Here’s a draft of something I’ve been working on over the weekend…

On a hot summer’s day a few years ago I was waiting at a train
station in the UK.
The train was late. A voice came over the public address system saying “We
apologize for the late arrival of the 10:30 to Brighton”. Fair enough. Then ten minutes later, the
same voice, in the same intonation, said the same words:  “We apologize for the
late arrival of the 10:30 train to Brighton”.
Ten minutes more, the same thing. And so on for an hour or so until the train
finally arrived.

What stayed with me was not the lateness of the train — the
day was so hot that tracks were buckling and we knew on setting off that we
were in for delays — it was that announcement. The words themselves sounded
like an apology, but, just like “your call is important to us”, the message
that came through to me was the exact opposite of what the words themselves
said.

* * *

Literature … Continue reading

Just before going to Oslo to collect his Nobel Prize for Economics in December 2005, Thomas Schelling was
interviewed by L.A. Times journalist Peter Gosselin about the challenges facing
post-Katrina New Orleans. The sheer
size of the reconstruction task is daunting, of course, but Schelling talked
about something different: the difficulties faced by individual evacuees trying
to decide whether or not to move back to the city: “It is essentially a problem
of coordinating expectations”, he said. “If we all expect each other to come
back, we will. If we don’t, we won’t. But achieving this co-ordination in the
circumstances of New Orleans seems impossible.”

Gosselin described the “circumstances of New Orleans” that Schelling was talking about. Washington,
he showed, had initially promised large-scale aid, but had then backed off from
those commitments, leaving evacuees to make tough decisions on their own. The New Orleans recovery became “a private market affair”.
Unfortunately, as Schelling said, the recovery was all about co-ordination, and
“There are classes of problems that free markets simply do not deal with well.
If ever there was an example, New Orleans is it.”

… Continue reading

I don’t usually post about Iraq, because I don’t really have anything to offer. But I could not help contrast the idea that the killing of Zarqawi is somehow significant with the following two pieces.

First, from the best blogger in the world at Baghdad Burning.

We heard the news about the dozens abducted from the Salhiya area in Baghdad. Salhiya is a busy area where many travel agencies have offices. It has been
particularly busy since the war because people who want to leave to
Jordan and Syria all make their reservations from one office or another
in that area.

According to people working and living in the
area, around 15 police cars pulled up to the area and uniformed men
began pulling civilians off the streets and from cars, throwing bags
over their heads and herding them into the cars. Anyone who tried to
object was either beaten or pulled into a car. The total number of
people taken away is estimated to be around 50.

This has been
happening all over Iraq- mysterious men from the Ministry of Interior
rounding up civilians and taking … Continue reading

It’s not quite clear whether Andrew Potter agrees with the American Enterprise Online when he posts pieces of an article that is part of their issue Attack of the Snobs. AP himsels makes no comment, but my guess is that he approves of the article in some sense, or else he’d say so. The article itself is entitled In Praise of Ordinary Choices. Given AP’s love of tweaking eaters of organic foods, my guess is that he’s on board with the American Enterprise Institute on this one.

Nevertheless, and much as I enjoyed most of Rebel Sell, he would be wrong. The AEI piece is MarketThink at its crudest.

First, let’s get past the sneers. There’s the title "Attack of the Snobs" itself, of course. Then organizations opposing Wal-Mart are "a regular terrarium of screamers".  The leaders are "Kerry and Dean assassins and union activists" — two groups of people it’s really hard to tell apart, I’m sure. Wal-Mart’s success has come about "contrary to snotty stereotypes,… not by piling clip-on ties and plastic shoes ever deeper on tabletops, but rather via intensive, inventive, high-tech management". I don’t know anyone who believes that snotty stereotype, so … Continue reading

Cut the Chatter noticed my thing about blogging being egotistical, and wrote something much better in reply. Basically, he says that

• yes there is a bit of ego in it [agreed – who am I kidding if I say there’s no ego involved in writing]
• he doesn’t really care if people read his stuff [I wish I could say the same, but my constant checking of sitemeter gives me away]
• he enjoys it. And that’s reason enough.

Except he says it better.

The other thing he says is that he enjoys reading other people’s blogs. Which I do too. There’s the ones I read because they are about a subject I’m interested in, which makes sense. I read the Mobile Enterprise Weblog because I’m interested in mobile computing, and I read StageLeft because it’s a left-wing Canadian take on politics. The ones that have really surprised me are the ones about daily lives though. My favourite along those lines, which is now being turned into a book, is Random Acts of Reality, which is by an emergency medical technician working for the London Ambulance Service. Whenever I think my job is stressful, … Continue reading

Yappa Ding Ding is all in favour of Bob Rae for leader of the Liberal Party. I’m no Liberal Party member, so my views count for exactly what you paid to read them. But I can’t agree with this.

It’s not that I think Bob Rae left the province a smoking wreck or anything like that – although the man himself suggests that the NDP doesn’t know how to govern ("The NDP are good at how to distribute the cake, but not how to make  the cake."). Rae Days aside, the popular picture of the NDP provincial government of the time doesn’t have a whole lot of relation to the reality.

It’s something else that bothers me. It’s this whole thing of people joining parties at the top. To hear Bob Rae, or Belinda Stronach, or Jean Charest, suddenly start talking about the traditions of the Liberal Party just makes my stomach turn over. Here is the front page of his web site:

The Liberal Party of Canada is one of the world’s great political
institutions, and I feel fortunate to have the opportunity to seek its
leadership. During this exciting and important time … Continue reading