Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Surveying the Internet, one can find many posts such as this one that contend that modern physics -- specifically relativity and quantum mechanics -- defy "common sense." In the place of such non-sensical physics, they promote Newtonian physics -- the physics with which they grew up. These "realist" or "objectivist" natural philosophers don't seem to realize how contrary to "common sense" was Newtonian physics. The earth is in motion: nonsense -- if one was moving, one could feel the motion; whether walking, riding a horse, or sailing on a ship, one could feel one was moving. Bodies in motion, unless disturbed, tend to remain in motion: again, nonsense, because clearly every motion in the terrestrial realm tends to dissipate, and the body comes to rest. The sun exerts some sort of mysterious force over the planets that acts instantaneously at a distance: the Cartesians were utterly dismissive of that notion, terming it "spooky action at...

We had just seen Bob Weir and Ratdog, and my friend, on arriving back at his bar (he owns it) he shouted out "Bob Weir rules!" A friend of ours was smoking on the sidewalk and responded, "Oh, please, it's not the 1960s anymore." Just so. When someone tells me they have just watched Hamlet , I always respond, "Good God, it's not the 1600s, you know!"

I've been reading a lot of Roman history lately, and you run across things like, "The consul Tiberius Gracchus was murdered in 133 BCE. A decade later his brother, Gaius Gracchus, was himself murdered while serving as consul, in 123 BCE." Man, I would think it would have driven them crazy, wondering, "Why are we counting the years backwards ? And, hey, just what are counting backwards to ? Just what's so special about 123 years from now, anyway?" (Oh, and I always love the name of the period from the mid130s to the late 120s: the time of "the Gracchi brothers." It sounds like a shady Brooklyn trash-hauling company was in charge of Rome during those years.)

As reported by Roderick Long .

Towards the end of Casino Royale , the female led tells Bond, "I'd love you anywhere, in anyway." My son Eamon immediately piped in, "I'd love you in a house, I'd love you with a mouse. I'd love you in a boat, I'd love you with a goat."

Glen Whitman criticizes Al Sharpton for his theistic explanation of morality . Yes, Sharpton's version of this is pretty bad. So why not debate someone serious, like Plato? It is obviously just to act justly. But God is the greatest justice, the eternal form of justice itself. And it is absurd to claim that it is unjust to have to obey the highest realization of justice. Therefore, it is not unjust to have to obey God. The argument often used against a theistic basis for morality, "I'm an atheist and I act morally" has no force against this form of theism: Of course, even someone who cannot see the pure forms beyond the cave mouth still can see a distorted image of them in the shadows they cast.

Here I found the remark that "The consequentialist [in ethics] is concerned with outcomes..." And only outcomes! And thus consequentialism is no moral system at all. Because to judge actions by outcomes we already need to have some way to judge the outcomes good or bad , which implies some prior morality. (E.g., Benthamite utilitarians would argue that we should work towards the consequences that produce "the greatest good for the greatest number." But why should that be our goal? We shouldn't it be the greatest good for me I work towards, or my family, or my tribe, or the people of Uzbekhistan? Consequentialism gets us absolutely nowhere, because it can't tell us what consequences are good!)

Cops on the loose .

How could this change possibly have occurred if the government didn't pass a law compelling it?

Look at this program from Sheryl Crow. If you have a date with her, make sure to bring along some wipes and persuade her to use them.

The Michigan GOP, rendered unable to function for two days by the overwhelming number of calls and e-mails from Ron Paul supporters after their chairman sought to ban him from the presidential debates, officially folds .

Many anti-Ron-Paul web sites are complaining that Paul supporters are "spamming" Internet polls. What is that supposed to mean? These people admit that Paul supporters, as far as they can tell, are not voting multiple times. Nor are they sending Viagra ads to the pollsters. No, what these people mean is that way too many Paul supporters are showing up to vote for him , in other words, "spamming" now means "voting for someone we don't like"! They may protest that, no, they mean that there are organized efforts on the Internet to send Paul voters to the polling site. Granted. But so what? Isn't that what campaigns do , you know, organize people to support their candidate? If the Paul campaign is doing that particularly well on the Internet, that means they should be silenced?

He's now up to fifth in the NH Republican presidential poll , and up from 1% in January to 3% now. Three percent may not seem like much, but it means someone who started out as a total unknown has tripled his support while spending very little money. (Hat tip to Lew Rockwell.) Also, the move by Michigan party GOP chairman Saul Anuzis to ban Paul from future debates has been crushed! The Michigan GOP party headquarters could not function to do anything except answer calls from angry Ron Paul supporters, so the chairman caved -- when I called today I was told "Mr. Anuzis, after discussions with the RNC, has decied to take no actions against Congressman Paul."

Little Green Footballs, one of the premier hate sites on the Web, warns Ron Paul supporters to stop voting for Ron Paul. When they keep on doing it, LGF removes him from the poll .

Here .

Wendy McElroy on Naomi Wolf on how to close an open society . (By the way, if I seem to be blogging in bursts these days, there's a reason -- when in Pennsylvania, my version of Safari can't access Blogger properly -- the "publish" and "save" buttons do nothing. And I have to drag the machine baack to Brooklyn to upgrade it, because we can only get dial-up in PA; well, "only" unless we want to pay $10,000 to run cable to the house.)

