Tag Archives: Libertarian living

Natural AC: Five plants that can dehumidify for free

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Tillandsia Royalty Free Stock Images

I’ve been looking around for natural methods to combat humidity for those days when the air-conditioner fails….or in places where it isn’t used.

For instance, AC isn’t as popular in Europe as it is in the United States.

That’s for a variety of reasons – including greater environmental awareness, better built homes, and popular fear of illness from constant exposure to cold air. Many Europeans think  air-conditioning makes you sick.

[Read this American tourist’s AC-induced cultural-shock in France.]

AC is also a lot of maintenance and expense.

So, finding a way to get humidity down without becoming dependent on a complicated mechanical device has got to be attractive to anyone with a survivalist bent.

There are several well-known natural methods to reduce humidity, but they still take quite a bit of effort and not all the ingredients are easy to come by in developing countries.

One of them requires hanging cheese-cloth (or gunny, burlap, or jute) bags of rock-salt from the ceiling, with buckets beneath to catch the water as it drips down.

Rock-salt is a desiccant, which means it extracts the moisture from the air until it is water-logged itself.

If you’ve ever had a salt-shaker that got clogged on humid days, you know how that works.

By the way, the solution to moisture in salt-shakers is simple – throw in a few grains of raw rice. They’ll absorb moisture in the shaker and keep your salt dry.

If rock-salt (salt with large crystals) is unavailable where you live, you can also spread table-salt in pans and leave them on counters or shelves. Table salt will absorb some atmospheric moisture until it’s too wet do absorb any more.  After the salt becomes water-logged, it can still be heated, dried, and reused.

Other dehumidifiers include baking soda , silica, and charcoal briquets. They do well as desiccators, but they’re not cheap in many places and they need to be replenished…or, in the case of silica, heated for reuse.

I’ve never tried salt or silica this way, so I don’t know if it actually has an appreciable effect on the humidity inside a house that’s worth the effort and clutter of pans and bags all over the place.

A simpler and more aesthetic method would be to grow indoor plants that absorb humidity.

At first, this seems counter-intuitive, because most plants add to the moisture content of the air.

If you live in an arid area, humidifying plants can be very useful.

That’s besides all the other proven benefits of house plants – purifying the air, improving mental focus and general health, speeding up healing, and making it easier for you to breathe.

Still,  there are a few plants that reduce humidity or at least balance it.

DoItYourself.com has a list of five “plant dehumidifiers” that are easily grown indoors:

1. The Peace Lily, which needs watering just once a week and sucks in moisture from the air the rest of the time.

2. The Reed Palm, which also purifies the air.

3. English Ivy, which you can hang from the ceiling out of your way, where it will reduce humidity and take care of airborne mold.

4. Boston Fern, which balances the humidity in the air, in addition to reducing it.

5. Tillandsia (also known as air-plant), which doesn’t even need a root system to absorb water an nutrients from the atmosphere.

The catch to this list is that when I researched the names of plants that add to humidity indoors, three names on this list –  the peace lily, the English Ivy, and the Boston fern – showed up on the list of humidifiers as well.

So, if humidity is a severe problem where you live, it might be better to just stick with the Reed plant  (one of the most useful plants in permaculture) and Tillandsia.

Tillandsia, a type of bromeliad, needs no soil and very little watering and can be mounted on cork, wood, wire, twigs, on a shelf or wall cabinet.

A Reader Writes About Going Off-grid

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I got a note this afternoon about an old article, “Getting off  the grid”:

Ms. Rajiva,
Your article Getting Off the Grid was excellent. I like your suggestion to
start letting go of things you can do without first. It is how I’ve
progressed and seems like a more natural path to getting off the grid.
Thank you for sharing your insight.
A.B

Thank you, A.B.   I’m replying here, because I’ve decided it’s not wise to reply to people I don’t know a bit, on my email.

Letting go of anything always sounds difficult when it’s proposed to you theoretically. When you run up against it in the course of living, it’s not that hard.

How many people worry about trivial blemishes in their appearance. And then cancer strikes and suddenly they don’t care about anything but getting the pain to stop.

People throw tantrums about a rearrangement of their office furniture, and then they’re fired and have to get used to a trailer or a basement apartment.

Instead of waiting for fate to take something away from you, just figure out what you can release on your own.  It hurts less when you do it yourself.

