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The Piper pandemic

Well, here you have it. This is how slowing consumerism and seriously reducing greenhouse gas emissions looks and feels: empty terminals, slowed shopping and quiet streets. It’s a lousy way to get there, but ironically the world-wide pandemic is changing habits of consumption in ways a purely… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Culture, Environment Leave a comment March 18, 2020March 18, 2020 2 Minutes

Covid-19: A war of the worlds

The appearance of the Corona virus that causes Covid-19

We live in two worlds, the world of the large and the world of the small. The large world includes those things we can see without any instruments, and the small world includes those things we can see only by using instruments like electron microscopes… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Environment Leave a comment March 16, 2020March 16, 2020 2 Minutes

The human experiment

Abstract: Self-consciousness is the sustained delusion of self and other, the capacity for objectifying both thoughts and objects as if they exist in states of separation. While animals in general have the capacity to identify features of and interact with their environment, it does not appear that… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Culture, Metaphysics Leave a comment March 13, 2020March 13, 2020 2 Minutes

America’s not ready

Senator Bernie Sanders

Super Tuesday appears to have provided the likely answer to the question of who will be the Democratic Party’s candidate for President this November, and it ain’t Bernie Sanders. Despite his win in California, the combined votes for Biden and Bloomberg in this … Read the rest

Larry Barnett Politics Leave a comment March 6, 2020March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

The growth paradox

Life on planet earth is a complex, adaptive system programmed for growth. Thus despite periodic major extinctions over its long history, earth continues to be populated by millions of species of plants and animals which have variously adapted to a wide range of habitats and fill nearly every ecological… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Environment Leave a comment February 27, 2020March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

The problem of evil

Charles Manson

As I see it, evil is the willful infliction of pain and suffering on others. It’s been with us for a very long time, and will continue to plague humanity into the future. Although people have wrestled with the problem of evil in various ways – mythologically, religiously, legalistically,… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Culture Leave a comment February 17, 2020March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

The homelessness Tsunami

Sonoma County estimates 3,000 people are homeless in the county, and is struggling to respond to this human crisis. $11 million was recently allocated by the Board of Supervisors, this largely in response to a homeless camp now occupying the Joe Rodota trail in the West County, but the larger solutions… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Culture Leave a comment February 9, 2020March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

Accessory Dwelling Units, aka: ADUs, a building industry dream come true

“We’ll make you big money by renting your backyard, and it won’t cost you a dime!” So advertise backyard lease, development, and property management companies in the process of aggregating an ADU portfolio. Promoted as a solution to California’s affordable housing… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Land Use Leave a comment January 18, 2020March 12, 2020 4 Minutes

Progress at all costs?

A recent article in The Atlantic about seabed mining points out that the metals targeted for collection include copper, manganese, nickel, and cobalt, all used in the production of batteries. The impetus for this sudden industrialization of the ocean bottom, in part, is carbon emissions,… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Culture, Environment Leave a comment January 5, 2020March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

1967 and the death of Groovy

Photo by Marc Riboud at the Pentagon, 1967

1967 was one hell of a year. I’ll try to make it short. It broke open in February, six weeks into my second semester at Rhode Island School of Design; the art school administration, in an attempt to purge hippies, used rule 153.b. in the college handbook to… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Recollections Leave a comment December 25, 2019March 8, 2020 6 Minutes

Homage to The Great Waveform

While enjoying my daily five-mile walk I found myself attending to each foot coming into contact with the ground, and reflecting on the nature of densely-packed space, as Buddhists refer to matter. That ancient Buddhists determined that solid-appearing matter is mostly space, albeit densely-packed,… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Metaphysics Leave a comment December 15, 2019March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

A not so grand theory of

History is written by the victor, and for the past 10,000 years that victor has been men. Accordingly, history (his story) concerns itself with power-based theories of patriarchal social order: styles of rulership, the role of warfare, and economic systems.

Herstory (not his story) is largely unwritten,… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Culture Leave a comment December 9, 2019March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

How to create affordable housing

I’m referring to government-regulated affordable housing — deed restricted to keep it affordable for 55 years, rent controlled and appreciation-limited, subject to income verification. Large projects of regulated Affordable Housing are rarely built in Sonoma, and the reasons … Read the rest

Larry Barnett Land Use Leave a comment December 3, 2019March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

The craziness

If you feel like you’re going crazy, you’re not alone. Many of us feel our ship of state is floundering and that its rudder’s fallen off. It’s not just the antics of our dishonest and quarrelsome President that’s troubling, but that America appears to have lost its way… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Culture 1 Comment November 6, 2019March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

Change fascinates us

Our fixation with moving screen images is perhaps the most obvious example of our fascination with change, but whether fast or slow, change unfailingly captures our attention. Change is so constant and pervasive that it is at times overwhelming, but change itself is really the only constant in our … Read the rest

Larry Barnett Metaphysics, Philosophy Leave a comment October 29, 2019March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

Gaming the system

Each of us are born into The System, a social organization of rules and conventions developed and deployed by our fore bearers. Having been progressively adopted in the past, The System is always obsolete and in need of tinkering; the assumptions upon which The System was developed never quite match… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Politics Leave a comment October 11, 2019March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

Passing the baton

It was recently announced that millennials now outnumber baby boomers in the United States, a milestone in the history of American demographics. For nearly all our roughly seventy-five years, baby boomers have dominated trends in fashion, economics, technology, science and environment, but this… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Culture 1 Comment September 27, 2019March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

Front Porch Fantasy

As modern life progresses and introduces new cultural forms, our tendency leans to retrieving artifacts from the past. This process of retrieval softens the shock of obsolescence; through names, shapes or designs, outdated cultural artifacts lend their comfort and familiarity to newer, less familiar

… Read the rest
Larry Barnett Culture 1 Comment September 13, 2019March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

The meaning of life

In the brief time we spend on earth, each of us goes about our business in whatever particular way we do, placing one foot in front of the other as the days and years roll by. “Waxing philosophical,” as my late father used to say, is something else apart, the activity of ruminating on the “why”… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Philosophy 2 Comments August 22, 2019March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

The Golem of Artificial Intelligence

Our pursuit of a machine that can think for itself — gather experience, learn and apply that learning to new situations — is long standing. The earliest computing machines, designed to calculate numbers, gave rise to fantasies of artificial intelligence through their faultless operation.… Read the rest

Larry Barnett Culture 1 Comment August 9, 2019March 12, 2020 2 Minutes

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