Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

McCain campaign has been getting a lot of gratuitous advice from the left lately. A lot of his enemies are saying that the reason he is losing is because his focus on Bill Ayers while the economy collapses makes him look ridiculous. Or desperate. So (they helpfully suggest), John McCain should focus on the economy,…

So what is Mr. Obama’s dark ambition? I’ll give it to you in his own words from his book Dreams From My Father. To avoid being mistaken for a sellout,I chose my friends carefully.The more politically active black students.The foreign students.The Chicanos.The Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.We smoked cigarettes and…

What if Barack Obama adopted John McCain’s policies? As the following interviews (all broadcast on the Howard Stern Show) suggest, he’d still be supported by many of his followers. The few McCain voters who were interviewed also seemed to feel the same way. As Thomas Jefferson said, “An enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper…

A good friend told me that while traveling in England, he was horrified by the number of surveillance cameras (apparently 1 camera per 15 people), and he sent me a link to a piece titled “Orwellian U.K. Angers People With Tree Cameras, Snooping Kids“: Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) — Hidden in foliage next to a path…

In a remarkable statement (especially for a former constitutional law professor), Barack Obama said that health care is a right. Not ought to be a right. Is a right. For the reasons I explained in this post, health care is not a right. Certainly not a right in the way our country has always defined…

As I’ve said before, I have never had a security clearance. Considering the problems in my life and some of the people I’ve known, it is highly doubtful that I could ever get one. Naturally, this inclines me to be somewhat unsympathetic to the security clearance mindset. Frankly, I have always found the security clearance…

Might Bill Ayers have ghost-written Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father”? It’s an intriguing question, and Jack Cashill offers a fascinating analysis. It’s long, but here’s an excerpt: To add a little science to the analysis, I identified two similar “nature” passages in Obama’s and Ayers’ respective memoirs, the first from Fugitive Days: “I picture…

In a CNN Commentary piece titled “Why Ayers case is risky for McCain-Palin,” Roland Martin asks a rhetorical question about the late philanthropist who funded the Annenberg Challenge: …never mind the fact that Ayers and Obama were involved in a multimillion-dollar education grant that was funded by a right-wing Republican, media magnate Walter Annenberg. Do…

It seems that Mr. Obama is not proud of his friends. It also looks like McCain is going after this with everything he has got. I suspect this is not the end of this subject, either. I’d expect at least one more ad featuring John Murtaugh, the son of the judge whose home got bombed…

My friend Tom Ligon has just been inducted into the Sigma Society. Here is what Sigma does: Many SIGMA members are Ph.D.-level scientists and engineers; all are science fiction writers who have spent careers applying their technical and literary talents in exploring the future of science, technology, society and cultures. SIGMA provides a significant pool…

I have just come across a comment on Obama’s questionable associates that explains why Mr. Obama is the most qualified to be President. All of these questionable associates are what makes Obama qualified. If you can stay clean and still get the goals of your constituency met then you are headed for leadership. I guess…

This campaign has gone on so long I’m already getting nostalgic. No, seriously, I was just thinking back. Only six months back, but it seems like an eternity. Anyway it occurred to me that if Hillary Clinton could bring up Ayers like this in April, then why not John McCain in October?

Our Country Deserves Better PAC is trying to raise $500K in 48 hours to try to win Michigan for McCain. Click on the link to contribute. Or click on this link to watch their videos. It also has a button for contributions. They are about 1/2 way through and have already raised $257,116.42 so they…

Psychologist Dr. Helen Smith has written two posts about the psychological aspects of the economic crisis, and her thoughts about how they might be manipulated by Democrats who hope to win the election. Her first post is here (see my similar thoughts on the subject), and in her most recent post, she has cited Steve…

I am probably not what most people would consider “Joe Six-pack.” Nor, I suspect, are most of the readers of this blog. The term usually denotes the kind of guy who’s unlikely to be reading blogs. According to the effete Wikipedia, “Joe Sixpack” is a sub-category of “John Q. Public,” and a lower one at…

No Quarter has a fascinating article on Obama’s past. It runs down in detail Senator Obama’s socialist past. Did you know that Barack Obama was affiliated with a leading national socialist party? Barack Obama didn’t include in his 2008 resume that he entered politics in the mid-1990s endorsed by Chicago’s leading socialists. This just keeps…

While this really can’t be called live-blogging the debate (or the Town Hall meeting), I thought I’d weigh in with a few thoughts while watching it. I have been watching Barack Obama mischaracterize the economic problem as being caused by deregulation, and I wish McCain would come back at him harder. Unfortunately, he’s limited by…

If this doesn’t make Barack Obama lose the endorsement of the Humane Society of the United States, I don’t know what will: Senator Barack Obama, recently taking more criticism for his associations with unrepentant terrorist William Ayers and racist preacher Jeremiah Wright, has now been found to have yet another questionable associate: Blogger and brutal…

David Axelrod is having a hard time explaining when Mr. Obama first found out William “Bomber Bill” Ayers was a domestic terrorist. So when did Obama find out that Ayers had been a member of an organization the FBI called a “domestic terrorist” group, and had been for years a fugitive from the law? “I…

I probably complain too much about runaway federal regulations, but this time, I’m going to do more than complain. I’m going to offer praise for a solution. We are now so regulated that nearly every one of us has become a federal criminal of one sort or another. While most Americans won’t wind up in…