Andy’s Thoughts

Here is a paper I recently wrote against stimulus spending for my American Dilemmas class at St. Edward’s University. I don’t really like the required format of the paper, so I may change it a little for publication. I appreciate any criticism.

Should the Federal Government Use Stimulus Spending to Help the Economy Recover?

According to figures released by the government, real gross domestic product (GDP) –that is, the amount of goods and service produced in the United States—decreased by an annual rate of 3.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008 (BEA1). This figure is not terribly alarming compared to the 13 percent drop in 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression (BEA2). However, the most interesting data that I encourage the reader to keep in mind while reading this paper are the following: before New Deal government spending took effect in 1932, government expenditures and investment accounted for 14.8 percent of GDP; for the most recent data available in the fourth quarter of 2008, that number stood at 20.4 percent (BEA3).

[Read the rest of this entry...]

I am trying to learn the C programming language.  Here is my first original program.  It computes the value of an operation that the user chooses.  I only had like ten compiler errors before I worked all the bugs out.  The division part still doesn’t work because I only know how to work with integers right now.  I know, pretty elementary.

#include <stdio.h> [Read the rest of this entry...]

Cosmopolitanism is inherently anti-authoritarian. If all of humanity indeed exists in the same moral community, then it follows that there is no room for any so-called authority to exist within the human moral community. Any authority must implicitly claim some kind of ethical dualism—one set of morals for the population and another for the authority. For how can the authority claim the right to imprison people if the population is not allowed to do so? [Read the rest of this entry...]

I updated the look and feel of my website. I hope you like it. I will start to post things a little more often now.

Death drum beating televised symbolic noises;
A roar in the church but silence at home.
Widow and orphan tears mix with blood,
And makes the crescent, the land of two rivers,
Fertile with the silence of a lost nation

Photography is a hobby of mine, so here are a few.

For those of you who don’t know, I am in The Electric Moonshine Band and we are preparing to record an album. We will be in the studio May 17-18.

Here’s a few new songs we are working on…

They are quite rough so bear with us…

Take 1 (”What is This Love” and “From Here to There”)

Take 2 (”She Touched Her Face” and “Down Here In The Middle”)

Marbled hedges line the walk, leaves of green, red, and gold.
Ivies crawl like fractal images across this leafy plane.
People trod across the concrete graph paper without notice
Of the pebbly scatter charts and probability curves underfoot.
One does not notice the messages in the air—the waves.
Orderly waves that are created by men and transmitted
Across limitless boundaries. The voice of freedom!
But who notices the order? Of course there is none—
What is the standard of order? The orbits of particles—
Orderly subatomic particles construct such things
What order exists in this marbled hedge with its interweaving ivies?
The order of the universe—the order that does not exist?
If the standard is the universe, then what of chaos?
What is the standard of chaos? The same universe and the same hedge?
The chaotic hedge and the orderly universe.
Existence.

Mountain laurels bloom to disguise the true nature within,
Much like the scholarly pine or the philosopher oak they are,
But alas they must bloom and pour forth their rage—
Their sorrows—disguised in colors and rays of refracted light.
All shades of feminine mystique hidden behind a funerary veil,
They explode from the bud in a supernova of anger and hate,
For time passes slowly in their arborous existence,
But time passes nonetheless.

No, this is not Star Wars, but would that not be cool? Instead of disgracing myself on social networking sites, I shall disgrace myself with my very own website! Here you will be able to find social critiques, (bad) poetry, (equally bad) philosophy, various art projects I may be engaged in, news from my world, and more. Please feel free to register and comment if you wish.