Who Were the Sea Peoples?

If you want to do well in LRC's rankings, just make sure "Ron Paul" is in your article's title. Gene, does this mean my article is 1/52 as cool as your Fascist America one?

God has been going through some Cambridge changes , man. (Hat tip to Roderick Long.)

My wife said, "I'm thinking of getting beta fighting fish." I told her she should wait for the release version.

John Rawls is most famous for his "veil of ignorance," which, in short, says that a just polity is one that everyone would choose if they had no idea of whom they would be in that society. As Anthony de Jasay has pointed out, this basically says, "If you make everybody the same person, we'll agree on political matters!" But, giving more evidence of Rousseau's genius, he anticipated and answered John Rawls 200 years before Rawls wrote: "If there were no differing interests, we should scarcely be aware of the common interest, which would never meet any obstacle; everything would run by itself, and there would no longer be any skill in politics."

Yesterday marked the start of eight days of Ron Paul Christmas. I met three fellow Ron Paul supporters in Chicago and we drove together to Iowa, through farmland and five hours later, into Des Moines. Aside from bumper stickers on out of state vehicles, the first candidate signs to be seen where the Huckabee and Paul campaign office signs, side by side. Inside the Ron Paul office, right now sprawling and very busy, at least 20+ volunteers were doing various things. After grabbing a bite to eat, I joined in and helped stuff literature (which we'll be handing out door to door in the coming days. Everyone was in good spirits and the talk around the office everywhere was surprisingly intellectual. No shortage of nerds at Ron Paul HQ, as it should be. At 8 PM we headed over to the Marriot where Ron Paul greeted us and gave an inspiring speech. There were hundreds of students in attendance. When Ron Paul told us that this movement would outlast the election, regardless of the fi...

OK kids, let's walk through this. In the past, I've heard "conservatives" get furious over the suggestion that the Civil War wasn't about slavery. Rush Limbaugh once was talking to a kid who called in who was a history buff, and Rush said, "What was the Civil War over?" The kid said slavery, and Rush commended him on a job well done. After all, Rush explained, it was revisionist leftists who tried to blame everything on "economic forces" and who couldn't just accept the fact that Americans were willing to go fight and die for moral principles. Now, in an effort to criticize Ron Paul, people (some who are conservative, though I don't really know about the Morning Joe crowd) are ripping him for allegedly blaming the war on slavery. (That's asinine, by the way, since Paul follows DiLorenzo's take on this issue closely. I.e. Paul was saying that Lincoln didn't need to fight a war to free slaves; he wasn't saying Lincol...

Wow, this was a hot button one. I got the usual email about not fighting Hitler, of course. I always love that argument, since I don't think the US should have fought World War II.