Tramworks or How to Bring Edinburgh to a halt for no reason

At 5am on saturday princes street in the middle of Edinburgh will close to all traffic for work in  preparation for the trams. I predict chaos.

This time round it is even more frustrating because the contractors won’t even be starting work immediately, they’ve demanded more money from the council, and the council have said no. watch this (not moving) space!

bbc report

Do something

This is the best advice I’ve heard I think on “the secret to success”.

Do you agree?

Budget Through

The scottish budget passed this afternoon, after it was defeated last week. This is no insignificant thing, £33 Billion at stake. But also the whole minority government project.

Last week, SNP had got the support of the tories and the 1 independent, but failed despite dramatic last moment promises to get the greens on board. This week, the SNP got the support of the tories, indepedent, labour and libdem.

You can go read the political commentary for yourself in any scottish newspaper, but for people like me this is interesting because this administration is the first minority administration I’ve seen, and this vote was potential-for-real-disaster moment they’ve had to negotiate their way round.

Not knowing the solution: Not knowing the problem

Trying to make the world/Scotland a better place looks ostensibly straightforward. Find the problem. Work out the solution. Apply.

Of course, life isn’t like that at all, so often we can barely work out what the problem is (sure, lots of people are in fuel poverty, but why are they?), let alone work out the right solution. One reaction is to claim we know the answer (people don’t have enough money for bills), often reasonably, apply a solution (give people money when it’s cold) and then monitor the result (targets for uptake/heat levels in homes).

The problem is, when things become about targets, you risk not fixing the problem. Because, unless your target is absolutely on the button mearsuring  the perfect solution to the problem, you end off focusing on the target, not on fixing the problem.

Another way of saying this, is that I think we all need an appropriately chastened epistemology… we do not know the right things to do, we do not know the solutions to the problems, and our best guesses are just that, guesses. So, we always have to remain open to the possibility that the solution we are proposing is not the best way of fixing the problem.

Need to measure how fixed the problem is, not how good we are at apply our fixes.

Losing Capital

It has been interesting watching the flow of capital at my work the last couple of weeks. No money, you’ll understand, but political capital, and also good will capital.

I think good will capital is underrated by a lot of people. It’s your ability to get someone else to do something, and normally relies on people by and large being happy to help others. I try to be one of those people, always ready to help, even if I don’t really know the person who’s asking me for it. It’s a collective good will thing at work – we all have to make those phonecalls from time to time asking people we’ve never met to do things we’d rather not do ourselves… and to make the system work you have ot sometimes (or often) say yes.

The thing is, that the goodwill capital can easily be used up. that’s not rocket science, and we’ve all had those days when one person too many has asked us to do stuff. But good will capital can also be wasted. Or maybe better described as loss. That is, if you ask someone to do something, but then later disregard that effort, you use your capital, but gain nothing from it. You lose it.

I’ve been feeling pretty grumpy the last couple of weeks, and I’m sure that I’ve been squandering my capital. Time to pull my socks up tomorrow I think.

Where do we put our rage?

Remember, O LORD, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare,  down to its foundations!”
O daughter of Babylon doomed to be destroyed,
blessed shall he be who repays you
with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
and dashes them against the rock!

(psalm 137: 7-9)

The  question is, should texts like this be edited out the Bible. Should a passage like this be censored, whether explicitly, or simply by never being read in worship. What place does it have in the Bible anyway?

Some would say, no place at all. The singer is invoking God’s power to thump babies’s heads against rocks. Not a very Christian thought. Not a very human thought come to that. And yet, censoring bits of the Bible is problematic, not least because it is impossible to draw a line in the sand as to what can stay and what must go.

So what to do with passages such as this? My feeling? Texts like this must remain included as part of our worship, not because they in any way advocate behaviour we should adopt, or indeed speak well of the nature of God.  If anything, they must remain precisely because they speak of what God is not. But of what we sometimes would wish he is. They must remain because they enable us to bring our rage, our injustice and our anger before God. And in so doing they remind us that our rage belongs in one place, and one place only: at the feet of God.

n.b. this has been a bad week for blogging, sorry all. Partly due to difficulties getting access to the internet, and partly due to other things you may have heard me talk about if you’ve seen me in person this week. I’ll try harder next week.

Paddling

My sister made this video of my brother and I paddling earlier this year (i.e. January 2009)! It made me smile, hope it makes you smile too. Or worry for us!

Dance the Blues Away!

Tonight, against my better judgement I went a ceilidh after work. Not sure how I’ll feel tommorrow – what with a late night and lots and lots of excitement. But, I am feeling much churpier than I was earlier.

Ceilidh’s have a lot of the things I need to be happy going for them; friends, music, exercise, structure, sillyness…

Death by… Pilates DVD

I bought a pilates DVD on Friday – if you ask me a fairly modest and measured response to the January blues that seem to be slowly, but very sure darkening my horizions.

I thought, as you might, how hard can it be? Answer. Very. Very hard. After 20 minutes I was ready to stop, my muscles weirdly shattered.

I will try keep you updated on my pilates-dvd created body, if the dvd doesn’t kill me first!

Reading a Nation’s Foundations

Returning to the nation’s foundations. One of the themes of Obama’s inaugural address today was returning to the source, the foundations of the United States as key to directing its future. Obama claims a vision to build a nation on the solid ground of the nation’s foundational truths and ambitions.

He sets the context of his speech as being in a raging storm, a storm of war, economic crisis, homelessness, job losses, costly healthcare, failing schools etc, which threatens the very survival of America. In this tempest, as in those that have come before Obama claims, “America has carried on… because we, the people, have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.”

Obama protests against the nagging fear that America is in an inevitable decline which it must come to terms with, rather than confront. Instead he proclaims that the challenges that America faces will be met. The much quoteable words, that the time has come “to choose a better history” promise a new era for America, an era in which its greatness must be earned along the long, rugged path towards prosperity. An America “bigger than the sum of our individiual ambitions.” An America remade.

America’s rehabilitation on the world stage will be by returning to the spirit of those founding fathers. “Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations.” Their vision, is of an America as friend to every nation and every man, Obama claims. He could scarcely take them more seriously, declaring “we are the keepers of this legacy”, a legacy not just of those founding fathers but of the brave American men and women upholding those foundational truths through the years.

Recognising the new context and new challenges of America today, Obama nevertheless claims that the only way of dealing with these is old. “Those values upon which our success depends – honest and hard work, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.”

In his conclusion Obama refers to the very year of the creation of America itself, when the capital was abandoned, the enemy advancing on it, quoting the first president himself, “Let it be told to the future world… that in the depth of winter when nothing but hope and virtue could survive… that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”

Obama’s point is clear, America must return to what it was originally intended to be if it is to truly fulfil its potential for good in the world.

And yet, the question must be asked, is this a sensible hermeneutic, a sensible interpretation of the the hopes and ambitions of the founding fathers? Had they been standing in front of him today, would they have recognised the voice of a president? And a deeper question must also be asked. Is this really what the President should be seeking to interpret? Is the context today really so easily read in the light of those founding fathers’ words and actions? Is Obama even actually reading them? Or is he transposing the hopes, ambitions and dreams of a 21st century democrat on the voices of those long in the past in an attempt to justify his outlook?

That is call for you to make, whether you will believe Obama’s vision, or dismiss it as a misreading of the past. And some of you, I hope, will have realised that Obama’s attempts to read the foundations of America run up against exactly the sames sorts of problems that Christians face in attempting to read the foundations of Christianity. Interpreting, reading the Bible is difficult, very difficult to do well.

You can read all of Obama’s address at bbc news online.