The best morning drink, while good for humor, can never be alcoholic. That would make you an alcoholic, unless it happens to be Gasparilla...

That said, my qualm is not with alcoholic morning drinks but with hot ones. It seems to be a breakfast staple. The brits drink tea; Americans drink coffee. And while iced tea is probably the perfect drink, it is for some reason not a good morning drink as it seems to inevitably and untimely pep the digestive system. Which leaves us with Orange Juice. Orange juice is a wonderful drink. Where it is often too sweet or to thick to be consumed at any other time, it complements cereal amazingly well.

Now, some may contest that orange juice is not the perfect match for steak and eggs, which is of course the perfect breakfast food. Yet while I cannot disagree with that, I return that coffee is similarly not the best mate for it either.

For first of all, coffee is most usually bland. It has a flavour of water mixed with dirt. In most cases the most coffee-like aspect of coffee is its aroma. Well, simply boiling an otherwise poor drink does not trick me. The idea of heating a liquid to a tempature which literally cannot be tasted(as it's hotter than the point at which your taste-buds die) does not make it a beverage. And it does not do any good either; for it is inevatably either so hot that it sears your tounge dulling the flavour of your food and dampening any makouts to occur over the next few days, or it is not hot at all. It is not a "refinement" of the palate to detect the space between hot and warm. It is by definition the inability to accurately detect hot.

Now... Milk. It is not, the thickness, the richness, the flavor, it is good for cereal but not for the drink. It cannot clense the palate if it might be in the food its self.

Soda is similarly not the choice. For soda is but beer with more sugar and less alcohol. It is best, and should be served cold, but cannot be drinken quickly, at least in the morning(as anyone who's tried to chug a mountian dew to wake up knows).

Which leaves us with very few choices. Drinks are, after all either herbs boiled into water(Coffee, Tea, Coke, etc.), or fruits squeezed and mixed with water(Orange Juice, Lemonade, Sprite, etc.). So the best drink for breakfast, must be some combination of the two groups. It musn't be too sweet as to be confused with a desert, nor earthy to be confused with dirt. And so it must be, that the Arnold Palmer is the perfect breakfast drink.

E=MC^2

They teach in school the Law of Conservation of Mass. That mass no matter what remains, it is split and separated and conjoined and formed but under no circumstance is it created or destroyed. They say energy is a magical force. It seems to the student, almost to not exist, merely a construct used to describe action; kinetic or potential.

But this is false, or at least as they describe it. Energy exists in mass. Mass has energy. Mass is energy and Energy is mass. As the nuclear bomb explodes, it literally removes mass from this world; it transforms it into pure energy, it explodes outward with unbelievable force, and we see that matter is indeed 'destroyed', if only transformed from one state to the other.

And so it leads that all energy could be mass, and all the mass we know to exist could similarly be pure energy. And so is the Big Bang. This may not be what the scientists say. This may not be what the Christian church says. But it makes sense to me.

That at one time, as the bible describes, there was nothing. It was pure potential, and whether it was the whole of mass compressed infinitely small or energy in it's pure sense. Something happened. And it exploded into existence. Pure energy reacted as energy does and formed into matter, and as matter appeared next to matter pressure pushed the newly created particles apart. They spread and did all those things the big bang theory claims.

I suppose my point is, existence did not necessarily begin with all matter compressed into a head of a pin. Rather, and seemingly more likely, there was no matter. All the matter there has ever been was not matter, but energy, potential, god.

In a sense this life is pointless
In many more it's not.
And in this cot of a bed, this clot of a world
i laugh at the pitiful nature of this so called poem.
it's hard to be motivated when your actions go unnoticed
it's hard to make change when you have no venue
when you make in impact
it's hard to use 'its' when possession needs 's
and in sincerely, it does not make sense
"it's" does not need to be contracted.
why must 'it is' steal the proper formatting of nondescript possession?

Is a fragile state. It is an arguably non-existent state. It is a scale, you can be walking to class, perfectly awake, and then realize, and pop your ears, and you can hear in a way you'd never imagine. You can suddenly hear the wind, the crack of twigs and leaves and the conversations of people far far away. You can live you entire life, and then get contacts, and suddenly you can see. And not better, but you can see as though you never could. And then there's sickness, and your minds weakens, your body is fragile, and your memory and perception damaged, time slows, it speeds, it fails to even exist. The tea you cooked up stays hot for hours and hours and hours and you wonder how that's even possible. And you wake up from a dream which you could have sworn to be reality, only to know that you must drop off the mail at the post office... and you have no mail to send.

