Painting Fakes

I was too busy to get my head into writing a Christmas post this year, but this is almost it.  After all, there are 12 days in Christmas, right? This Christmas I've been thinking about something that's not strictly a Christmas story - Jesus' inauguration message in the Nazareth synagogue, as told in Luke 4. He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me,     because he has anointed me     to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners     and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free,     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were faste...

 In his book Collapse,  Jared Diamond uses mining as a metaphor to explain Australia's environmental predicament. Mining in a literal sense - i.e. the mining of coal, iron and so on - is a key to Australia's economy today, providing the largest share of its export earnings.  In a metaphorical sense, however, mining is also a key to Australia's environmental history and to its current predicament.  That's because the essence of mining is to exploit resources that do not renew themselves with time and hence to deplete those resources.... Australia has been and still is 'mining' its renewable resources as if they were mined minerals.  That is, they are being exploited at rates faster than their renewal rates, with the result that they are declining.  At present rates, Australia's forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and iron reserves, which is ironic in view of the fact that the former are renewable and the latter aren't. I thought of t...