‘Black Swan’ author blames Obama, and Ontario, for screwing planet

Michael Moore has known for 20 years that he can come to Toronto and get a receptive crowd for ranting about the problem with America, but Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, brought a more acerbic attitude to his turn last night at the Salon Speaker Series at Grano Restaurant. “I want my vote back,” he said disparagingly of debt-addled Barack Obama, even though a black president was presumably just what he was talking about in writing The Black Swan — arguing that there’s always another unexpected social disruption around the corner like, say, a banking system verging on complete collapse: “It’s good to have more than one profession,” he told Margaret Wente of The Globe and Mail before the speech, “in case your own profession goes out of style. A Wall Street trader who’s also a belly dancer will do a lot better than a trader who winds up driving a taxi.” Coverage of the talk from Bloomberg also noted Taleb’s feelings about the BlackBerry: “Ontario messed up the world with this,” he said of the RIM device. “You guys bankrupted Iceland.”