Painting Fakes

Experiencing serious trauma can change your life, and rarely for the better. People who have experienced trauma are more likely to experience a range of other things - chronic mental illness, addiction, homelessness, marriage breakdown.  Trauma rewires our brains, changes the way we react to situations, makes us prone to 'fight or flight' in situations which are benign for other people. *** You would think that the bigger the trauma, the more serious the effect, but this is not necessarily so.  Case in point: last year I read and reviewed  Jimmy Barnes' two-volume autobiography.  Barnes suffered a horrendous childhood, witnessing domestic violence, experiencing physical and sexual abuse, being abandoned by his mum and left with his siblings to fend for themselves while their dad spent all his time and all the family's money at the pub.   Hardly surprising that Barnes' adult life was a train wreck of addiction, violence, self-destructive behaviour, promiscuit

Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has flooded our consciousness over the past few months.  Snippets of his talks keep popping up on my social media.  His book tour attracted national interest.  People on the right love him, those on the left hate him. None of this is accidental.  He has been carefully curating his public profile for years, posting prolifically on his Youtube channel, speaking publicly and making himself available to media outlets of all kinds.  He has a devoted following and earns a decent income from Patreon via donations from viewers of his long and complex videos.   His reputation is as someone who thinks deeply about the meaning of life and the significance of ancient mythology for the problem of Being.  However, he has been pushed into the mainstream in the guise of a champion of the Right courtesy of his embroiling himself in a rather strange and silly war in his university over the use of pronouns.  In the process he has become a champion of that mos

Another day, another US massacre by a problematic person with a licensed, high-powered firearm.  We have seen so many of them, and the aftermath is so tired and predictable, that they all become a blur. Right now, in the wake of the Florida school shooting, there is a lot of hope. The survivors are young, intelligent upper middle class adults, and they are prepared to use the sudden media attention to push for change.  No politician, even Donald Trump, dare trample on their grief by dismissing them out of hand.  Perhaps they will succeed in making change.  Perhaps they won't. As Australians we tend to feel a bit smug about this.  In 1996, after the Port Arthur massacre, the Howard government introduced tough new gun controls and there have been no mass shootings since.  Our crazy school attacks are carried out with knives, and no-one dies.  Then again, there were not many mass shootings in Australia before 1996 either, once Europeans stopped massacring our first peoples.  Cons

A couple of years ago I wrote a post about Paul Watzlawick et al's Change  and the idea of first and second order change.  The idea has kept on being useful since I remembered it, so recently I got my hands on a copy of the book to read it again.  Along with it I also bought a book by Watzlawick called Ultra-Solutions: How to fail most successfully. This little booklet is an exploration of the kind of solution which "not only does away with the problem, but also with just about everything else, somewhat in the vein of the old medical joke - operation successful, patient dead...".  It is a light-hearted romp through the pitfalls of rigid or inadequate thinking, using as its framework the witches and their mistress Hecate who tempted Macbeth, and who continue to tempt us in our day to adopt strategies just as seductive and self-defeating as that followed by Shakespeare's tragic hero. In each short chapter he deals with a mental pitfall. The search for security and

If you've been reading, you'll know that I'm on the hunt for simple diagrams that can explain the entire world at a glance. Here's another one A couple of years ago I did a piece of research for Shelter NSW on the redevelopment of public housing estates.  If you're a real nerd you can read it here , but unless you're especially interested in the literature on public housing renewal you'll find it very tedious. One of the many reports I read involved the researchers interviewing residents who had lived in the midst of a redevelopment project in Minto, Sydney.  They suggested that a large part of the reason for the disconnect between the plans made by the redevelopment authority and its contractors, and the preferences of the tenants, was that they view the neighbourhood very differently. Redevelopment professionals - architects, planners, project managers and so forth - see the suburb as a grid, as if viewed from the air, and for them all parts of the g

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 apiarist. A World Without Bee

If you were to watch the world news and listen to the pronouncements of our leaders, you would think we were at war with Islam.  Almost every night we see images of fanatical people brandishing flags with Arabic slogans and proclaiming Allahu Akbar (God is Great) alongside images of bombed out building, beheadings and abductions.  We hear stories of Christians and other religious minorities fleeing for their lives to avoid the choice of execution or forced conversion.  Is this an inevitable result of Islamic dominance in society, or is something else going on? I have been convinced for long time that Islam is not the problem.  Not that Islamic extremism isn't a  problem, but that this is an historical anomaly not an inevitable result of Islam. I want to try to explain briefly why I think this. When these persecutions and religious cleansing efforts first became headline news and various commentators and friends started suggesting they were a logical result of the teachings o

I've often thought the world can be described in a single diagram.  After all, how complicated can one planet be? This is not it, but it's a little bit of the way there - a diagram which explains how we need to understand current world events by means of a pyramid.  If I was really clever I'd make it an iceberg with the top item and half the second sticking out of the water but if you want cute and pretty you'll just have to look elsewhere.  (If you click on it, at least you'll see it full size). The idea behind this diagram is that we spend a lot of time focused on surface symptoms of deeper problems.  Because we spend so much of our effort on the symptoms we often fail to see what lies beneath them, so we opt for superficial solutions too.  We focus on cleaning up after natural disasters, playing with monetary and fiscal settings to smooth out fluctuations in our economy, surveillance and policing to prevent terrorist attacks, "stopping the boats&

Not many books in the world are genuine "must reads" but surely Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning is one of them*.  How could it be that I bought this book for two dollars from a throw-out table at my local shopping centre?  How is that none of my teachers, lecturers, pastors or mentors has ever recommended it to me? Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who died in 1997 at the age of 92.  He is famous as the founder and leading light of the psychiatric technique he called "logotherapy", and as a high profile holocaust survivor.  He was interred in Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic in 1942 with his wife and extended family, transferred to Auschwitz in late 1944 and finished the war in a camp affiliated with Dachau.  Man's Search for Meaning is a collection of three brief essays.  The first and longest, Experiences in a Concentration Camp, describes his time in Auschwitz and Dachau as a means of illustrating his psychological ideas an