Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Noting the difficulty inherent in proving that something did not happen, Dave quotes an AP piece which criticizes Andrew Breitbart for not providing evidence to rebut the claim that racial epithets were shouted by Tea Party activists: Conservative columnist Andrew Breitbart disputed accounts that tea party activists in Washington shouted racial epithets at black members…

Glenn Reynolds wonders about the timing of a series of federal raids in the general area of Southeast Michigan. Southeast Michigan happens to be where I live, and I’m wondering about more than just the timing. The focus of what has been repeatedly described as a “massive federal raid” is Adrian, Michigan, which is about…

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record, but one of the things which most worries me right now is the way libertarianism is being increasingly written out of serious discussions of what it is that defines us. What George Lakoff would call the “framing” of political theory itself. One of the…

The inimitable Jeff G brings it, as only he can: I mean, what teen in his rebellious stage isn’t going to embrace the edgy cries of, “all our shower heads are uniform in pressure!”, or “hell no, we won’t go (to restaurants that cook with table salt)!”. Why, it’s just like following the Dead around…

The forces of drug prohibition won a big case that will reverberate in the fight against the health care bill. They won it in 2005 in the Supreme Court. Read it and weep. Lawsuits from 14 states challenging the constitutionality of the new national healthcare law face an uphill battle, largely due to a far-reaching…

Historians may well mark this as the moment Iraq entered a new phase of existence, beginning to enter the Western world the way South Korea and Japan did after U.S. occupations: BAGHDAD – The secular challenger who stunned Iraq with his razor-thin parliamentary election win turned his attention to negotiations over a future government Saturday…

Has the Culture War come full circle? I’ve pondered the question in some recent posts, but a story I read about today makes me seriously wonder. A friend emailed me link to a story in the New York Times “Arts Beat Culture at Large” section titled “Protests and Defense of a Transgender Comedy at Tribeca…

In a post which shrilly and gratuitously indicts libertarians, a leading left-wing blog looks at a Seattle outrage in which the cops improperly tasered a woman over her refusal to sign simple traffic ticket: Three Seattle police officers were justified when they used a stun gun on a pregnant mother who refused to sign a…

In the latest anti-government outrage which no one has been able to conclusively prove is not somehow associated with the Tea Party Movement, there has been a brutal attack on a police car. A pit bull mix in Tennessee has been sentenced to obedience training after his dogged attack on a local police car. Winston…

Remember a few days back when I posted about the trouble with police crime labs? Well I have more evidence. San Francisco prosecutors told judges Friday that they could not “ethically go forward” with 46 narcotics trials because of evidence problems arising out of the scandal at the Police Department’s drug-analysis lab – signaling that…

I saw this at Vanderleun’s American Digest. Dymphna at Gates of Vienna whose mate Baron Bodissey did the artwork says steal it. Post it far and wide. Dennis The Peasant has this to say: …because Obamacare incentivizes non-coverage by imposing employer fines for non-coverage that are far less than the cost of offering health insurance,…

Speaking of making unfair associations, it has come to my attention that Facebook is associated with a rise in syphilis. No really: Professor Peter Kelly, director of public health in Teesside, claimed staff had found a link between social networking sites and the spread of the bacteria, especially among young women. He said: “Syphilis is…

What does it take these days to rebut or debunk a lie? Maybe I am living on another planet from some of my fellow citizens, but I thought the claim that Tea Party protesters shouted the N-word at a congressman had been thoroughly debunked by people who simply took time to review the numerous videos…

I’ve been writing this blog for nearly seven years, and one of the reasons I started it was because I was tired of the “EITHER YOU’RE A LIBERAL OR YOU’RE A CONSERVATIVE” dichotomy. It what has always struck me as a process of collusion, libertarians were simply written out of the equation. Since the election…

Rick Nebel who is in charge of the Polywell Experiments at EMC2 comments on Alan Boyle’s article on progress in Fusion Power on MSNBC’s Cosmic Log. As usual, I seem to have created some misconceptions by my comments. First of all, what we said on our website is that the work on the WB-7 has…

The Wall Street Journal interviews a Drug War observer who says that changing our policy of Prohibition is a viable alternative to the Drug War. Cross Posted at Power and Control

If the audio wasn’t exactly clear this should make it plainer: Reverend Al Sharpton told Fox News: “I think that this began the transforming of the country where the President had promised. This is what he ran on.” When the interviewer interjected that many view the vote as a step towards socialism, Sharpton didn’t skip…

Sarah Palin has a new Facebook up. We’re going to reclaim the power of the people from those who disregarded the will of the people. We’re going to fire them and send them back to the private sector, which has been shrinking thanks to their destructive government-growing policies. Maybe when they join the millions of…

While it’s hardly a crisis (and in the light of the Obamacare atrocity it may seem downright frivolous), the more I think about a seemingly minor annoyance yesterday, the more it deserves a post, as I think it sheds light upon the downright despicable mentality of activists. A neighboring family consists of a husband and…

An interesting report on bad science in crime labs. Let us consider something we used to teach our sophomores – lead smelting and refining. Almost all lead occurs as sulfide ores that contain lesser amounts of other metals. Smelting removes the sulfur and refining removes most of minor elements, notably gold, silver and copper. The…