Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

  • Women Choose L.I.F.E: California Program Helps Single Mothers Overcome Mental Illness and Addiction

    Individuals who manage co-occurring disorders have two or more independent disorders that they are dealing with. Typically, this means that the person endures a mental illness as well as drug or alcohol abuse that is unrelated to one another. The LIFE project, run out of the Southern California Alcohol and Drug Program, helps homeless, single…

  • Temple of Robbers and Thieves: Massachusetts Episcopals Call on Bank of America to Repent

    Under a gray churning sky, as those with roofs over their heads in Boston threw together preparations for Sandy’s landfall, a group of Episcopalians made their stand against Bank of America. Two tempests were fuming a short time ago: one has subsided, leaving a trail of destruction here and to the south. But the other,…

  • Are Female Veterans Being Left Out In The Cold?

    After leaving the U.S. Air Force, Staff Sergeant Barbara Barnes spent years living in fear of stray shadows and sudden noises that could trigger flashbacks to trauma from her days of military service. Barnes never served abroad or saw combat. She served as an administrative officer from 1984 to 1990, processing legal documents on military…

  • Feed the Hungry: MIT Students Provide Meals for the Needy

    Wednesday Oct. 24 marked the one-year anniversary of Feed the Hungry, the MIT student-run Wednesday night community meals program located at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Central Square, Cambridge. At 5:30 p.m. the Central Square Church doors opened up allowing people to sit down in the chapel room just before the final food preparation takes place.…

  • Down and Out in Boston: Massachusetts Women Encounter Great Economic Hardship

    Although Cambridge and its sisters Boston and Quincy remain economically prosperous and have a combined population of 830,000 people and 430,000 women, women still have a higher poverty rate than men. Cambridge, the home of Spare Change News, has a population of 105,000 people. The Cambridge household income has almost doubled from $55,000 to $95,000…

  • Are There Viable Possibilities Now for Student Loan Reform?

    It’s hard to avoid the clichéd statement—and every pundit has been saying it over and over again—this was truly an historic election. Not only was President Barack Obama re-elected, but a number of very progressive candidates, such as Elizabeth Warren, seized seats in Congress as well. It seems clear: the values of the American public…

  • If You Are a Millionaire You Can Be a Presidential Contender

    Barack Obama’s re-election revived the shock (conservatives) and awe (liberals) that our country actually completed the century-long transition from owning black people as slaves, to putting one in the oval office. His supporters like to believe that a (mostly) fatherless, urban minority who achieves such a high level of up-from-the-bootstraps success knows the value of…

  • Aftermath

    On election-day morning, I was sitting with some of the right wing blowhards in the Men’s Fitness room of the YMCA. As you may have guessed most of them are old, fat white guys who sit around and talk smack about everything and everybody. They complain about what’s wrong with the country and degrade women…

  • What Obama and Romney Do Not Debate

    With the quadrennial presidential election extravaganza reaching its peak, it’s useful to ask how the political campaigns are dealing with the most crucial issues we face. The simple answer is: badly, or not at all. If so, some important questions arise: why, and what can we do about it? There are two issues of overwhelming…

  • Mitt Romney Is Irrelevant

    In the second Presidential debate Mitt Romney answered a question about how he would make sure in his administration that women would receive equal pay. He touched upon the memory of the beginning of his term as governor of Massachusetts, where he found that all of the folks looking to be in his cabinet were…

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