Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Every once in a while, I read a post from FoxNews, to remind myself that I should go easier on LewRockwell.com. Today, it was the smirking Michael Goodwin , with this complaint: President Obama’s team put out an ad praising him for sending in Navy SEALs to kill Usama bin Laden and doubting whether Mitt Romney would have done it. To further exploit the one-year anniversary of Bin Laden's death, he gave an interview to NBC in the Situation Room, from where he observed the raid. And The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Obama campaign has an enemies list, a group of Romney donors it singles out by name on a Web site while declaring some got rich “at the expense of so many Americans.”  As outrageous as those breaches of decency are, they are merely the latest extension of Obama’s polarizing presidency You see, no Republican president would ever exploit military adventures for political advantage . No Republican politicians would ever stage a press conference at a site impor

Let us say that you are an anthropologist who has found a people who were obsessed over everything green.  They paid great to anything green they could spot in their vicinity, watering it, feeding it, cleaning it, maintaining it, as appropriate. This is extraordinary to you, as all of the grey buildings, their brown animals, their red flowers, and so on, and completely neglected. When you point this out to them, they tell you, "You are being irrational! Naturally enough, if all of the green things are getting better, we must assume everything else is as well!" They have a cult of greenness, and the very thing that is making everything that isn't green get worse, their fixation on what is green, they believe to be also the best way to attend to non-green things. Well, Western Civilization has been increasingly caught up in a cult of measurement for the last 400 years. BUt, I have learned it is irrational to think that being fixated on what can be measured might lead u

In the classical and Christian epochs, few people would have worried about exactly how a government was constructed from parts or what operating procedures those parts followed when it came to deciding whether a particular government was justified. Instead, it was justified because it brought about a good end: generally speaking, because it was the most concrete expression of and ultimate protector of the civic order that underlay its existence. The details of how the government had been composed -- out of the monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements combined, or only one or two of those -- and how it operated -- by voting and of what sort, according to what sort of constitution, and so on -- were of interest not as ways to justify the existence of the government, but as methods that could be evaluated according to the extent to which they did or didn't help a government achieve its end. But with the overthrow of Aristotelian philosophy, the baby was tossed out with th

The police outline of where Vinnie the Nematode finally caught up with Amy the Amoeba and made her pay for splitting, Court and Carroll Streets.

It was the parasites my cat sent me !

I have on a number of occasions heard someone say, "It's weird to see a white dude with dreadlocks." What's funny is, having spent my fair share of time with Rastafarians, during the time I played in reggae bands, I never once heard that complaint. If a white dude became a Rasta, the Rastas loved it. What they didn't like at all was anyone, black or white, who wore dreadlocks as a fashion statement. "Him wolf in sheep's cloting, man," was the common description. Just thought I'd let you know.

When I suggested that a probability of zero does not mean an event is impossible, and Bob Wenzel and his fans went into a fury attacking me for my Keynesianism, one of the oddest things said was that I had abandoned anarchism "for money." Well, if that's true, it's not working!I am presently doing three things for pay: teaching at a college where I was hired by... an anarchist, helping to edit a libertarian magazine, and tutoring Java programming. My abandoning anarchism has not, so far as I can tell, brought me in a bloody penny. I'm going to have to find a more lucrative way to sell out.

On The Wire, characters are always saying things like "I'm just a police," or "He's a police." I have never heard a single person in real life call someone "a police." The short, gender-neutral term is "a cop." Is this a Baltimore thing, or something new I've missed, or does it only exist in TVLand?

I've been thinking that the fundamental difference is that, in Keynes's story, people make quantity adjustments, whereas in Hayek's they make price adjustments. Does that seem correct?

Is the biggest productivity difference in my life in the last ten years. For the first time, computerized calendars and contact lists are actually effective! It is the ability to do data entry anywhere the is the key: in the past, you could always print your computerized calendar or contact database, but you couldn't add your next dental appointment while standing at the reception desk, or capture a phone number while chatting at a conference, and that makes all of the difference in the world.

Could you: 1) Integrate iCal with the contact list? If I type someone's name in an appointment, it would be nice to be able to click on their name and have that bring me right to their contact info. 2) Create a third wifi mode for the iPhone? I would like to connect to my home network when I am there, but not be assaulted by dozens of wifi networks as I walk down the block!

