Painting Fakes

I've just finished reading Simon Reid-Henry's Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West Since the Cold War, 1971-2017.   Because I could.  It's quite a tome and I read each of its three parts separately with a bit of time in between reading something a bit lighter. Reid-Henry teaches history, political economy and international law at the University of London as well as being Senior Researcher at the Oslo Peace Research Institute.  I'm super-impressed by people who can write books like this.  You would have to read and catalogue an almost unimaginable number of sources - the end-notes alone cover 87 pages - and then somehow make sense of all those little pieces of data to try and tell a coherent story.  I'm convinced that history writing is a kind of conjuring trick, but without historians we would have to do all that fact-checking ourselves, or just rely on our memories.  All the events he covers in this book took place in my lifetime, but there's plenty

Last year I wrote three letters to the Prime Minister urging him and his government to get serious about climate change (you can read them here , here , and here ).  Then we had some bushfires.  Unprecedented, nation-defining fires in all six States and the ACT.   Surely after this we couldn't keep going with business as usual?  Well apparently, to all intents and purposes we still might.  So I wrote another letter.  I've been agonising over this one for more than a month.  How do you say to the leader of your country, a very publicly practicing Christian, in the politest terms possible that it is time to repent?  Anyhow, this week I finally finished it and popped it in the mail. Bearing in mind that there is a heated internal debate in the Coalition on this subject, and also that Scomo's office is stacked to the rafters with coal industry stooges, I also sent copies to all the Queensland LNP Senators, as well as to my local (Labor) member to whom I have sent a