Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"The state, which cannot protect crowds of dating couples and parents with children outside of Camden Yards, is not going to make eastern Ukraine safe for neoliberalism." Here .

My post on Python and data abstraction was mistaken: every example I had seen of using the '@property' feature showed how to control access to a variable with the same name as the property. But last week, and found an example showing that you don't need a variable with the property name at all, so it can, indeed, be used to screen moving a variable into a different class. I stand corrected!

I offer again Mises' characterization of choice: "All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another. Nothing that men aim at or want to avoid remains outside of this arrangement into a unique scale of gradation and preference." --  Human Action Mises is explicitly stressing the notion that there is one kind of choice, and that all choices pick out an item from a "unique scale" of preferences. Collingwood say, "No, moral choices are of a distinct type from economic choices, although they are both purposeful." If we adopt Mises' view, we have to picture Jesus surveying an array of possibilities, engaged in considerations like: "Well, I certainly have a great absolute advantage at producing loaves and fishes. And I do think that Galile...

I attended a philosophy conference a week ago. I walked in late to the keynote speech, and circled the back of the lecture hall to join my friend on the other side. Thus, I got to see what almost everyone "listening" to the lecture was doing. At least a third of the people in the hall were... fiddling around with their smart phones! So, let us wrap our minds around this: every person in that hall was there voluntarily. Presenting at the conference may look good on their CV, but no one is going to check and see if they attended the keynote address or not. They could've gone out, on this beautiful Saturday at St. John's University, sat on the grass, and texted their friends for the duration of the keynote lecture, and no one would've been the wiser. On one level, they must have thought, "I don't want to miss this lecture." But this was a philosophy lecture, one which took one's full attention to follow. And these people were not following i...

Mises famously treated moral choices as just another species of economic choice: "All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another. Nothing that men aim at or want to avoid remains outside of this arrangement into a unique scale of gradation and preference." -- Human Action Collingwood saw the important difference between merely economic action and moral action that Mises missed: "It is thus possible to distinguish three types or forms of action. First, the doing something because it is what we want to do; secondly, the doing it because it is expedient; thirdly, the doing it because it is right. The first is the sphere of impulsive action; the second, of economic; the third, of moral. These three are not mutually exclusive species of a genus. There is no action ...

Of course, "ages" are constructs of historians, and no one at the time ever woke up and said, "Honey, guess what: the Middle Ages began this morning!" But if we want to point to a time when the revival of Europe after the disappearance of the Western Roman Empire really began, we could do a lot worse than say, "1000 A. D." As of the year 1000, the population of France was around 6 million, and Germany about 4 million. By 1300, both those numbers had roughly tripled, with France at around 19 million and Germany 12 million. And at the same time, there were great migrations from these areas into Iberia, Poland, and the Baltic region. The period saw improved farming techniques, the creation of the modern university, the foundations laid for modern science, the building of many great cathedrals, the rediscovery of much lost Greek thought, and the beginning of Europe's re-urbanization. Then a small problem, the Black Death, struck, wiping out about ha...

Research on plants continually reveals them as more active than anyone had thought: "The more we learn about these underground networks, the more our ideas about plants have to change. They aren't just sitting there quietly growing. By linking to the fungal network they can help out their neighbours by sharing nutrients and information – or sabotage unwelcome plants by spreading toxic chemicals through the network."