Essays by Larry Barnett
TV shows and Hollywood movies often portray elite government security teams as oafish incompetents around whom brilliantly evil criminals run rapid circles. The plots then center around a cat-and-mouse game played by the evil-doers and the one or two members of law enforcement who can see through… Read the rest
Just as global warming gains international traction with treaties, targets and timetables the price of oil miraculously drops. A coincidence? I think not.
Just as solar, wind, biofuel and electric technologies become more competitive with high-priced oil and gain wider adoption worldwide the … Read the rest
Sex Porn is a global multi-billion-dollar industry. Studies indicate that for many addicted to such material its sexual content is less significant than its feelings of overcoming powerlessness. The defining characteristic of porn is a sense of control through the objectification of self and other,… Read the rest
We place a great deal of faith in eyewitness testimony and its impact on criminal justice is enormous. Eyewitness accounts can vary widely, however, as has been the case in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri by a young police officer. Declining to bring charges, the Grand Jury … Read the rest
A Californian for nearly 50 years I’ve infrequently traveled by train but I grew up in the suburbs of New York and took the train to Manhattan from time-to-time. My earliest memory of a long train trip was when I was eight years old and my family took an overnight train to Florida.
Trains really did… Read the rest
It would be nice, I suppose, to believe that everything is just fine: the motivations of people are well-intended, science and technology always solve every problem, freedom and democracy are humanity’s natural state, the world can accommodate an unlimited number of people, and infectious… Read the rest
Setting aside the purely commercial aspects of harvest decorations and TV commercials featuring cute turkeys and cartoon characters in Puritan outfits, Thanksgiving’s acknowledgment of earth’s bounty and the value of kindness towards others is a welcome departure from our customary… Read the rest
In the world’s economy there are only three types of money, fast, slow and no.
Fast money is just that, credit which moves so quickly it requires the use of automated computer algorithms. At its extreme, fast money is circulating the globe, staying in sync with the international dateline, executing… Read the rest
Try as we may to be blasé – making it the subject of horror movies, detective dramas, novels and so forth – the mystery of death remains humanity’s primary conscious and unconscious preoccupation. The heart of philosophy and religion, not to mention Hollywood, “the great… Read the rest
Every new artifact of human culture generates a set of effects. The most predictable of these relate directly to the operation or impact of the artifact; for example, the invention of the automobile made the horse and buggy obsolete. Less obvious… Read the rest
Countries have used a variety of excuses to go to war. Some cite the need for protection of people who speak their language, like Vladimir Putin is doing in the Ukraine or Adolph Hitler did before annexing the “Low Countries” adjacent to Germany in the 1930’s. Others, like the United… Read the rest
It’s interesting how medical terminology has been applied to the digital realm; after all, computers are just machines, right? Machines don’t get sick and that’s what we’ve always loved about them and why they’ve effectively replaced human beings as a labor force.… Read the rest
Back in the hippie-dippy days of the 20th century two things were a Big Deal: Hair and Astrology. Long-haired men faded as an issue when pattern baldness and changing fashion inevitably reduced their impact to statistically ordinary, and astrology – replaced by ecology – quietly slid… Read the rest
It was recently reported that the world’s oceans now contain three times as much methyl mercury as they did before the industrial revolution. Oceanic mercury becomes highly toxic methyl mercury due to the chemical action of sea water, and methyl mercury causes cognitive impairment, sometimes… Read the rest
Our society is so permeated by commerce that business metaphors are regularly applied to non-business situations. Thus we “profit by experience,” “calculate our losses,” and “take stock in the situation.” Another common phrase concerns “the business… Read the rest
Being a grandfather provides the opportunity to experience contemporary fairy-tale movies, and suffice to say, the stories have changed.
The German fairy tales compiled by the Brothers Grimm were indeed quite grim; Sleeping Beauty, for example, included episodes of potential infanticide and … Read the rest
All language is metaphor, and for that matter, so is every word in every language. We humans are metaphor-makers, and making metaphor means making meaning.
Words create a nominal, or language-based reality which generates internal image-ideas. Through a process of fine-grained description we … Read the rest
America is exceptional in many ways, not all of them so good. One way which falls into this “not so good” category is an inordinate pride in speaking and teaching one language only, namely English. Pride is often a good indicator of self-righteousness in individuals, and so it is culturally… Read the rest
The internet of things had not arrived when NYU professor Neil Postman wrote his 1985 critique of television and its effects on society. I suspect the concerns and predictions he made in “Amusing Ourselves to Death” would have not differed greatly had he seen what… Read the rest
Beginning with painting on rocks and writing code for binary computers, the records of what we know have variously been kept. Between these two extremes are found language, hieroglyphics, cuneiform markings in clay, pictograms, alphabets, printing… Read the rest