I am in PA, in the woods, and have only iPhone access to the Internet. I'm trying to approve your comments, but it is simply impossible on an iPhone. I see a link called "Publish," but when I touch it, the screen flashes, and then returns to exactly the same state it was in before I "clicked" on the link. When I try to check the comment's "choose" boxes, thinking maybe I can publish your comments in a batch, the screen again flashes, buy the box isn't then checked. Jeez, this is Google, one of the wealthiest technology companies in the world. Why can't they get their iPhone interface correct?

Who opened the first cinema in Ireland?

My anarchist friends blame violence chiefly on the state. So what is the least peaceful nation on earth? The anarchist one: Somalia .

In yesterday's delegate counts as of this moment, Romney is up 65-3 on Paul. That lead will widen significantly, probably to something like 200 up for Romney. In the popular vote, Romney is beating Paul by four or five to one. Perhaps Paul is just trying to make him overconfident?

is us : "Not: because Wall Street steals and we have no justice, we begin to admire sociopaths. But: because we admire sociopaths, therefore Wall Street is able to steal. Not: because the social contract has unraveled, therefore we wish to be sociopaths. But: because we are sociopaths, therefore the social contract has unraveled.  I know this is a very unpopular thing to say, but if you find yourself wanting to be bad because everyone else gets away with it, then the problem isn't everyone else, the problem is you."

"May I ask you [Voegelin] to let me know sometime what you think of Mr. Popper. He gave a lecture here [at the New School for Social Research], on the task of social philosophy, that was beneath contempt: it was the most washed-out, lifeless positivism trying to whistle in the dark, linked to a complete inability to think 'rationally,' although it passed itself off as 'rationalism' -- it was very bad. I cannot imagine that such a man ever wrote something worthwhile reading, and yet it appears to be a professional duty to become familiar with his productions." -- Leo Strauss "This Popper has been for years, not exactly a stone against which one stumbles, but a troublesome pebble that I must continually nudge from the path, in that he is constantly pushed upon me by people who insist that his work on the 'open society and its enemies' is one of the social science masterpieces of our times. This insistence persuaded me to read the work even though

Now, one of the top search strings by which people find their way here is: "joe montana' children." OK, someone explain this. I dare ya.

Often, atheists who want to note the "injustice" of Christian doctrine cite the concept of original sin as an example. (They rarely note that they are using a concept of justice that they have borrowed from Christianity in the first place, but never mind that for now.) "How," they ask, "can a just God possibly be punishing people today for something done by two people thousands of years ago? The idea is barbaric!" As I understand original sin, such questioners have gotten the concept all wrong. And I do not think this understanding is merely mine: I also think it is the correct understanding of the doctrine. But I do realize this will not be held universally. So what does original sin mean, as I see it? Well, what happened to create this sin? (And in the following, I think it makes little difference whether you take this story literally or metaphorically, so do whichever you wish.) God told Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of g

Ryan Murphy contends that buying local organic "crap" is just a form of signaling. Two things: 1) No one is trailing me as I shop, Ryan. I can buy anything I want to without anyone knowing. I could buy the cheapest, most distantly grown things in the store and tell everyone it's local organic produce, if I want, and get away with it for years. If it is "all about" signaling, then why would I actually buy local produce instead of just talking about how I do so? 2) Isn't what is good for the goose also good for the gander? Shouldn't signaling theorists (and other reductionistic social theorists) apply their theory to themselves? If organic-food shoppers are "really just" signaling how environmentally conscious they are, shouldn't we be asking what Ryan is signaling in putting forward that theory? Perhaps he's not actually doing economics, he's "really just" signaling how tough-minded and cynical he is. UPDATE: And no

I heard John McWhorter of The New Republic today talking about the Zimmerman trial, and he said the a conviction could lead to a "useful conversation" about race in the United States. Well, that very nice, but... Shouldn't the matter of whether Zimmerman is, you know, guilty, enter into the matter of whether it would be good to convict him?

This company runs the most obnoxious ads. Per esempio: "If you store your stuff at your parents house, that means you have to go visit them."

A place where you can pay New York City taxes, but with none of the urban amenities!

