Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

In today’s Detroit Free Press, I read about an interesting promotional idea — free pizzas in exchange for McCain campaign signs: A Warren pizzeria owner received threatening phone calls Wednesday after a political pizza deal went awry. “They’ve been actually calling here and threatening my life,” said Salvatore’s Pizzeria owner Diana Franzoni, who previously offered…

Have you heard that McCain voted with Bush 90%-95% of the time? I’ve heard it so many times my eardrums are ready to burst. Of all the talking points in the Obama campaign, I think it is probably Point Number One. I hadn’t really given much thought to looking into the details, although it did…

Orson Scott Card is a Democrat. He is also a fierce critic of the press. The in the tank for Obama press. An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America: I remember reading All the President’s Men and thinking: That’s journalism. You do what it takes to…

In my long discussion of the Michael Smerconish endorsement yesterday, I should have made it more clear that in terms of the big picture, Michael Smerconish is what film gangster Hyman Roth would call “small potatoes.” Most ordinary middle class people — especially the undecideds who don’t read newspaper pundits (much less blogs) — have…

Real Clear Politics has Obama up by 11 in Pennsylvania as of 22 Oct 008 0300z. And yet Governor Rendell is nervous about Pennsylvania and is asking Obama to return. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell has sent two separate memos to the Obama campaign in the past five days requesting that the Democratic Presidential candidate–as well…

I just learned something new, and I am horrified. While I often condemn socialists and socialism, until today I had not realized that the word “socialist” is code language for “black”: The “socialist” label that Sen. John McCain and his GOP presidential running mate Sarah Palin are trying to attach to Sen. Barack Obama actually…

If there’s one thing that’s worse than Bill Ayers, it’s his respectability. How did it happen that a guy like that came to be respectable? The same way bad people always become respectable, of course. Nice respectable people fail to speak up. By “nice” I mean the very people I referred to in this post;…

Like a lot of people, I’ve been wondering about those polls. If McCain were to pull ahead of Obama (as he has four or five times before), wouldn’t the Obama campaign be so scared that they would want the results either changed, statistically skewed, or somehow not reported? I realize they don’t have the kind…

“He did not write a blurb for his book,” Burton said. “He did not.” So said Obama spokesman Bill Burton, specifically denying what Zombieboy had to go out and specifically track down. Here’s the picture. Of what Barack Obama absolutely Did Not Write. While I’m at it, I figured I might as well scan page…

Now that Philadelphia conservative radio talk show host and columnist Michael Smerconish has “decided” (for Obama), M. Simon is disgusted. So am I. In fact, I am so disgusted that I don’t know what to do. I realize that everybody’s mind is made up so what could I say that chould make much of a…

A certain person named Smerconish who claims to be a Republican has come out for Obama. A giveaway is that this missive was published in the HuffPo among other places. Mr. S lists five concerns where he thinks Mr. Obama has better ideas than John McCain. The five are Terrorism, where he thinks Iraq is…

It’s getting colder! That’s what Lorne Gunter says in a piece headlined “Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof“: In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since…

Alan Boyle brings us up to date on the latest news from the world of fusion. Of course I’m especially interested in what he has to say about Bussard Fusion and their progress to net power. I’ll give you the short version: “We’ve been pretty busy, but it’s the same situation,” Nebel told me today.…

Evidently in Britain there are fewer restrictions on polite conversation that there are in America. So Melanie Phillips says it: You have to pinch yourself – a Marxisant radical who all his life has been mentored by, sat at the feet of, worshipped with, befriended, endorsed the philosophy of, funded and been in turn funded,…

You remember when Obama was way up in the polls? (Wasn’t that like a week ago? – Yes it was [ed.]) Now that he is falling back in the polls Joe Biden knows why it is happening. Racism. It is like a disease. Once other people get infected it is only a matter of (not…

Barack Obama likes to talk about cynicism, and in a very critical way. In the following speech before AIPAC in March, he expresses gratitude for having so many young people in his campaign, and describes “cynicism” as the biggest enemy we’re going to have to fight. Presumably, he thinks young people are less “cynical” than…

I love government coverups, especially when the purpose of the coverup is to keep government bureaucrats from being embarrassed. This time, British government bureaucrats are so embarrassed that they’ve gone on the “diaper defensive“: A government report that found old-fashioned reusable nappies damage the environment more than disposables has been hushed up because ministers are…

According to Frank Rich, there are only three ways McCain can win, and two of them involve race: The election isn’t over, but there remain only three discernible, if highly unlikely, paths to a McCain victory. A theoretically mammoth wave of racism, incessantly anticipated by the press, could materialize in voting booths on Nov. 4.…

“He didn’t ask for Senator Obama to come to his house. He wasn’t recruited or prompted by our campaign. He just asked a question. And Americans ought to be able to ask Senator Obama tough questions without being smeared and targeted with political attacks.” So said John McCain, and I couldn’t agree more. I’ve lost…

It’s hard work being my muse, but Coco tries. Here she is perusing the newspaper in search of interesting tidbits for me to blog about. But eventually, Coco tires of this, and she can become awfully annoyed at the endless (to her, very boring) tappy-tappy game I seem to be playing with the keyboard. When…