Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Islamic Crusades: An Introduction Islamic Crusades 1: The Occupation of Constantinople Islamic Crusades 2: Before Islam… Egypt, Iran, Iraq Islamic Crusades 3: The Co-Option of Jerusalem Islamic Crusades 4: Lessons From the Thai Jihad Islamic Crusades 5: Why did they hate us in 1783? Islamic Crusades 6: India’s Millennial Burden Islamic Crusades 7: India’s Modern…

A question which has been plaguing me lately is whether it is possible to have a legitimate debate over socialism without sounding like a rabid, hysterical, over-the-top, far-right conspiracy theorist. It would be nice to have time for an essay-length discussion, but I don’t. The problem is, for some time I’ve been convinced that socialism…

A poster on the Drug Policy Forum of Texas list suggested the above video in the context of a University of California at San Francisco course on cannabis therapeutics that is accredited by the AMA and the ANA (American Nurses Association). Here is what the www site has to say about the accreditation. The University…

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 I have done a number of posts on the subject of how cosmic rays affect clouds and climate including: Magnetized Weather And The Lost Concensus Global Warming Not So Hot Clouds More Clouds Model Prediction Climate Alchemy – Turning Hot Air Into Gold Clouds In Chambers Feedbacks…

I realize some people have personal stakes in the liberal versus conservative dichotomy, but is there any end to this conservative liberal diagnostic crap? If you want to tell whether someone is conservative or liberal, what are a couple of completely nonpolitical questions that will give a good clue? How’s this: Would you be willing…

For those of you who have noticed the double post of “The Death of Copyright” my apologies. I left the title off the first post and decided to repost it with the title and delete the previous version. A simple matter on blogspot. With the Six Apart software used here it is a total pain…

What the Motion Picture industry has not figured out is that the price of any product will go down to its marginal cost. How do you make a profit in such an environment? Volume. The difficulty of course that the available time for watching movies is limited. So let us look at what my internet…

The fact that racism lurks behind much of the gun control impulse is not a new topic at this blog. Among the things I’ve discussed over the years have been my personal experience with gun control advocates; Clayton Cramer’s groundbreaking work on the subject (and his documentation that racist gun control efforts even included dog…

Watching a recent White House press conference video at Politico, I am more convinced than ever that the White House is having fun and games with the Birth Certificate Truthers. (FWIW, I have tried to take their arguments seriously, but the whole thing seems designed to be immune to serious debate; I think that even…

While I moved to Ann Arbor last August, I haven’t spent much time in Detroit. Although I want to check out the cool ruins, people have told me not to go, as it’s not only a high crime place, but if you call the cops they’ll never come. This isn’t why I haven’t gone there…

Nature News is reporting that the ITER fusion experiment is in big trouble. Very big trouble. It is way over budget, way behind time, and the experimental efforts are being scaled back. ITER — a multi-billion-euro international experiment boldly aiming to prove atomic fusion as a power source — will initially be far less ambitious…

Spengler at Asia Times is looking at the portents from Iran and sees a collapse coming. And as per usual he uses his favorite metric. Whores. The man is obsessed. I can, however, appreciate his obsession. Until very recently, an oil-price windfall gave the Iranian state ample resources to pursue its agenda at home and…

The picture (Climate Modelers At Work) is from a Popular Science article discussing an MIT (yeah THAT MIT) paper predicting doomsday if the Chinese and Indians don’t stop improving the lives of their citizens with more and better electrical supplies using their coal resources. Well not really. It is only American policy that is in…

When I saw the Drudge headline that a reporter had been dragged kicking and screaming for wanting to give President Obama a letter, naturally my curiosity was aroused. The picture links this story: A reporter for a small newspaper was forcibly removed from a press area near Air Force One shortly before President Barack Obama…

Whether I like it or not, this is supposed to be a political blog, not a self-indulgent forum for posts about personal irrelevancies like being awakened in the middle of the night by bats. Anyone reading that post might think, “What has any of this to do with the serious problems posed by Barack Obama?”…

Last night after 1:00 a.m. I was rudely awakened by a home invader. Well, actually, it was my trusty watchdog Coco who awakened me by barking and lunging at the window from the bed. As I was already fast asleep, the commotion entered my dream state, and gradually caused the dream to merge into a…

Gates Of Vienna explains how Germans paid for Social Security. How socialist was Hitler? Let us look at the government contributions to social security between 1938 and 1943 (in millions of Reichsmarks) 1938 640 1939 749 +16% 1940 940 +26% 1941 1395 +48% 1942 963 -31% 1943 1119 +16% This is how socialist Hitler was.…

In looking at what the auto bailouts will mean for unions I came across an interesting comment on the current danger in investing in unionized companies. Well, sure. Fewer companies mean fewer companies needing government services. While we are at it, we could also kick some states out of the Union, and maybe revoke a…

Despite her wildly irresponsible public pronouncements about judges making the law, the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court will go sailing through. That’s because, in a numbingly familiar process, the identity politics card has been played again. In a statement that horrified Roger L. Simon, Justice Sotomayor elucidates tellingly on her philosophy: I…

Test and Measurement World is looking at the innovators of the world and finds that China is rising. China has a reputation as a production powerhouse but generally doesn’t get much respect as a source of innovation, despite efforts to change that. Now, those efforts may be paying off, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit,…