Gender Wars: A Word To The Wise

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Comment at A Voice Of Men.com

“If men were all that into how women look, why does she think that 99,9% of the men on the planet will shy away from the question: ‘Does this dress make my ass look fat?’
Besides the trouble you might get into if you actually dared answer the question truthfully, I find it really hard to believe that men give a rat’s ass to begin with. On a very basic level men will look at a woman and go:
‘Is she young and fertile?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ok, she will do.’
All you have to do is look at all the fat, bleached and self-centered women out there, that are some man’s wife, to prove this point.

If women spend half the amount of time they spend in front of the mirror, trivializing over petty details about their looks, on actually having sex with us, and doing something serious about what’s going on on the inside, there would be no shortage in men loving them.”

Comment:

Blog comments are often more enlightening than the blogs themselves. Digging around for more information about the crime of battery-acid throwing, common in some parts of Asia including India, I came across a masculinist blog, on which I found this gem of a comment.

I call it a gem, because although it’s ill-tempered and unfair (we women do spend time on fixing our “insides”), it manages to say more in one paragraph, intentionally and unintentionally, than many an essay in ten.

A truth that is uncomfortable to many women is that sex is more important to men than it is to women (we’re talking averages and generalities).

Despite all the media hype, beyond a few attributes signifying youth and health (which are both important for fertility),  a high level of beauty is simply not needed for male sexual and emotional engagement, as even men readily admit.

(See here and here and even here (Naomi Wolf: “The Beauty Myth,” Anchor, 1992), although Wolf’s other contentions are controversial and not something I want to bring into this blog post.

Then, what is important for male sexual engagement?

Evidently, the opposite of female self-involvement.

That would be a woman’s awareness of the needs, thoughts, and feelings of people around her.

Something your neighborhood padre would be happy to celebrate.

Women concerned about the raging gender-wars should chew on that.

Maybe Shakespeare was onto something, after all.

First US State Recognizes Jury Nullification

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The freedom-loving people of New Hampshire have quietly hit one out of the ball-park for the cause of true justice. At LRC blog, Will Grigg reports on jury nullification in New Hampshire. In a dark sky, this is one bright, shining star.
“Posted by William Grigg on July 6, 2012 10:10 AM

When New Hampshire Governor John Lynch signed HB 146 into law on June 18, the Granite State became the first in the nation to enact a measure explicitly recognizing and protecting the indispensable right of jury nullification.

New Hampshire’s jury nullification law reads, in relevant part: “In all criminal proceedings the court shall permit the defense to inform the jury of its right to judge the facts and the application of the law in relation to the facts in controversy.”

There is nothing novel about the principle and practice of jury nullification, which dictates that citizen juries have the right and authority to rule both on the facts of a case, and the validity of a given law. This is widely recognized in judicial precedents in both American history and in Anglo-Saxon common law dating back to the Magna Carta (or earlier). At the time of the American founding it was well and widely understood that the power of citizen juries — both grand and petit — was plenary, and that their chief function was to force the government to prove its case against a defendant — and the validity of the law in question.

In contemporary America, however, trial by jury has been all but abolished in practice. Reviewing recent Supreme Court rulings, legal commentator Adam Liptak of the New York Times observes that in its just-completed term, the High Court “has turned its attention away from criminal trials, which are vanishingly rare, and toward the real world of criminal justice, in which plea bargains are the norm and harsh sentences commonplace.” (Emphasis added.)

The fact that the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers, which is supposedly sacrosanct, has become all but extinct illustrates the extent to which the U.S. “justice” system has become Sovietized.

After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the jury system — which had been established under Czar Alexander II in 1864 — was abolished and replaced with “People’s Courts” composed of a judge and a panel of two to six Party-appointed “assessors” who heard all of the evidence and decided all questions of both fact and law. The assessors “became known as `nodders’ for simply nodding in agreement with the judge,” wrote federal Judge John C. Coughenour in an article published by the Seattle University Law Review. “People’s assessors virtually always agreed with judges; acquittals were virtually nonexistent…. [U]nlike our adversarial system, the Soviet inquisitorial criminal justice system neither prioritized nor emphasized the rights of individual defendants, but instead paid homage to the interests of the state.”

One very telling measure of the Regime’s fear of citizen juries — especially those informed of their right to nullify unjust laws — is found in the efforts expended by prosecutors to prevent cases from going to trial.

In his 1998 book (co-written with Lawrence M. Stratton) The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts points out that “the vast majority of felony cases are settled with a plea bargain….” Many, perhaps most, “felonies” today involve no offenses against persons or property, no criminal intent, and are usually a product of an opportunistic prosecutor’s malicious creativity in confecting a criminal offense.

