Who Were the Sea Peoples?

but you ain't, you get yourself in some trouble. When I saw that one Rob Sheffield wrote an article called "'Blurred Lines': The Worst Song of This or Any Other Year" I clicked on the link, thinking I would like the piece, since I don't like the song . (Yes, I know that's a parody.) Instead, I found an article I like even less than the song. Robin Thicke is crass and crude and commercial... but at least he doesn't pretend to be something else. Sheffield, however, is going to show off how much smarter he is than the pop stars about whom he writes... by saying things like: "Also, in terms of geometry, it's impossible for lines to be blurred because lines are straight by definition. If they get blurred, they're not lines anymore. Then they're 'squiggles' or 'blotches' or something. This is just math, Robin Thicke!" There are so many things wrong with this paragraph that it actually represents an amazing comp...

"Governments are the offspring of religion and morals and philosophy and social experience; governments are not the source of civilization, nor the manufacturers of happiness. As Christianity embraces no especial scheme of politics, so various forms of government are best—under certain circumstances, in certain times and certain nations. And, far from being right to revolt against small imperfections in government, a people are fortunate if their political order maintains a tolerable degree of freedom and justice for the different interests in society. We are not made for perfect things, and if ever we found ourselves under the domination of the perfect government, we would make mincemeat of it, from pure boredom." Read more here .

On a 2013 episode of Criminal Minds , they dug up a time capsule from 25 years ago and found a severed head in it. How could it have gotten in there? Wasn't the capsule guarded? The sheriff explained, "It was a different world then: no one even locked their doors!" So this different time, when no one worried about crime, was... 1988! In the middle of the crack years, when crime rates were sky high compared to today!

If your purchase isn't as specified , sue!

It is really something how often I see articles proffering "financial advice" that "reveal" some well known fact as a source of "profit." For instance, I recently saw an article (I'm not going to go hunt for it: you can easily find one like it yourself) saying that houses are a good investment "because of the mortgage interest tax deduction." But the mortgage interest tax deduction has existed for many years, and is hardly a secret. Thus, whatever benefit it creates is already fully accounted for in the price of real estate, so that, on average, real estate will just return the ordinary return on capital invested: real estate costs more than it would have without that deduction, and just enough more to bring its return on investment into line with all other assets. (And I'm not here claiming that markets are always and everywhere in equilibrium: but I do think markets work well enough that no disequilibrium is going to last for de...

When people look back on the history of ideas a thousand years from now, the idea that witches could turn themselves into cats or that wizards could visit other places in their dreams will see like very minor oddities compared to the idea that we are " living in a simulation ." (In fact, in some computer-simulated reality, why shouldn't there be sorcerers or ghosts or teleportation? They exist in World of Warcraft !)

Here John Gray does it : "or a sceptical view of the power of human reason (as in David Hume and Michael Oakeshott), conservatives distrusted any attempt to remake the world according to the dictates of high-minded ideals and abstract models." This is a common mistake made by people who do not understand Oakeshott was an idealist philosopher. Oakeshott was not "sceptical" about human reason. He did not say that rationalism is good reasoning , but still even the best reasoning comes up short of the mark. To the contrary, what he said was that rationalism is irrational . It is an attempt to replace concrete thinking with reasoning that is abstract, and therefore partial and defective. An analogy: imagine that some people's image of top notch free throw shooting was formed by watching Andre Drummond . They tell everyone, "The way to shoot free throws is the Andre Drummond way." Now Oakeshott comes along and says, "No, that way is nonsense: he...