Joe was surprised by my post joking about all Congressional hearings being about wasting taxpayers money. I've seen this before, where anarchists imagine that if one is not an anarchist, one must think the current state we have is great. I don't. The state is often terrible. I am no longer an anarchist because I have come to believe that, while that is true, not having a state is usually even more terrible: it typically involves a number of rival groups engaged in a violent struggle to become the state. Obviously, anarchists don't advocate this! I just think that is what will usually result from the dissolution of the current state. The typical comeback is that, well, "We will have a society of individualists who will not tolerate this sort of thing." But even if that can be created, those individualists will have the problem of defending against outsiders who want to impose a state on them. And then they will wind up either being conquered, or creating a &q

It turns out that Queen Elizabeth will live ten times as long as the average British worker. (Plus, she can lay up to 2000 eggs a day.)

Here : "And when this kind of practice of something becomes effortless, when it becomes second nature, instinctual, it becomes part of you and you of it. You simply cannot describe the great skill of a craftsman, or a cook, or a priest, or an artist except by observing how he or she has become what she creates and does. Julia Childs' cook-book can never replicate an actual Julia Childs meal. It can merely abstract from it, copy it. But the itness is hers and hers alone. At that point, where the idea and the practice and the person simply become one, human activity takes flight. It becomes integral."

Let's say Ron Paul's "caucus strategy" plays out perfectly, and he wins overwhelming victories in all of the remaining caucuses. Meanwhile, Romney takes all of the delegates from every remaining primary. How will that work out in delegate count ? Romney: 955 Paul: 98 (Yes, we might expect Paul to pick up a handful of delegates in a few proportional primaries, but, really... this was supposed to be a winning strategy ?!)

I'm watching an adaptation of a P. D. James novel for the telly. A woman comes over to the apartment of her ex to tell him she is pregnant, and is going to have the baby. But she expects nothing from him. That, he tells her, is exactly what she will get: he can contribute nothing, "writing is more important to me." She gets up to go. But then he makes a move to ameliorate leaving her in the lurch, a single mom caring for a baby with no support from the guy who fostered it: "But wait! I didn't even offer you a cup of tea! I could make you one..."

As someone who worked on a hypertext system before the Web was created, I am always amazed by "Web" designers who simply do not get the idea that created the beast at all. I am looking up some travel information, and hit two sentences in quick succession, one saying: "Please visit our conference website," and the next saying: "Please visit X College website," with neither sentence containing a link! If you want me to visit a WEBsite, you could take advantage of the features of the WEB, and put in one of those silken strands that leads me from your site to the one you are instructing me to visit!

Outlined here .

UPDATE: As you will see in the comments, even one of Block's admirers not familiar enough with his writings finds this scenario "stupid," and suspects it is some ridiculous caricature of Block's view. But, as you can also see in the comments, all we did was to faithfully film a case Block very explicitly lays out in his own writings! UPDATE II: Well, now Joseph insists he did know we were merely dramatizing a passage straight out of Block, leaving me with no idea what he objects to. UPDATE III: I think I may have it. Imagine you know a really nice fellow, a gentleman, bright guy, really polite. He also has a a huge, ugly goiter on the side of his neck. It would be very nice to bring attention to that goiter now, would it? Well, I think the problem the critics of this post are having is that Walter is just like that fellow, except that his goiter are his conclusions about the legality of acts like this, and by making the video, I am drawing attention to the

The announcer said, "Congress will be holding two sessions concerned with wasting taxpayers' funds." But I thought *all* congressional sessions were about wasting taxpayers' funds...

In English political thought, from Thomas More to the American Revolution That's the working title of my next book. The theme explored is the historical development of what constitutes legitimate political authority, and when existing authority can be overthrown. Since this is a period that began with a dynasty put on the throne in a coup, and saw a civil war and two revolutions, these questions were often at the forefront of men's minds, and they were given serious attention. At present, my list of thinkers to address includes (updated to include recommendations from the comments): Thomas More William Shakespeare Richard Hooker George Buchanan Charles I John Milton Oliver Cromwell John Lilburne Thomas Hobbes Robert Filmer Algernon Sydney John Locke George Berkeley David Hume Thomas Jefferson Thomas Paine Edmund Burke Who have I left off the list?

I arrived in my office at 12:28, and immediately pushed the on button of my computer. It took until 12:44 before I could actually use a program.

Out on Staten Island, at the New York Political Science Association annual meeting: UPDATE: Murphy wins: I've have removed the photo from my presentation! Yes, the picture is very disturbing... but then, so is the text. And another:

because I know, when you see a trend, it must continue forever! Furthermore, "prosperity and evolution... go hand in hand." So dinosaurs must have been more prosperous than amphibians! If good ideas "having sex" are more successful than bad ideas "having sex," what explains Ridley still getting attention? And can't Reason turn up the heat in the studio so "Kennedy" doesn't have to wear a winter hat inside?

