Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

It strikes me that unless a patron were intoxicated, clowning around, or pushed (or maybe having a seizure), it would be very unlikely to fall through a priceless painting hanging on a wall at an art museum as is being widely reported. “How do you do that?” asked one news commentator incredulously. Beats me. Normal…

One of the memes frequently tossed about — especially by promoters of the various “caveman” diets — is how “we” (meaning all human beings) have not evolved since Upper Paleolithic times, and that illness results from our failure to limit our diet to what our Cro Magnon ancestors ate. The premise is that thousands of…

The UN’s IPCC has just taken a few more torpedoes below the water line. Well it turns out that the WWF is cited all over the IPCC AR4 report, and as you know, WWF does not produce peer reviewed science, they produce opinion papers in line with their vision. Yet IPCC’s rules are such that…

I dunno… have you considered flavonoids? I also hear good things about resveratrol. But don’t believe it my blennies. Incidentally, i [sic] DO demand that you bend, but i [sic] do NOT expect you to obey. But buy [non-sic] god [sic] i [enough] DO expect you to try. The rest Is up to You not…

It seems a lot of folks are upset by the recent Supreme Court decision on corporate free speech. Let me reprise a discussion at Talk Polywell on some aspects of health care that have a bearing on why corporate free speech is important. The discussion was about life extension and how cooling the body in…

Like a lot of readers here, I was not happy when I saw the excerpt that M. Simon posted from Scott Brown’s post-election press conference in which Brown (after pausing to observe that it was “post election”) apparently endorsed national health care. Ugh! I am vehemently opposed to nationalized health care in any way shape…

Trilogy: a nude awakening is a sort of play/happening that has a stage full of naked dancing girls. Hundreds of different ones all together. In the all together. Trilogy is about many things: body dissatisfaction, dominant masculine hegemony, Germaine Greer. Well, well, well. If male hegemony can get hundreds of women to dance nude on…

In my post The Glaciers Are Melting I looked at an an error in the IPCC report that was taken straight out of a popular science magazine, New Scientist. New Scientist did a retraction and the head of the IPCC, railroad engineer Dr. Rajenda Pachauri, defended the “data” despite the retraction. He finally gave in…

I put up a video of Scott Brown in a short discussion with a voter about health care reform. My first personal complaint about what he said was at the beginning of the video when he says: “We’re past campaign mode” i.e. I no longer have to lie to win. I guess now that he…

Who is Ellie Light? She’s…simply…amazing! She appears everywhere, and writes, anywhere! In plenty of papers! Penning powerful paeans in praise of the President! “42 papers in eighteen states with dozens of different hometowns listed at last count“! Naturally, a lot of people want to know, and some have spent a great deal of time looking…

No, I didn’t invent that God-awful phrase, but thanks to Sean Kinsell, I found it — used in a deprecating manner by a commenter to Sarah Hoyt’s discussion of her writing and Robert Heinlein. Heinlein isn’t helped by the fact that he seems to be a favorite of libertarianesque geeks who spout sexist nonsense. It’s…

Via Glenn Reynolds, I just learned that the best diet might be to cut out carbohydrates and eat like a cougar. But not long ago, I also read about about a book postulating that eating lots of carbs is the way to be thin. Might that work for cougars? Has anyone tried caging them and…

You see that chart above? It was taken from an article on the missing carbon sink. The graphs in the chart show results for net CO2 emission or absorption from before and after the missing sink was found. Note the down arrows for North America? That means North America is absorbing more CO2 than it…

This is so depressing. Cross Posted at Power and Control

This will seem like a self-indulgent and frivolous post, as I’m not one of those “here’s what I ate for breakfast” type bloggers, but I decided to write it anyway, because the technology involved has helped me, and I thought it might be of assistance to some of the readers. I like rice, and I…

Obama’s poll numbers are cratering. Gallup buries the lede in its latest polling on health care, the Browning of Massachusetts, and Barack Obama’s performance in the first year. They headline the fact that 55% of Americans want Congress to suspend work on ObamaCare while only 39% want Congress to continue. That’s not exactly news; it’s…

Ryan Mauro has a very thoughtful discussion of a TV show I’d never heard of in an essay titled “A Sermon Inspired by The Real World: Washington, D.C. — A bisexual Christian on MTV’s reality show illustrates the true meaning of the faith.” I don’t normally associate MTV with bisexual Christians (whom I assume could…

This is an ominous development, and I don’t think it’s being widely reported: WASHINGTON – Ex-cons who converted to Islam in New York and other state prison systems have turned up in Yemen as Al Qaeda terror recruits, a new Senate report says. The focus on ex-cons was part of an intensified effort by Al…

NASA agrees with me on the nature of drug abuse. Initial low-level involvement with drugs may result from peer pressure, drug availability or other risk factors in an individual’s social or family environment. Subsequent escalation to and maintenance of higher levels of drug use is likely to result from biological, psychological or psychiatric characteristics of…