Tag: China

New Years Health Resolutions?

Alright, I do know that it’s not exactly the 1st. But by now, some of you who had health, weight, or fitness resolutions for the New Year are starting to wonder if it’s really worth the effort. For you, I present these items.

Maybe your resolution was just to “eat healthier.” Well, one of the few things just about every health and nutrition expert can agree on is that fruits and vegetables are healthy — and most of us eat too few of them. And by “most of us,” I mean everybody from vegans (who often eat lots of grains) to paleo eaters (who are likely to eat handfuls of nuts and lots of meat). If you were unimpressed by the thought that eating more of them could make you “prettier,” perhaps you would like to know that it is also linked to a lower risk of dying from ischemic heart disease.

I’ve been an advocate of weight bearing exercise for years, and I like this article from BlogHer. I admit, I hate the picture. I know it was selected to be all non-threatening and get ladies used to the idea that they can lift without looking like, oh, I dunno, Gladys.* But as the article says, emphasis mine:

I lost inches everywhere – my thighs went down an inch each, my waist an inch and a half – and I lost 7% body fat. The jeans I am wearing today are a full two sizes smaller than the ones I was wearing 2 months ago. And I’m pretty sure I don’t look like any of those muscle-bound gals in the bodybuilding competitions. At least, no one has said the word “bulky” in my presence. This combination of heavy lifting and high-intensity intervals is the closest thing to a fitness miracle I’ve ever found.

If you aren’t ready to buy weights, there’s always body weight exercises like push-ups and squats. In fact, there are many regimens designed for use without any equipment more complicated than a chair.

Maybe instead of lifting weight, you want to lose weight. There’s this L.A. Times item on whether we can blame the obesity epidemic on excessive carbohydrate consumption. Nobody could blame you for wanting to lose weight; after all obesity is blamed for 16,000 extra deaths annually and $7000 in lost productivity and medical costs. Want to be horrified? Check out this infographic from Men’s Fitness:

Obesity
Via: Medicalcoding.org

Seriously, don’t give up on the New Years Resolution right now.

In closing: pre-existing conditions; a horrifying read; even more amusing given the source; bubble; science, or future made for TV movie; damn straight; overwhelming support for a handful of sensible “gun control” laws (including enforcing the ones on the books); they laughed at me when I suggested China could foreclose; banks can’t even follow the law when dealing with one another; I’ve known people who weren’t this bright; and shrimp farming.

*Make no mistake. This woman worked very, very hard for hours every day to get this look. I can’t say I know whether she uses any hormones or not. She is to be admired for her dedication. However, most women I know don’t want to look quite so muscular. And trust me, even working at my level means just forget woven shirts.

The Girl who Played with Shorties

And They Wonder Why the Peasants are Revolting: Even the market news pundits at Marketwatch get it: “In one America, one in 10 of those able to work are unemployed. In the other, Wall Street’s America, bonuses are set to increase.”

Social Security Round Up: I thought about doing a Social Security post, but so many people have already said what needs saying. To whit, most of us have small enough “savings,” “home equity,” and/or “market gains” that we expect to depend at least partly on Social Security (some people depended on it before they even fully appreciated what it was). Social Security needs to be the issue in November, because “saving,” “privatizing,” and all those other words mean nothing more than “destroy.” All those people talking about how “broke” Social Security don’t understand how it works and have an ulterior motive for “reforming” (again, synonym for “destroying”) it. Don’t look at Chile without seeing the whole picture.

Speaking of the Reid vs. Angle race: If this weren’t a race with truly nationwide implications, I wouldn’t spend so much time on elections in an entire state with a population lower than the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. But Senator Reid is the Majority Leader, and Sharron Angle is one of the highest profile teabaggers running. The press is rightfully all over it. Anyway, it’s a tight race.

The Party of Personal Responsibility: Oh! And our other Senator is blaming a “liberal organization” for his woes: namely that he had an adulterous affair and then tried to cover it up by making sure his mistress’s husband was, ahem, taken care of monetarily. Right. ‘Cause his “can’t keep it in his pants” problem? That’s totally the fault of liberals.

Everybody has seen this by now, right?: How dare unemployed people not accept low paying jobs or opportunities that require them to move halfway around the world, ungrateful wretches. Meanwhile, first time unemployment insurance claims are up.

China Knows Better: They know they can’t make do with a Latte Economy. There’s more to a vibrant economy than egg rolls and laundromats. They build stuff, and when they don’t know how to build it they make the West teach them how.

Chuck is Right: Seriously, he’s just a tweak more conservative than I, but this is spot on: “If the number of illegal aliens in this country is something like 20M, you can be real sure that drugs and other criminal activities isn’t what needs addressed. The job picture is what needs [to be] addressed. Enforcement of the pissant employment laws is virtually non-existent, employers know that the chance of getting caught out is tiny and the fines small enough to cover with their illegal hire profits.” Fewer fences, more crackdowns on employers who like workers that don’t stand up for any rights.

