Paradocracy

No, Mary Cain is not a hero. 

She's just another frustrated former athlete eager to cast blame for her personal failings and her misjudgments of a high-profile program and myopic coach. 



In news this week, former Nike distance runner Mary Cain has lambasted her former coach and program by attributing her personal traumas to a “system” abusive toward women. 

In her scathing exposé of Nike’s Oregon Project, Cain points to coaches who encouraged her to get “thinner, and thinner, and thinner” in order to compete with the world’s best. 

In her diatribe against Salazar, Cain claims that he “created an arbitrary number of 114 pounds” as a target weight for the 5’ 7” athlete. 

To get a better idea as to why Salazar might encourage his athletes to cut weight, we might benefit from an assessment of the body mass index (BMI) readings for the top female middle-distance athletes at that time. 

To simplify the data, we’ll take a look at the BMIs for each female athlete who competed in the 2012 Olympi…

I'm probably the biggest Cowboys fan on the planet, as I was baptized into fandom. 

I'm here to spare my fellow Cowboys fans of a lifetime of grief: so long as Jerry Jones owns the Dallas Cowboys, they will never return to the Super Bowl. 

This has nothing to do with the makeup of their roster, which they have nearly perfected this season, because it has everything to do with management and culture. 

Teams win with effective leaders and purposeful players, and dynasties are made from the cultures they create. 

The winning tradition of Cowboys football was resuscitated by Jimmy Johnson in 1989, but it was prematurely sacrificed in 1994 for the benefit of Jerry Jones' ego as Jones pressured Johnson out of Dallas before winning their final Super Bowl with Johnson's unit in 1996. 

Since then, the Cowboys have endured a twenty-three-year drought, without a single NFC Championship appearance over that stretch, posting a regular-season record of 186-172 (.519). 

For comparison, Tom…

This past Saturday, Olympic gold medalist and world record holder Eliud Kipchoge journeyed even further into uncharted running territory by dipping under the two-hour mark in a tailor-made marathon in Vienna. 

The event, appropriately named the 1:59 Challenge, spurred just as much bewilderment as excitement, especially in the running community, where competitive athletes and recreational runners alike entered into fierce debate on the subject.



In the aftermath of the event, I was personally struck with a range of emotions and curiosities as a result of what I had just observed, in particular what it implies about the direction of the sport of distance running.

Over the course of my life, I have found inspiration in cases where people had triumphed in the face of adversity and unideal circumstances; in particular, the most profound inspiration has taken the form of triumph amidst relatable conditions, which allows us to begin to imagine the significance of any achievement.

Mankind is unque…

Across the developed world, a series of spiritual movements have arisen from utopian visions of alternative existence. 

While the popularity of the budding movement remains unquestionable, the logician will struggle to discover its merits. 

Plainly, the spirit of this movement has been completely compromised in the development of its numbers, as diminishing camps of aboriginals and traditionalists have yielded to the audible rumblings of outcasts and quasi-intellectuals always on the lookout for somebody or something else to blame, albeit cunningly. 

While nuanced, the differences between the groups have shaped the conversation around vaunted notions predicated upon unexamined assumptions. 

Take, for example, the islands of the Pacific, where one can effortlessly find locals who disapprove of the so-called commercialization of their respective islands. 

The innocent islands they once knew and loved are now bustling with tourists and peppered with towering hotels, luxury resorts and condomi…

In modern economics, no greater effort has been made than in identifying some lack of money as the solitary drag on economic growth. 

However, the present state of money, a fiat currency with no inherent value, has confounded the nature of money and, in turn, the most important dynamics pertaining to economic growth. 

In effect, the rise of fiat currencies and their digital formations has produced an abstraction effect that has obfuscated the meaning of investment, prices and economic growth. 



In order to better appreciate these concepts, we will endeavor to classify and relate them to the inherent state of human affairs, whereby we may aspire to truly understand their meaning and influence over the economy and our lives. 

To begin, we must appreciate that economic growth stems from saving (from underconsumption) and capital investment (which stems from the surplus enjoyed from saving), whereas consumption essentially draws from saving and capital investment (and thereby growth), while dr…

While the investment world attempts to make sense of the burgeoning tensions arising from the so-called "trade war" between China and the Trump administration, the US Dollar Index (DXY) has moved sideways along with the major stock-market indices. 

Meanwhile, smart money has piled into precious metals gold and silver, which have witnessed remarkable dollar gains over the past three months: the spot price of gold has gained $270/ounce, or twenty-one percent, compared to $2.31/ounce, or fourteen percent, for silver. 



For the investor seeking alpha, gold and silver stocks present tremendous upside, while silver bullion and miners are particularly appealing at a time when the metal continues to trade at historically-low premium compared to its yellow rival. 

At the beginning of June, one ounce of gold traded against 93 ounces of silver. 

The last time gold traded so expensively in terms of silver, quarterback Brett Favre was preparing for his rookie season with the Atlanta Falcons a…