The Drug called Music.

       The train bounced and jerked intermittently. The windows were dirty. The chairs dusty. The inner body showed signs of antiquity. Even the door shewed its state of dilapidation; sliding open and close as the train swayed right and left. The advertisements lining the top section near the ceiling were laced with sinewy lines of cobweb. And the passengers packed in this cramped space were no better. All appeared frazzled and fraught with a perennial fatigue save this wailing baby. Outside, the trees seemed to burgeon in contrast, with two plain coloured birds zooming in on an unseen prey. Though when one peruses, one would only notice an immobile mass of green basking in the dull glare of the sun.

       I tapped the "Play" button.

The roar of a dragon rattled the train so hard that my ipod flew out of my hands.

       I glanced around and was befuddled. Clearly no one had noticed the gargantuan beast flapping its wings as it glided over the puny train with its claws outstretched because their faces were still wrought up with this look of self-induced agony. With a mere shrug, i picked up my ipod.

Hesitantly i tapped "Play";somehow i felt myself tensing up, as in in anticipation of something...or someone.

       But this time there was no roar. No sound. Nothing. An eerie silence encompassed me. Where was everyone? As i strained my ears i could almost hear a soft pulsating sound from a distant source. This tingling sensation seemed to tell me that i was still in the fully packed train yet there was no one around me. Not a single soul. And then i was falling. Before i could scream everything stilled again. There was nobody surrounding me; and just as quickly as it stopped, i started falling for the second time. Yet this time it was different. It felt like i was being pulled towards something instead of falling in a never-ending vertical tunnel. And the pulling force grew stronger as i accelerated towards..what? Whe-
       -...an almost visible gush of air shoved me to one side of the tunnel; then i was in the train again. Sharp elbows nudged against me and when i glanced down i saw a woman endeavouring to stand from her prostrate position. The train had veered a little too sharply and she had lost her balance; which was not much of a surprise judging from her extra high heels. Indifferent, my gaze now transfixed on the blurry screen of my ipod, i saw that it had reached the end of the track.

       Smiling to myself, i chose the next song and embraced myself for whatever it was that was coming.

mood status.

i am angry. angry and mad. i just want to get this over and done with.

on the other hand, "Inglourious Basterds" is such a pleasure to watch again and again and again and again, mainly due to the primary antagonist, Colonel Hans Landa who switches between French, German and English so fluently and surprisingly Italian too! I shiver in anticipation of the day when i can do the same.

zzz

ahhh fuck i am bored.

Unweaving a Rainbow.

Religion had always been a contentious topic amongst men, still is. Some extremists have been known to deprecate such beliefs in an egregious manner, while others secretly formed societies that excoriate such faiths lest they be caught and tried and most repeal the actions of such men.

Adler was no such entity. He has witnessed enough sunrises and sunsets to understand the raw beauty of nature. He has often been enthralled by colourful rainbows or felt the the gushing force of waterfalls; the sheer magnificence of nature present yet ever elusive, it was like holding water with his bare hands.

Thus when he was called upon to defend his childhood friend in court, for he had been hauled up; his public speech of blasphemy; he had been shocked. Will he pull himself and Luke out of this seemingly intractable quandary or will they both perish in this uphill battle, for the law was simple; blasphemy equates capital punishment.

       "In being present, are you implying that you are of the same mind as your blasphemous friend here?" the judge had asked.
       "Your honor, in saying so, are you suggesting that i am as publicly didactic as him when it comes to objurgating the presence of God?" stammered Adler.
       "Yes," answered the judge, at the same time as Adler ended his question, though he looked slightly appalled.
        With a mischievous grin on his face this time, "Then no, your Honor." The judge stared at Adler for a split second and continued on, a little more ardently.
       "Adler pray tell me, are you an atheist yourself?" inquired the judge with a slightly derisive snort, for he knew he has cornered Adler; the attention of the court segued towards Adler now instead of the wrongdoer, Luke.

        The silence which followed lasted a moment before Adler nodded and mouthed his answer.
    
