Press "Enter" to skip to content

Public Citizen

Hit and myth

Our human experience is fundamentally emotional, and emotions are fundamentally confusing. The stuff of imagination and subconscious life, emotions are primordial, which means not subject to the whims of logic or reason. From the standpoint of brain development, logic and reason are newcomers on the... Continue

One hundred and fifteen degrees

In 1972 I lived in the foothills of St. Helena in the Napa Valley. It was a modest little house with a swimming pool built in the 1950s by the man who created Meadowood, now a world-famous luxury resort; he and his family lived there... Continue

Why it’s so hard to relax

The earliest Greek myths recount the emergence of the cosmos through a violent act of separation. The unity of all things was broken when at the urging of his mother, Gaea, her son Kronos forever divided his parents by cutting off the generative organs of... Continue

The search for autonomy

Our experience of the continuity of self, the sense of personal autonomy with which we awaken each day, is very persuasive. "I" is a persistent experience, persistent enough that each of us can treat it as real and thereby treat others as real, too. Indeed,... Continue

When life throws you a curve

At our human scale it's easy believe in straight lines. High School geometry made things worse; Euclid's imaginary geometric forms served to reinforce our illusion that Point A, Point B and Point C can be connected by a straight lines, like when we point a... Continue

Disfavoring moral complexity

One of the dilemmas of modern times is effectively coming to grips with morality. The word itself is derived from Latin, meaning "proper behavior" but has become loaded with other connotations, religious and social. Our humanitarian, modern sensibilities incline us to disfavor moral entanglements in... Continue

Sonoma’s examples of real, true and beautiful

Retailing has never been an easy business. Changing tastes, new technologies, capricious landlords and finding loyal employees alone are enough to create conditions of failure. Add in the Internet, and today's retailer faces incredible odds. Here in Sonoma, those of us who've been here for... Continue

Predictably predictable

When a major new commercial building project is proposed in Sonoma, its appearance is scrutinized, poked, prodded, and otherwise worked-over by committees until it is declared suitably "Sonoma-Style". Thus we see "Sonoma-Style Farmhouse" and "Sonoma-Style Barn" popping up in proposal project narratives reading more like real... Continue

Sonoma’s new oligarchy

The City of Sonoma has always had oligarchs, powerful people of great wealth and the inclination to use it. First among these was General Mariano Vallejo, the Mexican General who owned much of Northern California, including the town of Sonoma. He laid out the city,... Continue

Paranoid leader, paranoid state

America was founded from within a state of paranoia, the persecution experience of the Puritans and other Christian sects in England. Coming to the shores of North America was envisioned by them as their refuge from paranoia, but instead of escaping it, they brought it... Continue