Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

I don’t know what qualifies Germany or Germans as the world’s experts on American politics, but that seems to be one of the dominant memes these days. In a piece titled “Obama Mia” in the Wall Street Journal, I read about a loopy German musical glorifying President Obama, and promoting the personality cult surrounding him:…

From Bill Clinton’s former White House special counsel Lanny J. Davis comes a good question: The question is, will we stop listening to the strident, purist base of our party who seem to prefer defeat to winning elections and no change at all if they don’t get all the change they want. As someone who…

Barnes and Noble keeps getting in trouble with people who want to boycott the store — not so much for selling the wrong books, but for improper placement of them. So I thought that in the interest of helping all parties laugh at themselves, I would try to come up with new and improved suggestions…

Here is an interesting development that may be good for continuous output solar power. The company’s approach uses calcium hydride, a simple, non-toxic salt. Under Solar Fusion’s plan, solar heat is collected by an array of heliostats directed to a central down mirror, eliminating the requirement for a power tower. The heat, focused on a…

I left this comment (more or less) at Nate Silver’s 538 blog. He was a hoping for Coakley despite the shift that his stats clearly showed. Nate, Reminds me of what I said here about the Obama/Palin race. Bias is such a hard thing to give up. You lose some. You win some. The real…

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c www.thedailyshow.com Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis This is the funniest Jon Stewart I have evahh watched. Give it a view. Hillarious. H/T Larry Johnson at No Quarter Cross Posted at Power and Control

In what I consider an early sign of optimism over the Coakley-Brown election results, CNN’s commentators don’t look happy right now. They are talking about early signs showing a Republican victory, while a stressed-out looking Paul Begala carries on about how Ted Kennedy would have won big. (So does that mean that if Brown wins,…

Pick a station: Massachusetts Radio Live Online And listen to tonight’s election results live online. Drudge Has A Counter Up H/T on the Drudge counter to the gorgeous Pamela of Atlas Shrugs

I was a bit surprised to read that the City of Detroit is dumping raw sewage into nearby rivers and streams, because, well, that’s the sort of thing that’s not supposed to happen in advanced Western countries: Metro Detroit’s outdated sewage systems regularly violate the law by dumping raw and partially treated human waste into…

Before the race between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino had not been on my radar screen. Recently, though, his breathtakingly demagogic statements about the election forced me to pay attention. According to Menino, Massachusetts voters who support Scott Brown are doing so not because they want him to win (or because…

While I have briefly touched on the CPAC kerfluffle (Liberty University’s Matt Barber and the boycott of CPAC over a gay conservative group being a co-sponsor), I really didn’t get into the specifics — especially about the gay conservative group, GOProud. However, for those who are interested, John Hawkins’ interview with GOProud’s founder Christopher Barron…

N987SA? What a cryptic title for a post. So let me start with September of 2007 and an airplane crash. According to several mexican newspapers, G-II reg. N987SA went down this morning in Yucatan, Mexico, about 20 nm from MID. It has been reported the plane was carrying 3.2 tons of cocaine. Mexican Air Force…

Steve Mosher (an online friend of mine) has written a book about the unfolding of the ClimateGate Story. From the first discovery of the files to the world wide reactions to the e-mail and data release. Climategate: The Crutape Letters (Volume 1) Here is what Anthony Watts has to say about the book: I’ve read…

Hugo Chavez has just reminded me why I shouldn’t be buying his gas (even though it’s cheaper and therefore tempting). CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez on Sunday accused the United States of using the earthquake in Haiti as a pretext to occupy the devastated Caribbean country and offered to send fuel from his…

H/T Commenter simentt via e-mail who saw it at Karl Denninger’s blog. Karl Says: My only comment: Youtube appears to have taken this down several times, but it keeps reappearing. I found several incantations along with people hosting the raw FLV file. This appears to be created by some rather angry Democrats, and is one…

Via Memeorandum, I learned about a new study by sociologists which sheds new light on a vexing question — why do many college professors lean so predominantly to the left? The answer seems disappointingly simple — liberal want to be professors, while conservatives don’t: The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by…

For reasons that are not entirely clear, I feel like writing about guilt today. Perhaps I should feel guilty for daring to write about guilt when we are supposed to be, um, celebrating. It’s a holiday, right? Holidays are for celebrating, right? So what sort of weirdo would feel guilty on the occasion of a…

I very much hope that this indictment of the Tea Party Movement is either exaggerated or untrue: The Nashville linup also would appear to rebut another commonly held argument that the Tea Party Movement’s independence is guaranteed by its fundamentally libertarian character, so incompatible with the GOP’s heavy reliance on cultural conservatives and foreign-policy neocons.…

A piece in the Wall Street Journal has made me feel the need to elaborate on an earlier post I wrote about Haiti. The irony is that according to the Journal, where it came to the recent quake, it paid to be poor: CITE SOLEIL, Haiti — For once, it paid off to be the…

Here is the first sketchy report on Friday night’s nerd night in New York. If you’ve never been to a Nerd Nite before, here’s how it goes down. Take a college PowerPoint seminar on bird migration or muscular dystrophy or nuclear fusion or what have you, and hold it late at night in a hip…