Paradocracy

Today marks the end of an era, the final stand of Historic Hayward Field and the veritable symbol of American distance running.  Legends and their feats echoed across this field, along with the chants and cheers of impassioned fans, inspiring the many who have trained or competed there.  For the running enthusiast, no single venue may ever compare to the one which hosted so many world and national records, Olympic athletes and hopefuls, NCAA and USA Championships, their many stories and the ineffable sensations which motivated them to compete, to challenge themselves and to discover their capacity for greatness.  For generations, Hayward Field has stood proudly as a proving grounds and a launching pad for those who've religiously trained for their moment and others who've gathered there to be inspired or to witness the incredible.  With this loss comes a blank slate, and though state of the art, no investment can possibly recapture the spirit...

Those who intend to violently curtail freedom of speech operate from an obsession with discord or from a desperate appetite for limited classifications for singularities which otherwise amount to complex subject matter.  In the lion’s share of cases, it appears as though a select few impassioned chatterboxes monopolize the headlines with explosive rhetoric designed exclusively to make your blood boil, to deliberately obfuscate the ongoing conversation, and to persuasively nudge passive bystanders into accommodating their half-baked demands.  Of course, the unquestioning or preoccupied bystander generously yields to the moment’s inertia as a way of sheltering oneself from the onslaught of ridicule which might otherwise overwhelm him.  What’s more, the average individual faces little difficulty in accepting these demands, as his connections and relationships seldom, if ever, present such a problem.  Where those problems present themselves, however, one always r...

Government’s laws appear to stretch forever into the cosmos, scarcely reined in by those who stand to benefit from the expansion of their powers.   Those laws, then, often replace negotiations and interactions between persons who are perfectly capable of managing nuances and disagreements on their own, who are likewise fully capable of assuming and evaluating their own respective risk appetites.   Of course, while these laws behave as surrogates for the otherwise human factors who originally conducted their own due diligence or paid the dear cost for their personal negligence, the statutory counterpart, the mere interpretation of a composite of ink and paper representing emotionally-inspired thought, fails to assume the same dynamic character of live human beings, always lingering around for far too long and always failing to adapt to fresh discoveries, new innovations and contemporary customs.   Instead, civilizations are predictably left with outdated a...