Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Bloombeg has this. FlowPoint Capital Partners, the $15 million hedge fund co-founded by Charles Trafton, is betting against companies such as student-loan servicer Navient Corp. to profit from what it calls a college bubble bursting in slow motion. The Boston-based firm is building positions against stocks of textbook publishers, student lenders and real estate companies…

Just an idea, but what if the unsecure private e-mail server existed so that foreign governments who made large donations to the Clinton Foundation could hack the system and gain access to classified information that HRC could not give them directly? That would make this treason, if proved. Ordinary American on August 13, 2015 at…

A retired geologist wrote a letter to the local paper outlining the EPA incentives a week or two before the dam “broke”. You can read about it at ZeroHedge A week before The EPA disastrously leaked millions of gallons of toxic waste into The Animas River in Colorado, this letter to the editor was published…

Typical. Military technology developed for use against terrorists is now being deployed against Americans in the War on Drugs. (And the war against unapproved sex.) SAN DIEGO — Facial recognition software, which American military and intelligence agencies used for years in Iraq and Afghanistan to identify potential terrorists, is being eagerly adopted by dozens of…

I still can’t figure out ( 46 years later) how that album cover got past the censors.

This does not pass my smell test: Protesters who claimed affiliation with the Black Lives Matter movement stormed the stage during a rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in Seattle on Saturday, taking over the microphone and forcing Sanders to leave without ever speaking. Moments after Sanders took the stage at Westlake Park, two women…

It happened in Seattle. When the crowd asked the activists to allow Sanders to speak, one activist called the crowd “white supremacist liberals,” according to event participants. After waiting about 20 minutes while the women talked, Sanders was pushed away again when he tried to take the microphone back. Instead, he waved goodbye to the…

The fight over the Ex-Im bank is something almost no one has heard of, and yet it’s sort of a pivotal ideological struggle of our time.  Ex-Im basically exists to hand money to U.S. exporters, on the basis that hey, other countries hand money to their exporters, so we should too (you don’t want Chinese…

Fracking has changed the oil business in a fundamental but not obvious way. Time frames are changing. Things that used to be understood are now in flux. Lets look at supply and demand issues. Price no longer works the way it used to in order to balance supply and demand. In response to Saudi efforts…

Is evidently a euphemism for female genitalia. At least according to some folks who have sex on their brain. Which appears to be a LOT of Republicans.

Waving the bloody shirt used to get you political support. Waving the bloody rag seems to have a different result. =============== That comment got deleted despite a “LOL” comment in response. Maybe they didn’t get the joke. Or maybe it was much too racy for their family friendly discussion of “We think we know which…

Trump has donated $100K to the Clinton Foundation. He has supported Clinton in politics. And he favors (or used to – it is hard to tell) single payer health care. How in the heck did he get to be the Republican front runner? It is like we have a one Party system or sumptin. And…

The separation method which he discusses in the beginning of the video is liquid chromatography. I was working on that in ’68/’69. I was also doing gas chromatography. In the US, Drug Prohibition severely restricts the study of these compounds in humans. But to a certain extent I can understand the rear guard action. If…

Cribbed from the comments at Samizdata.

Some parents whose children have been killed by guns are suing a few Chicago suburbs because of the “flood of guns” coming from those suburbs. How about stopping the flood of murderous impulses?

Until tonight I had not had particularly strong feelings about Donald Trump. I thought he was a joke. But I’ve been (stupidly, I guess) watching the Republican candidate debate tonight, and I just saw him threaten to run a Third Party campaign. So now I say FUCK DONALD TRUMP. I think he might as well…

I get emails. Lots and lots of emails, and at this point at least 75% of it is spam. The other day I got a political spam email urging me to buy Confederate flag products (something that I did not find particularly surprising in light of recent hysteria), but today I was sent a real…

Hardly my idea, but I thought I would check out the logic involved. With three vintage videos!

I know, I know. God hate flags. But let’s not dwell on the past. I don’t know why I am suddenly being reminded of old posts. Must be getting senile or something.

As that last post on “causation” reminded me, anything can be said to have caused anything. Especially when it comes to the war on drugs. Anything caused by the war on drugs can be and is said to have been caused by the drugs themselves. This includes insanely high prices, murder, corruption, terrorism, whatever. It…