Paradocracy

Until 2009, the players of the National Football League (NFL) would remain in their locker rooms until well after the playing of the national anthem.  What changed? As it turns out, during the 2009 NFL season, the league began mandating that players stand at attention and face the flag during the playing of the anthem.  What's more, in 2012 the Department of Defense (DoD) began shelling out millions of dollars to teams for participating in the on-field ceremonies, rendering the players near equivalents to the gladiators of the Roman Empire.  You might remember Russell Crowe shouting , "Are you not entertained?"  As teams began participating in the ceremonies, a seemingly-innocuous expansion of the propagandizing presence of the metastasizing political machine, the well-intentioned players and the adorning heritages of their teams tacitly attached themselves to the new, uniquely American form of patriotism, unquestioning patronage to the sacred flag

ESPN host Jemele Hill labels Donald Trump a "white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself [with] other white supremacists." She continues with her next tweet, "Trump is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. His rise is a direct result of white supremacy. Period." First, Donald Trump's "rise" has far more to do with the real state of the American economy and the shift of the minority vote, a category that Barack Obama previously dominated in addition to that of civilian casualties by way of drone strikes, something the majority would surely describe as offensive. Voters effectively expressed their preference for a non-establishment candidate by supporting Trump over Clinton. White supremacy was hardly even a subject under consideration at the time of the election. Suddenly, after a number of violent episodes between two wildly-abrasive and contentious groups who have far more in common than they would readily ackn

In anticipation of the colossal hurricane known as Irma, Floridians have mobilized to purchase everything they could conceivably need to weather the storm and protect their property. Stories of lines at gas stations, shortages of water at grocery stores, and lack of sand for sandbags are just a few examples of the scarcity facing residents and travelers as they prepare for Irma's arrival. Now, many of you may have a working understanding of supply and demand, the foundation of modern economics. The law of supply and demand shows that the quantity of any good supplied will increase along with the price of that good, whereas the quantity of any good demanded will fall along with the price of that good, and vice versa. Equilibrium then is the exact point at which the quantity of any good supplied at a given price matches the quantity of that good demanded at that price. So, in the case of coveted supplies during a state of emergency, market agents will immediately expe

Over the past week, several Caribbean islands have been completely ravaged by the serious CAT 5 hurricane widely known as Irma. Meanwhile, the Weather Channel and other domestic news stations focus on the state of Florida and the hundreds of stranded travelers at Miami and Fort Lauderdale international airports. During these interviews, we hear complaints about the same devastating hurricane disrupting their luxurious vacations, while some poor-planning procrastinators alongside them lament being stuck at the airport. In the modern world, it appears as though everyone else is at fault, whether it's an insufficient supply of water bottles, shortages at grocery stores, too few airplanes to service their airports, or not enough gas at the local pump. People and their governments have become masters of complaining and concocting sob stories while they've become increasingly naive about taking personal responsibility over their own lives. Of course, the looming devast

Is anyone else repulsed by the phrase mandatory evacuation ? In the weeks surrounding the Caribbean's most recent bouts with hurricanes and tropical storms, a phrase that has become almost numbly parroted across the airwaves and during town hall meetings has been that of mandatory evacuations . In these cases, public officials determine that the forecasted calamities are so threatening as to merit threatening their residents in their own way, by way of jail time or forced removal, if they refuse to vacate their homes and flee to a neighboring region of permissible habitation beyond the scope of their forecast models. Sadly, this appears to only set further precedent by which government actors, seemingly always bursting with the warmest of intentions, will continue to encroach upon your personal liberties in pursuit of their own myopic agendas of righteousness and life well-lived. The Weather Channel has even issued reports of police in Deerfield Beach, Florida, arresting

It's interesting how the Weather Channel seems to treat the devastation of the Caribbean, even American territories, as precursors to what they have identified as the event , otherwise known as landfall upon the continental United States. For the people presently facing Irma, the event is happening now. The reason this is important is that it implies a lot about the way we view the world and its inhabitants. Although the political map clearly illustrates borders between nations, views from the International Space Station reveal that these boundaries are mere imaginary lines drawn by history's political pundits whose self-interested motives altogether failed to represent the unanimous consensus of the time, and yet they fail even more miserably in that capacity today. Notwithstanding the fact that we are all inhabitants of this earth, of the same species and familiar family dispositions, we are subliminally inculcated by political representations of this terrestrial

An article published today by MarketWatch, entitled The world is becoming desperate about deflation , reveals the astounding truth that interest rates would not have remained as low as they are today if the American economy had truly recovered from its most recent recession. Economists of the political ranks tend to support lower interest rates and inflationary measures because they advance spending, boondoggles and measurable economic activity to the limited timeframes of their active administrations, at the real expense of future output and thoughtful investment that simply affords no benefit to present-day headline economic indicators and the intellectuals who wield them. In an anemic economic climate, infrastructural change is the antidote to misinvestment, while monetary manipulation is the politically-convenient mirage in the desert of economic despair. While wanderers across that desert perceive advantage in continuing to chase elusive returns and public policy tacitly

Many of the millennials who today salivate over the explosiveness of the cryptocurrency exchanges are likely blind to the manias which not too long ago preceded this one. In the mid to late 1990s, investors simply could not get enough of the emerging dot-com label, buying anything that slapped the .com to the end of its name. Akin to the subsequent housing boom, earnings (or rents) were rendered immaterial due to the anticipation of astronomical forthcoming gains. With the effective federal funds rate being brought down from over 8 percent in late 1990, when the NASDAQ traded under 400 points, to under 3 percent by late 1992, the opportunity cost relative to speculative investment had been rendered virtually negligible to the perceived gains of the stock market.  Finally in 1999, the Clinton administration presided over the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the 1933 legislative measures which delineated the differences between commercial and investment banking to effectively co