I've decided that rather than have a jumbled mix of blog entries some of a personal and others of a political one intermixed together, I'll just set one up at WordPress; plus it offers the benefit of allowing for exporting so I can later shift to personal hosting if necessary. Anyway, please check it out at dmack901.wordpress.com

It comes across as propaganda, and I guess technically is, but if nothing else, skip to 4:21 and see the graph. I havn't bothered to fact-check it yet, but that's downright convincing in it's self. Not to mention McCain's attempts to affront the issue, and obscene support Obama received from these banks. Then compare McCain's "nation of whiners" Phil Gramm(who was right) to Obama's advisors... eigh...

You can argue the points, but the fact remains, it physically can't be a failure of the free market... we havn't had a free market since some time in the 1800s.

Assuming even the unrealistically high price of $4.00 a gallon, the price of a base model F150(after rebates) is 40k miles worth of gas less than the base Honda Accord. This means that until you drive 100k miles you will lose money on the Accord. If gas is less expensive like $3 that's more like 125k. Of course this isn't to mention the value of having $9,575 today verses breaking even after 100k miles. In fact, considering the interest earned on that it will take significantly longer for you to break even with an Accord.

It is my firm belief that no lie can long sustain in the face of the truth. The opinion of man is based upon observation and experience, and while beliefs are not lightly changed like leaves on the tree whensoever it gets cold, it is not blind. Thus if any lie has long persisted you must ask what purpose it serves. You must ask what evidence there is against it, and how obvious is that evidence? Indeed, you must become that evidence, but far more importantly, ensure so do your neighbors. The success of community is founded upon it's continuity, and ability to enforce those accords they've reached. Am I my brother's keeper you ask? Why no, actually you are not; you are your brother's brother, and you will be judged as such. For the apple does not fall far from the tree, nor the loins split to make the poles, and it is your silence while demonstrates approval.

Now I've talked about this before, and if you're reading this, you've probably read that too. But the relevance of my classes recently compels me to clarify. You see, in contemporary political thought we've read a couple essays and parts of books which demonstrate the way in which society may become auto-totalitarian; how in Soviet style countries during the cold war the green-grocer put up signs saying "Worker's of the World Unite!" Yet, he was not the only one to do so. His neighbor did so, the office-worker did so, everyone did so, because in truth they were compelled to do so. In some part it was the government, but mostly, it was because one did that the other must. And in doing so they did not genuinely tell workers to unite, rather they expressed their submission, while saving face behind the security of ideology and in doing so created a perception, and a practical reality that a united opinion existed. While this is considered, even in our class, to be a fairly recent occurrence I'm not sure. I am however sure it is occurring today, not here, but in the Middle East. This is exactly the auto-totalitarianism which we are facing. While they may not put signs in their window pronouncing "Death to America" they put scarves on their face and submit to the power of the ideology. However, it is not mere ideology, as in the case of communism, it is simply an opinion, a belief that we would be better off, a belief that the government at hand is actually communist, rather than a state capitalism. With Islam the forces are much greater, the belief stronger, the punishments not only harsher, but prescribed by god himself, the imposition that the more strict. Where a velvet revolution was possible in Czechoslovakia, taking the signs down are not enough. The majority is too large, the minority to uneducated of the alternative. It is a sense of oppression which drives revolution, but in order to feel oppressed there must not only be an alternative, but you must genuinely know of it; you must on some level be able to experience it, or see it. This is what the US invasion of Iraq aims to correct.

We can't invade every country that has oppressed people, but in this case the ideology was not simply opposed to ours, but actively trying to destroy, not our way of life, but us as individuals.

I can't say for certain that this was George Bush's goal. I'm fairly sure it wasn't Colin Powell's. I'm fairly sure it wasn't the majority of the congress's. In truth, I can't say that it was the goal of anyone in particular, but it is the effect, and even if it is the most improbable of co-incidences, it's one I'll take.

Labour is labor, it is employment, and it produces both Income for the laborer and Capital for the employer. This income is either spent on goods, driving demand, or it is saved. Investment arrives from both the Savings of the company and the savings of the Individual as lent by banks. This leads to the relationship between demand and investment, or demand and production which requires investment and determines employment. This means that the unemployment rate meausres the effeciency of the demand + investment equilibrium. On one hand demand for goods drives the demand for labor, if there's no demand for goods there's no reason to hire people to make them. But if there is demand for goods, and there's no investment/capital, there's no money to hire people with.

