Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Not a creature was stirring, except for my mouse…. I realize that the night before Christmas is no time for kidding around, but seeing this headline was really too much: Joe Biden disagrees with Pat Robertson on Pot “I still believe it’s a gateway drug. I’ve spent a lot of my life as chairman of…

I need to do a better job of keeping up with local news. Until today I did not realize that local activists are fighting for slower speed limits in Ann Arbor. One of them is a public school teacher who makes a fascinating comparison between driving and ritual human sacrifice: Jeff Gaynor, a teacher at…

Hmmmm…. Whether the night before Christmas is the right time or not, I have just finished devouring — with great relish — a book that Glenn Reynolds recommended not long ago: After You Shoot: Your gun’s hot. The perp’s not. Now what? It’s a real head trip of a book, especially if you’re one of…

A nice summary from Steve Chapman, but a bit pessimistic. An optimist might have noted the world has never been more free, and posited the notion that further movement is perhaps slow because there’s no more low-hanging fruit — the remaining unfree societies of 2010 have significant pathologies. And while there wasn’t a whole lot…

Last night I drove a half an hour west of Ann Arbor and back, and this morning I drove half an hour east and back. People are in a hurry, and many of them seem stressed. Bad drivers stand out more than ever. Michigan’s biggest problem is that it has set two different highway speed…

Pat Robertson thinks the war on marijuana is bad for family values. I have been saying that for decades. I have been posting this link often: Demographics. It runs down what mass incarceration does to family values. BTW Pat says he is “not exactly for the use of drugs”. I’d love to find what exactly…

Southern Ohio is in the midst of a public health emergency. There is a serious outbreak of pills in the area. Nearly one in 10 babies were born addicted to drugs last year in southern Ohio’s Scioto County. Rehab admissions for prescription painkiller addictions were five times the national average. In a rare step, the…

Via Glenn’s link to Snowflakes in Hell, I learned about a new gun control proposal they’re trying to sneak through. By “they” I don’t mean only the Obama administration, or Mayor Bloomberg, or the BATF. I also include the Washington Post, because of the sneaky way the proposal is described: To stem the flow of…

As there has been some debate recently over the possibility of gay soldiers engaging in sexual harassment of straight soldiers (which some would apparently define as being gay while showering with men who aren’t), I thought I would take a look at a frustrating issue that I have never quite been able to clarify to…

When Glenn linked my post about whether incest is banned in the military, he not only made my post look funnier that I had thought it was, he reminded me of an obvious irony: IF NOT, RESTORING ROTC TO COLUMBIA WILL JUST BE THAT MUCH EASIER: “Does anyone know whether the Code of Military Justice…

The Missoulian reports on a marijuana case in Montana that went bad for the prosecution. They couldn’t seat a jury. A funny thing happened on the way to a trial in Missoula County District Court last week. Jurors – well, potential jurors – staged a revolt. They took the law into their own hands, as…

Quick question. Does anyone know whether the Code of Military Justice prohibits incest? William Saletan claims that it does, Technically, the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Manual for Courts-Martial prohibit sodomy, bigamy, adultery, “wrongful” cohabitation, and incest. Except the link he provides does not prohibit incest; it merely lists incest as an example…

A comment to an earlier post touches on an intractable problem which refuses to go away, and makes me feel as if I am in a permanent Catch 22. <i>I just have one question: why do you keep treating Sullivan as if he’s meaningful or even sane? One shouldn’t feed trolls nor like to the…

David Freddoso at The Examiner thinks that a story claiming that Wikileaks is a government plot is a tin foil hat theory. I’m not so sure. Document dumps with lots of verifiable facts plus a few ringers is a standard and very old way to plant false information where it will do some good (the…

When I was checking myself out at the grocery store the other day, I saw a new sign on the keypad: WIC NOT ALLOWED IN SCO Hmmm…. For a couple of seconds, I felt bureaucratically challenged. Then I realized that “WIC” meant the welfare debit cards that always seem to slow things down for the…

As anyone who remembers “The Dating Game” knows, the way the game works is that a young female contestant gets to ask a series of questions to three young male contestants (aka “eligible bachelors”), then chooses the best man based on the answers. She cannot see them, of course. In this charming episode from 1972,…

Matthew Yglesias makes no secret of wanting Swedish style socialism for the United States, and says so. He also chides American progressives for not being more explicit about advocating socialism, and says gumption is required. …you need to have the gumption to take money away from people whose consumption has a low marginal value, and…

Via HotAir, John Avlon of No Labels continues fussing over alleged extremists right and left, this time aiming at Rush Limbaugh and his criticism of the group. But Avlon’s attacks seem off-target.  While I’m not a fan, Rush can hardly be described as “far right” in country where self-described conservatives outnumber self-described liberals 2:1 and his program…

I’m not a credentialed historian, but I have read many, many books about Nazism and Communism over the years. So many that I have lost count. It is numbing to read about mass killing, especially the details. Most of the books I’ve accumulated are in boxes, but here are a few I took off the…

While I like to joke about Al Gore by comparing him to Jerry Falwell and calling him an “evangelist,” consider the eerie connection between Al Gore and Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps: Fred Phelps is a long time Democrat supporter and frequent Democrat candidate for various offices in Kansas. As recently as 1998 Phelps got…