Many people have claimed that Hayek's The Road to Serfdom states that a single step towards the welfare state will initiate a near-inevitable slide into full-blown socialism. Others have argued that Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions makes the case for total relativism amongst scientific theories. (These are just two examples that happened to pop into my mind this morning; I'm sure you can come up with others.) In response, people -- and I confess I have been one of those people! -- often trot out what they feel to be a crushing reply: but later, Hayek / Kuhn himself very explicitly declares that that is not what he meant! After all, who should know better than the author himself what a book means? But this is not the decisive blow people who use it think it is. Why? Well, the text is an historical act, and determining its meaning is an act of historical understanding. In such work, we do not simply take an actor's word for what he/she did or

Now matter how many times it is debunked, we still get this : "It is not that the sun and the raindrops cease to exist if there is no one there to see them. Manzotti is not a Bishop Berkeley."

Mark Mitchell reports on a couple who are trying to save their children from the tyranny of genderism. They aren't going far enough! Who are they to impose a human identity on this poor child. Perhaps it would rather be an aardvark, or a slime mold! Just release it in the woods, and let it figure out what species it self-identifies as.

We had an apartment on a thousand-acre agriculture estate -- cheaper than a hotel room! Click for a larger view. Oh, and that is Bond down at the end of the driveway.

In response to a very sensible proposal , our leader blathers: 'In an interview with the Grupo de Diarios America, an association of leading Latin American newspapers, Obama said Washington would not "legalize or decriminalize drugs because doing so would have serious negative consequences in all our countries in terms of public health and safety."' 'The US leader added that legalizing or decriminalizing drugs "would not eliminate the danger posed by transnational organized crime."' Yes, and cutting out binge drinking followed by driving will not eliminate the danger of dying in a traffic accident. But it sure would lower it.

This happened a year ago, but I just heard the story today: My (Filipina) wife was touring a high school with our son, after he had been accepted to (but not yet confirmed he was going to) LaGuardia High School, New York's performing arts secondary school. A Chinese mom was standing next to the two of them at one point, and asked if he was likely to attend the school they were in. My wife responded, "No, he's probably going to LaGuardia." The Chinese mom asked "What is he going for?" "Music." "Ah! Which instrument: piano or violin?" When my wife admitted it was... drums , the woman looked aghast, and immediately changed the subject.

The index for Oakeshott on Rome and America is done (sorry, indentation did not paste in properly): Abbott, Frank Frost, 107, 109 Abstraction, 8, 44, 45–46, 71 Ackerman, Bruce, 154, 175–77, 178, 179, 180 Adams, John, 145, 154, 167, 182 Alexander, Christopher, 15 Amendments, to U.S. Constitution, 79, 80, 163, 183, 194 American founders, 35–36, 79, 147–61, 194     Burke and, 159–61     civil association and, 42–43     election crisis of 1800 and, 174–80     English transit and Locke, 147–51     as Enlightenment rationalists, 137, 152–53, 155, 159, 160, 193     federalism and, 77–78     Federalist Papers and, 151–52, 155     Machiavelli and, 145–46     'original intent' of, 98, 183     political thought and, 152–56     rationalist politics of, 3–4, 5, 71, 143–61, 180     Roman model and, 5, 100, 136–37, 138, 144, 154, 196     slavery, women and, 156–57     Webster and, 158–59     See also Jefferson, Thomas Anabaptists, 147 Ancestor worship, in Rome, 105.

John Derbyshire got himself fired from National Review with a post giving the "non-black" version of "the talk." A lot of things have been written about it, but I haven't seen someone really nail where Derbyshire goes wrong. (Someone may have: I have not read every commentary!) So let me say what I think is seriously wrong with what "Derb" wrote. His basic point is that white (or Asian, or...) parents have a responsibility to try to keep their kids safe, just as black parents do when they advise their children on how to avoid being viewed as a criminal by the police. The chief problem with what he wrote, as I see it, is that, by focusing on race, he fails badly at that task. Consider some of his bits of advice, such as: "Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally." "Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods." "Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks." "If you are at some pu

I saw a little special on the telly the other night about the increasing presence of Asian-Americans in ads, seeing as they are the wealthiest ethnic group in the United States. They interviewed an Asian lady, who said, "I think this is great, because seeing more Asians in the mainstream media will help to combat stereotypes." It apparently did not occur to her that the mainstream media, and especially mainstream advertising, deals almost exclusively in stereotypes.