It is common for prosecutors to multiply charges as a way of terrorizing an innocent defendant into accepting a plea. Very rarely do we see a defendant with the means to defend himself in such circumstances. For the average citizen who finds himself targeted by an ambitious prosecutor, a plea bargain usually seems like the only relatively palatable alternative to the expense of a trial and the possibility of a long time in prison. At the bargaining table, “I’m all in” for the prosecutor means that, should he lose, he would sacrifice a little prestige, with the taxpayers absorbing all of the expenses; the defendant stands to lose everything and faces the prospect of utter ruin.

This is why so many innocent people are willing to deal. For the State, the most attractive feature of such arrangements is the fact that it keeps such cases away from juries. And we’re left with a “justice” apparatus that functions, in the words of legal scholar John Langbein, like “the ancient system of judicial torture,” which relied on self-incrimination through duress, rather than conviction on the basis of sound evidence.”

A Tribute To Ayn Rand And The Spirit Of America

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A Tribute to Ayn Rand

I posted this in 2008 and I’m reposting it from PopModal today because it seems to be corrupted on my blog and the youtube version has vanished

Projwal Shreshta  compiled the quotations from “Atlas Shrugged” and the music, which is Divano, by Era.

From “Atlas Shrugged”:

“I started my life with a single absolute: that the world was mine to shape in the image of my highest values and never to be given up to a lesser standard, no matter how long or hard the struggle.”

“What is morality, she asked.
Judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, and courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price. ”

“The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that.”

“I never found beauty in longing for the impossible and never found the possible to be beyond my reach.”

“I take no pride in hopeless longing; I wouldn’t hold a stillborn aspiration. I’d want to have it, to make it, to live it.”

“I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life.”

“Every form of happiness is one, every desire is driven by the same motor.- by our love for a single value, for the highest potentiality of  our own existence — and every achievement is an expression of it.

“Every man builds his world in his own image; he has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence—by his own choice.”

“Morality is judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, and integrity to stand by it at any price.”

“Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.”

“Devotion to the truth is the hallmark of morality; there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.”

“I am. Therefore I’ll think.”

“The choice–the dedication to one’s highest potential–is made by accepting the fact that the noblest act you have ever performed is the act of your mind in the process of grasping that two and two make four.”

“There was no meaning in motors or factories; that their only meaning is in man’s enjoyment of his life, which they served – and that my swelling admiration at the sight of achievement was for the man from which it came.”

“For the power and the radiant vision within him which had seen the earth as a place of enjoyment and had known that the work of achieving one’s happiness was the purpose the sanction and the meaning of life.”

More quotations listed conveniently here:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

Yes, We Have A Banana Republic…

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Linh Dinh at Counterpunch describes the good part of the US descent into a banana-republic:

“It’s all going according to plan, this transformation of the US into a police state and Third-World nation, but what’s meant by “Third World,” exactly? A Third World country is one that is poor, with inadequate infrastructure, an obscene wealth gap and a corrupt government. America is by far the most-indebted nation on earth, with a record-setting trade deficit, so we are, in effect, much poorer than Greece, Zimbabwe, Somalia or any other basket case, but it hasn’t become manifest because we have guns, missiles and drones pointing in all directions. Using our gargantuan military to hold the world hostage, we receive more foreign aids, in the form of debts, than all the other nations combined. Riding a nuclear-armed mobility scooter, America is a gross welfare queen barging down the world’s sidewalk, but this is how an empire is supposed to work, many will smirk, and they are right, of course, until this extortion racket falls apart, and soon enough. Preparing for the inevitable, our ruling class is becoming more belligerent abroad, in a last ditch effort to prolong its advantages, and nastier at home, to slap down domestic rage at a sinking standard of living. Splurging beyond our means for decades, we will revert to the universal means, and not because we care about justice or equality, but because we don’t have a choice.

Just as there are pockets of First World opulence and luxury in even the most dismal Third World countries, rich nations also have stretches of Third World squalidness and destitution, but Third World isn’t all bad. Not by far. To survive on little requires enterprise, resourcefulness and cooperation, virtues that will emerge and even blossom as we slide downward. Ubiquitous in most Third World countries, peddlers will make a comeback here, and the black market will thrive. As globalism recedes, the local will rise. Instead of being slaves to huge corporations, we will become tiny businessmen, as long as we’re not hunted down, then fined or locked up…..

