Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Discussed at Think Markets . What have I lkeft off my list? What have I wrongly included? Please come over and help me out with this list.

I got a hold of nothing Grasped it tightly in my fist But when my fingers spread apart, I saw It had been stolen away

Today my son and I went to use the athletic facilities at my college. Near where we were, one of the women's athletic teams -- I'm not going to say which one, as my goal is social commentary and not the humiliation of an individual -- was practicing. This team's forty-something, male coach was addressing them, and was doing so with a stream of obscenities ("you lazy little f#*ks don't give a s;&t") that made me embarrassed I had brought my son there. Is this now normal, that a forty-year-old man can address late-teen girls in this way with no fear of reprisal?

Ought to behave like the real world in all ways except those for which the writer declares that they are or explains why they are different. That is why it is fine for Tolkien to have walking tree men -- he has set his story in an ancient time, before a metaphysical change in the world, when such creatures existed -- but very bad for television programs to show drivers that can look at the person in the passenger seat while conversing for up to five seconds on a busy highway without crashing. (Unless, of course, they have explained at some point that these are X-Men drivers who don't need to look where they are going to avoid accidents, or that it is Neal Cassidy who is driving.

This really bothered me: Here, Washington had a great opportunity to gradually emancipate some of his slaves without much to-do: Just keep them with him in Philadelphia for over six months, and the law would free them for him. He needn't even have lost their labor: would a free black in 1790 have had many better options than working for the president of the United States? And I bet they would have worked pretty cheaply, as well: they surely would have felt much gratitude to Washington for adopting this tack. Instead, he carefully contrived to keep his personal, household staff (all of whom he must have known well) in bondage by rotating then between Pennsylvania and Virginia. I'm generally inclined to not judge figures from the past by modern standards, but obviously the idea that slavery is wrong was well in the air at that time: witness Pennsylvania's law! For men like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, I think slavery was akin to opium addiction: they knew what they wer...

We just passed a Mennonite high school. My son said, "Hey, isn't that what Superman is afraid of?"