Just Walk

Just Walk

Passion, Ambiton, Declaration;
I feel these in my heart,
I take a step,
Sometimes almost one more,
Soon I lose my passion,
Soon I lose my ambition,
Soon I lose my declaration,
I look for them,
I call for them.
Where did they go?
My heart dies.
My life loses direction.
I lose my balance,
I fall back,
Into a familiar indention,
With a history of many previous falls in the sand,
I rise back up.
They find their way into my heart again and give me life,
but as before I soon lose them just after one step.
I won't give up.
I will learn to walk, and then to run.
I will learn to keep my heart alive.
I will never give up.

Just one more step.
That is all it takes.
The next step is my mountain to climb,
It is the step only I can take.
So I continue to fall,
Hoping and trying to find a way...
To just walk.

Nov 16, 2008

Economic Crisis

This post is a bit of a deviation, from the traditional topics I blog about, but I find it to be a topic of interest.
I am NOT qualified to analyze this. This is from light research and I plan to edit\fix this over the next few days. This should provide some overview on the situation, but treat this as possible misinformation for the moment. Please comment with fixes to the analysis, and I am writing this to help clarify it to myself and provide some understanding as to what this mess we are in is. This is simply food for thought.

The Economic "Crisis"

The year is 1998, we want to stimulate the economy so Mr. Greenspan lowers interest rates. This stimulates buying. Great! Consumer spending! So people go out and buy houses, but few can actually pay for the entire house so they get a loan\mortgage. Times are great, so banks decide to start "sub prime lending." Sub prime lending is when a lender gives a loan to a customer with a higher than normal chance of default. then you have a mortgage crisis. Suddenly many of these borrowers default on their houses; because they are not able to pay for them, and they cannot turn a profit\sell the house to pay it back since the value of the houses has fallen from oversupply of real-estate and over purchasing by buyers. This creates a cascade of effects.

"Liquidity Puts" and (Securitization)
Banks use securities. What does this mean in relation to mortgages? Well basically what banks did is collected all these mortgages and loans together in a package. This package was called a C.D.O. (Credit debt obligation). They then let investors invest in these packages, this is the aspect of what the securitization of the mortgages\loans is.
Now the risk of the loans and mortgage are distributed amongst the bank and the investors in the C.D.O. (collection of the mortgages and loans). Then some banks decided to guarantee the money of the investors, this is called a "liquidy put". This allowed the banks to hand out more mortgages and loans at lower rates, and increase sub-prime lending practices. Well as you can see this isn't what we would call a stable practice.

Now you have a situation where the borrowers are defaulting, so the C.D.O is not a very attractive option for investors. So what investors do is pull out. They take advantage of the "liquidy put" options and suddenly banks have borrowers who do not pay, and investors who are pulling out their money. This leaves banks with a bunch of debt and no one willing to buy the C.D.O. This is where the federal bailout comes in. The government buys these securities, and provides banks with stability where as otherwise the bank would collapse.

Consumer spending and Business
Now we have creditors who are calling in their money, and holding what they have. The puts a crunch on many consumers and affects businesses with loans. The consumers now have more trouble getting good loans for items. This means less demand. Less cars, less optional things. So now we have stores like Circuit City getting in severe trouble, because of falling\negative profit margins. Car makers get hit harder. The Detroit Three (GM, Ford, Chrysler) feel a strangle as the market struggles to regain stability. GM now needs federal assistance. If GM fails many of the parts factories the other companies benefit from will also fall. This creates a problem for Ford and Chrysler who are already in trouble. GM's failure would cause unemployment rates to soar several percent.

Federal Bailout - Where does the money come from?
The money for the bailout is paid in part by taxes, and in part through bonds. A bond is a loan from a party to the government. The government then pays the bond plus some interest back at a later date. Many of these bonds are bought by the PRC. Peoples Republic of China. This is where "our children will pay for it." originates from, since it is them who will be paying for the bonds. The fact China is buying these is not a bad thing is some respect. We offer China's economy a lot of benefit from all the products we buy from them. If we suffer they suffer. It is in China's interest for our economy to do well.