Back to the positive aspect. Each home can become a store or a restaurant. Each car is a gypsy cab. In totalitarian Vietnam, the government actually gives its people much more leeway to conduct petty business than is allowed in America. A private home can display a table with, say, five cans of soda, two brands of cigarettes and some candies, and that’s a store, though nobody is manning it most of the time. To get service, you might have to shout. It’s not their only source of income, but this pee wee initiative does bring in a buck or two a day, so it’s better than nothing. ….. There is no welfare, food stamps or Social Security in a Third World country, no safety net outside of your extended family……

One can say that the United States is becoming a police state because it is turning into a Third World country. Already, choppers snake through skyscraper canyons and tanks roll down main streets. The police state protects and advances the interests of the ruling class, which in our case is the military banking complex, and since an informal market nibbles at the profits of banks and corporations, you can expect their henchmen, cops and regulators, to stomp hard on us smallest fries. (Underpaid in a collapsed economy, cops will also use these opportunities to shake us down, so that’s a kind of tax we’ll have to pay.) In any case, it appears that as we become poorer and thinner, not to mention more enterprising or devious, and more colorful too, since everyday will be casual Friday, we will have to fend off our bullying state, if not the gangs that rise up in its place.”

Indian Opposition Says No To Wal-Mart

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Bloomberg reports on Indian opposition to corporate giants forcing open the lucrative retail market:

“Opposition parties and government allies rounded on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s bid to open India’s retail sector to foreign companies like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT), stalling parliament for a fifth day with their protests.

In a rare concerted attack on the ruling Congress party, Singh’s two largest parliamentary partners joined the opposition in criticizing the policy approved by the Cabinet last week, forcing both houses of parliament to adjourn. Overseas retailers stand to be barred from opening stores in at least 19 of India’s 45 largest cities with state assemblies set to veto their entry. “

I’m glad to hear this.   Even though it’s too little too late. The spineless Manmohan Singh has already opened up local mutual funds to foreign investment, with all the economic and other dangers of cross-border financial flows and hot money.

Of course, the globalist mouthpieces, (Time: Jyothi Thottam, “Why India Should Stop Fearing Walmart”), are anxious for it to happen.

The big media outlets like to put a local face on the policy (“India’s Wobbly Walmart Embrace’), but astute readers aren’t fooled.

One writes:

Let’s say our law says that Walmart will source 30% from small players. What about the rest, the 70%? Is it going to source 100% of it from India or is allowed to import the rest, i.e. 70%? According to the WTO you cannot stop them from importing.  The example the writer gave was from Bharti-Walmart which is a wholesale cash and carry store (like SAM’s) not Walmart – it is the consumer side which will kill the Kirana business and the Indian manufacturers. She talks about the food supply and global chains without even knowing what it means. …..

They are in the business of making money and lots of it for their US shareholders. They are not in the business of reducing cost for Indian consumers. If it happens that they buy in bulk in China and flood the Indian market with imports, so be it.  Today India is a net Export-Import deficit country with $85 Billion per year. This is the contribution of Dr. Singh…from a few billion a year trade deficit that we had before to having to borrow $85 Billion a year to pay our imports minus exports. So what do you think will happen when Walmart imports $100 Billion dollars worth of goods into India every year?

Now you have to somehow find current $85 Billion net deficit + $100 Billion = $185 Billion dollars PER YEAR.  In the case of the USA, it was simple. The USA borrowed $3 Trillion to pay the deficit. It has the luxury of printing dollars. So if China demands money, they can print it. They just recently printed $600 Billion. India can not do this and India will ultimately be screwed.  In the 17th Century, India was a net exporter. Then the Britishers came and India became a net importer and in turn a poor country. That will happen after a few years if our appetite for imports continues to grow and our exports dont keep up with the rise in imports as happened in the last many years. Today, we borrow soft money and hard money from the IMF, bonds, FDI in other sectors etc. to pay the difference of $85 Billion of dollars that we have to pay to import more than what we export. How long do you think this is sustainable? How long do you think we can continue to borrow either via the FDI route or via IMF loans to pay for our imports. India is one of the few countries where you can allow all these things, including changing our nuclear policy, allowing FDI, etc. without discussing this in Parliament first.

Remember also that Walmart started putting in RFID tags into their clothes from last year, August 1, 2010, making it possible at some point that you could be tracked anywhere you went, because of your clothes. This is incipiently fascistic.

