Mr. Wonderful's World

State Cuts Continue to Library Budget
Here in Hudson, we just successfully passed a voter referendum to increase the City of Hudson’s support for our library for the first time in a decade. By a better than 60% margin voters here affirmed the importance of the library in our daily life.
Now we are faced with cuts [...]

Read Full Post »

This week’s decision by the US Supreme Court to allow corporations, including unions, to hold full rights to free speech and political action under the First Amendment to the Constitution once again reminds me of the strange practical and ethical relationship we have with corporations. In the 1886 ruling, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific [...]

Read Full Post »

Return to Creditor
There is an interesting headline in today’s (1/25/10) New York Times, “Huge Housing Complex in N.Y. Returned to Creditors”.1 This article reports that Tishman Speyer Properties and BlackRock Realty defaulted (welched?) on their debt obligations of $3 billion for their 2006 purchase of the Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan for $5.4 billion. [...]

Read Full Post »

Anti-Wall St Does Not Mean Anti-Business
President Obama’s proposals to break up the “too large to fail” mega banks and otherwise reapply the Glass Steagall Act to the financial sector has predictably brought loud complaints that this is populist and anti-business. Even the rhetoric of the reporters and expert talking heads reflects a general bias that [...]

Read Full Post »

The other night I was catching up on the latest world news from my prime TV journalists, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. Colbert interviewed Riley Crane (take a watch of this six minute clip), an MIT postdoc who lead a team that won a DARPA Network Challenge to find ten red balloons on display at [...]

Read Full Post »

President Obama’s speech on accepting the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 2009 has generally been reviewed in the US with much glow about its rhetorical heights and appreciation of its depth of thought. I did not watch Obama give this speech. Instead, I turned to the text which I could read at my leisure [...]

Read Full Post »

Bruce Edward Hall’s Diamond Street Hudson, New York – The Story of the Little Town with the Big Red Light District1 is every new resident’s introduction to a part of the history of Hudson missing from conventional touristics materials. Turns out that Hudson has depended on weekend traffic far longer than the current economy of Manhattanites (and others) coming [...]

Read Full Post »

Library Budget Question on the Ballot
Tomorrow, Nov. 3rd, is Election Day here and around the state. On the ballot in Hudson and Greenport is a proposition to increase support to the Hudson Area Library. I have been working on this initiative and pass along the following reasons to go to the polls and say, “Yes” [...]

Read Full Post »

The current New York Review of Books has an article by James Bamford, “Who’s in Big Brother’s Database” that reviews the new book by Mathew M. Aid, The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency . I have gotten in line at my local library to read this book and will make [...]

Read Full Post »

Americans do not like to use the word “empire” in reference to the country’s role in the world. Our Presidents uniformly role out rhetoric that sounds just like Obama’s. Here is a paragraph from his Inaugural speech:
And so, to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the [...]

Read Full Post »