If federal assistance is not offered to the companies it is possible a large portion of several industries would collapse. Unemployment rates would soar, not to mention another cascade of effects. So this is why out government decides to intervene in the economy; which is controversial, because it brings forth the question of how involved the government should get.

My View Of What Is Happening to the World.

These ideas and thoughts are an opinion. They are subject to change. If you see a problem anywhere post a comment, and I will do my best to ammend\address it.

The world is changing.

Integrity

Unimpaired, unadulterated, or genuine state; entire correspondence with an original condition; purity.

I see Integrity as representing a purity of information. After the recent election of Obama, I observed some very interesting effects in people. There is a great hatred from many for Obama. I observed as people began to boil their views on Obama. A few things caught my eye. One person's citation for Obama included that he did not say the pledge of allegiance, and was un-American and a terrorist.

http://thinkonthesethings.wordpress.com/2007/11/02/barack-obama-refused-to-say-the-pledge-of-allegiance-youve-been-played-for-a-daggone-fool/

The pledge of allegiance part; I believe resulted from a chain email. There is another part referring to a terrorist rumor:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/did-you-know-that-senator_b_74710.html

The point I am trying to make is not for or against Obama. It is that if the majority of the people in this world are accepting information as pure without question we have a problem.

Many people are deciding who to put in leadership of the most powerful country in the world, based on rumors, flyers, and chain emails. We are in a different world. It is one full of lies, trickery, and deceit when it comes to information. As consumerism becomes more and more the focus of the world, we are innovating more and more ways to put information into peoples hands. We are also creating ways to do this in extremely convincing ways.

My point is we are becoming more ignorant because of this. There seems to be a ever growing amount of people who accept everything they see. There are people who accept stereotypes as fact, some very close to me i.e. Muslims going to build bombs in mosques. This is sad. When you combine this ignorance with intolerance...Intolerance is amplified.

It is amplified because you have everyone believing different things from all of these sources of information. With these differing beliefs we now have an initial setup. Once we add in arguments and emotions tensions rise. If intolerance is included here, we now have a recipe for instability. As time continues and information becomes more and more dispersed and developed, differing beliefs increase in number. If tolerance is not an attribute of the people, we now have conflict as people fight to resolve that they are in fact right. Conflict increases anger triggers hate and begins the emotional process of mutual destruction. Yea I am beating a dead horse, with this tolerance stuff, however is seems to make so much sense. (At least to me)

Bad information doesn't come in a shady looking box with a warning label. It comes as a delicious entree, mixed with truth, gibberish, and delight.

There is another balancing factor here that is to ensure Integrity in information. Don't assert that everything you see and hear is fact. Learn to ensure integrity with what you choose to base your choices, stances, and beliefs on. If you don't your choices, stances, and beliefs are on a foundation of sand, that will either wash your ideals away or swallow you in your ignorance. Build them on a foundation of rock; a foundation of integrity.

If things don't change or continue to get worse, we may very well be approaching a limit.

Nov 5, 2008

Why God Might Not "Prove" Himself (under the perspective that he exists)

This is a religiously biased post under the presupposition that God exists. So it is food for thought under that view, and is only objective under that condition, and not the condition that he exists.

Perhaps God does not reveal himself directly, because of what doing so would result in. Imagine what would happen to the world if God stepped into a clearly physical form and started dancing around. This changes so much. I think the general idea is if we can still be a good tolerant people, regardless of belief, ideas, knowledge or thought as things are. God prancing around, might produce a result where we would all start being "good." However, for some of this it would only be an act, a lie, we would hide our feelings, everything we feel and did if it wasn't in conformance with what we perceive as "good." Lets face it though "good" is a perception. It is only as good as the code is built around. I don't think God would want us faking so much of ourselves. We do it enough as it is. He wants to see that we develop a good nature not because of him, but because it is a path we choose regardless of his influence - he wants us to have a choice by our own conclusions - proving his existence directly pretty much tilts the table in such a way that all the chips fall into one hole. It is true, many people are "good" and do some things, under the context that is because of and for God, I don't know whether to call this insincere to their nature or not, but I think they may just be fanatical a little bit and misplacing credit. They are good people because they like being good people. They believe in God because they choose too. Under this view he wants us to have a free choice, where anything that might not be his path is a possible reasonable option for us to choose.

Nov 3, 2008