Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • O'Donoghue and media capture?

    I was floored on Friday driving while listening to Today with Pat Kenny (Friday July 31, last 15 mins). Well, when I say floored, I was shouting at the radio. In the usual PK roundup of the week, where a panel of guests is invited to comment on events of the past seven days, some…

  • Mexican cat-off

    Mr Puds has some new friends/enemies. This evening a standoff took place between two neighbouring cats and Puds. Puds stood on our shed, while two as yet unnamed cats stood on the neighbour’s shed. They traded dirty looks with Puds and, even me. For now I think I will call these new cats Ginger and…

  • Sean Dunne's Icelandic debts

    Commenter FPL has pointed to a Wikileaks document I hadn’t seen before, and I believe has not received widespread attention. Full PDF (Dunne is on Page 128). It includes this page, which refers to developer Sean Dunne’s liabilities to Icelandic bank Kaupthing. The bank was sort of like Ireland’s Anglo Irish. It was nationalised last…

  • What NAMA needs

    Constantin also has a good list of things that need to be added to the legislation, to make it more accountable to the taxpayer: 1) Provisions for taxpayer protection and provision for a taxpayers’ oversight board filled with only independent observers, who are not in the employment of NAMA, NTMA, the State or any other…

  • What NAMA means

    Constantin has been giving some of the best NAMA analysis I have read thus far. I will quote two specific sections I believe are important (but read the whole thing on his blog). Light block quotes are from the draft NAMA legislation. All of this is from Constantin: (c) a reference to the long-term economic…

  • Gerry Gannon's assets

    One of the Anglo 10 is signing assets over to his wife, according to the Irish Mail on Sunday. I did a backgrounder on Mr Gannon here. LEADING developer Gerry Gannon is transferring properties worth tens of millions of euro, including an entire lake and foreshore, into his wife’s name. The surprise move – initiated…

  • Anger and John O'Donoghue

    The Sunday Tribune reported over the weekend that current speaker of the Dail, and former tourism minister John O’Donoghue spent upwards of €125,000 (excluding government jet costs) over two years. Among the details: Among the expenditure were a series of €900-a-night hotels, €7,591 on “airport pick-ups” during a two-day trip to London, €120 for hat…

  • Giving something back?

    Given the day that’s in it, after seven years of blogging, I feel like I should try and give something back to the blogosphere. Over the years I have offered hosting to a number of people who I felt deserved better tools than Blogspot offers, or would be better served by having their own domain,…

  • That time again…

    Gavin’s Blog is seven years old today. 🙂 Thank you to all my readers over the years.

  • Buy one anyway

Got any book recommendations?