Who Were the Sea Peoples?

See how insulated you are from other social classes. I scored a 47.

Excellent post from Karl Smith on when an intellectual ought to say, "No, thanks." Rod Dreher notes that abortion is used very frequently to deliberately kill baby girls just because they are girls. Women's rights, anyone? When I deposit a check using my ATM card at the teller's window, the teller asks me to enter my pin. But I'm making a deposit: if some stranger comes along and wants to put money into my account, I absolutely want him to be able to do so, whether or not he has my pin.

when seals talk: (Hat-tip to Andrew Sullivan.)

I've always known of certain strange, alien folkways, practices such as putting those big plates in your lips like above, or fire walking, or making your bed every morning, or mixing your own cleaning fluids from concentrates when you can just buy a new bottle that is already mixed. And I have never minded if others want to follow those folkways, so long as they don't try to get me involved in them. Well, I now know of another: the people in Tuscany eat white bread. I don't mean they eat white bread with butter on it, or dipped in oil, or lathered in honey. No, at a restaurant, the waiter brings out a basket of dry, white bread, and the diners begin to simply eat it, as is. Again, I don't mind if they do it, but I think I'd do the plates in my lips first.

in the long run. And why that says little about the efficient markets hypothesis. In a recent post, Scott Sumner says , "I’m still looking for the model that will tell me how to beat the stock market." He then goes on to claim: "Even the smart money can’t beat the market, except by luck." My response is: 1) Of course there is no model that can beat the market steadily, over the long term; but 2) That does not in the least make the case for Sumner's claim. And the key to seeing why both of these can be true is... historical understanding! Sumner's claim, in fact, rests on a form of scientism, which holds that, if you don't understand something by means of having a mathematical model for it, you have no understanding of it at all. There is only science and ignorance, and no other valid forms of knowledge. Which is self-refuting nonsense, since that claim itself is not a piece of scientific knowledge . Here is a variation on the "Sumner hyp...

The discussion is pretty silly. The guy keeps calling Phelps a long-distance athlete, but of what Phelps swims, only the 400 IM is really considered a distance event. But, in any case, the paleo diet folks are proven correct: look how sickly all of those starches have made Phelps.