Survivalist News

U.S. Weighs Takeover of Two Mortgage Giants - NYTimes.com
The companies are by far the biggest providers of financing for domestic home loans. If they are unable to borrow, they will not be able to buy mortgages from commercial lenders. In turn, that would make it more expensive and difficult, if not impossible, for home buyers to obtain credit, freezing the United States housing market. Even healthy banks are reluctant to tie up scarce capital by offering mortgages to low-risk home buyers without Fannie and Freddie taking the loans off their books.

Together the two companies touch more than half of the nation’s $12 trillion in mortgages by either owning them or backing them. They hold more than $1.5 trillion of the mortgages as securities. Others are sold to investors in the form of mortgage-backed bonds.

In recent weeks, the companies have spiraled downward, undermined by declining confidence in their future and shaken by sharp declines in their assets as the housing markets have continued to slide and foreclosures have risen.

Some in U.S. replace oil heat with wood stoves | Reuters
Record prices for home heating oil are rippling across Americas northern regions, stoking demand for wood stoves and other alternatives, and forcing some heating oil companies out of business.

Staying Alive: THINGS TO THINK ABOUT
I got a tip yesterday from a person concerned about Bronchial dilators. It was about Jimson Weed and how it is a source of Atropine. And while I agree that Atropine is good in it’s place, there is little use for Jimson Weed. What we are talking about here is if a person gets hit with an agent that closes off his breathing passages. Kinda puts you in a bind. Breathing is pretty necessary to life. But Jimson Weed is probably not going to help you in this situation.

T. Boone Pickens Wind Energy Plan
T. Boone Pickens, the 80-year old Texas billionaire oil man, has BIG plans for wind energy. Crazy, huh? Not really, it doesn’t take a brainiac to figure this one out (which may be why President Bush hasn’t). So, if you watch news and pay attention, chances are decent you’ve heard about Boone’s plan to build a whole pile of windmills from Texas to North Dakota. He claims it could produce 20% of the nation’s electrical power within 10 years. If that happened, the natural gas currently used to produce 22% of the nation’s electrical power could be freed up for use in natural gas powered vehicles. Translation: less dependence on foreign oil, cheaper gas, greater national security. If this isn’t good news for the SHTF samurai, I don’t know what is!

Press TV - Israeli jets using Iraq’s airspace?
The US has allowed Israeli jets to use US airbases in Iraq and fly over Iraqi airspace for a likely attack against Iran, Iraqi media say.