Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Kensington stone
Runic inscription discovered in Minnesota and supposed to represent the extent of Norse exploration in North America. The Kensington Stone is a slab of rock that was found embedded in the roots of a large tree by a Swedish farmer named Olaf Ohman on his Minnesota farm in November 1898. It measures 91 centimeters long…
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John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943)
U S medical doctor, inventor, author, and spa administrator who promoted dietary and other health reforms. Kellogg was born into a large family of Seventh Day Adventists in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he grew up listening to the health-reform teachings of prophetess Ellen White. Adventist leaders pushed Kellogg toward a medical career, and he began…
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John A Keel (1930- )
Popular writer on UFOs and anomalies who believes that such phenomena are demonic entities he calls “ultraterrestrials.” Keel has asserted that such things as UFOs, Bigfoot, and Lake Monsters are inhabitants of another, paranormal, order of existence. Because they easily slip out of normal “consensus” reality, it is not surprising that scientists have difficulty verifying…
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Paul Kammerer (1880-1926)
An Austrian biologist who claimed early in this century to have produced experimental evidence of the validity of the Lamarckian genetic mechanism for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He worked on sea squirts, salamanders, and midwife toads. For example, the midwife toad is land dwelling, and the male lacks the dark and rough nuptial pads…
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Kachinas
The spirits who guided the Hopi Indians’ ancestors from the previous world to this one and who continue to guide these peoples’ lives. The Hopi believe that we today live in the Fourth World; the previous world was underground, and the kachinas spirit people who are intermediaries between humans and the Great Spirit guided the…
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Kabbalah
Reputed source of secret Jewish wisdom. Although the Hebrew word kabbalah actually means “tradition” and referred originally to the legal practices of Judaism, it has become associated with mystical Judaism; in particular, it refers to a system of obscure and mysterious practices that were formulated in the medieval period. The most famous of the kabbalistic…
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Joseph of copertino (1603-1663)
Ecstatic Franciscan priest called the Flying Friar. He was born near Brindisi of very poor parents and in his youth was sickly and slow-witted, earning the nickname “the gaper” for his habit of wandering around with his mouth open. He joined the Franciscan order, working as a servant, and was eventually admitted as a novice,…
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Jin Shin Jyutsu
A form of healing practice developed in Japan in the 1940s by jiro Mirai. Literally the “Art of Universal Energy in Compassionate Man,” Jin Shin Jyutsu is based on acupuncture and is a direct refinement of acupressure. It draws on the perspective of the Chinese idea that the human body is enlivened by chi (universal…
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Jin shin do
A form of healing bodywork developed as a variation on Jin Shin Jyutsu by Ron and Iona Teegarten in California in the 1970s. Jin Shin Jyutsu is a form of acupressure in which various points on the body are massaged in a set sequence. Following their introduction to Jin Shin Jyutsu in the 1960s, the…
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Arthur Jensen (1923- )
A prominent U.S. educational psychologist who has made important contributions to the study of intelligence from his graduate student days to the present. He maintained in an article published in the Harvard Educational Review in 1969 that there is an hereditary difference in the average Intelligence Quotient (IQ) of U.S. whites and blacks that blacks…
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