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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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 …

One of Every Three American Adults is a Criminal

Earlier today, the Wall Street Journal posted an article on the growing epidemic of criminal records. The article reports that nearly one out of every three American adults has a criminal record -- a statistic corroborated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose records show 77.7 million individuals on file in the organization's master criminal database. Is this an indication of a society which is becoming more violent and criminal, or of one which is becoming ever-populated with needless and overreaching laws, ordinances, and regulations? In a country whose growing majority depends upon government for salary or entitlements, this is indeed the mechanism through which the dependency is enabled. Some are obviously more than willing to surrender increments of freedom for the promise of free stuff.

Along with the extensive and pervasive development of laws in the United States, their execution has become more vile and horrid. And the experience of police brutality, along wit…

Homelessness More Lucrative than $150,000/Year Job in SF Bay Area

Most people in the United States long for a $150,000-per-year salary. This makes sense, as the nation's median personal income is roughly 80 percent below that mark.

It's a lot of money.

In fact, this income level qualifies for the top 4 percent of Americans and the top 0.1 percent of the world's population; it is 109 times the global average.

If this is true, how could an unemployed homeless person possibly make more money? Well, the federal, state and local governments: that's how!

Let's take a look at the numbers.

A single Bay-Area Californian earning $150,000 per year pays an effective income tax rate of 32.23 percent: this figure is inclusive of a 7.20-percent effective state income tax (and 9.30-percent marginal rate), an 18.27-percent effective federal income tax (and 24.00-percent marginal rate), and a 6.76-percent effective rate for Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) taxes.

In addition to income taxes, the homeowner incurs an annual mortgage cost amou…

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