And quite rightly, too . Polanyi has a lot to offer. Rothbard's review of The Great Transformation is the single worst book review I have read in my life. (I still crack up at Brian Doherty trying to defend Rothbard's contention that Polanyi exhibited a "worship of the primitive," since Brian had to admit that, in a several-hundred-page book, he could not find a single quote that backed the contention, but still, if you read between the lines carefully enough, and use your imagination ...)

Over at Rod Dreher's blog , one "celticdragonchick" argues that, since, "close to a quarter of clinically recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage," there really can't be anything wrong with abortion. By the same reasoning, since 100% of human lives end in death, murder must fine as well. (Oh, and I note this not simply because of this particular case, but because I've run across the same argument a number of times.)

"Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.…There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles‘ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need." (Acts 4:32–35)

1) When you are asked if you have any of the forbidden items in your carry-on luggage (knives, explosives, incendiaries, guns, clubs, etc.) answer, "Yes, sir, I brought them all." Then explain that you thought the picture was a checklist of what you were required to bring. 2) When shown the brace position during the safety film, immediately adopt it. Then hold it for the rest of the flight, while making low moaning noises of distress and whimpers of fright. When anyone tries to talk to you, simply become more frightened.

"And certainly ideology, it used to be thought, could not have been involved in that most practical of revolutions -- the American Revolution. "Few historians of the Revolution believe that anymore. It now seems clear that the Revolution was very much an ideological movement... In fact, I would go so far as to say that the American Revolution was as ideological as any revolution in modern Western history..." -- The Idea of America , p. 321

I was going through the security line in Belfast when I saw that my backpack had been pulled aside. There was a small sign next to where it sat, reading "Your bag has been selected for additional searching." When the airport security fellow arrived, to a group of very grumpy looking people awaiting their bags, I said, "Listen, you could be facing a much happier crowd down here. What you do is this: everyone whose bag is selected, put them in a drawing for a new Jaguar. Then, people will be anxious to get the additional screening." All security procedures could be connected with a similar chance of a prize. What do you think?

I was in the gym in Belfast, and I caught the Irish blokes kind of chuckling at the paltry amounts I was lifting. "Hey," I told them, "I've never lifted kilograms before. You just see how you do the first time you try lifting pounds." 

I have not died! I have not posted since I have been recovering from: Red and white wine Bread Salami and prosciutto Chicken liver and vegetable crostini Conch in tomato sauce Seafood risotto Ravioli with meat sauce Lamb cacciatore with spinach Fried and breaded calamari rings King prawns roasted in their shells Lemon tort Spumante Limoncello Grappa

"[Berkeley] is no subjective idealist; he does not say or hold that my smelling is the smell or makes it; for him, the smell is the smell and the sound is the sound; but the existence of smell and sound are, he insists, nothing other than the smell smelt and the sound heard." -- A.A. Luce, Berkeley's Immaterialism , p. 65

James Joyce's novel Ulysses faced many difficulties over charges of obscenity . I was just thinking about this, and it occurred to me that he may have hit a huge snag with the obscurity of some of the prose. The censors reading probably didn't find the parts they could understand that objectionable, but I imagine them thinking, "If this is what he's put in the bits we can read, just imagine what's in the bits we can't read!"

Over at ThinkMarkets: now he thinks he knows how to do campaign finance reform using some weird stuff called "sortition." Next thing you know, he'll be lecturing us on probability, or some s&^t like that.

Many conservatives feel that recently -- since Freud? since behaviourism? since the 1960s? -- our society has "gone soft" on criminals, because we tend to treat crime as a disease or social problem, rather than a moral failing. Well, if by recently, they mean the 1790s, they may have a point: If the characters of people were produced by their environment, as Lockean liberal thinking suggested, perhaps criminals were not entirely responsible for their actions. Maybe impious and cruel parents of the criminal were at fault, or maybe even the whole society was to blame. "We all must plead guilty before the bar of conscience as having had some share in corrupting the morals of the community, and levelling the highway to the gallows,@ declared a New Hampshire minister in 1796... "Let every criminal, then, be considered a person laboring under an infectious disorder," said one writer in 1790. "Mental disease is the cause of all crimes." ( The Idea of Amer

