Paradocracy

After a less-than-mediocre dining experience at an Indian-Pakistani restaurant today, and minutes after learning that we had returned an order of spice-less biryani, the manager approached to ask about our experience. I quickly informed him, “Not good.”  Instead of asking how to improve his restaurant, he embarked upon a quest to prove to me and my accompanying master chef that we were simply unenlightened about the methods of his region and that his restaurant avoids spices to allow customers to return home without the aroma of the food.  Oddly enough, we dine to enjoy the cuisine, not to taste the region or the story of excuses behind the tasteless menu of inadequately-characterized courses.  I thank my sweetheart, the aforementioned master chef, for exposing me to the best cuisine on the planet, her own, which has effectively transformed me into the American Gordon Ramsey of Asian cuisine and the greater band of ethnic fare.  It is humorous how close a res...

The Dow Jones Industrial Average originally consisted of 12 companies.  Of those original companies back in 1896, only General Electric remains, and during the most recent recessionary periods it has proven reliably representative of trend.  During the collapse of the dot-com bubble, General Electric fell from roughly $60 per share in September of 2000 to nearly $20 per share in February of 2003, a whole 66-percent decline over 29 months.  Over the ensuing 55 months, General Electric shares would rebound over the 40-dollar level, only to tumble all the way down to $7 per share by March of 2009, as the world experienced the greatest financial meltdown since the Great Depression.  Since that low, General Electric has endured to again eclipse the $30-per-share mark, closing at $32.88 on July 15, 2016.  Since then, however, the stock has resumed its seemingly-secular downward trajectory to close at $17.45 per share at the end of 2017, completing a full 47-...

The case of this year's Tampa Bay Buccaneers finely illustrates the progressive narrowing of the deviation between the teams of the National Football League. In fact, the conclusion of one particular game specifically typifies this trend: the season finale between the New Orleans Saints and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Entering this game, the Saints bore a record of 11 wins, 4 losses,  compared to the Buccaneers' pitiful 4 wins and 11 losses. On paper, this game was a sure victory for the Saints, and the oddsmakers in Vegas and experts on popular sports sites nearly unanimously affirmed this by favoring the Saints by at least a touchdown across the board. However, while the win-loss records of these two teams seem to represent two drastically different tales of two radically different teams, even a stark contrast between a bonafide Super Bowl contender and a bottom-of-the-barrel unmentionable, the truth is revealed by a closer examination of the individual games. When me...

While seated at my gate at San Francisco International Airport, I couldn't possibly help but overhear the young lady seated beside me: “I want to be in a relationship, but I don’t know how to be in one. Is this how love feels? I’m just like, when I look at him, I don’t feel anything, and I feel like [sic] the more time I spend with him, the more I’ll dislike him.”  This aligns rather interestingly with an alarming monologue overheard months ago at my local Safeway grocery store: "Are my expectations too high? Perhaps I'm watching too much This is Us ." The growing accessibility of theater and technology appears to come with a tremendous downside, which has unfolded before our eyes in real time: today's human being is left to decipher between the beginnings and ends of theater and those of real life. All too often, the two appear to be conjoined, even indistinguishable. And where theater once existed as either comic relief or an artistic expression of pat...

In his latest hit Untouchable , Eminem censures the political right by invoking the " hands up " slogan and painting the portrait of a marginalized black man, as contrasted against the "untouchable" white boy. In this highly ironic gesture, Marshall Mathers only furthers the notion that there is some discernible difference between so-called whites and blacks, even advancing a false archetype by framing the black boy as a drug addict: "Probably comin' from the dope house." From the very beginning of this political diatribe, Mathers rushes immediately into the false white-black paradigm before carefully examining specific instances of implied racism. Of course, the hefty implications here point unambiguously toward extant institutional racism , believed to have been grounded in traditions woven into the fabric of the red, white and blue. However, had Mathers taken his history and statistics courses a bit more seriously, if he had even taken the...

A recent video has gained popularity on YouTube and broadly on social media, entitled "Farmers Fail to Justify Killing Animals." The ideological assault begins by dramatically panning around trailers transporting cattle before focusing on the adventurous-appearing, hipster-looking gentleman headlining the project of interviewing the unsuspecting farmers on the subject of the morality of their business. From the very beginning, the interviewer leaps into the realm of fallacy by framing the argument around a prepared intellectual onslaught between a groomed intellectual wielding his sharpened staff and unwary workers operating out of context over the course of their regular duties. Of course, the interviewer will naturally have the upper hand as he enters into this conversation with fine-tuned verbiage against dull and largely-untested laymen whose professions rest upon their ability to perform tasks, not on their capacity to navigate the nebulous stratosphere of might...

The first salary cap in NFL history was imposed in 1994 at $34.608 million, the equivalent of $57.163 million today. The current salary cap in the NFL is set at $167 million per team, meaning a near tripling of the cap since its introduction. According to theory backing the artificial price ceiling, the salary cap offers two reported benefits to the NFL: controlled costs and near-parity between teams.   How successful has this proved to be, and what are some of the externalities spawning from this restriction? Well, the low-hanging fruit here appears to be the unforeseen consequences of the salary cap era, which oddly enough share a lot in common with the greater American economy: the NFL has increasingly become artificial, homogenized and even sterilized. Of course, the salary cap was originally born out of fabulous intentions, aspiring to neutralize the playing field between major and junior market teams. Whereas teams like the Detroit Lions and B...

Earlier this week, I stumbled upon a Facebook thread where a number of commenters had claimed that "taxation is the price we pay to live in a civilized society" and that "we don't own the land or the money, so it isn't theft." What is truly fascinating about these sorts of comments is that they are pure expressions of the efficacy of government-sponsored education, which began for most of us as early as we started standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, an oath which was, ironically enough, originally penned by a self-proclaimed socialist, Francis Bellamy, in 1892. The problems with the Pledge of Allegiance are manifold: first, the baseless and paradoxical assertion that Americans ought to pledge their allegiance to a flag or to a republic instead of the principles of freedom, liberty, sovereignty, and eternal vigilance to the devices of government, the ambitions of political actors, and the republic itself, when in fact the Patriots waged and won a war o...

According to a Pew Research Center survey , roughly 37 percent of Americans report that they or someone in their household owns a firearm. This statistic implies that roughly 47 million households in the United States own at least one firearm. According to another source, the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund , there are, on average, nearly 12,000 gun-related homicides each year. Of course, this number varies year to year, from 8,855 in 2012 to 13,286 in 2015. At the present time, roughly three thousandths of a percent of the American population is lost annually to firearm-related homicides. Put another way, this is 0.003 percent of the population each year. When comparing the number of firearm-owning households to the incidence of homicide each year, one finds that there are 3,917 of those households for every single homicide. And there are more than twenty-five thousand guns for every one of those incidents. This is hardly evidence of a causal relationship, as som...