Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I've a couple of papers in their preliminary stages in which I am attempting to collaborate with younger colleagues. One of them keeps suggesting we use things with names like "Skype" and "Drop-box." What the hey? OK, I'm gonna go him one better. I am going to insist that all our collaboration take place in World of Warcraft . "Ah, you want to talk about the paper? Then meet me in Westfall and we can discuss it while we kill Harversters." Or: "The new draft of the paper? Ah, I dropped it off with Jergosh the Invoker in Ragefire Chasm: get together a group, and when you kill him you can loot him for it."

I think it must be breakfast in bed. First of all, a bed seems to me just a horrid and uncomfortable place to eat a meal: the meal would shift around as you moved, you can't really sit up properly, if you shift your legs too much you get the meal in your lap: ugh! Secondly, having breakfast shoved over you, pinning you there, before you've even gotten up to use the loo, makes the whole idea seen even worse. And if you had gotten up and performed your ablutions, why in the world would you want to get back into bed to eat? And yet, it is portrayed repeatedly as the height of luxury!

I just thought of this the other day, and it made me laugh just remembering it. There was one summer when, after band practice, we would take a drive down to Stamford. There was a small Jamaican grocery, in an unassuming house. You could buy plaintains, yams, breadfruit, ackee, saltfish, scotch bonnet peppers, and so on. But... if you knew the owner, you could also, with a slight nod of your head, and so long as no strangers were in the store, be allowed behind the counter. As you came around to his side, he would open a trap door in the floor. You duck in, and descend a set of wooden steps into a West Indian night club. They had a DJ, mirrored balls, Guinness, Red Stripe and hard liquor, hot food, and Rasta men sitting in the corner rolling big spliffs and puffing on them. My band mates and a few of our friends would spend several hours in this basement hide-away, dancing, eating, and drinking with whoever else wandered by, before we had to return to the surface and go back to our ...

You will read gardening books that promote strict adherence to organic purity, and others that recommend using any chemical help you can get. Here, as so often, I think virtue is the mean between two vices: I always try to garden mostly organically. Many of the complaints of the organic community about factory farming are justified. A regime of continual application of artificial fertilizers and pesticides clearly reduces the biodiversity of the soil: they are like similar to taking continual cocktails of drugs in order to remain "healthy." But the analogy holds in the reverse direction as well: antibiotics and other strong drugs have their uses, in emergency situations . If you take antibiotics every time you have a sniffle, you are setting yourself up for serious trouble down the road. But when you have meningitis, it is a very good idea to take them. I try to take the same attitude towards my garden: insecticides, weed killers, and artificial fertilizers are emergency...

Here : "As Ellis has put it, the early moderns replaced the Aristotelian notion of active powers with an essentially “passivist” conception of nature. For the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition, by virtue of their substantial forms natural substances exhibit a directedness toward the generation of certain outcomes as toward a final cause. Efficient cause thus presupposes final cause or teleology, which in turn presupposes substantial form. Get rid of substantial form and final causality, and efficient causality in any robust sense -- any sense that entails an active tendency toward the generation of certain effects -- goes out the window with it. That is precisely why Hume’s puzzles about causation and induction followed upon the early moderns’ anti-Aristotelian revolution. What replaced active powers was the idea of natural phenomena as essentially passive -- as inherently directed toward no particular outcome at all -- on which certain “laws” have been imposed from outside....

I picked up Moby Dick for some research (you will see the results soon), and wound up browsing some other bits for the first time in years. Melville was pretty darned funny: "Nantucket! Take out your map and look at it. See what a real corner of the world it occupies; how it stands there, away off shore, more lonely than the Eddystone lighthouse. Look at it—a mere hillock, and elbow of sand; all beach, without a background. There is more sand there than you would use in twenty years as a substitute for blotting paper. Some gamesome wights will tell you that they have to plant weeds there, they don't grow naturally; that they import Canada thistles; that they have to send beyond seas for a spile to stop a leak in an oil cask; that pieces of wood in Nantucket are carried about like bits of the true cross in Rome; that people there plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's w...

I wish to offer an example clarifying this post . The contention is that we may sometimes increase freedom by decreasing the strength of property rights. At least one commenter confused this with the idea that all decreases in property rights must be good, or that it is always good to maximize one person's freedom at the expense of others' property rights. Since no one made either contention, there is obviously some confusion here, but confusion is always an opportunity for clarification! The specific case I want to take up, where I think it is clear that a weakening of property rights led to an increase in freedom is that of the " right to roam " laws introduced in England and Wales in 2000. Property owners lost the right to exclude hikers from undeveloped parts of their land, specifically downland, moorland, heathland and coastal land. I suggest that it is pretty clear that the people of England and Wales are "more free" than they were before this law ...