Check out this crazy thread . So, what I did in this post was to state an absolutely standard, but somewhat surprising, finding in probability theory. I did not think or claim I was making some novel breakthrough: I was just reporting. In fact, even the dart thought experiment was not my own: I got it from my old boss, Randy Nelson , who got his math PhD with a specialization in probability theory, and who writes textbooks on the subject. But the commenters in Wenzel's thread went crazy. Their reasoning seemed to be, "Although I know nothing about probablity theory, I know that ex-libertarians are the worst sort of idiots... so let me jump in abuot how stupid Callahan's post is." One poster actually declared that my "infinitely fine-pointed dart" would pass through... the real number line! As though thicker darts would stick right in the reals! Several pointed out my "Keynesian reasoning," or how I must be cut out for politics because of my s

I'm here in Belfast attending the British Political Studies Association annual conference. At a meeting of our sub-group, my friend James Connelly remarked, "Attendance is low this year: I guess we get a lot more people when the conference is on the mainland." "James," I asked, "are the Poles and French and Greeks and so on aware that England is the mainland?" "Yes, they are," he responded. Heavy fog in the Channel, continent isolated.

When re-districting occurs, conservatives are often aghast at this "un-American" practice. But the idea that representatives ought to be "like" the people they represent, in as many ways as possible, is as old as America itself: Actual representation became the key to the peculiarities of American constitutionalism and government. People wanted elected officials that were like them in every way, not only in ideas but in religion, ethnicit, or social class. The people in Philadelphia in 1775 called fo rso many Presbyterians, so many artisans, and so many Germans on the Revolutionary committees. -- The Idea of America , p. 183

Surprisingly, my post on probability theory has generated quite a discussion thread. (And here I thought I saying Ron Paul won't win the GOP nomination was the key to lengthy threads!) In the course of the discussion, I thought of a way to refine my first example to clarify the issues a bit. Instead of an infinitely fine-pointed dart, let's take an ordinary one, and instead of the real number line, we'll just throw it at the wall. Now, I ask you, "Does the exact middle of the head of the dart have some exact x, y coordinates on the grid of that wall, despite the fact that, of course, we could never measure that exact x or that exact y?" If you answer "yes," then I will note that there was a 0% chance that the dart would land at those coordinates, and yet there it is. If you answer "no," you have adopted a respectable philosophical position, denying the physical reality of the continuum. But you have changed subjects on us: you've do

In yesterday's primary result, Romney beat Paul in delegates won 83-0. All bound delegates. I wonder why no one has taken my bet yet ?

I took a long walk today, and didn't see a single sign that just a couple of decades ago, this city was a battleground. I must research further. Tomorrow, my plan is to do a pub crawl. At each stop, I will alternately sing "Do you want a chicken sandwich Bobby Sands?" and "Ian Paisley Wears Nuns Undergarments." If I live, we can declare the troubles officially over.

In front of me on line at the Primark department store is a sixteen-year-old Irish girl with her infant son in a stroller. The boy is screaming, sobbing, and repeatedly says "Mama, mama." She completely ignores him as she piles a bunch of frilly lingerie onto the counter. Finally, his crying attracting the attention of others, she tries to jam a pacifier into his mouth, which he spits out, to begin sobbing "Mama" again. She pays and wheels him away. I pay a minute later. I can hear the baby's cries the whole time I am at the register, and while riding down the escalator. When I emerge into the street the girl and the still-sobbing infant are ahead of me. I could swear I heard her lean over to the stroller and say, "I've read fecking Bryan Caplan, and he tells me none of this will make any difference to how you turn out, so shut your fecking gob."

The city is amazingly normal: not too different than Cardiff or Manchester, calm, going about its day-to-day business. I have not yet seen anything that would hint that a few decades ago it was under military occupation, the scene of a slow-motion civil war.

If so, have they ever used Blogger on it? Because it just works stunningly badly. Last night I tried fixing a post title from my phone. First of all, the "Edit" button itself is a very hit or miss affair: from my phone I find that well over half the time it simply does nothing. Well, this time, it kind of loaded my post for editing: the title came up, but the post body window was empty. "Surely just a display problem," I told myself. So I fixed the title and saved. Nope, not just a display problem: the body of my post was wiped out. Crap like this happens all the time trying to use Blogger from a phone. Oh, and commenting is even worse: once you do anything other than type in the comment box (like, say, scrolling the screen) the comment box stops accepting input: you have to click on "Done" on the phone's interface, then put the cursor back in the comment box to enable typing again.

