Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

This is something I wrote in October of 2007. I don’t know why I haven’t cross posted it before this. So without further ado: == I recently wrote an article on Enron and Carbon Trading. Here is another bit excerpted from a link provided in Enron and Carbon Trading. Enron commissioned its own internal study…

Watts Up With That? is taking a look at satellite data vs model data. The satellite data, ERBE – The Earth Radiation Budget Experiment, is in the upper left. You can click on the graphs for a larger view. I’m not going to go into all the math. I leave that to the boffins. The…

Speaking to the Turkish Parliament, President Barack Obama made the following claim: “…if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.” As Don Surber demonstrates, the claim is wrong: With an estimated 5 million to 8 million Muslims, obviously he does not mean by…

Wow. Can the kowtow be far behind? MORE: I think Brian Williams’ bow might tend to have at least partially answered M. Simon’s question. AND MORE: Ed Morrissey asks a question to which he does not want the answer: If Williams bowed, what would Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews do to wish the President a…

When I saw that post by Ann Althouse (guest blogging at Instapundit), I immediately thought the link might be going to this highly popular YouTube video of these Siamese twin girls. Instead, it went to a picture of edible twin egg yolks. It’s hard to tell whether the yolks are completely separate, so whether the…

Whenever I engage in brevity, I feel as if I’m leaving something out, which is my way of apologizing for this short post. Anyway, Richard Epstein contrasts the views of libertarians and conservatives towards the Sotomayor nomination, and said this: “…constitutional law contains no magic bullet that condemns judicial activism and lauds judicial restraint…” (Via…

Now that Dick Cheney is to the left of Barack Obama on gay marriage (or, as Ann Althouse says, “doing his usual thing of currying favor with the lefties”), where does that leave our reactionary president? I guess he’s doing his usual thing of currying favor with “Christianist theocrats.” Oh the irony!

H/T Raving Dave via e-mail Cross Posted at Power and Control

There is new hope for incandescent light bulbs. Shooting them with lasers can raise their efficiency dramatically. An ultra-powerful laser can turn regular incandescent light bulbs into power-sippers, say optics researchers at the University of Rochester. The process could make a light as bright as a 100-watt bulb consume less electricity than a 60-watt bulb…

So Bush was King and Obama is his son? Who knew?

Speaking of insults and ad hominem attacks, Ann Althouse (guest blogging at Instapundit) links one of the most extreme examples I have yet seen in all my years of blogging. At Playboy’s online site, an angry leftist named Guy Cimbalo (who apparently fancies himself a “rape fantasist”) compiled a list of prominent conservative women, and…

Here is the book Klavan mentions: Democracy in America and a more modern look at the phenomenon: Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change H/T Video suggested by Brendan Wright on Facebook Cross Posted at Power and Control

Not California. Although California is failing. The States I’m going to discuss are Muslim States affected by the world wide financial crisis. Spengler is taking his usual jaundiced look at the world. Financial crises, like epidemics, kill the unhealthy first. The present crisis is painful for most of the world but deadly for many Muslim…

When I saw this video, I was a bit taken aback. It’s easy to forget that (just as there are parents who’d strap a bomb on their baby) there are parents in the world who think it’s cute to watch their baby play with a deadly snake. As the YouTube caption explains, there is a…

Speaking of labyrinths, sometimes the self-canceling nature of blogging prevents me from being able to write. For example, I don’t like ad hominem rhetoric and personal attacks. When I saw one yesterday, I was immediately irritated. But the self canceling “rules” got in my way. This was especially complicated by the fact that it was…

Don’t miss Victor Davis Hanson’s “Lost in the Labyrinth of Race.” Hanson has spotted so many of the perverse twists and turns in the pretzel logic that calls itself “affirmative action” and “identity politics” that for those who love to hate bad logic, this piece is a pure joy to savor. Like this delicious excerpt:…

By now you have probably heard of Energy Secretary Chu’s plan to paint the roofs in America white to fight global warming. He should have had a talk with Alice about the big mistake that was made in Wonderland by painting the roses red. So how about some appropriate mood music? Cross Posted at Power…

As if there wasn’t enough wrong with Justice Sotomayor, now we learn she is against the Second Amendment: Just six months after Heller, however, Sotomayor issued an opinion in Maloney v. Cuomo that the protections of the Second Amendment do not apply to the states, and that if your city or state wants to ban…

Well, I have to blame something, don’t I? There’s some fat woman whose picture I keep seeing every day at Drudge, and I haven’t been interested because it looks like a plug for a TV show or something. This morning, (after having seen her picture for probably the 20th time), I figured I should check…

Will we still have a Constitutional Republic in four years? I have my doubts. A new White House policy on permissible lobbying on economic recovery and stimulus projects has taken a decidedly anti-First Amendment turn. It’s a classic illustration of Big Government trying to control every aspect of a particular activity and in the process…