills are no longer needed. Concepts like this should shred anyone's notion of an output gap. Sure, American hands are underutilized, but if those hands don't have anything to do that's productive, can they really be considered unused "capacity." No, they can't. And this is the problem with big, macro-thinking. You can point to two GDP trendlines and say "Look, undercapacity..." but that totally ignores the ground level where real employees have to find jobs that they're suited for, and no amount of expansionary practice can change that problem.
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POPS(NOT)Federal (NO)Reserve - Bank After watching this video This video here that i have clipped is a must see. It is the Beginning of the criminal control of these global Banking Families. http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/8D34CDB8-B4BA-475A-A016-BA569688751A/
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POPSAmerican Casino: A Documentary About the Home-Mortgage Crisis more @ clip source the Cockburns meet one guy in "American Casino" who understands the whole mess better than most, a California real estate investor named Jeff Greene who smelled the end of the housing bubble around 2006 and bet $1 billion against the mid-decade exuberance of Wall Street. Sitting in his walled and gated beach compound in Malibu, Greene calmly tells the camera that the opportunity for his successful hedge bet (which has yielded $500 million so far) involved massive pain for millions of homeowners.
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POPSIt's About Spain Today, Tomorrow....the US? Banks in Spain are manipulating the housing market by artificially shoring up excess demand. Are we to believe that buying 110,000 homes was an investment made for returns? I hope I don't hear a echo of this thinking in the U.S. Sadly, hopes do not dictate reality.
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POPSEndless Oil Kutcherov's technique involves dividing the world into a fine-meshed grid that maps cracks (or migration channels) under the Earth's crust, through which the hydrocarbons can bubble up to the surface. His advice: Drill where the cracks meet. Doing this, he predicts, will dramatically reduce the likelihood of dry wells. Kutcherov expects the success rate of drillers to more than triple, from 20% to 70%, saving billions in exploration costs while opening up vast new areas of the planet --most of which has never been deemed to have promise -- to exploration. Good news for oil-dependent humans, I guess. Not so good for the environment and climate change.
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