The final aspect, I'll explicitly consider here is that the effeciency of labor plays a role. Specifically, what I mean by the effeciency of labor is that a worker makes $500 worth of products in a day and is paid $70, the employer makes $430 minus other costs. The labor's transaction is ineffecint because he is not getting the full value of his work. The less the value of his work he gets, the more that money is centralized in the hands of the employers and locked into drive investment. This also means less money is available to drive demand. It thereby leads directly toward disrupting the equilibrium between demand and investment. Some may argue that this is exactly the check with Marx cited, and although I'm not entirely ready to disagree, I tend to think not, for as long as the worker is not making enough, the system slows to a halt, the employer stops profiting.... idk there's more i can say but I'm hungry.

I've always thought that both supply side and demand side economics seemed to be oversimplified. They both almost seems to go out of the way to support their particular preferences, and it wasn't until about a week ago or maybe less that I sat down and came up with the following flow chart of the economy.


Shot at 2008-10-20

This seems like the best blend of the two and makes sense. A supply of goods does no good if buyers have no money to buy with, yet buyer's can't buy anything if suppliers don't have the capital to produce goods. Thus income from labor is split into savings and expenses, where expenses fuel demand and savings fuel production. It requires a balance between the two for the economy to work properly. Also the efficiency of the laborer is 'profiting' is important and I havn't fully thought that out yet, butt.. I was reading on plastic.com a note on the argument of 'conservatives' that supply side creates wealth whereas giving money to the middle/lower class only spreads it around..

Not that's not a wording I've heard before, and it's one which makes a lot of sense. If money is invested then it allows for the production of more efficient means, and produces goods. If money is spent, it moves from person to person. I need to figure this out, because there's good logic in it.  But I'm too tired. It's a shame, there's a real breakthrough in the relationship between labor's production and this concept, and I'm tending to think it results in a need for consistent(though not necessarily predictable) revolutions. Probably crazy. /goodnight

Well, I'm watching NBC Nightly News, and as you know, gas prices have dropped quite dramatically. However, the certain cause, as the media sees it is dropping demand. This is simply not true, or at least not as they portray it. It is honest in that the demand for oil futures had plummeted, but in terms of actual consumption... think about your personal consumption. You may have cut usage by 5, 10 or even 20%, but you did this back when oil was nearing $3.50. You did this back when it was $4, but prices didn't drop then. Prices dropped with the market for the simple reason that the prices we've been seeing were entirely unjustified. It's true that China has been using more oil, but they did not double consumption in the past year or so then magically cut it coincidentally when the US market fell. The point is, investors who've been buying oil futures at exorbitant rates realized that like home prices, these were unrealistically high. My point is, the news is utterly failing to comprehend even the most basic elements of our economy. My all means, keep an ear to the ground, but do not believe the word on the street.

The more important point is, if you believe that consumption has dropped 30% in the past month(fueling the 30% price drop), then you're the same person who believed the rise in prices was the result of an increase in consumption or the "closure of oil refineries" in the southeast during a hurricane...In all truth, that doesn't make sense. We've got plenty of gas refined before and after the hurricane that it shouldn't jump, and if it did, it should immediately drop back down to pre-hurricane prices within a week or so of passing.

Or well, maybe not the eyes, but it's weird how perfectly the face can convey emotion. And, I'm not talking about being happy or sad, scared or mad, but aggressive or relaxed, outgoing or introverted, sincere or guarded. It is amazing, just browsing through profiles, picture after picture, you can see into people's personality. Obviously, mistakes will be made basing impressions off a mere picture/profile sound/ etc., but to focus on even that says a lot. It is pure self-expression, they are profiles, exactly, and I'm not sure if I have a point, so goodbye

btdub, I think I'm finally formulating the ability to determine what a "good person" is, verses a "bad person", and I'll just mention it has almost nothing to do with intent, and yet everything.

Today, my fellow Americans, we are in a somber state of affairs. Several of the nation's greatest banks have passed and several more are on that same path. They have been plagued by the disease of failed mortgages. They have lent unfounded money to borrowers who've had no ability to return it, and consequences if this are now readily apparent.

Indeed, these are of the most sudden passings which have shocked both citizens and shareholders across the nation.

Yet, while it is not unheard of for a man to fall dead mid-stride, such death of a great many does not occur; rather, it is the death of these few which has broken the ranks of the silently ill. Their fate, their failure, can no longer be concealed.

Too many have been mislead regarding the health of these institutions, and the savings of far too many are set to fail with then.

Let it be clear that those who have partaken in fraudulent or in anyway inappropriate and illegal actions will be pursued with the utmost severity.

I've instructed congress to proceed with negotiations regarding a reimbursement plan for those investors who such banks have defrauded.