India FDI Watch has a detailed report on what really happens when foreign lobbyists get big retail giants into the market, monopsony:

“Industrial licensing had brought monopolies to India but monopsony is a new phenomenon for India which has recently come to the forefront in the manufacturing goods sector due to the increased specialization in the global process of production. This has led to the concept of a single supplier to a large producer who obtains the goods at a ransom. The larger the amount of any commodity a large retailer can purchase, the greater the concession on price, delivery, it can extract. This is a demonstration of monopsonistic procurement and the awesome monopsonistic purchasing power which comes with it. This is unique to the modern world of digital instant communication (branding, streamlined logistics distribution can drive down prices still further) and hugely affects the agricultural commodities market also, as shown. The more of a commodity large retailers purchase in bulk, the lower the prices growers of agricultural commodities obtain!”

More in this report on how the globalists at WTO would like to destroy the decentralized production of food:

“The Bank has identified laws such as the Essential Commodities Act (1955) the Agricultural Produce and marketing Act (APMC 1972) and the Prevention of Black Marketing and Maintenance of Supplies of Essential Commodities Act (1980) which have defended the rights of farmers to a just price and the rights of the poor to a fair price for food, as having “prevented the free mobility of agricultural produce and thus segmented the Indian domestic market into many smaller markets.

The government has also imposed restrictions on foreign investment in the retail of agricultural commodities, and on both foreign and domestic private investment in wholesale. These restrictions have collectively discouraged and/or prevented the private sector from undertaking large-scale investment in agricultural storage, marketing, or processing activities – an example of horizontal fragmentation preventing desirable vertical integration. The result is that today there is no large, organized, efficient pan-Indian supply chain in the agricultural sector, including in horticulture. What the Bank defines as “fragmentation” is in fact self-organized local systems of production and trade which are not controlled by a centralized store or by centralized, monopolistic corporations. And the repeated attack on India’s “geography” shows how anti-nature World Bank’s basic economic thinking is. Not only the World Bank like to wish away India’s diversity and geography, it would like to destroy India’s food sovereignty.

Thus, the Bank takes apples grown in Himachal and says it would be cheaper to import them for Chennai. This was exactly the argument the trade liberalisers had used to justify wheat imports. However, the imported wheat turned out to be twice as costly as domestic wheat. Navdanya has filed a case in the Supreme Court against wheat imports.”

Note:

I’ve shopped at Walmart, and they have great prices, true. But in the US I don’t have that much of a choice of smaller shops.  In India, however, there are plenty of choices….and it should stay that way.  Anyway, I don’t think I should be shopping at Walmart, even if the prices are low.  It’s a question of choosing smart self-interest over self-defeating self-interest. I like cheap prices, but I also want to live in a country of small shops and farms, not one of huge commercial farms and supermarkets.

It’s time to buy from local retailers, wherever possible.

The American-made Retail E-guide features over 2500 American-made products from over a dozen popular retail stores like Dillard’s, Home Depot, TJ Maxx, and Costco.

How Americans Can Buy American
Post Office Box 780839, Orlando, Florida 32878-0839
Tel: 1-888-US OWNED (1-888-876-9633)
Emergency Backup: 407-234-4626
Email the Author: Roger Simmermaker
Web: http://www.howtobuyamerican.com

On this issue, I agree with OccupyWallStreet.

If we can’t lower taxes to bring companies back, we can boycott multinationals with predatory practices. Giant corporations of this kind have nothing to do with the free market.

From TowardFreedom:

“The shiny happy people featured in Wal-Mart advertisements, as well as the company’s continued PR claims of corporate responsibility (“We at Wal-Mart take an active interest in conserving the environment!”), simply doesn’t match the frustrating reality of their corporate behavior. Even the largely toothless Environmental Protection Agency, for example, a federal regulatory outfit that sometimes seems to exist simply to provide permits for giant corporate polluters, has managed to prosecute Wal-Mart for Clean Air Act violations in nine states, due to the company’s stubborn insistence on storing lawn fertilizer and other toxic chemicals in parking lots located near local watershed areas.

Greenwald even takes us to Wal-Mart’s global factories in where Wal-Mart workers put in 14 hour days 7 days a week and brush their teeth with fireplace ashes because their salaries don’t allow them to buy tooth paste. Implicitly in this global tour is the fact that, while wrapping itself in the American flag and a shallow sham version of patriotism, Wal-Mart cares very little for the health and well being of its workers, the environment, or the health of the U.S. economy as a whole, beyond the short-term dollar value it can extract to increase its profit margin.