       "Your honor, i live a troubled life. My ma is sick, and my da recently passed. I have a little brother and an even younger sister. I work two shifts a day earning a meager sum barely enough to feed the hunger of my siblings. And my ma; after my work, i have to travel a slight journey into the mountain to collect herbs and flowers that would strengthen my ma's health and in so doing, cure her of her disease. So for me, i need something more, more than the comfort of God, to grant me the will to live on and help my family get its substantive needs to survive, especially during this winter season. I have never in my life denounce the presence of a higher entity but do you not see, that i need something more, way more than that to help maintain me and my family's existence in this vast world?"

       A soft gasp of awe flowed across the members of the floor. Now all looked back at the judge for what he has to say. With no intent of slowing down his frenetic pace, the judge's strident voice carried on.

       "This is no political meeting. So spare us your demagoguery, if you may. Answer me then since you seem so sure of yourself. Do you frequent churches to fi-" Before the judge could finish someone shouted from the back.
       "Oh give the boy a break you fool. He barely has enough time to work and aid his frail mother, not to mention feed his siblings and now you are reprimanding him for not attending church services! Have you no heart and empathy?!" A plaudit followed until the guards quietened the now galvanized crowd in the court.
       A look of irrevocable intransigence formed on the judge's face as he frantically dictated, " The next imbecile who opens his mouth uninvited shall face ten whips along with these two boys." The whole court was engulfed in silence.

      "Now tell me what of your friend? What do you have to say about his blasphemous way? Does he have a sick mother and siblings to feed too? Does he work 10 shifts a day?" his questions now enveloped in anger.
      "As a matter of fact, your Honor, his situation is worse than mine but before that. Can i, with all due respect, ask, if whether the accuser has any veritable proof to show what my friend here has done?" Adler's tone seemed unchanged despite all that has transcended.
      "Oh you do not have to worry, i have here many witnesses who have exclaimed that they heard what he said-"
      "Words only? your Honor. No burning of churches, no beating of faithful followers, no-"
      "YES words only but words are enough to show evidence that he denies the existence of God-"
      "Then your Honor i have here a palatable explanation to Luke's recalcitrant mannerism toward God and authority, if i may." Adler looked up towards the judge with an ingratiating smile. Without waiting for an answer, Adler continued.
      "Unlike me, Luke's father died in war a long time back. And his ma had ran away with another man, leaving him in an orphanage home. We would have thought that he would be well taken care of. On the contrary, he was bullied, by the other children there for he was the youngest. Thus there has never been a day passed where he had stopped questioning God why his father was taken away from him at such an early tender age and why his mother had deserted him just when he needed her the most. Overtime your Honor, these feelings blossomed into a deeply etched hatred, albeit misconstrued. And that is the case that we are all looking at here. Furthermore my friend has never been good with words, a fact supported by the lack of proper guidance since young. He tends to favour emotional talk rather than rationally constructed conversations. Therefore i believe what Luke had on his mind were questions - formed from hurt and disappointment for God has 'taken' away from him what every child should have at such an age; and he failed to understand that sometimes, God works indiscriminately and that his da's death was no punishment nor unfortunate event - which came out wrongly in the ears of the beholders you have your Honor. So the truth of the matter remains which is that he believes in God but fails to understand why this happened to him"

        The court burst into applause.

A Moment In Time.

Reading this may result in a desultory shrug.

It takes 498 seconds or 8 minutes and 18 seconds for a ray of sunlight to travel the vast distance of 150 million kilometers to reach the blacks of your hair. A fact many of us have come to regard as auxiliary information. But there is a beauty to this number. It creates a daily paradox, scientific jargon and explanation aside.

Imagine you are standing on a beach, with your eyes closed. You hear the ebbing flows of the tide, the continuous caws of the seagull as well as the billowing wind. Then as you slowly open your eyes, darkness surrounds you. But only for an ephemeral instant. For in the next, the sky lights up brightly, as if someone just switched on the lights. Where is the paradox we ask?

