Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Here . (Hat tip B-Murph.)

Sometimes our spaces are a leeetle bit tight.

"[Madison's and Jefferson's] was a cutthroat business. Consequently, their often devious political strategizing does not have to diminish the achievements of either Madison or Jefferson." -- Madison and Jefferson , p. 621 This is a curious thing to say. Couldn't one write something similar about, say, Al Capone: "His was a murderous business. Consequently, his many killings do not have to diminish his achievements"? If politics is as necessarily "cutthroat" as Burstein and Isenberg seem to assume, perhaps the honorable thing to do is opt out of it?

Ok, I watched the guy next to me execute this drawing. On a moving subway train. While standing up.

Here I noted that using Jovan Belcher's recent crimes as a soapbox to call for tighter gun control is a logically specious form of argumentation: a single, spectacular case does not significantly change the case for or against gun control at all; instead, the person using it is relying on the availability bias described by Daniel Kahneman. But this bias distorts policy in terrible ways. I recall once when a man was beheaded by an elevator that someone in the legislature immediately called for laws ensuring "this will never happen again." Of course, it had never happened before, and, as I recall Joe Bob Briggs noting at the time, legislation or no, it was never going to happen again anyway. A one in a trillion chance concatenation of events had taken place, and it was an utter waste of time and resources to devote any attention to it. But, the case sure was spectacular, and I bet the proposed "fix" got the lawmaker some TV facetime. Frankly, I have paid littl...

OK, I am not a second amendment absolutist. (Or a first amendment absolutist, or any other amendment for that matter.) But I don't like stupid arguments wherever I find them, and here is one, courtesy of Jason Whitlock : Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead. In the coming days, Belcher’s actions will be analyzed through the lens of concussions and head injuries. Who knows? Maybe brain damage triggered his violent overreaction to a fight with his girlfriend. What I believe is, if he didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today. OK, so Belcher killed his girlfriend when they were at home together, as far as I understand it. If he meant to kill her, he couldn't have done so with a knife, or a baseball bat, or dozens and doezens of others deadly wea...

"You need a calculus degree to understand how they calculate passer efficiency ration." -- Verne Lundquist during the Alabama-Georgia game.