Just added this to “selected poetry.” A wonderful poem by Edgar Allen Poe.

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Annabel Lee – Edgar Allen Poe

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Just created a new page based off of my visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I’ve selected my favorite art, which might give you a few ideas of what to look for should you ever decide to visit.

“For it was the mastery of man over his environment which heralded the dawn of the new age, and it was in the stress of expanding economic energies that this mastery was proved and won.”

- R.H. Tawney

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Some thoughts I had while listening to another pro free-market rant in my History of Economics class.

Just updated the Original Poetry section with something new.

I haven’t done much blogging on here lately, but my investment blog has seen a little bit more action.

One week and I will be back in New York City. I cannot begin to describe how radical of a shift it is moving from the slow-moving, tree hugging Oregon community to the focused, fast-paced, electric atmosphere of New York City.

Still, I’m ready. I don’t know what this year has in store – success or failure? I do know, however, that I’m going to give every responsibility that I have as much energy as I can muster. What responsibilities are those?

1. Guiding the House of Bonhoeffer through the year, ensuring that the house is healthy, competitive and growing in both the short and long terms.

2. Leading the King’s Debate Society into a a position of financial and social entrenchment at TKC.  Focused vision, increased competitiveness, a more Christ-centered organization.

3. Growing my stock portfolio, keeping my long term financial prospects strong, and having a good time while I’m doing it.

4. Focusing in my studies, chewing the meat and spitting out the bones. Taking every bit of knowledge I can, mulling it over, debating, pondering, and clarifying.

5. Never forgetting the least advantaged. Never forgetting to love people, to give them my time, energy, and heart.

6. Through all of the above, staying on my knees and remembering Who it is that should be the driving force behind my actions and motivations.

I’m ready. Let’s do it.

Just a heads-up. I’ve started a new blog to follow my investment experiences and observations, as well as to post my thoughts and stock picks. You can find that at here.

Posted some new poetry the other day. The front page of the blog hasn’t been active for much of the summer, but the poetry section has been updated every week or two with new musings.

In other news, it’s been a great summer, but I’m definitley ready to get back to King’s, and New York City. It’s going to be a big year, and I’m ready to get started. I’m also ready for my mouth to stop hurting, I got my wisdom teeth pulled just a few days ago.

Ciao.

I took a few days off. I just added a new page called “[Essential] music”.  I’ll post [essential] music whenever I can find it. You can visit the page to read what I mean by “essential.”

Also, more posts in original poetry and selected poetry.

Phew. Got done reading poetry for an hour and a half. Shakespeare is a genius, Thomas Gray made me laugh like an idiot in the middle of a crowded coffee shop.  If you’ve got a second to spare, go read “Ode (On the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes)”

In a recent op-ed, columnist Paul Krugman declares Ronald Reagan the architect of the financial meltdown. Singling out Reagan’s support of the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, Krugman writes:

The more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years.

Krugman extends his argument:

We weren’t always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the 1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income, slightly more than in the 1960s. It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared from the American way of life, culminating in the near-zero savings rate that prevailed on the eve of the great crisis. Household debt was only 60 percent of income when Reagan took office, about the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. By 2007 it was up to 119 percent.

All this, we were assured, was a good thing: sure, Americans were piling up debt, and they weren’t putting aside any of their income, but their finances looked fine once you took into account the rising values of their houses and their stock portfolios. Oops.

…

But it was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable. Overstretched borrowers were bound to start defaulting in large numbers once the housing bubble burst and unemployment began to rise. 

I don’t claim to know anything about Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, and I’m certainly not one to criticize Krugman for narrowing the first sign of regulatory trouble to a single piece of legislation, but Krugman seems to be implying that Reagan’s deregulation forced American’s into investment decisions that they couldn’t afford.  

What do you think? If we grant that Reagan’s deregulatory record opened the doors for American’s to spend beyond their means, do Reagan and his advisers bear responsibility for Americans who willingly spent and borrowed irresponsibly? Was it Reagan, or irresponsible Americans?

           Ever met someone so much smarter than you that it just makes you feel dumb? Anyone who has knows it can be a harrowing experience. You know how the story goes: while meeting a new acquiantance, a discussion of some topic surfaces, and after mounting a defense of your beliefs, you come to find that your positions aren’t quite as reasonable as you thought. Excitement is replaced with apprehension and confidence dissolves. 

            That’s been the story of my life for the last few days. I’ve had the pleasure of conversing with a brilliant gentleman studying political science, and I’ve been challenged in a number of ways, mostly in providing well researched analysis and establishing causality in support of my beliefs.  During these conversations, I’ve found myself embarrassed with my inability to defend my positions, and have more than once identified with how Thrasymachus must have felt debating justice with Socrates.

            Still, for all of my ignorance and embarrassment, these conversations have been overwhelmingly positive. For one, it has sparked in me an obsession with logically validating the ideas that I have throughout the course of my day. After some thought, I realized a striking resemblence between the active validation of ideas and the validation of moral decisionmaking. So, I’ve decided to label the habit of logical validation the development of intellectual conscience.

            Let me explain what I mean. The common use of “conscience” involves moral consideration—or, put more simply, it is the little voice in your mind that gives you moral suggestions. What I’ve learned recently is that although my moral conscience is healthy and strong, my intellectual conscience with relevance to logical consistency is not. With some of my beliefs, it seems that my enthusiasm for their underlying first principles has led me to make faulty assumptions and logical leaps. To illustrate this, I’ll use an example from one of my recent conversations regarding capital gains taxes.

            In an op-ed that I wrote on the capital gains tax, I claimed that a decrease in the capital gains rate would pay for itself and actually provide a net increase in government capital gains revenue. My Socratic friend asked me to elaborate and support my beliefs, and after a brief discussion, I found that although many of my facts dealing with the 1997-2005 tax revenues were correct, I had made an assumption on the causality of lower rates and historical increases in revenue. In my enthusiasm for free market economics, I had silenced my intellectual conscience, that little voice in the back of my mind that upon introduction to the Laffer theory once asked, “aren’t there other factors at play here?” Unfortunately, it also seems that just as the moral conscience can slowly fade by being ignored, so it is with the intellectual conscience.

            The painful accountability of the discussion described above showed me that I need to have an intellectual conscience loud enough to hold me to logical consistency just as I need a moral conscience loud enough to keep me making the right ethical decisions. I’ll continue to weed out bad assumptions and faulty logic,  and maybe learn to heed my intellectual conscience as urgently as I try to obey my moral one.