This place may very likely turn into nothing more than my "excerpt granary." But I'm sure I can find some argument for the utility of such a granary...

There is still a propensity to forget the enormous scope of primitive warfare. The following just serves as my own reminder. Lawrence H. Keeley wrote War Before Civilization, and the samples that ( Read more... )

This is little more than a “data dump.” I already knew about this, but Mithen does the best coverage (that is, of the little I have read) of a topic I think about on-again, off-again.

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I thought this was just awesome.

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These machines can be built inexpensively, though they would require a kind of construction "schedule" to maximize economies of scale. If this can be done, why hasn't the whole damn society jumped at the opportunity? Which leads me to a more useful question: if tons of very cheap (construction, property, labor, ( Read more... )

A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext ( Read more... )

just war theory, a set of conditions justifying the resort to war (jus ad bellum) and prescribing how war may permissibly be conducted (jus in bello). The theory is a Western approach to the moral assessment of war that grew out of the Christian tradition beginning with Augustine, later taking both religious and secular (including legalist) forms ( Read more... )

With the exception of an emergency, do not yell at pedestrians while operating your vehicle.

Dennis Kelleher's comment on the Justice Department's $7 billion civil resolution with CitiGroup over Great Recession securities fraud seems judicious: "That amount is meaningless without the disclosure of the key information about how many hundreds of billions of dollars CitiGroup made, how many tens of billions investors lost, how many billions ( Read more... )

I'm interested in this idea that Napoleon Dynamite is a noble savage narrative. Napoleon does not belong to the early 1990s small town in which he operates. He simply has no cognizance of the laws of conformity and competition that regulate the lives of his fellow high school students. His innate goodness--or coolness-- is brought into focus, and ( Read more... )

If the people make the rules for the government, who will make the rules for the people? Nature...

"Culture has been defined in a number of ways, but most simply, as the learned and shared behavior of a community of interacting human beings ( Read more... )