They like to call it an “Emergency Department” now: At least there are fewer uninsured people showing up in the ER.

Oh just come out and call Abe Lincoln a damn Liberal: “The genius of Lincoln — and it’s really the greatest historical legacy of the Republican Party — is that all individuals were to be treated based who they are, not who their parents were.” The 14th Amendment is brilliant in its simplicity. It does not need to be repealed, revised, or “interpreted“. Speaking of which, screaming over Anderson Cooper on national television is not a way to be taken seriously.

Priorities: when you think Jimmy Carter outranks Tim McVeigh, the Rosenbergs, John Wilkes Booth, and Benedict Freaking Arnold as worst person in American History, you have some truly messed up ways of thinking. Where’s Lee Harvey Oswald? Oh right, he killed a liberal so that makes him a hero I guess. I’m guessing the criteria included that they be American, which is why Osama and Emperor Hirohito are left out.

This one’s for you, JP: Hal Turner is guilty.

Popularity Counts: Over 25 most popular things. Take it for what it’s worth. I’m glad my car isn’t a “popular” color. I had a devil of a time finding that silver Civic on a parking lot!

I don’t intend to discuss Ground Zero again: Barbara lays it out.

What were they thinking?: No, you can’t legally prevent people from talking to one another at the mall.

Listen up, Ladies: a new “morning after” contraceptive is now approved by the FDA, and is good up to 5 days later.

Things are tough all over: Kroger is expanding their selection of store brand beauty products.

Blame the GOP: So says a Reagan Insider!

Are… Are World Leaders Supposed to Look Like That?: The caption makes the image even stranger.

Mortgapocolypse

Before we get to today’s news, let’s start with a bit of history and background on how banking and lending works. Long ago, the first bankers realized that the odds of everybody wanting their money at the same time were just astronomical. So if they were to lend some of that money out at interest, not only would they profit, but they could pass on a little bit of that interest to depositors, making people want to deposit money with them. Charging of interest is even discussed in the Bible, so we know it happened in Biblical times. This process in fact creates money, so it’s very important to the economy.

But let’s fast-forward to a mythical and highly simplified bank somewhere in America. We’ll call it Bailey Bank. Bailey’s got ten thousand depositors with an average daily balance of $1,000. Simple math says they have roughly $10,000,000 in deposits — small by modern standards but still nothing to sneeze at. The Federal Reserve Bank regulates how much money they need to have on hand, and also says how much needs to be deposited with them for emergency purposes. They still have plenty of money to lend out.

So Bailey makes a few dozen mortgage loans, and lends for a few farms and small businesses too. If they are short on cash, they can borrow money from nearby Potter Bank or from the Federal Reserve, at interest rates set by the Fed. These are the rates that Greenspan used to mess with, and the ones Bernanke can change today, not the rates that banks charge us but the rates they charge one another and the rate that the Fed charges them.

When they came to the point where they didn’t really have more money to lend, they sold a bunch of mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie and Freddie paid them to be the servicers — sending the bills and collecting the money — and paid Bailey most of the money they would have earned by keeping the mortgage until it was completely paid off. This left Bailey with more money to write more mortgages. But Fannie and Freddie have rules about what they will and won’t buy. So Bailey changed some lending policies to make sure that Fannie and Freddie would buy their loans. There are properties that you almost can’t get a mortgage on because other banks did the same thing.

You already know the sad story of banks being left holding the bag in the foreclosure crisis they created. And maybe you even have seen how banks are driving down property values in your neighborhood by dumping properties at ludicrously low asking prices.

This also left Fannie and Freddie behind the 8-ball, and it may yet cost American taxpayers $1,000,000,000,000 to fix it. Why bother? Because banks have stopped counting on holding mortgages until they mature and count on selling the paper to investors like Fannie and Freddie. Without someone to buy the paper and give banks more money to lend, lending will dry up even more than it already has. And that means almost nobody buys property without cash. It may already be too late to save Fannie and Freddie; they are being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. It would be polite to say that’s a negative for the stocks.

But there is one ray of sunshine in the mortgage mess: the arrest of Lee Bentley Farkas of mortgage company Taylor, Bean & Whitaker. He and unnamed conspirators are accused of fraud in the TARP program, “misappropriating” $400,000,000, and causing the collapse of Colonial Bank by selling them $1,500,000,000 in bad mortgages. I agree that this prosecution is a good start.

In closing: Arizona still keen to repeal the 14th Amendment even as its schools wonder how to comply with state law; homelessness in America; China owns 13% of the publicly held national debt; some people said I was nuts when I suggested that some religious nuts favored the life of an embryo that couldn’t even become a baby over that of a fully grown woman; terrorist nitwits; and sometimes buttons are better than velcro.