To answer that we would have to pause and rewind. 8 minutes and 18 seconds back to be precise. At this moment the Sun has already begun to shine on this side of the Earth [ the part experiencing dawn ], yet we are still engulfed in darkness. In these 498 seconds we live with the eerie prescient knowledge that light will encompass us soon.

How is that not beautiful?

PS : the same happens with sunset, just in a reversed format.

Creatures.

Creatures lurk in the dark corners of our mystical minds. Creatures that we embrace in fear, creatures that engulf fear, fueled only by anger, creatures of regret, secretly bemoaning actions done. Creatures of pride, notwithstanding insurmountable forces, creatures of envy, galvanizing wrong deeds that emerged from misled thoughts. Creatures of habit, which beleaguer creatures of curiosity. Yet there are creatures of hope and peace, convening around a pulsating ball of warmth. All tightly guarded by creatures of control.

Yet my creature of sleep escaped.

Deprived.

Sleep eludes me. So does the word 'tradition'. Chinese tradition to be exact.

Irregardless i think economy is a magnified version of biology. Think about it. Just like how women are magnified versions of girls, or not.

I need to solve a sudoku puzzle in 2 minutes.

I need sleep, too.

Traffic Lights.

Sometimes rays of enlightenment gently caress the palpable surfaces of our mental acuity, leaving behind in their wake the conception of an idea, at its very inception. Mine revolved around these machined self-effacing traffic controllers many of us barely take note of as we dutifully trudge on in our mundane lives. These pieces of machinery which emit different lights accordingly play such vital roles in maneuvering the traffic, occasionally even drawing violent fulminations from spinning tires as they screech to a standstill, leaving traces of burnt brake and rubber in the air. They face implacable rush hours undauntedly. They allow pedestrians to stride across busy roads. They are so essential that without, the days as we know them would descend into traffic anarchy. Yet there are those who remain intransigent to the meaning behind the lights, the gracious green for please-carry-on-have-a-nice-day, the mellow yellow for slow-down-you-accelerating-boobs and the radiant red for stop-unless-you-have-a-death-wish-or-good-insurance-policy.

They are so hauntingly beautiful because even in the absence of human and cars, they continue on in their sedentary tasks, switching eternally from green to yellow and then to red, hinting at the phantasmic existence of humanity. [Well, of course we have not adopted energy-saving traffic lights which switch off temporarily when the streets are deserted]

What AIG Did.

Legend
AIG, you should already know what AIG is.
I        =     Investors
IB      =     Investment Banks
CDO =     Collateralized Debt Obligations

AIG sold CDS to not only holders but also speculators. CDS are Credit Default Swaps, another complex derivative. Fundamentally they insure those who bought the aforementioned CDOs. But people who do NOT own the CDOs could buy as well! Now of course like any other insurance you have to pay premium, right? So that's how AIG earned money from this.

Sure when everyone is paying their mortgage then the money goes up the chain to AIG and AIG receives those premiums, everything seems perfect, savvy? Wrong. Have we forgotten that the CDOs were made up of loans taken by the those who would face problem when it comes to financing?

When they default, AIG pays them back, whether it's 100 cents on the dollar or not i am not too sure as that goes into the minute details. This repeats itself with those speculators who bought CDS from AIG as well. That purveys the explanans as to why AIG needed bailout from the Feds.


However these merely skim through the multifaceted disaster. For example, there is the housing bubble and the bursting of the bubble, why asset value dropped, how that culminated to a liquidity crisis or how a vicious cycle flows underneath all these, like the rebuying of the derivatives by the same companies mentioned or some sort like that which contributed to the whole economic calamity.

:D

Oops.

I left out the part that is most important. Ideate this. What happens when the Borrowers fail to pay? Foreclosures, yes. Investments fall rapidly. Investment banks who are still holding on to these CDOs suffer huge losses. Investors suffer huge losses. Workers suffer huge losses.

Now is where AIG comes in. But before that let's rewind back to what AIG did prior to this impending crisis.

Subprime Mortgage Crisis.

