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A Pagan's Blog

UPDATE below Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked (in German) “Power makes stupid.” Recent articles about the overly enthusiastic use of tasers by cops (the term ‘police officer’ overly dignifies these thugs) are a good confirmation of his observation. My example is not isolated. Here is another example. As usual the cops are exonerated. Big organizations look…

Pop!Tech 2007, like Pop!Tech 2006, offered a wonderful array of creative people doing fascinating and vitally important work in that realm where society, culture, and technology come together. One of the most important at many levels was a talk given by Dr. Victoria Hale, a scientist who first worked for the FDA then Genentech. She…

Courtesy of John Cole at Balloon Juice, who credits the original discovery to Andrew Sullivan, this is too good not to post, even though I’m so busy I can scarcely sit down. Sullivan writes: “Waterboarding was sometimes used in the Deep South to torture African-Americans and to extract false confessions to alleged crimes. And when…

https://www.peterkuper.com/stock_jpgs_j/images/dissent_j.jpg UPDATED 11/15, 11/29 I’ve been thinking about the following for some time. Not many links right now, but there likely will be. And as I do I will update and move this post forward. Historically governments generally lasted between 200 and 400 years before collapsing from a combination of incompetence, corruption, and inability to…

My favorite “hard science” blog, by physicist and science fiction writer David Brin, has the following questions anyone should ask conservatives who claim to love their country: “* WOULD YOUR HACKLES RAISE IF IT WERE DEMOCRATS WHO… “…insist that it is just fine for two companies, run by a pair of extreme partisan brothers, to…

All the blustering over Iran and the bomb encourages Americans to think that Iran’s getting nuclear weapons is a disaster for the United States. The argument is not just wrong, it is stupidly wrong. First, there already is an Islamic Bomb, if you must use that terminology. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. In addition, Osama Bin…

I blogged earlier on the American right wing’s bizarre hatred of Rachel Carson, including their surreal claim she was guilty of “genocide” because her arguments influenced policies dramatically reducing DDT use, including its use against malaria. Even if their claims were accurate as to the effects of the DDT ban, it is difficult to charge…

Before Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, many of us opposed the war. Some of us, myself included, predicted that if Bush and his supporters invaded, the result would be not democracy but chaos, more killing than would have been the case otherwise, and the collapse of the country. The ingrown ruling class that dominates…

The Washington Post has just reported the infant formula industry hired Republican lobbyists to dampen a federal government campaign to increase breast feeding in the US. Early breast feeding is connected with lower rates of asthma and diabetes, but also lower rates of profit for manufacturers of infant formula. The Bush administration, which puts the…

The tensions are heating up between a gift economy revitalized by the web and corporations who make money to the degree they can keep information scarce and expensive. Until recently the only way research could be made available was through journals often published by corporations less interested in science than in profits. With the coming…
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