Painting Fakes

When I was a young man the World Government Conspiracy was quite popular (or should I say unpopular?) in the conservative church circles in which I moved for a while.  The basic idea was that various powerful forces were working in secret to create a single world government, perhaps with the United Nations as its initial vehicle.  This government would appear benign and desirable initially, but once firmly established would show its true Satanic character in fulfillment of various prophecies in the Book of Revelation. There were a number of usual suspects in this conspiracy - Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Club of Rome, Jewish bankers (or Jews in general) and Communists.  Many elements were imported from earlier conspiracy theories.  For instance, the Jewish aspect of the conspiracy was imported directly from Nazi propaganda.   The Protocols of the Elders of Zion -  a clumsy forgery created by the Russian secret service which purported to describe a Je...

There are many different ways to bring on the Apocalypse.  One of them, apparently, is to be so careless as to lose all the honeybees. Bees make honey, which is very tasty, but they also cross-pollinate plants, including many of our food crops.  Apparently about one third of all the crops in the world rely on bees to pollinate them, including most fruits, nuts and seed crops.  If the honeybees were to disappear some of the slack might be taken up by other species including other bees, butterflies, dragonflies and birds.  However, none of these do such a good job, and at such volume, as our cultivated honeybees. Unfortunately, large-scale honeybee loss is not pure speculation, it is an actual, present risk.  I've just been reading a book on the subject by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum called A World Without Bees, first published in 2008 .   Benjamin is an environmental reporter for the UK Guardian  and McCallum is her partner and fellow hobby a...