Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

An article in today’s WSJ reminded me that academicians can’t wait to get their mitts on data. They want personal data about the most personal habits of millions of Americans, and in this example, their ostensible goal is to “help” people who in their opinion are “at risk”  of becoming addicted to gambling: Similar to…

For an alternate view The Storm Ahead in China. H/T Communism vs. Democracy and Markets. Are these the only viable options?

Here is a comment I left at You Can’t Buy Your Way to Social Justice: If you are interested in social justice become an engineer. They have done more for the welfare of humanity than all the politicians and “social justice” types combined. And made a profit at it to boot.

In the comments to Eric’s This should not be happening in the United States. But is this the United States? commenter Scott M said “I wish I knew then what I now know.” Watch this video and you will know it too. About 7 minutes. And worth every second. Oh. Yeah. Pass it on. This…

If this report is any indication, it’s fascinating how much money people make for teaching people how to do things that they don’t seem all that competent to do. A Naperville Central High School driver education teacher facing drunken driving and theft charges is due in court this week, according to authorities. Jeffrey Peterson, 54,…

Michele Catalano is a highly respected blogger and writer I have linked many times over the past decade. So I was just completely taken aback to I read that she was visited and questioned by a team of six armed government agents for doing absolutely nothing but Googling things that any normal writer or blogger…

I’m very interested in time and frequency. One, for technical reasons and two, because when I was a kid it just grabbed me. Quartz crystals are at the heart of most electronic equipment that needs precise time and frequency. It is the “quartz” in a quartz watch. That is changing some with the advent of…

Police these days have no problem breaking down doors, shooting dogs, killing difficult patients who don’t want to go to the hospital, and generally behaving like criminal gangs, but if this story is any indication of what happens when the chips are down, in life-threatening emergencies they couldn’t care less: A man who was brutally stabbed…

A 95 year old man who lived in a nursing home was fatally shot with a bean bag gun when he resisted efforts by the police to take him to the hospital: The Cook County medical examiner’s office said that the cause of death of John Warna was hemoperitoneum – bleeding in the stomach area…

I read about police abuses almost every day now. The latest SWAT Team outrage involved holding small children at gunpoint during a home invasion — all in retaliation over their father having quarreled with a drunken off-duty cop at a veterans lodge. The officers threw to the floor, kicked and handcuffed Georgeia, her stepfather and…

The Un-Civil War: BLACKS vs NIGGERS A disgusted Black man boldly confronts the dysfunctional and criminal subculture (along with their apologists) that exists within the African-American community. This race-realist endeavor exposes many inconvenient truths and will certainly become a catalyst for candid conversation. Flooded with statistics, headlines, pictures and other evidence, this book is not…

Not Safe For Work Which fits right in with Eric’s “Unbelievable Courage” triggers unbelievably pointless and futile argument. Not to mention that some of us (and Eric is Definitely included) are working on the incarceration problem. H/T Zero Hedge

Against my better judgment, I was silly enough earlier to get involved in a Facebook discussion arose over a Western tourist’s unfurling of the now-banned Rainbow flag in Russia.  Some background: It’s illegal in Russia to have “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” in public places. That basically means you can’t show any support for LGBTQIA…

The things I stumble across on the Internet! Sheesh. This morning while engaged in perfectly innocent news reading, I found myself irritated by an article in the San Francisco Chronicle which called a Bohemian Grove protester (they are all paranoid nutcases, IMHO) a “libertarian”: A clash between self-described hippies and libertarians has thrown the traditional…

Test your knowledge of the Zimmerman incident. Not to be confused with the Zimmerman Telegram. Take this quiz.

Yeah. I have been kinda absent. Busy. Incredibly busy. I hardly have time to read blogs let alone write one. So what am I doing? Well it involves electronics. And it is a long shot. Several long shots in fact. Which brings up something I was just reading by following an old link suggested by…

Let us suppose that Trayvon Martin attacked George Zimmerman because he assumed (based on the prompting of his friend Rachel Jeantel) that Zimmerman was following him because he wanted to have sex with him. While I have no way of knowing whether Jeantel’s testimony is true, if it is, then isn’t the question of whether Zimmerman…

In what he calls bad news for libertarians (which it certainly is), Reason‘s Nick Gillespie points to a very depressing study which confirms a painfully awful truth. The less faith people have in government, the bigger government grows.  Which brings us to the 2010 paper “Regulation and Distrust,” written by Philippe Aghion, Yann Algan, Pierre Cahuc, and…

Here’s what happened to a perfectly innocent woman who came home from work to prepare what she thought was going to be a romantic dinner: After leaving her operating room scrub nurse duties at Sarasota’s Doctors Hospital on Wednesday, Louise Goldsberry went to her Hidden Lake Village apartment. Her boyfriend came over, and after dinner…

I don’t know why, but I like this useless machine and I would love to own one: Watching something like that would calm my nerves. (Watching the propeller second hand on my airplane clock actually helps me get to sleep.) And as I have a couple of old printers that I’ve been too lazy to…