Who Were the Sea Peoples?

The emphasis on the last shot in basketball seems irrational to me: "James missed 20 of his 38 field goal attempts... James, however, didn't make the shot that mattered most." The score was tied at the end of regulation, and the shot James missed then would have won the game. But, of course, ceteris paribus , so would his making any of his other misses in regulation have won the game as well, since the Cavs would have been up two or three at the end of the game, and not tied. (Of course, the Warriors might have played differently had they been down!) The focus on the last shot seems to me to be an instance of availability bias .

Here I noted that using Jovan Belcher's recent crimes as a soapbox to call for tighter gun control is a logically specious form of argumentation: a single, spectacular case does not significantly change the case for or against gun control at all; instead, the person using it is relying on the availability bias described by Daniel Kahneman. But this bias distorts policy in terrible ways. I recall once when a man was beheaded by an elevator that someone in the legislature immediately called for laws ensuring "this will never happen again." Of course, it had never happened before, and, as I recall Joe Bob Briggs noting at the time, legislation or no, it was never going to happen again anyway. A one in a trillion chance concatenation of events had taken place, and it was an utter waste of time and resources to devote any attention to it. But, the case sure was spectacular, and I bet the proposed "fix" got the lawmaker some TV facetime. Frankly, I have paid littl...

OK, I am not a second amendment absolutist. (Or a first amendment absolutist, or any other amendment for that matter.) But I don't like stupid arguments wherever I find them, and here is one, courtesy of Jason Whitlock : Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. In the coming days, Belcher’s actions will be analyzed through the lens of concussions and head injuries. Who knows? Maybe brain damage triggered his violent overreaction to a fight with his girlfriend. What I believe is, if he didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today. OK, so Belcher killed his girlfriend when they were at home together, as far as I understand it. If he meant to kill her, he couldn't have done so with a knife, or a baseball bat, or dozens and doezens of others deadly wea...