Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Just started using Google Chrome as my web browser. I had no idea it was possible for the browser to speed up one's Internet experience so much.

Driving home from teaching my class today, I heard an ad on CBS News Radio from the Rent Stabilization Association. The purported speaker in the ad was a "small" landlord, who, with her husband, owned a 16-unit building in New York City. She noted how hard she and her husband worked to maintain their building, how they employed many local contractors, and how people like her were vital to the NYC economy. Then she mentioned a bill intended to freeze rents for... I can't quite remember... the unemployed? The underemployed? But something like that. So, I thought, coming up will be a pitch for how this rent freeze would punish small landlords like her. But no! The next thing she said was (I quote from memory, probably nothing close to verbatim, but I think with the gist correct), "And this bill is vital to the well-being of both me and my tenants." OK, I thought, this must be a ruse of some sort, put forward by some tenants' advocacy group, because clearly, any...

The researcher who perhaps did the most to promote this idea seems to have been almost entirely discredited .

Alasdair MacAIntyre makes a very interesting point in an essay entitled "Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?" He cites a paper that contends that Italians "are less committed to and identified with the actions of their government than are Germans or Englishmen..." The evidence the authors present is survey answers as to how much "pride" the respondents have in the actions of their governments... to which the answer, it seems, is much less for Italians. But, as MacIntyre notes, the words for "pride," although somewhat translatable, just do not mean the same things to Italians, Germans, and Englishmen. In particular, Italians are most fiercely proud of things that it would not even occur to the other folks to be proud of. I think "happiness" surveys are largely worthless for the same reason -- happiness just does not mean the same thing across cultures. If you doubt this, think of what an ancient Greek would say about happiness...

taken by an amateur astronomer from his garden shed .

Over at Reason.com, Tim Cavanaugh writes : "As surely as Earth rests at the center of a finite series of interlocking crystalline polyhedrons within the compass of a benevolent prime mover, so Ben Bernanke will clear all challenges and have his woeful career extended by the U.S. Senate." Tim is clearly trying to mock the stupidity of pre-Enlightenment views of nature, but it seems all of philosophy and science before the Enlightenment (TM Voltaire) is mushed together in Tim's head as an undifferentiable swamp of falsehood, because: 1) The idea of "interlocking crystalline polyhedrons" was put forward by Johannes Kepler , who was a pioneering advocate of heliocentrism, not geocentrism (so the Sun, and not the Earth, was at the center of those polyhedra), and Kepler is supposedly one of the early heroes of "modern," scientific thought. 2) The idea of the "prime mover" came from Aristotle, who certainly did not see that mover as "benevolent...

Democrats kept complaining that Bush had sent Guantanamo detainees into a "legal black hole" where the evidence against them would never be weighed in court. But now that a Democratic president has adopted the same policy ? Fugedaboudit! It's all hunky-dory!