Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Every once in a while, I read a post from FoxNews, to remind myself that I should go easier on LewRockwell.com. Today, it was the smirking Michael Goodwin , with this complaint: President Obama’s team put out an ad praising him for sending in Navy SEALs to kill Usama bin Laden and doubting whether Mitt Romney would have done it. To further exploit the one-year anniversary of Bin Laden's death, he gave an interview to NBC in the Situation Room, from where he observed the raid. And The Wall Street Journal revealed that the Obama campaign has an enemies list, a group of Romney donors it singles out by name on a Web site while declaring some got rich “at the expense of so many Americans.”  As outrageous as those breaches of decency are, they are merely the latest extension of Obama’s polarizing presidency You see, no Republican president would ever exploit military adventures for political advantage . No Republican politicians would ever stage a press conference at a site impor...

Let us say that you are an anthropologist who has found a people who were obsessed over everything green.  They paid great to anything green they could spot in their vicinity, watering it, feeding it, cleaning it, maintaining it, as appropriate. This is extraordinary to you, as all of the grey buildings, their brown animals, their red flowers, and so on, and completely neglected. When you point this out to them, they tell you, "You are being irrational! Naturally enough, if all of the green things are getting better, we must assume everything else is as well!" They have a cult of greenness, and the very thing that is making everything that isn't green get worse, their fixation on what is green, they believe to be also the best way to attend to non-green things. Well, Western Civilization has been increasingly caught up in a cult of measurement for the last 400 years. BUt, I have learned it is irrational to think that being fixated on what can be measured might lead u...

In the classical and Christian epochs, few people would have worried about exactly how a government was constructed from parts or what operating procedures those parts followed when it came to deciding whether a particular government was justified. Instead, it was justified because it brought about a good end: generally speaking, because it was the most concrete expression of and ultimate protector of the civic order that underlay its existence. The details of how the government had been composed -- out of the monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements combined, or only one or two of those -- and how it operated -- by voting and of what sort, according to what sort of constitution, and so on -- were of interest not as ways to justify the existence of the government, but as methods that could be evaluated according to the extent to which they did or didn't help a government achieve its end. But with the overthrow of Aristotelian philosophy, the baby was tossed out with th...

The police outline of where Vinnie the Nematode finally caught up with Amy the Amoeba and made her pay for splitting, Court and Carroll Streets.

It was the parasites my cat sent me !

I have on a number of occasions heard someone say, "It's weird to see a white dude with dreadlocks." What's funny is, having spent my fair share of time with Rastafarians, during the time I played in reggae bands, I never once heard that complaint. If a white dude became a Rasta, the Rastas loved it. What they didn't like at all was anyone, black or white, who wore dreadlocks as a fashion statement. "Him wolf in sheep's cloting, man," was the common description. Just thought I'd let you know.

When I suggested that a probability of zero does not mean an event is impossible, and Bob Wenzel and his fans went into a fury attacking me for my Keynesianism, one of the oddest things said was that I had abandoned anarchism "for money." Well, if that's true, it's not working!I am presently doing three things for pay: teaching at a college where I was hired by... an anarchist, helping to edit a libertarian magazine, and tutoring Java programming. My abandoning anarchism has not, so far as I can tell, brought me in a bloody penny. I'm going to have to find a more lucrative way to sell out.