Category Archives: Uncategorized

(Community Matters) terrific article, terrific couple, dear friends – Gary & Richard in AAS’s June 2012 Real

(Community Matters) Paul Krugman – a populist

(Community Matters)  At Harvard University, Fareed Zakaria’s commencement speech:

We are living in the most peaceful times in human history…The United Nations estimates that poverty has been reduced more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500 years…This country has its problems, but I would rather have America’s problems than most any other place in the world.

Fareed Zakaria: editor of Newsweek International whose column appears in Newsweek, Newsweek International and The Washington Post.

Hat Tip: Lynn Meredith

(Community Matters) I concur with this opinion – not so sad speculators didn’t eat up the usual IPO margin.

updated for link

(Community Matters) Sorry to be missing your first birthday party

Happy Birthday, Clara

I want to eat cake like that too

(Community Matters) In Marfa celebrating Ballroom Marfa, a super arts organization started by friends Fairfax Dorn & Virginia Lebermann. Good friends including Suzanne Deal Booth, Tobin Levy & John Wotowitcz are also on the board. We’re all here this weekend raising money for and celebrating their great work.

a rendering of their new Marfa drivein

Also a very productive Marfa Public Radio board meeting while here and back in time for tomorrow’s Laguna Gloria wedding of dear friends Jessika Mann & David Roth

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Photo: Garrick Stephens, Tobin Levy & moi

(Community Matters) two buses took employees to the new site last night at midnight. Board members had been sworn to secrecy. The new Wheatsville Co-Op in South Austin

(Community Matters) David Brooks (yes SM, I know you can’t stand him, but it’s a good column 🙂 )

When I read the Stanford discussion thread, I saw young people with deep moral yearnings. But they tended to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions; questions about how to be into questions about what to do.

It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.

(Community Matters)  Target has agreed to donate up to $120,000 in support of marriage equality by donating proceeds from sale of pride shirts to the Family Equality Council.

The Family Research Council is on it. They have started a massive calling and email campaign intended to dissuade Target for supporting equality in marriage.

Please email Target at press@target.com or call them at 612-304-6073, option 6 to express your support.   HuffPost story

I’m looking forward to once again shopping at Target. It’s been nearly 2 years.

(Community Matters) seriously? Planning Commission telling Austinites they have to get a health permit to rent a room to a friend or a weekender? And, they want homeowners to have to seek Planning Commission permission for any vacation rental? this is absurd. I get the nuisance thing but this is bureaucratic terrorism.  AAS story

we just had a city election where over zealous neighborhood activists campaigned against the incumbents. fortunately, citizens overwhelmingly overruled them

(Community Matters) I find the entire trial unseemly yet as compelled to read the new york times piece. As to violations of the law, I’m glad these will be sorted out. As to human flaws, why have Americans come to believe our leaders can have none. Great men have great flaws.

(Community Matters) Steven and I popped down to Sealy over night for birthday dinner with my dad, mom, sister (flew in from FL), brother (Eli), sister-in-law (Luci), nephew & niece (Eli & Paulina). Dad was 77yo yesterday – looking forward to many more.

At the restaurant, Paulina (9yo) surprised us by agreeing to play a short song on the piano for the entire restaurant. After a thunderous round of applause, she decided to play two