This will be a slow procedure, and the markets will undoubtedly require time to regulate, but the foundations of our economy are strong and America will continue to prosper

So, if I understand this correctly, John Doe buys/gets a mortgage for 200,000 house he'd buying, and say he's paying 6%, meaning over thirty years he's gonna pay a total of 431,000 including 231,000 of interest. So the bank will make a profit of 231,000 over 30 years, or 7,700 a year for 30 years.

Now the bank packages 35 of these together. Now you see they lent out $7 million and over 30 years will get that plus $8 million profit back. However, it takes a long while to get that money back. So instead of waiting, they sell the package to Frank Richass for 9 million. They get their 7 million back, make 2 million profit, and are free to walk away. 2 Million profit today is better than 8 over 30 years.

Well the bank quickly realizes, shit, all we have to do it give out a bunch of mortgages sell them off. Now, people aren't stupid. They say, hey, how do I know these people are gonna pay their mortgages? And banks say... Well I guarantee it. If they don't then then we'll pay the difference. But what about when people actually start defaulting on their mortgages?

Well, the people who own the MBS stop making money. If everyone's paying it they get their 269,500 a month, if 5 of the 35 don't then it's 231k a month. However if 20 of the 35 don't pay if off, then that only gets to 9 million, and they don't make any profit. Plus! If people who do pay it off pay pay off the mortgage quicker than anticipated, then they don't have to pay as much interest.

My math is clearly not perfect, and the numbers/rates/and percentages are off from the real world, but at the end of the day, if they make a bunch of bad loans, the back can't pay off all they guarnteed. So the bank goes bankrupt, and the investor either doesn't make a profit/as much of one/or even the money he put in.

Apparently the 700 billion would purchase the MBS, now I'm not certian if that's the cost of the MBSs. If it is, we theoretically could get some of the 700billion back, if theoretically everyone kept paying their houses then we'd get it all back.

Of course, that's not gonna happen. If the banks are going bankrupt paying to MBS holders what the homeowners didn't, then it's clear that those securities are not good ones. The big companies wouldn't be pushing them on the government, and Congress/Bush wouldn't be so eager to buy them if they were good investments.

Their theory is that if we buy them, and take the loss, then the banks won't go bankrupt paying what they guarnteed the securities would. (I'm not sure if they want to buy both the MBS which "people" hold or even the bad loans which banks hold). As a result the banks and MBS holders could keep their money and keep lending to people(presumably with legislation to make sure they didn't go too crazy again). But what if we don't pay $700+ billion for them?

Then, the banks have to pay out what they guarnteed the MBSs would until they run out of money. Now shouldn't they have a lot of money stockpiled? Probably not, as soon as they sell it for 9 million they go out and give 9 million in loans and sell it for 15, then again then again, and then the shit hits the fan. People start realizing the housing market's crashing. They realize that people are defaulting on mortgages, and the bank has to start paying what they guarnteed the MBSs would. But all their free money is tied up in more bad(and even worse mortgages given at the hight of the boom) which no one is willing to buy as MBS. So the bank is stuck with a ton of bad mortgages and so are the MBS holders. And the cards fall where they may, and people lose money.

But why do we need the banks need to give mortgages? Well the arguement is Demand-Side. They say, if banks don't have the money then buisnesses can't get loans to start or expand, if they can't start or expand, they can't hire people, and no one will be able to get a job or buy a house since there won't be anyone to give you a mortgage.

But does that make sense? Housing prices are lower and still falling. Other than money in the stock market... People still have income, they're still working, they still need houses, they still need cars, they still need all the same things they needed before. And at the end of the day.. That money's still out there.

As a matter of fact, remeber who why it was lent in the first place? It was lent to people to purchase overpriced homes. Which means, all this money ended up going to the former owners of the homes. Some of it went to construction companies, some went to reality companies, some went to devolpers, and a whole lot went to private individuals who sold their home.

So where is it now? two places: those people who profited off selling a house, put it in the bank(or stock market), others spent it or are going to spend it on goods. Ultimately, it's no big deal. Its a little hard for the people who put money in the stock market and it will be hard to get a loan for something you can't afford...

Well you know what? You shouldn't buy something you can't afford.... Did you see what I saw at the top when writing this????? On a 200,000 loan at 6% you pay $231,000 in interest! How about you save and just wait to buy a damn house when you have the money? It takes 14 years at the most. Or maybe instead of saving for 14 years and spending 300k save for 7 years and get a 150k house and work for 7 more). Most importantly!! When you've bought the house you won't have to keep paying a mortgage to the bank for 16 years. You'll be able to actually save for your own  retirement.!