Homestead mailing list

[Rebecca Lewinski <rebas_own AT hotmail.com>]

bob writes:
> You said that "you" were smart enough to save your 401k -- Give 'yourself' 
> that credit.  And give gov't the doubt they deserve in all matters fiscal 
> (and in my opinion, many others). 

::laughs::  I think I gave credit to George Ure's blog UrbanSurvival for 
getting our 401K out of the stock market--George does know the market and 
studies long-term financial "waves", of which we're now in the downleg of, 
but he also uses what could be called fringe technology to make his moves 
(the predictive linguistics work, or "web bots" over at HalfPastHuman).  He 
jousts regularly with other stock market experts as to whose methods work 
better.  What I have noticed about George is that in the past two years he's 
been nearly dead-on, and has made an impressive return (I want to say like 
1000% in the last year, but I'd have to shuffle through his archives for the 
last two months to check).

I don't think I mentioned what a complete pain in the ass I was to the spouse 
in trying to get him motivated to move our 401K to a safer place.  Maybe I 
get credit for being a total rhymes-with-witch, but it worked.  And it helped 
that a number of things that had been predicted in George's blog came home to 
roost during that time, which finally got the spouse's attention.  He still 
left the kids' funds in the stock market, and those are about worthless now, 
just as we got the older kid into her first year of college.  Personally I 
think her having to work some during college will do her good, so it's not a 
total loss.  Just... unnerving, as we had been expecting something else.

Bev writes:
> Rebecca, you and a few others on the list, notably Lynda and Lynn, seem 
> to be able to quickly discern the 'origin' of a piece, like you did 
> above.  What tools or resources do you use to do this?  It is something 
> that I haven't been about to successfully do.

Just clicking around in a website on things like mission statements, "who we 
are", and linked pages can lead to the actual owners of a site, or who they 
are most closely affiliated with.  Wikipedia for all its flaws can provide a 
lot of info, SourceWatch.org is my newest favorite for getting background 
information.  Um, there are places like SpinWatch.org, the Center for Public 
Integrity (publicintegrity.org and supposedly non-partisan), MediaMatters, 
sites like that.  I used to spend a lot of time too over at People for the 
American Way when I saw the Constitution was being shredded.  

There is a site that grew out of a college political science class (Purdue?  
Princeton?), but I can't think of the name of it.  I think they popped up 
during the last years of the Clinton era.  Their professor gave them the 
project of creating a completely non-partisan site for checking political 
facts (unspinning the spin from either direction), and it became such a 
popular website that it was given a permanent berth by the school.  That 
would be worth finding again...

family is clamoring from breakfast, and then it's major cleanup time around 
here... I have to admit I made the mistake of eating a piece of fruitcake 
this morning--not such a bad thing but I made it with the crabapples I used 
to make the crabapple liqueur.  WHOO-HOO.  Took a few cups of coffee to 
uncross my eyes...

-Rebecca in the great Northwest




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