Imagine a situation in which the people, or, we might say, the market, had chosen a particular medium for money. But a central state is established with the purpose of shoving its own preferred money down the people's throats, whether they want it or not. Nevertheless, the people manage to circumvent the central government's attempt to impose its money on them, and use their preferred form anyway. Who are these Rothbardian heroes? Well, they were the ordinary people of the new United States, who, when the central government attempted to thwart their desire for paper money, by imposing gold and silver money upon them, ran an end run around the Feds: Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution had prohibited the states from printing bills of credit, but the needs and desires of all the protobusinessmen and domestic traders were too great to be stymied by a paper restriction. So the states, under popular pressure, got around the constitutional prohibition by chartering banks, h

Aargh! Blogger on an iPhone wiped on my post! Here goes again: Every culture on earth is 100,000 years old, and East African. The exceptions would be any cultures, should any exist, that have at some point suffered a catastrophic culture wipe-out: losing speech, fire, tools, and so on. An example: It is often said that American culture is "younger" than British culture. But American culture just is the wing of British culture that split of in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North America from the rest of British culture. Picking which one is older is like picking the older amoeba after one splits into two.

"There's a 0% chance that X will happen." Most people interpret that to be equivalent to, "X will never happen." But that isn't so. An example: If one were to toss an infinitely fine-pointed dart at the real number line and hit a spot between 0 and 1, for any particular number in that range, there is a 0% chance you will hit it. But you *will* have hit *some* number, so even though there was a zero percent probability that number would be hit, it was hit.

A new hamburger joint opened up near my house: roughly the fifth "gourmet" hamburger place within half-a-mile of me. They were right at the exact end of the upward market in high-end burgers, so that by the time they opened, the market was saturated and the place has sat basically empty since it opened: I rarely have seen more customers than employees inside. And they are on a high-rent street. I commented to my friend that they were sure to go out of business soon, but he replied, "No, two brothers run the place, and their parents own the building, so it basically costs them nothing to stay open." Well, it costs the brothers nothing, but it sure costs the parents a lot! Imagine a scenario where the parents had the storefront rented for $8,000 per month (what I guess the place would fetch), and the brothers tell them they want to rent another storefront, and ask to be funded $8,000 per month. The net effect on the parents wealth would be exactly the same: they

In Virginia , the state where Ron Paul did his very best in the popular vote, Romney won the delegate race 43 to 3. These are pledged delegates. Only a handful of states permit the kind of manipulation at the district level that is allowing Paul to greatly exceed his popular vote totals in some places. The Paul campaign itself has said it hopes to pick up six states this way, none of them very large. So that leaves him getting whomped in delegate count in 44 other states, by totals similar to the above. (For instance, in California, a winner-take-all state, he will lose 172-0.) I will bet anyone who wants even money that Paul will lose to Romney by at least 500 delegates. Any takers? Say, for a thousand?

This is the most interesting essay of this collection so far. Wood states a bold thesis to begin: We have repeatedly pictured the Founders, as we call them, as men of vision -- bold, original, open-minded, enlightened men who deliberately created what William Gladstone once called "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the hand and purpose of man." We have described them as men who knew where the future lay and went for it... In contrast, we have usually viewed the opponents of the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists, as very tame and timid, narrow-minded and parochial men of no imagination and little faith, caught up in the ideological rigidities of the past  -- inflexible, suspicious men unable to look ahead and see where the United States was going. The Anti-Federalists seen forever doomed to be losers, bypassed by history and eternally disgraced by their opposition to the greatest Constitutional achievement in our nation's history. But maybe

I know a guy who is kind of troubled. His mother was the town whore where he grew up. His father could have been any of hundreds of guys. He really feels uncomfortable about these facts, so I decided the other day to comfort him. "I know the solution to your problems!" He looked hopeful. "Here's what we do: We pretend your mother was a virgin! And we pretend your were conceived when Zeus visited her in the form of a swan. There: don't you feel better now?" "What?! Are you nuts? I know that wasn't the way it happened. So how does that fairy tale help me?" Well, I guess it doesn't, does it? My tale is a lot like the stories some libertarians tell themselves about property. A story where someone finds a little plot of land that is entirely unused, fences it with his own labor, and begins to farm it, is a lovely tale. But it has nothing to do with our world, where every property title is sullied by centuries of theft, murder, conques