Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Nate Silver has been getting some flack for his declaration that Donald Trump had a 2% chance of winning the GOP nomination. One thing to note in Silver's defense: "2% chance" is not "no chance": 2% chance events happen! But the real problem is elsewhere: Silver thinks we can assign "objective" probabilities to one-off events. But to assign a probability to any potential happening in an "objective" way, we have to abstract from the particular circumstances of time and place absolutely everything that cannot be reduced to a number by which we can "objectively" place that potential happening into a class with other, past happenings taken to be "identical" to the potential happening in all relevant features except those differing numbers. (For instance, we will have to turn each presidential candidate into a point in a vector space, where the number of "factors" we choose to include in our analysis are the dimen...

They are, without meaning to, ripping the mask off of our one-party state, run by the military-industrial-legal-financial complex (henceforth MILF). The MILFs are quite happy to have "two" parties fighting fiercely over abortion, and who gets to go in which bathroom, and legalized pot... because they don't care about these issues one little bit. So long as both candidates are on their side on MILF issues... they win every election. This realization was starkly thrust upon me in 2004, when 50% of the American people wanted us out of Iraq... and we got two candidates committed to keeping us in Iraq! How could this be? In a two-party system, with an electorate divided 50-50 on a crucial issue, how could we not get one candidate taking each side? Well, because there aren't two parties. There are the two masks of the MILF party, "fighting" furiously over non-MILF issues, to keep the voters distracted, while in almost complete agreement over MILF issu...

How is it possible that Donald Trump has surged to his largest lead yet in national GOP polls , just a week before real voting starts? His campaign was supposed to be a joke, and his early decent poll numbers an aberration that would disappear once voters "got serious." Here, I think, is a good chunk of the explanation: When our elites keep telling single mothers living in a trailer with their unemployed, meth-addicted sons, and working at Walmart for $10 per hour, or guys whose father had a high-paying factory job for 45 years but who were laid off from a similar job four years ago and have found no work since, that they are beneficiaries of "white privilege"... well, what you get is Donald Trump. When I mention such examples to someone who uses the phrase "white privilege," at least someone intelligent who uses it, e.g., Daniel Kuehn, the response I typically get is, "Of course, 'whiteness' is only one aspect of privilege, and there ...