Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Lately I've spent a lot of my online persona arguing two main things: On LRC I've been questioning the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy in biology, while on Mises.org I've been defending the free trade / globalization orthodoxy in economics. To be honest, I have indeed experienced some cognitive dissonance. Don't get me wrong, I still think the ID critics are on to something while the trade critics are misguided; I wouldn't keep writing these respective articles if I thought otherwise. But I can certainly appreciate the structural/rhetorical (for lack of a better term) similarity between some of my own defenses of free trade and the mainstream biologists' defense of evolution. The one thing in particular that worries me is this: It is possible that the hysterical warnings of people like Paul Craig Roberts (who says the US will be a Third World economy by 2024) are right, but that the cause of this catastrophe is something other than "free trade." In that c...

Well I wasn't as hooked as quickly as with the show 24 , but nonetheless I am now a big fan of Joss Whedon's Firefly . How to describe the show? Well, imagine that the rebels had been crushed by the Empire, but that Han Solo lived and returned to smuggling. Incidentally, if you do decide to give it a try, don't you dare rent the movie first. You need to watch the television episodes in order (there are four total discs--the evil capitalists cancelled the show in the first season) and then watch the movie, Serenity .

"Naturalism," as far as I understand it, simply means taking one idea and making a fetish of it. (In this case, the idea of "nature.") As R.G. Collingwood put it, you can tell materialism is a religion because if you just substitute "God" for "nature" in a talk by a materialist, you'd have a perfectly good Christian sermon. But I've never even found a consistent naturalist. A friend of mine at LSE told me, "I try to practice a naturalistic attitude towards sex." What he meant was that he wanted to sleep with lots of women. What he didn't want was the natural consequence of that activity, getting lots of women pregnant. That sort of naturalism he worked studiously to avoid, but whatever artificial means were efficacious. Similarly, I've been reading The Beauty of the Beastly , a very entertaining book by Natalie Angier. She pitches a similarly "naturalistic" attitude towards sex. But she certainly doesn't...

Callahan has been banned from Yahoo! mail ! (Another hat tip to Rob Dodson .) In related news, my friend Walter Bloch told me that he often hunted for the shortest string that uniquely found a person in his phone file. The string for me was 'allah.'

Does anyone know who are these "Wintry Micks" they keep talking about on The Weather Channel? And why do people feel so free to slur Bob and my people, anyway?

OK, somebody please tell me that it was a parody commercial I saw advertising a drug to treat "Restless Leg Syndrome."

and I'm here to help. Radley Balko continues his great work on abusive police practices. Also, see David Henderson on why going to war with Japan in WWII was a stupid decision. One thing to note: Henderson teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School.