Who Were the Sea Peoples?

In a survey of over 100,000 high school students in the U.S., a whopping 36% of the students expressed the belief that the press should have to receive government approval before publishing news stories. Okay, I finally understand why my husband is a nihilist. If there is any hope to be had, I can't find it. (I guess I shouldn't worry about it; the national media are nothing but lapdogs for the state, anyway.)

My impression, from watching Monty Python , The Avengers , and other British TV shows from the 60s and 70s, was that England is a vague and somewhat out-of-focus place. I can now assure you that is not the case -- objects are every bit as sharp and focused here as in the US, and their colors are no more or lessed washed out than are the colors of American objects. However, against the above, I must mark in the surprise-on-the-downside column the fact that England is chock full of very tiny steps -- oh, like an inch high or so. English architects seem to have precisely determined the height at which a step is just too small to be plainly visible, but plenty tall enough to trip you. A favorite place for these mini steps is in pubs, perhaps as one transitions from one room to another, but maybe just hanging out halfway across a single room.

Seriously. Say what you will about this group, they occasionally are right on the money. (Note: This might take a while to load with a dial up, and either way you need to turn on your speakers.)

A common dismissal of free market anarchism is that "it won't work." I actually think this is right, but not in the sense that the law-and-order critic means. Yes, it is true that if you took just about any group of individuals from the current planet and turned them loose in a virgin territory, that in 20 years they'd have a coercive government of some kind. So in that sense f.m. anarchy "won't work." But notice that this would be due to the prejudices and faulty theories of the random sample of people. I do not say that they'd be compelled to adopt a government because of rampant crime, vague land titles, etc. No, I am conceding that anarchy "won't work" in the same way that abstinence programs "won't work" to combat teen STDs. It's not that there's anything flawed with the policy of abstinence; on the contrary, it works every time it's tried. (I think I'm stealing that line from Bill Bennett....

After one of my many thought-provoking LRC articles on matters divine, an emailer thought he'd blow me up by asking, "Can God make a chair so heavy he can't lift it?" I forwarded the email to a Christian philosophy professor at my college, and he said that most theist thinkers deal with this type of thing by saying that even an omnipotent being needn't have the ability to perform nonsense tasks. E.g. nobody would challenge Aquinas by asking, "Can your God blumber dift?" So in the same way, my colleague said, we shouldn't squirm at questions like this. But I think in this particular case, that's not the right answer. It is certainly coherent to ask if God can make a chair so heavy He Himself can't lift it. Moreover, it's not even an internally problematic statement-- I can make a chair so heavy that I can't lift it. (I concede that I can't make a chair so heavy that God can't lift it.) Thus I think the correct ...

While trying on nursing nightwear yesterday (undoubtedly some of the frumpiest clothing in existence), I overheard two teenage girls talking in front of the large mirror in the fitting room. Girl 1: Amy Byer is very petite, so she designs her clothes for shorter girls. Girl 2: Uh huh. Girl 1: They're cut so that they look right on someone who's not very tall. Girl 2: (nothing) Girl 1: Anyway, Amy Byer is not a slutty designer. She designs very classy stuff. It's not supposed to be slutty looking. Girl 2: Right. Girl 1: (pause) So I think what I'm going to do is just bring my mom here, and point out this outfit. Man did that bring back memories! I don't think I ever spent time inventing rationalizations about petite designers (althought Amy Byer may very well be petite), but I certainly do remember wanting clothes that my mom considered way too trampy. I looked at myself in the mirror, and saw myself, now 21 and wearing a long floral nightgow...

Every week the US stays in Iraq costs the lives of 14 American soldiers and $2 billion . The above figures are sourced to "Christopher Preble, a Navy veteran of the 1991 Gulf War who directs foreign policy at the conservative Cato Institute..." I didn't realize Cato even had its own foreign policy!