Technopolis

The destruction of Christiania? One of the most successful and well-organized of hippie-style alternative communities is Christiania i...

Have a secure Christmas and police state New Year As I waited in line at my local U.S. post office today, I read a notice announcing t...

Finally confirmed: PowerPoint makes you stupid I've seen it countless times. Otherwise intelligent colleagues, students and leade...

Comparing responses to Sputnik and 9/11 Michael Halloran, professor of rhetoric and colleague at Renssealear, offers a thoughful compa...

Sorrows of Empire: grim diagnosis from a noted political scientist An excerpt from Chalmers Johnson's new book, The Sorrows of Emp...

Constitution? We don't need no stinking Constitution! General Tommy Franks, leader of U.S. forces in the war on Iraq, has an inter...

London protesters use mobile technology to ruin Bush PR images Here’s a story from the BBC about clever attempts to ruin the scenic sp...

Smithsonian celebrates weapons of mass destruction The shameful history of attempts to exhibit the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped...

The global spread of HIV A map prepared by the BBC provides graphic depiction of the spread of HIV AIDS around the world. There is muc...

More on global warming From CNN today : WASHINGTON (AP) -- Melting of glaciers in the Patagonian ice fields of southern Argentina a...

Phytoplankton vanishing at a rate that alarms scientists Were it not for reassurances from the Bush administration that global warming ...

Clash of civilizations -- Wesley Clark's view of the preparations The Village Voice has a story by Sydney H. Schanberg about a new b...

Closing the Chatrooms A fairly large piece of Internet utopia is closing down. As reported by Reuters, Microsoft is draining the sewer...

Terrorizing America's climate scientists There’s new evidence of Bush administration attempts to bully E.P.A. scientists studying gl...

Thoughts on Howard Dean I went down to the City of Hudson for a Howard Dean rally this afternoon. While I've always had a favo...

Your Daily Dose of Fear from Bush (don’t worry, children, he’ll protect us) Social scientists and concerned citiizens have begun paying...

Edward Teller's "contributions" Edward Teller, 95, physicist and tireless Cold War advocate for nuclear armaments, die...

The Bush administration's attack on the environment Bill Moyer's recent interview for Grist , reprinted in The Utne Reader off...

GMOs: The less information the better? Heeding complaints by the United States, Canada and Argentina, the Word Trade Organization has ...

Energy wake-up call? Quick! Hit the snooze button! Julian Borger's article in The Guardian does a fine job of summarizing what i...

Your energy wake-up call I was on the BBC Newshour this afternoon, talking about America's excessive expectations about energy. H...

Better late than never: debunking Powell’s U.N. dog and pony show Last February, Colin Powell appeared before the U.N. Security Council ...

Anti-Globalization Woodstock in Southern France Here's a story from The Age , an Australian newspapger, one that's not likely ...

Underming the objectivity of science policy An important quest in post-Kuhnian philosophy and sociology has been to cast doubt on stan...

Progress on the March (continued) -- A summer camp for computer addicts Sorry to have been away from the weblog for a while. I've b...

So this is progress: human hybrids in the lab As reported in the Washington Post , scientists have recently produced an ethically dubio...

New logic for Bush leaguers As quoted in the Boston Globe , Ari Fleischer recently issued the following challenge on the missing weapo...

Yet more on the conquest of nature: destruction of Amazon rainforest intensifies Perhaps only on the BBC -- not Fox, CNN, much less Twee...

The conquest of nature (again): Superweeds foil GM crop plans One widely heralded feature of genetically modified crops is that they ca...

Orwellian Newspeak on climate change A report on the state of the environment that the Environmental Protection Agency will release so...

San Francisco affirms the precautionary principle Here is some very good news. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors recently adopte...

Bush's delusions of empire Eric Hobsbawm writes of the Bush administration's vision of empire in light of earlier episodes of ...

The Open Society and its new enemies George Soros, financial wizard and philanthropist, has written a fierce but thoughtful critique ...

Big Brother -- candid photo Close-up from hearings of the House Judiciary Committee on the Patriot Act and other measures enacted aft...

Tax "cuts" and the redistribution of wealth Over the past half century the trend has been to transfer wealth from lower and ...

Vocabulary for the day: synonyms for "puppet" Chalabi, Ahmed: “The Americans are even split over whom to back: the Pentagon ...

The shame of Rockford College At the commencement exercises at Rockford College recently, journalist Chris Hedges was booed off the st...

Another victory in the invasion and "conquest of nature" As I was growing up in California, textbooks and audio visual materia...

Citizens panels and the nanotechnology bill in Congress As part of my testimony to Congress on April 9, I suggested that among the activ...

Inverted totalitarianism -- Sheldon Wolin's argument Sheldon Wolin, political theorist who is now emeritus professor of politics at...

None dare call it fascism It’s interesting that the topic of fascism and totalitarianism should arise in discussions about politics in...

Use the difficulty This wonderful story and piece of advice came to me from writer, thinker and dear friend, Tim Stroshane. "Th...

The boys and their toys -- gender and war in Iraq Although there has been much comment about the jingoistic nationalism, triumphalism an...

Questions on the origins of the SARS virus The excerpt below comes from an essay published recently by the Institute of Science in Socie...