Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Back in 1995, Bill Clinton blamed conservative radio talk show hosts for the horrific act of terrorism committed by Timothy McVeigh. I will never forget how he singled out G. Gordon Liddy by name, and his argument back then was not much different than it is now. These people created a climate that led to…

Glenn Reynolds linked a very thoughtful post by Sean Kinsell, and the thoughtless comments Sean is getting do not endear me to the people making them. Anyway, I’m too tired to get into the details, but in a minor aside to a post, Sean attempted to explain why local Japanese might be uncomfortable about a…

While I normally don’t like to write posts about something that is already under discussion in a previous post, I think I should make an exception in light of more recent comments to my post about a sloppily-reported story alleging that “STRAIGHT PRIDE” stickers and T-shirts were being sold by an “Official Tea Party Sponsor.”…

It looks like drug prohibition has given us a gift. The battle for Ciudad Juarez began about two years ago when the Sinaloa drug cartel, led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and based along Mexico’s Pacific coast, began trying to wrest control of the crucial drug smuggling corridor into the United States from the Juarez…

Well, the event that I anticipated in a previous post has occurred. My Jack Dempseys have had babies. Hundreds of them! (What this means is that inside their excavated Colosseum, they laid eggs and hatched them out, and the fry have just started to venture outside.) I was talking on the phone earlier when I…

M. Simon’s post about the Obama Zombies book linked my earlier post on the general subject of zombiedom, and Simon offers a personal observation: …a lot of us tried to warn you but you were so caught up in hope and change that your eyes glazed over whenever we tried talking reason. Yeah, that is…

Mass produced graphene Transistors just got a little closer with this laboratory advance in graphene film fabrication. “Before we can fully utilize the superior electronic properties of graphene in devices, we must first develop a method of forming uniform single-layer graphene films on nonconducting substrates on a large scale,” says Yuegang Zhang, a materials scientist…

Eric mentioned Obama zombies in this post which brings up a post I did on a book about Obama zombies: == So I’m noodling across the net and came across a reference to this book: Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation So naturally I’m interested in the reviews. Here is one reviewer,…

Bill Clinton’s recent remarks about Oklahoma City reminded me of a post I wrote almost two years ago, when Hillary gaffed ominously, “We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.” At the time I opined that K. Lo was right when she said “There is something deeply wrong with the Clintons.” To…

Did you know that the volcano that exploded in Iceland was most likely because of global warming? I didn’t either, but an expert says it is “just the beginning“: Hooper [“an expert on Iceland’s volcanoes at Delft University in Holland”] warned that the eruption may be only a taste of the future if climate change…

At the Ann Arbor Tea Party, I was delighted to see a very young-looking college age kid wearing an F.A. Hayek T-shirt, and I complimented him on it, saying that very few people his age had even heard of Hayek, much less knew enough about his philosophy to like him. At the time, I was…

While I think it’s an inconsistent argument, the Tea Partiers are often accused of being an “astroturf” front for Big Republicanism, while at the same time their handmade signs are scrutinized and ridiculed at every opportunity for spelling errors, politically insensitive gaffes, etc. Actually, I think the obvious sincerity and ingenuity of their homemade signs…

The conservative position: Some one could be doing something bad and the evil goes unpunished – we must pass a law. The liberal position: Some one could be unfairly taking advantage of another in an economic transaction. The evil goes unpunished – we must raise a tax. Which is why I am neither a liberal…

It’s that time again. I was surprised to see my own entry here. Can CV readers spot my contribution to keeping the Earth out of an ice age? Remember folks, much of the world gets dangerously cold every year. If you’re not doing your part to help, you’re no better than some lunatic stuffing people…

One thing I missed in last night’s post about the Ann Arbor Tea Party is a video clip I shot which shows the deliberate disruption of one of the speeches. Tony DeMott of the Campaign for Liberty was talking about Mitt Romney (to whom the Ron Paul supporting DeMott is resolutely opposed), when a goofy…

The Examiner reports that The Emperor of Hemp, Jack Herer, has died. Jack Herer, much beloved Emperor of Hemp and marijuana hero. is dead at age 70. Herer was a tireless advocate in the battle to end marijuana prohibition. He was perhaps the world’s most famous activist for the decriminalization of marijuana and the utilization…

Three Tea Parties in one day, and I’m back. I can’t believe I went to all three! This morning I attended a “Taking it to the Street!” meet on Haggerty Road in good old Northville, Michigan, then in the afternoon I attended a Tea Party rally in Plymouth (both of which were organized by Rattle…

Palin-Romney in 2012? Or maybe that was Romney-Palin? Yes, I guess it was the latter. Anyway, I’m not that keen on Romney, but I’m wondering whether it would work. So, apparently, is Sarah Palin — if the headline “Mitt Romney-Sarah Palin in 2012? You betcha!” is to be believed: Conservative superstar Sarah Palin opened the…

I know I haven’t said anything about it (probably because there are just too many wrong things in too many places and I can’t write posts about them all), but I think what’s going on between the United States and Israel right now is especially horrifying. Our most loyal, stalwart ally, and the only real…

Noting the organized effort to deploy Tea Party crashers, Ann Althouse offers some words of advice for those who might feel overwhelmed: 1. If any Tea Partiers feel tempted to express themselves in a manner that can help their opponents paint the movement as racist/extreme/violent, they need to resist that temptation. If they now think…