While all of this is deeply sobering, Greenwald wisely chooses to end the film on a powerful high note, spotlighting and interviewing several citizen/activists – normal people just like you and me – who have chosen to organize their communities to oppose Wal-Mart’s predatory behavior and fight for more just and sustainable local economies.”

25 Reasons To Be Glad To Be In America

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25 REASONS TO BE GLAD TO BE IN AMERICA

Right now, in this country, even with all its problems,

1. You can buy a condo on a lake for under $15,000.

2. You can buy a house in a good neighborhood that needs a little work for $25,000. You can buy a trailer for under $1000.

3. You can sell unskilled or semi-skilled labor for $12-$20 an hour.

4. You can pay little or no taxes on a wage of under $35,000, if you go into business for yourself, know how to structure it, and are the head of a household with children.

5. You can earn a money-making qualification online for less than $1000, and you can get the money for it, if you don’t have it. You can pay it back on time after your graduate. You can learn how to fix anything in your house that doesn’t need a license, by watching a You-Tube video.  You can learn any language online, for free. You can learn to play a musical instrument for free, and you can record and play your own tapes for free.

6. You can fly to a foreign country and back for under $100, if you know where to look and when.

7. You can buy a fresh loaf of bread, a big bag of crackers, a big bottle of shampoo/detergent, a box of pasta, each for $1.

8. If you bought items in bulk and with coupons, you could even get them for less. And if you cooked your own food and kept it very basic, you could feed yourself for under $50/mth.  Even less, if you fish or have a little garden.

9. You can get a gym membership for $10/mth. You can create a home gym for under $10.

10. Most of the people who were foreclosed on didn’t have much money in their homes. Those that did have the means to sue, a legal system they can use without putting up a dime, and a free PR machine on the web with tools like blogger and wordpress.

11. You can rent a room in any city for $250/mth or even less, if you do some chores. You can live for free if you do housework, or can take care of older folks.  You can rent a trailer for a month for under $300.

12. You can buy a computer for under $200, brand new. Second-hand computers that are functional can be bought for under $100. You can use a computer for free for an hour or more in any library.

13. You can get access to sophisticated hospitals and treatment for an insurance payment of about $100/mth. It’s not full coverage, but it will cover your for emergencies. You can get an alternative consultation for $50. A bottle of vitamins is less than $8. You can buy herbal remedies for even less. You can get excellent health advice free on dozens of internet sites. You can learn yoga online without paying a dime.

14. You can buy a functioning car for under $500.

15. You can borrow money at under 5% for most things and you can structure and restructure your finance in dozens of creative ways to save you money

16. You can buy a stock for $7.

17. You can educate yourself completely free at a good public library, available in any town.

18. You can read practically any classic book in the world on the net, for free.

19. You can make your own movies or documentaries for next to nothing on You-tube.

20. If you have a brilliant idea, you can get someone somewhere interested enough to pay you to develop it.

21. You can work at home and make $15,000/yr with minimal skills, if you don’t mind clerical work.

22.  If you are out of luck, you can get meals and a place to sleep for free, for at least a week, in almost any city in the country. You can buy a presentable work outfit at a thrift store for under $5.

23. Almost anywhere you can find a church or a shelter to feed you and help you find a job, even if you just came out of prison.

24. You can phone anywhere in the US for free on a computer. You can get a basic internet line for $20/mth. Or you can get free wi-fi at dozens of cafes and libraries in any city. You can sit in them and enjoy their facilities, their electricity, and AC and heat for free, day after day, and no one will question you.

25. You can go to sleep every night in peace and quiet, with no airplanes and bombers flying overhead. You breathe clean air. The phone and internet work well almost all the time. The buses run on time. The trains run on time. Taxis are cheap in most cities. So are buses. You can travel anywhere in the country by bus.

New Research Shows Radiation Linked To Cancer

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From Natural News.com (hat-tip to Unfiltered News Network):

“Our work shows that radiation can change the microenvironment of breast cells, and this in turn can allow the growth of abnormal cells with a long-lived phenotype that have a much greater potential to be cancerous,” Paul Yaswen, a cell biologist and breast cancer research specialist with Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division, said in a statement to the press. Continue reading →

Trying Out Some Natural Remedies – II

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About two weeks ago, I started a diet that involved eating mostly vegetables, seeds, and lean protein, along with some vitamin supplements. I’ve been feeling exhausted and overwhelmed all the time, even after sleeping well.

Well, two weeks are up now. Time to review and see if my diet is having any effect. Continue reading →