Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

A lot of people are upset over the bowdlerization of Huckleberry Finn by a prominent publisher, and a number of prominent bloggers have weighed in with various thoughts. I tend towards First Amendment fanaticism, and I would be absolutely rabid with rage if it turned out the government had a hand in this. OTOH, I…

Remember back in the days when the conventional wisdom held that the Japanese were going to overtake us and everyone else? Sean Kinsell has a great discussion of why Japan is slipping behind China and South Korea. He begins with a mysterious title I can’t quite fathom: ???? That might mean Happy New Year. How…

David Harsanyi is looking at the Death of the Constitution. A document widely ignored by both parties when it gets in the way of something “really important”. Like preventing gay marriage. Or prohibiting drugs. Perhaps the flaw in the document is its ambiguity rather than its complexity. Giving Congress the wide-ranging authority to “make all…

Detective/Officer Howard Wooldridge (retired) of Citizens Opposing Prohibition who works tirelessly for Drug Prohibition Repeal informs me via e-mail that a Federal Marijuana Prohibition Repeal bill will be submitted to Congress in a few weeks. I don’t have a lot of hope for passage of the bill this time around. But it is a start.…

Yes, instead of boycotting Christmas, I’m celebrating it twice! Just as there have been two Christmas Eves this season, it is now Christmas for the second time. Merry Christmas everyone!   ? ??????? ?????????! The code didn’t render Cyrillic, but here’s what I was trying to say:

I am having trouble keeping up with conspiracy theories about CPAC. First there was the “boycott” of CPAC by angry WorldnetDailyers and FamilyResearchCouncilors who complained that CPAC had been taken over by homos. And today I read that CPAC has been secretly taken over by radical Islamists. Excuse me, but isn’t there a rather major…

Thanks to a credit card issue, the blog was down for a couple of hours this morning. My card (with which I pay online bills automatically) expired and a new one was issued, but for some reason that caused absolute chaos. I fail to understand why in this day and age, a credit card for…

It seems the State of Illinois is so desperate for revenue that it is instituting an internet sales tax. CHICAGO, Jan. 7, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — The Internet Tax Bill (HB 3659) was passed in the Illinois Senate on January 5, by the House of Representatives on January 6 and brought to the Governor, who may…

Evidently he is a “name” in the PUA community. And what is a PUA? A Pick Up Artist. i.e. a conman other wise referred to in polite society as a salesman. In the argot of the street he is a “player”. And for your further amusement may I present the female of the species. And…

No. This is not some new way to make THC with genetically altered mushrooms. (it is just a matter of time though). It is about a follow up to my story Mutiny In Montana. The Helena Independent Record has a story called Missoula marijuana ‘mutiny’ mushrooms. Call it the Pot Shot Heard ‘Round the World.…

(And I hope comments are too!) One of the things that makes spam such a pain in the ass in blogging is the way it increasingly tends to inhibit the ability to discuss ordinary topics. If you have been blogging for any length of time (I’m going on eight years now), you have no doubt…

One of the first things I read this morning was Steny Hoyer’s accusation that Tea Party supporters have unhappy families: There are a whole lot of people in the Tea Party that I see in these polls who don’t want any compromise. My presumption is they have unhappy families. All of you have been in…

Via Glenn, an interesting Right Coast piece on academics with anger management issues. Schama and Sachs are not isolated cases, of course.  This sort of talk has become commonplace among people who used to be liberal but serious, sophisticated, and certainly not hysterical.  You hear it from public figures like Schama and Sachs, and you hear it…

At the last minute on what we consider to be our Christmas Eve, I got a Christmas tree from Home Depot. I paid only ten dollars, as there were only three trees left, and it was a pathetically scrawny tree. I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t been ripped off entirely, but I considered myself lucky…

Via Ann Althouse, I learned that CNN is all atwitter over Sarah Palin’s retweet of Tammy Bruce’s pro-gay twitter:  Normally, it’s what Sarah Palin tweets that makes news. This time it’s what she has re-tweeted. The former Alaska governor Monday relayed a comment from gay conservative pundit Tammy Bruce, who was expressing her criticism over…

While I like to think that my light bulbs and what I do with them are my own business, as we know, the government does not. So I was delighted to see Glenn’s link to a new rebellion against the ban on incandescent lights in the form of a hot new loophole: Skirting EU law:…