Everybody’s talking “transparency” these days. I used to think that transparent meant nearly invisible, like glass is transparent, but its meaning seems to have morphed into exactly the opposite. So when we talk about transparency in government today, what we mean is making the operation... Continue
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Valentine’s Day serves many purposes in the lives of people everywhere. It marks the beginning of little league. No, that’s not it. Oh yes, it reminds us to let that someone special know that they are still special to us. Let’s talk sex for a... Continue
What are we to make of our obsession with zombies? If one considers mass media as a window into our collective human consciousness, then the mass-media outbreak of zombies represents the expression of a symbolic neurosis emerging from modern society as whole. Human society in... Continue
President Obama’s recent State of the Union speech represents an attempt to reframe the political debate in an era of unprecedented obstructionist scorched-earth politics generated by a hardened extremist right wing faction, funded by a bottomless pit of unlimited corporate money, brought to us by... Continue
Blame Grand Central Station. New York was once ready to tear the Grand Dame down and replace her with a glass-clad skyscraper. I was horrified by the idea, and still am. Penn Station had already suffered the ravages of the wrecking ball, and it seemed... Continue
In July of 2010, to commemorate the 175th anniversary of the founding of our pueblo, I conducted an archaeological excavation at the Casteñada adobe, inviting the public to come out and dig, screen and catalog artifacts. The owners at the time, Robert and Leslie Demler,... Continue
We are all challenged with something… death, divorce, illness, money issues, bad coffee, who knows what. It all makes community connection more important than ever before. Whether we are getting older or in transition, we need each other. Nobody taught me friendship 101. Sometimes I’m... Continue
Communication between people defines us as social beings; all our senses are employed in the act of establishing contact and sharing information with others. Ordinarily, our senses work in concert with each other, creating a synesthetic blend of information from which we continuously convey and... Continue
In 1835, the Pueblo of Sonoma was founded and Mariano Vallejo appointed Commandante of the Fourth Military District and Director of Colonization of the Northern Frontier. Vallejo describes his arrival to Sonoma County, on his way to the mission to lay out the pueblo of... Continue
In a society of over 300 million people efficiencies are needed, and representative democracy is how we choose to provide efficiency in the development and administration of governmental public policy. Other societies are organized differently but all governmental systems, whether democracy, monarchy or autocracy are... Continue