Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

The Daily Mail (UK) has an article up about endocannabinoids. Cannabis-like chemical could help keep couch potatoes slim. The break out of “endocannabinoid” into major publications has begun. And the Brits are ahead in the race.

I have been doing more thinking about the article in the local paper about the 4:20 meeting of the local chapter of NORML/Americans For Safe Access recounted at Cannabis talk here will lighten up sooner or later. The newspaper article galled me because I think that it perpetuates stoner stereotypes in its subtext. A stereotype…

I did the very first interview with a LEAP Officer which can be found at Interview With A Police Officer. Also at Winds of Change. At 5:39 into the video there is a discussion of the corrupting influence of the War On Drugs On Police. Radley Balko also discusses that at Boston And Militarism: The…

Reading this gave me a wry chuckle: all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is. What about the Fourth Amendment, you ask? That’s long…

From NASA Video Tech Briefs NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) launched in February 2010 with the goal of understanding the causes of solar variability and its impacts on Earth, focusing on measurements of the interior of the Sun, the Sun’s magnetic field, the hot plasma of the solar corona, and the irradiance that creates the…

Los Angeles City Council member Bill Rosendahl: “I thanked God… …medical marijuana has saved my life.” I don’t understand why the endocannabinoid system isn’t better appreciated. NIH: Endocannabinoids in the immune system and cancer. Modulation of the endocannabinoid system interferes with cancer cell proliferation either by inhibiting mitogenic autocrine/paracrine loops or by directly inducing apoptosis….…

Made a 12 inch long steel airplane from rough plans, to which I added a scaled, nine cylinder rotary engine I designed from tiny hardware parts. Behind the engine is a clock mechanism. (As you can see, the photo was taken at a little after 9:30.) The second hand is the propeller.  The landing gear…

An uncle of the Boston bombers, Ruslan Tsarni, was married to the daughter of Graham Fuller. From the link: He served 20 years as an operations officer in the CIA. Assignments include postings in: Germany, Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, North Yemen, Afghanistan, and Hong Kong.[10] In 1982, the CIA appointed him National Intelligence Officer for…

Headline in the British press. Obama blames American guns for Mexican deaths Sheer demagoguery of the rankest order. We have a president with absolutely no shame.  

Eric did a post about the government having total authority over children “absolute autonomy, absolute power”. Well, CPS (Child Protective Services) in California is not the only agency that acts that way. I did a recent story on an Idaho case They Took Her Kids. This is an update. Just because the below graphic grabbed…

There are some interesting developments in the California child-snatching case I posted about the other day. Not only are a lot of people outraged by the tyrannical and unaccountable behavior of CPS, but a California state legislator who is trying to look into the matter has discovered that the agency believes that it has an…

There’s some really annoying and tasteless tagging that’s been going on in Ann Arbor, and it doesn’t even have the excuse that some graffiti has of being artistic. One clown likes to write the word “mole” and the other writes “SAES” all over buildings and other things. I have seen it, and it is not…

Muslims? Maybe. Our politicians? For sure.

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again. I’m often glad I never had children in this once free country. Reading about a California couple whose baby was snatched by armed police who illegally entered the hous with hands on their guns — because the parents sought a second medical opinion — served…

Frank left a link to this video from 28 August 2006 at On Market Monetarism My reply to Frank on his point about “monetarism is dead” (which I may have misunderstood): Peter Schiff restated monetarism in different terms – debt financed consumption – which blew bubbles. A bubble is another term for “local” inflation. Inflation…

The Rockford Register Star used Cannabis talk here will lighten up sooner or later as the headline for an article to discuss a 4:20 gathering at Whiskey’s Roadhouse that I attended. The article discusses the pessimism at the gathering while “everyone” else and especially Colorado is celebrating. I met the reporter at the gathering and…

Well… no…  Free book.    Ill Met By Moonlight, my very first, ever published book is up in a re-edition, for free on Amazon till 2/5. Shakespeare, high-fallutin’ language and gender changing elves.  (Okay, one.  And, oh, boy, is he enough.) Did I mention Shakespeare?  And that it’s free?

It seems that the Tsarnaev brothers’ mom is just your typical normal American mom who learned all about 9/11 on the Internet: Kilzer wrote that Tsarnaeva was a loving and supportive mother, and she felt sympathy for her plight after the April 15 bombings. But she stopped visiting the family’s home for spa treatments in…

Over the past couple years I’ve gradually become a convert to a collection of ideas called market monetarism (MM), which espouses the notion we should do away with inflation targets and replace them with a nominal GDP level target (NGPLT, for short).  They seem to explain the current economic conditions better than Keynesian “liquidity trap” or…

While art is often defined as an imitation of nature, nature is often an improvement on art. Check out these grains of sand: Or this view of the microstructure of austenitic steel. If the above had been painted by a Cubist in the teens or twenties, it would probably be hanging in a museum. Instead,…