Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

A conservative I am not. (The reasons are complex, but for starters, I am utterly missing the third leg said to be vital to supporting the conservative “stool.”) So I typically call myself a small-l libertarian, or libertarian conservative, but even those terms have their limitations, as I just don’t fit any mold entirely.  I…

Arnie Gunderson and friend explain why It Can Happen Here. From the blurb about the video at Arnie’s site: The well-known safety flaws of Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactors have gained significant attention in the wake of the four reactor accidents at Fukushima, but a more insidious danger lurks. In this video nuclear engineers Arnie…

People always say that ideas have consequences, but I disagree. Ideas themselves do not have consequences. It is the implementation of an idea that has consequences, which means that those responsible for implementing bad ideas are to blame, and not the ideas themselves. So the hell with ideas. In and of themselves, they are harmless.…

This weather makes me understand why people like California despite all the problems. Here’s the national picture Drudge linked earlier: Notice that the California coast is absent from the measurements on the Drudge picture. So is the Pacific Northwest…. Here are today’s highs. Quite predictable to anyone who has lived there. Other people have to…

“If you’re involved in the gay and lesbian lifestyle, it’s bondage. It is personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement.” Michele Bachmann allegedly said the above in 2004. That remark, along with the many others that are being repeated all over the Internet, will not endear her to gay voters, 25% of whom generally vote…

The stealing of things like plumbing or wiring out of buildings is what I would call “bottom feeder” crime, because it is the lowest form of crime. So-called “scrappers” do incalculable damage by making houses completely uninhabitable and shutting down power for entire communities. It cheered me to see that occasionally cops will devote genuine…

Over at Ace of Spades, re medical marijuana being legalized in New Jersey: As I wrote I just no longer have any interest in using the coercive power of the state to impose my personal preferences on recreational drug use on anyone else. Well said. I think this sort of law winds up undermining respect…

How could this possibly have gone unnoticed? What’s scary is that this was really really obvious fraud. Apparently the bar for successfully defrauding taxpayers is appallingly low. There must be thousands of cases where the perpetrators weren’t this stupid about it and so evaded detection. Yet another concrete example of why GDP growth is negatively…

From Glenn: LEFTISM DEFINED? “He prefers the inequality that comes from a government hierarchy, over inequality that comes from voluntary trade.” I always figure that people who feel this way do so because they think they’re better at sucking up to authority figures than at creating value on their own. And my guess is, they’re…

While government safety Nazis have a love affair with warning labels, what they are mandating with cigarettes makes the usual warning labels look lame. In California I found a discarded Kent cigarette pack on which the warning label occupies more space than the brand name. I was so amused I picked it up and put…

While this might only seem to be of interest to welders, I just learned about a huge nationwide acetylene shortage only because I recently acquired some welding equipment, and looked into getting tanks refilled. It is nearly impossible (and much more expensive) to get acetylene. This has not been in the news because ordinary people…

It isn’t every day I find a “three-fer,” but in today’s Detroit Free Press I found a story which touches on why so many people are willing to surrender freedom. Drugs, dogs, guns. Clearly, some people cannot handle any of them. So they must all be taken away from everyone. Just think! If we could…

Yes, I am still on the road, and exceeding the government-imposed driving quotas mentioned by an earlier commenter. But hey, that’s probably because I’m a “slave” to my driving. Or to the evil automobile/oil industry which enslaves and oppresses us all! I am a victim, doncha know? Liberals think they can free us from this…

I somehow nearly missed this Tyler Cowen crushing of the argument that Fannie and Freddie did not play a major part in driving the financial crisis: 1. It is not denied that the mortgage agencies were guaranteeing about half of all U.S. mortgages right before the crisis (Yet somehow they had not so much to…

Dave has an outstanding post up dealing with the drug legalization question. I’m always interested in the comments as a very rough gauge of popular sentiment. A legalization fear I see a lot these days is based on “if we leave those people alone what will they do?” Of course the question started gaining a…

I have been alerted to a social problem. Not a very severe one. But it has IMO a relatively simple technical solution. So I’m designing. I expect to be done in about two or three more weeks including schematics and board layouts. When it is done I’m going to announce it and try to raise…

Today I drove 905 miles from Los Angeles to Santa Rosa, New Mexico. The drive took over 14 hours and I’m beat. A couple of pictures from the road. Rolling through Albuquerque at dusk: And a full moon bouncing with the night traffic. Once things look like that, it’s time to sleep. I’m sure I…

So, I’ve been following the debt-limit debate fairly closely, especially at Megan’s, and I’m struck by two claims that have virtually no basis in reality but have  somehow achieved a strange ubiquity. First is the notion that reaching the debt limit means default.  In fact, not only are revenues are about ten times interest payments,…

James Taranto, one of the web’s best writers and clearest thinkers, on drug legalization: Since we live in the real world and not Libertarianland, it’s unreasonable to think that legalization of drugs would not result in at least some of the sort of government expansion of the sort Greenwald desires. Thus we continue to lean…