My understanding on this matter has increased somewhat marginally. Here is my take so far.

There are 6 major titles that you have to keep in mind.
1) Borrowers              [B]
2) Lenders                  [L]
3) Investment Banks[IB]
4) Investors               [I]
5) CDO (collateralized debt obligations)
6) CDS (credit default swaps)

So the borrowers which are in this case potential HOME buyers will take loans from these lenders, whilst the lenders sell these mortgage loans to investment banks [Hence the investment banks are in charge of the loans]. You must comprehend that subprime lending [refer to title] means loaning money to the various groups of the society, all of which most probably would have trouble with the repayment of the loans.

Now these investment banks (GS, ML, LB etc) would agglomerate these loans along with a horde of other subprime loans [ eg. car loans, credit debt]  into what we would come to know as CDOs, which are convulated derivatives. Following this, the investment banks would pay rating agencies namely Moody's, Fitch and S&P to assess the CDO and these agencies are paid and paid well. Therefore, the CDOs are given AAA ratings. Take note, these institutions merely offered their opinions on the matter and hold no responsibilities whatsoever.

What happens next is that these CDOs would be sold to investors who based their decision mostly on these ratings albeit the fact that they should first understand what they were buying exactly. Let me elucidate the P.O.V. of these investors.

They see CDOs as high return investment, higher than any other types of investment. For example if the Borrowers took a loan of 100,000 Dollars and there are 100 Investors, each would have invested 1000 Dollars; And due to the high interest rates, these Investors would get back say 1250 Dollars by the end of the bond repayment. I mean famous rating agencies declared that these investments were AAA! And they had such high return rates! Why not invest?

But what did investment banks get from these sales, i mean the risk is ostentatiously high but you see they are not the ones shouldering it, the investors are the unfortunate ones. Thus, when the investment banks sell these derivatives to the investors they charge say a 'small' fee for it. So continuing with the example, each investor would earn 250 Dollars, now, say the investment banks charge a fee of 50 Dollars that wouldn't be too much, right? Yes. That's what the investors thought as well. So therefore, short term performance is being focused on, whereby the more CDO they sell, the more they profited from it. This leads to predatory lending, where no one cares how unsuitable the loans were for the borrowers and who they lend the money to; as long as they rake in mortgage loans to be sold. Except the investors of course but this fact was obfuscated to them wasn't it?

Now, of course another reason as to why these borrowers were further mired into their intractable quandaries was because of the steep fall in house prices. Yes it was high and yes it was rising but when it suddenly fell, the eddy effect of the sudden decrease knocked borrowers down. I am still reading on this.

next is :

Why AIG Nearly Fell.

ps. i know i know i should be covering on more recent news like the ludicrous anti-blasphemy laws in Pakistan which led to several deaths or the vital ramifications after Hosni Mubarak's downfall, or the blatant refusal of Laurent Gbagbo to acknowledge the fact that Alassane Ouattara has already won the elections held in november or whether Gaddafi is going to go down but yeahh this held my attention suddenly. like a dormant seed of interest that sprouted shoots and leaves of curiosity :D

I don't get it.

I may sound like an obsolete recording machine when i say this, not to mention naive and ignorant, but could Lehman have survived had they bought CDS from AIG. Did they? [like what GS did] or did they not bet against the massive bulge of CDO? Because i mean the FEDs bailed AIG out and AIG 'bailed' GS and various other institutions out but was Lehman supposed to be one of them.

Please help me.

To Read.

What happens when you cannot attain an experience firsthand?
You ask others who have or you read.

What happens when you are despondent and suicidal?
Well this is a little tricky, you do the deed or in this case the 'sin'. If you do not, you take drugs. If you do not, you hire a therapist. If you do not, you read; about what others have gone through or more like HOW others have gone through.

What happens when you are unsure or feel inept with something?
You read.

What happens when you want to impress someone intellectually? Wait let me rephrase, what is one of the methods to make yourself look less dowdy?
You APPEAR to read.

What happens when you feel tired?
No, you don't read. You sleep.