Check out J. Rufus Fears selling Rome to a bunch of neocons : "Whenever you’re talking about Rome, you must fight against the nonsense of a movie like Gladiator. You must fight against the nonsense of this program called Rome, some degraded spectacle on HBO." No, none of that decadence or violence or corruption you've heard about! Except here's someone writing at that time : "XXXI. Sulla now began to make blood flow, and he filled the city with deaths without number or limit; many persons were murdered on grounds of private enmity, who had never had anything to do with Sulla, but he consented to their death to please his adherents. At last a young man, Caius Metellus, had the boldness to ask Sulla in the Senate-house, when there would be an end to these miseries, and how far he would proceed before they could hope to see them stop. "We are not deprecating," he said, "your vengeance against those whom you have determined to put out of the way, but w...

By me. Here .

Of course, Internet polls are not scientific, but, still, have a look at Ron Paul's numbers . In a ten candidate field, he's getting as many positive votes as almost every other candidate combined . The press is going to have to start taking him seriously. And Andrew Sullivan has said that, as far as he is concerned, there are only two candidates, McCain and Paul.

Here .

The standard libertarian solution to how people best can achieve the obvious benefits of mutual cooperation whilst maintaining respect for the dignity and autonomy of the individuals comprising any social group possesses the virtue of being the readily comprehensible consequence of accepting a small number of intuitively appealing principles. However, what proponents regard as admirably simple readily can appear simplistic if libertarian apologists display little awareness of the location of their ideas within the great currents running through the history of European political thought, a history incorporating much profound contemplation of human nature and social reality. If prominent proponents of libertarianism appear to be ignorant of the great themes of Western political theory, then its opponents can plausibly dismiss libertarianism as another naïve attempt to deal with the complexity of political life with a set of simplistic slogans. That may not matter in terms of motivating ...

From MSNBC.com : "On defense for much of the evening, Giuliani switched gears nearly an hour into the debate, challenging Rep. Ron Paul’s suggestion that the U.S. bombing of Iraq had contributed to the terrorist attacks of 2001. "As mayor of New York at the time of the attacks, Giuliani said sternly, 'I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before, and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations.'” Giuliani must not listen very well, because bin Laden himself has cited that as a major reason for his jihad against the US.

I've been thinking about the need to distinguish between two very different sorts of anarchy. The word comes from the Greek an archon , or no leader. The first type of situation in which there might be "no leader" gives us the common usage of anarchy: in a social order dependent (in some sense) on there being a leader, there suddenly isn't one. Thus, we get "Baghdad is in a state of near anarchy." The second type of situation occurs when there is no leader, but the social order has evolved or been designed to function that way. That of course, is what most people who call themselves an "anarchist" mean to advocate. And that is why it is absurd to try to refute their position by saying, "Oh, you want anarchy? Just move to Baghdad."

Getting off the Brooklyn Bridge today, I saw a sign, in fading paint, on the wall of a building: "Flats to let / So-and-so Realty." Were "flats" and "to let" really once common American lingo? If so, when? And what process banished them from our vocabulary? (I had an English friend vigorously complain to me one pub night that contemporary American English does not distinguish between the function of a landlord, who in England has a flat "to let," and that of a potential tenant, who wishes "to rent" that flat.)

This afternoon I heard a commentator on CBS News Radio discussing Rudy Giuliani's recent re-affirmation of his pro-choice stance regarding abortion. The commentator noted that, while the position would probably cost Giuliani a shot at getting many votes from Republican evangelicals, the presidential candidate had most likely calculated that he could make up for that with support from moderate Republicans, especially with California having an early primary. What struck me was that the commentator never entertained the possibility that Giuliani might have determined what to say about this issue based on what he really believed . We have reached the point in the decline of our polity that the notion that politicians might be adopting a stance based on principle is not even considered plausible.

Playland Amusement Park in Rye, NY has banned smoking at the park starting this season. They did it because it's a family park and their customers preferred not to expose their kids to smoke. Isn't that funny? The customers wanted a no-smoking policy, and the business implemented it! How could that possibly have happened without the government getting involved?

I heard a telling conversation between a cop and a bartender the other day in Brooklyn. The cop was complaing about a bicyclist: "My partner and I were in an unmarked vehicle, going the wrong way over the Union St. bridge. This guy on his bike starts screaming at me for going the wrong way. I stopped the car and told him, 'Don't ever talk to anyone in this neighborhood that way. For all you knew, I could be some nutcase.'" Note: 1) The cop never tried to justify his own lawbreaking, saying, for instance, "It was an emeregency call." Law-breaking by the police needs no justification in his eyes. The Brooklyn police routinely violate traffic laws to, say, get a slice of pizza. 2) Far from its being the job of every citizen to help enforce the law, as it has been for centuries in the common law tradition, citizens better just mind their own friggin' business. Of course, it has been decisively demonstrated that without norms against and public disappro...

My favorite store near Milford Pennsylvania offers fireworks, tobacco, and gasoline. What a day you could have! Load up the trunk with fireworks, start pumping some gas, light a smoke, and watch the fun begin!

Wi-Fi is in trouble in Europe. The Independent reports : "But several European provincial governments have already taken action to ban, or limit, its use in the classroom, and Stowe School has partially removed it after a teacher became ill." A teacher became ill ! That had never happened before the school had installed Wi-Fi, and, of course, post hoc, ergo propter hoc and all, so Stowe was clearly right.

Sports Illustrated reports that the Yankees are considering firing Joe Torre. These decisions often seem to me to defy any probabilistic understanding of a sport like baseball. I mean, in ten seasons, Torre has won four World Series and made the playoffs most of the other years. This year he has a horribly injured pitching staff, and the team has not done well for one month. What are the odds that some other manager could do better? Is there any other major league manager with a better record than Torre over the last decade? But a few bad weeks, and his job is on the line. Well, the fans want something done, and Steinbrenner sure isn't going to fire himself!

Click for a larger image: (Notice the man on the right who, oddly, is walking straight at a brick wall.)