Who Were the Sea Peoples?

My life seems full: I have everything I need. Do you think I could be suffering from deficit deficit disorder?

At least for a few hours. He was sitting outside, on the porch, inside a cooler we had left out to "freshen up." I thought he must be dead -- how could he possibly be alive, at 38 degrees? -- but when I shook the cooler to dump him and the rest of the contents out, he began crawling, on what looked to be three or four legs. (Where could the rest of his legs have vanished to, without the process killing him?) I could not possibly abandon such a stalwart fellow, so I brought the cooler inside. Twelve hours later, he is still gimping around inside the cooler. I tried giving him some bread, but he seems uninterested. Shy of putting into the cooler the traditional food of flies -- I really don't want to go there -- what else should I try to feed him?

I just found HyperGeertz today (just a couple of minutes ago, in fact), and they have this nice page of photos . You'll notice that at the top of the page, there is a lot of material warning you not to do anything but "watch" the photos on the page you are on. (Who "watches" a photo? Will they get up to something if they are not watched?) This brought to mind a question I've had for some time: Let's say I use an "img" tag to display one of those photos on this page. (Not that I would ever do that, after such a stern warning: this is purely hypothetical, mind you!) What have I done? I have not made my own copy of their photo. I have not moved it to my site. I have essentially just made a little window on my site through which to see a portion of their site. Surely this is the kind of thing for which the Web was created! Does anyone know the copyright status of such a (purely hypothetical!) maneuver?

"Religion is never merely metaphysics. For all peoples the forms, vehicles, and objects of worship are suffused with an aura of deep moral seriousness. The holy bears within it everywhere a sense of intrinsic obligation: it not only encourages devotion, it demands it; it not only induces intellectual assent, it enforces emotional commitment. Whether it be formulated as mana, as Brahma, or as the Holy Trinity, that which is set apart as more than mundane is inevitably considered to have far-reaching implications for the direction of human conduct. Never merely metaphysics, religion is never merely ethics either. The source of its moral vitality is conceived to lie in the fidelity with which it expresses the fundamental nature of reality. The powerfully coercive "ought" is felt to grow out of a comprehensive factual "is," and in such a way religion grounds the most specific requirements of human action in the most general contexts of human existence... "R...

Bob writes an interesting post about the Mises Institute here . A few observations: 1) As soon as I arrived at my first Mises Institute event, someone I knew from online and I met in the bar at the hotel at which the events used to be held. Right away, he began telling me ethnic jokes. There was definitely an atmosphere that, if you weren't comfortable with such material, you had come to the wrong place. And I occasionally heard one of the senior people, who has lots of H's in his name, say some clearly racist things. 2) That being said, I think the truly racist time at LVMI had passed by the time Bob and I got there (at roughly the same time, I think). Rothbard, in the late 80s or early 90s, had decided that an appeal to racists was just the ticket for his movement.  He published articles saying things like blacks weren't doing very well because they weren't so smart*, got involved with Neo-Confederate causes, and so on. I think by 2000, Lew Rockwell sincerely reg...

I just re-read Clifford Geertz 's essay "Ideology as a Cultural System." There's a lot in there supporting the Eric Voegelin's and Michael Oakeshott's understanding of ideology: They arise when a coherent worldview that had sustained a culture cracks, and people begin to desperately search for a way to make sense of things. But Geertz lacks Voegelin's broad historical vision, and therefore thinks this loss of coherence that ideology attempts to patch over is permanent: we will all be ideologues from now on, forever. But civilizations have declined before, and ideologies arose in their wake. And then, one day, a new civilization-forming worldview coalesces, and the ideologies, mostly, disappear.

Is something I believe in strongly. My kids demanded "No Pulp" orange juice the other day. "Did you ever think of the flip side of this?" I asked them. They hadn't of course, so I told them. "Somewhere in the world -- I picture Nepal -- as a result of your decadent preferences, there are young children struggling to down the glasses of 'All Pulp' orange juice that you have left them. You just imagine their sad little choking sounds as you enjoy your 'No Pulp' juice."