Paradocracy

The residents of Oakland, California, and other nearby Bay Area cities, are considering a ballot proposal which centers around the assignment of a $6,000 penalty per parcel to property owners whose property fails to satisfy the City’s arbitrary use standards for a period of no less than 50 days each year: the proposal applies to both developed and undeveloped properties, which equates to penalizing people for failing to build, when it is precisely the existing regulations, compliance costs and zoning laws which make it so prohibitively expensive and challenging to build in the first place. 

I know this firsthand, as I have worked closely with property owners on such developments in the housing space; the permitting and engineering fees are exorbitant for even basic projects, let alone something as considerable as homebuilding or the development of multi-unit complexes. 

As it turns out, the terms of the proposal may also prove too ambiguous to secure the desired ends or to be actionable…

A new television commercial proposes a new way to add time to our day. 

In the commercial, the woman presents a generic clock which shows the addition of a thirteenth hour between the twelve and the one. 

Humorously, the space between the twelve and the thirteen, and likewise between the thirteen and the one, is precisely half of the distance between every other hour interval, and unless the gearing has been modified to accommodate this change, this implies exclusively that the twelfth and thirteenth hours will merely split that same hour, allotting only 30 minutes to each before the one o’clock hour. 

What’s more, this achieves nothing in the way of actually extending the day, serving only to unimaginatively obfuscate the reliable measuring apparatus which humbly reflects the average amount of time for the earth to complete a single rotation around its axis. 

While we could surely re-engineer the clock to accommodate a thirteenth hour, this change will only alter the significance of time…

Another subject has entered the social scene in a more meaningful capacity than ever imagined for the most basic of questions about personal identity. 

The subject has entered casual conversation, the workplace and even schools, where teachers and professors have been encouraged or even required to gently inquire into the gender identities of their students, so as to avoid mistakenly referring to them by the traditional pronouns which have gotten the job done for so many centuries. 



Well, according to the fresh crop of Cal-Berkeley enrollees, there’s apparently nothing the average person can say or do that won’t offend a member of the protected class. 

And gender is yet another form of unrestrained abuse running rampant in our community, where some individuals have expressed that these two words fail to adequately represent them. 

Well, here’s the cold, hard truth: they were never really designed to represent anyone; they were designed to represent chromosomal composition and reproductive…

A great confusion has arisen out of the clamor of political debate, one which presupposes that any dismissal of the merits of “institutional racism” somehow equates to one’s rejection of personal struggle. 

Whereas the struggle of any individual remains always and everywhere unique and wholly personal, his common bond of complexion with others who have struggled serves inadequately as the basis for any argument which regards this commonality as the cause, or as the reason, for that veritable struggle. 

To condemn the unidentifiable and nebulous abstraction, then, by castigating an unnamed institution which persists beyond our specific capacity to recognize its power, serves only to absolve individuals of their personal responsibility, to shift blame and culpability to a specter which exists only by the creative designs of our imaginations, which exists as the scapegoat for all outcomes popularly maligned as undesirable. 

This unactionable practice, then, swiftly and categorically excuses…

The Kaeparnick craze and other viral movements haven't merely pressured people into becoming simpler caricatures of their prior selves, but they have manifestly exposed people for how foolish and uninformed they've been all along. 



In his final year in the NFL, Kaepernick ranked 17th in passer rating and 34th the year before that. 

He played through an entire season in only two of his six years in the league, and his best full-season performance ranks far outside of the NFL's top-250 single-season passing performances in the league's history. 

For reference, the oft-criticized Tony Romo posted a career passer rating of 97.1, as compared to Kaepernick's 88.9. 

Romo's passer rating dipped below 90 for only one season of the eleven seasons he played, whereas Kaepernick failed to eclipse the 90 mark on three of his six seasons, a full 50 percent of his time in the NFL. 

In fact, Kaepernick accomplished this feat only once if we are to discard those other two seasons in …

The information technology era has combined with a generation armed with fancy words and concepts they don’t completely understand to equip a great many with smart-sounding statements, which ultimately fail the more rigorous test of logic, and a wide audience to receive and celebrate their every utterance. 
So while increasing numbers enjoy the wide-reaching channels of media once employed exclusively by professionals, they exist no differently than the trick-or-treaters on Halloween who do their best to look the part.
One key distinction here is that the former may make a more compelling case by glossing over complex concepts with smart-sounding words or pseudo-scientific explanation, without anyone in the audience noticing the difference. 
And while the trick-or-treaters eventually return to their regular attire and reveal their true colors, the con artist continues his charade until he returns home for the night, where he’s either miraculously convinced himself that he actually knows …