To be or not to be?

Through Hamlet, Shakespeare may be showing what he thinks makes a killer by illustrating the Prince of Denmark as a killer's antipathy. We know Hamlet is an educated man, he has gone to school for awhile His wiliness shows with his witty execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He clearly thinks things out from beginning to end, logically. It's his logic that allows him to second guess killing a person. He has ample opportunity to kill Claudius, but he hesitates. Hamlet would rather kill him when he's not praying. He finds a reason not to kill a person through reason. He even finds an excuse not to kill himself in his 'to be or not to be' soliloquy. He reasons that killing oneself is a great risk because he doesn't know what's coming afterward. He realizes the finality of death is too frightening to do it. The tragedy of Hamlet is the effects of his logic and reasoning causing him to hesitate. Each failed attempt at action has a natural consequence. Imagine if Hamlet would have dispatched Claudius during his phony prayer. Polonius probably would have lived; so would have Ophelia, Laertes, Gertrude and even Hamlet himself if he would have killed Claudius at that momemnt. Because of that hesitation to act, as many of us might have, there commences a terrible chain of events that costs many more lives than was necessary. It might be why we identify well with Hamlet. His hesitations are natural, but sometimes that hesitation comes with a steep price.
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Billions and Billions of Stars...

Last week I watched a fascinating documentary on Stanley Kubrick. Arthur C. Clarke was talking about Kubrick's 2001:A Space Odyssey. Something he said was thought-provoking that has really stuck with me, especially because I walk under the stars every night when I walk my dogs. Clarke said that behind every person was 30 ghosts. For every one human living there were 30 dead; this adds up to about 100-150 billion people who have ever walked the earth. That's about the same number as the stars in the sky. Clarke said, isn't it amazing that the Universe is so big that each person that has ever existed might have an entire world to themselves?

That's beyond my comprehension. If you really try and comprehend the sheer size of the Universe, you'll soon find it impossible. Our brains (as advanced as they are) do not have the ability to comprehend the vast size of our universe. To put it into context, the moon is about 500,000 miles away from earth. To travel around the Earth and end up at the same point, one must travel about 40,000 miles. The moon is more than ten times further than that distance, and that is the closest celestial body to our planet! The closest planet to Earth, Venus, is 25 million miles away. To travel 1 million miles on Earth, one would have to circle the planet nearly 30 times. To say we cannot comprehend the size of the universe is an understatement.

It is the most beautiful thing to look up in the sky at night and imagine where all those stars are. For all the shapes stars make in constellations, they are millions if not billions of miles away from each other. Such thoughts truly make me feel small, but it assures me that there is far more beyond this planet than most people bother to imagine. Next time you get the opportunity to look at the stars, see them and imagine the vastness of this universe. Even though we will never comprehend such size, it is an exercise enough to try.
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Money Supply Blues

As I hear more and more about this economic crisis, the pundits and politicians' voice begin to merge and it becomes a sort of white noise. There isn't much sense to be made out of most the reports, so as a statistician I prefer to look at data and see what the real story is. Data sometimes lies, but to be frank it lies a lot less than politicians and businessmen scrambling to keep their jobs. I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) website for some graphic interpretations of various economic data. As I had said back in March, the United States is in a recession, perhaps the worst in a very long time. But what does the data say about this? Inflation is currently at 3.7%, not much different from last year. The unemployment rate (6.7%) increases every month, but we're still nowhere near where we were in 1982 when the rate was around 10 percent. What really worries me is not the labor indicators, it's the monetary indicators. Check out the latest data and you will see what worries me.

In a little over a month the total money supply for Treasury and the Federal Reserve have sky-rocketed. This is the medicine that is supposed to soothe the credit markets. But at what cost? As Milton Friedman pointed out, inflation is always a monetary problem, how prescient. Some may say, so what? These are hard times that call for drastic measures. The cost of these drastic measures has been the potential implosion of the American government's credit-worthiness. To increase this money supply, debt must be sold, and interest paid to debt-holders. As this debt grows, it is nearly certain that the dollar will begin to lose its value. We saw this last year when the dollar plummeted against the Euro. This would change after Europe entered its own downturn, but the lesson remains. The danger of applying Keynesian economic theory is that in trying to breathe life into an economy one may end up destroying it instead.

One must ask during times such as these, how much government intervention is necessary to stave off disaster? Many people, including the insulated folks in DC, ponder this question as if it is abstract, and there are no real consequences to such tinkering. Much of this downturn can be attributed to overzealous tinkering in the housing market. If the government cannot take responsibility for their complicity in this matter, what makes you believe they have the wherewithal to fix it? We are witnessing the government solution, which is to print money. We are walking down a dangerous road, not unlike the 1930's. Government interference in economic markets exacerbated what could have been a severe recession and helped it become a depression. We have historical precedent, I can only hope that decision-makers will pay attention, but you'll pardon me if I doubt it.
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Shaking out of a funk

It has been so long since I've done this. I fear I might be rusty. I just thought I would come back and reread some of my old blogs. I was writing about the economic crisis in March and the housing crisis last December. Well, here I am a year later, and a year wiser. My writing style might have changed, I've been reading a lot of William Shakespeare lately, so don't be surprised if that shows up. I am coming out of a bit of a funk and I think writing may help pass the time and help revive my passion. It's funny but my therapy was listening to Shakespeare. I was able to put certain scenes of his plays on my Ipod. So I've taken to listening to pieces of his plays and watching them on the weekends. I have burned through so much in a relatively small amount of time.

I have seen or read in the past four months:
-Hamlet
-Henry V
-Othello
-Macbeth
-Richard III
-Julius Caesar
-Midsummer Night's Dream
-King Lear
-Romeo and Juliet
-Much Ado about nothing


I currently have in my Netflix Queue:
-Twelfth Night
-The Tempest
-The Girl Next Door (wrong queue)

Other than my more lascivious taste in Art (Girl Next Door Rocked!), I have really digested a lot of one artist. I don't even think I like this many of Mozart's pieces. Shakespeare is a genius with language and just sublime to listen to. I've even taking to memorizing verses of Shakespeare so I can recite it to myself. The characters are so relatable. Especially being depressed, I understood Hamlet better than I ever hoped to. His soliloquy on his own existence cuts to the core of every man who's ever been sad. My depression had a voice with Hamlet, my rage had a voice with Marc Antony, and my fantasy had a voice with Henry V's stirring speech at Agincourt. It really has been therapeutic...more than I could ever express if I had a thousand more words than the Bard himself. I hope to discuss a bit on each of the plays I've either read or seen. I absorbed a lot of Shakespeare so this might take awhile...
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