Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

I keep GMT so it is already 14 April for me. == Arnie Gundersen: The Myths Of Three Mile Island (video). Dr. Steve Wing on the health effects of Three Mile Island (video). A reevaluation of cancer incidence near the Three Mile Island nuclear plant: the collision of evidence and assumptions. This is an NIH…

Dan Mitchell says the Obama plan for automatic tax increases when Congress overspends is a bad idea. At that rate the government will own us all before long. He has a counter proposal. There are more in the comments. I have one myself. There is a better way: decimation. If Congress and the President over…

I’m back from Radley Balko’s tour-de-force presentation about brutal SWAT Team raids (yes, they are inherently brutal), and the systematized militarization of police in America. This was a large crowd of twenty-somethingish law students, and Balko began with this horrific video showing the police shooting a dog whose only crime was being owned by a…

If you’re in Michigan, don’t miss this event. Especially if you’re an Ann Arbor Reasonoid like me. This Wednesday, April 13th, at 12:15 pm, Reason Senior Editor Radley Balko will speak about police militarization at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor. The speech will be at  625 S. State St. in room…

Earlier Drudge linked this story about feral hogs invading a Texas suburb.The citizens are apparently helpless, because they are not allowed to shoot the hogs, and the beasts have an uncanny ability to avoid traps and snares. Feral hogs are on a rampage in a Fort Worth neighborhood, leaving a path of destruction behind. Merely…

Here are some links to keep you up to speed on the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Interview With A Site Cleanup Worker – He talks about a worker only being able to turn three bolts before exceeding the allowable radiation dose. – Note you may have to use a browser other than Firefox to watch…

This sort of thing is getting as outrageous as it is predictable.  At his public school, Little Village Academy on Chicago’s West Side, students are not allowed to pack lunches from home. Unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria. Principal Elsa Carmona said her intention is to…

During one of his discussions of Chernobyl (the truths of which seem very much unsettled), M. Simon cited a source familiar to anyone old enough to remember the good old days of Cold War moral clarity. PRAVDA. While it still bears the commie logo, the editorial bias has changed. Anyway, in response to M. Simon’s…

The Nuclear Plant at Fukushima has just reached the inner circle of hell. Level 7. (well it is Japanese and I don’t read that so good – like not at all) But you can go to Zero Hedge for a general outline. Here is what they have to say. What started as less serious than…

Note to my readers: I like to post here at Classical Values only the most reliable reports and speculations. Well as reliable as possible given that it is breaking news. I do use My Naval Nuke Reactor Operator training to filter as much as I can. I also use as a filter the Emperor’s evaluation…

In a piece Glenn linked titled “Big government on the brink,” Robert Samuelson points out that Americans are more dependent on the government than they realize: Few Americans realize the extent of their dependency. The Census Bureau reports that in 2009 almost half (46.2 percent) of the 300 million Americans received at least one federal…

Food prices are going through the roof for basic commodities. This is causing instability in many places around the world. Spengler says there may be no solution. From the Straits of Gibraltar to the Hindu Kush, instability will afflict the Muslim world for a generation, and there is nothing that the West can do to…

One of the many annoyances these days consists of spam text messages on cell phones. The worst is so called bulk SMS “short code” spamming, because many of these orginate from crooked providers from all over the world who, because of inherent flaws in the system (as well as lawsuits based on “free speech”) are…

I am in a hurry today, so I have no time for a long and thoughtful post. However Sarah emailed me a link to a humorous article which is simply not, um, “family friendly” enough to be quoted at length in this blog. I didn’t know what to do with it, until I saw this…

There is a lot of back and forth going on about nuclear power. The advocates say it is plenty safe and there are others who say radiation scares me and I don’t think nukes are safe at all. Let us think about it in terms of “fear of flying”. By objective criteria (compared to automobiles)…

You can see the whole video the excerpt was taken from at my Gorbachev – Chernobyl Did It post. This article explains why “biorobots” were necessary. Describing the horrific event and its immediate aftermath, Russia’s Pravda (April 26) said: “The nuclear reactor was burning for ten days. The people who were trying to extinguish the…

China likes Thorium based nuclear reactors. So they are doing research. If the reactor works as planned, China may fulfill a long-delayed dream of clean nuclear energy. The United States could conceivably become dependent on China for next-generation nuclear technology. At the least, the United States could fall dramatically behind in developing green energy. “President…

A source for the plastic detector: Rexon Components. Another Source: Bicron Plastics. A pdf of some of their products. GammaWatch makes a very neat watch/radiation detector for $250. Unfortunately they are currently out of stock. This is kind of cool but it is not very sensitive. It will warn you of very serious hazards: NukAlert…

Althouse says quoting from AP: Winnebago County’s numbers say Prosser received 20,701 votes to Kloppenburg’s 18,887. The AP has 19,991 for Prosser to Kloppenburg’s 18,421. I live in Winnebago County and no one I know here voted for Prosser. Or Kloppenburg. In fact I can state categorically that neither was on the ballot. Fraud? Well…