Hurricane Irma Reveals How Nationalistic America Really Is

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 world to assume that those political borders render us inherently different, or in some cases better purely because we reside on the preferred side of the line.

Until we recognize that the composition of a life depends upon factors beyond government jurisdiction or national identity, until we appreciate the value of a life on the basis of its uniqueness beyond those superficial identifiers, we are condemned to perpetuate and fortify the concrete and intellectual borders which prevent us from understanding, valuing and collaborating with the eclecticism of this world.

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The Kaepernick Craze: Exposing the Nation's Fools One Conversation at a Time

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 …

America's Civil War: Not "Civil" and Not About Slavery

Virtually the entirety of South and Central America, as well as European powers Britain, Spain and France, peacefully abolished slavery — without war — in the first sixty years of the nineteenth century.

Why, then, did the United States enter into a bloody war that cost over half of the nation’s wealth, at least 800,000 lives and many hundreds of thousands more in casualties?

The answer: the War Between the States was not about slavery.

It was a war of invasion to further empower the central government and to reject state sovereignty, nullification of unconstitutional laws, and the states’ rights to secession.

It was a war that would cripple the South and witness the federal debt skyrocket from $65 million in 1860 to $2.7 billion in 1865, whose annual interest alone would prove twice as expensive as the entire federal budget from 1860.

It was a war that would blur the lines and jurisdictions between sovereign states, that would indiscriminately sacrifice the founding principles etched …

Institutional Racism: The Sasquatch of Political Folklore

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…

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