Who Were the Sea Peoples?

some explanations are clearly bunk , but this one is brilliant.

to be believed:

Oh boy. I'm five pages into Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini's What Darwin Got Wrong and they have already introduced five entirely gratuitous acronyms, so that I'm reading sentences like (and here I exaggerate a little, but very little, for effect), "If we are correct that in ET, NS is separable from GS and, in its reliance on S-R, analogous to OT, then our case is made." Why, oh why, do analytical philosophers write like this?

"Après le déluge, c’est moi." Isn't that supposed to be in Italian??

The Vikings had the ball with a handful of seconds left in the first half. They tried a long bomb to Randy Moss. He caught it, but got called for pass interference. The Vikings then let the clock run out, although they had time for two more bombs. One of the announcers was so puzzled that she went and asked Minnesota's head coach about it at halftime. His explanation? "We decided we were going to take one shot at it." That's an explanation?! That describes what they did, but certainly does not explain it. You just saw Randy Moss could beat his defender. Why not let him try again? (And Moss agreed with me: He was clearly exasperated when the Vikings ran out the clock.) I see teams do this a lot. But why isn't it a straight probability calculation: Yes, there is some chance a bomb will be intercepted and returned for a touchdown, but isn't that a miniscule probability compared to the (still tiny) chance that your team will score? Also: Brett Favre is don...

Having assigned my students a paper on Aristotle's economic thought, I was shocked to see how many of them characterized the Philosopher as "utopian" and "an idealist." I puzzled over this until I realized the cause: Any check, moral or legal, on acquisitiveness is seen by young people today as utopian! They cannot conceive that acquiring a certain amount of wealth, while often necessary to living a good life, is not sufficient; for them the good life simply is getting lots of stuff. Markets are wonderful tools that promote allocative efficiency. But this is what happens when markets are allowed to run untrammeled over society: instead of being properly understood as tools, the tools are worshipped as ends in and of themselves. The moneychangers don't just have a booth in the temple; they are now the priests running it.

I was thinking about a recent post by Bob Murphy when I came across this: "Since no name can apprehend the divine, or exhaust its meaning, it can therefore be conceded, on the other hand, that all names, in so far as they proceed from a genuine religious conviction and are conscious of their limited and mediate capacity, may be assured of a certain relationship to the divine. Thus apparent scepticism first opens the way to variety, freedom and scope in moral and religious ways of life, and transfers the centre of religious 'truth' from gogma to the ways of life themselves. Henceforth, neither variety nor contradiction in religion need give offence." -- Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England (Cassirer is here discussing the work of Nicolas of Cusa.) Thus, religious tolerance and a frank admiration for religious diversity can be based not just upon a wishy-washy reluctance to hurt anyone's feelings, but also upon a sophisticated acknowledgement of...