Painting Fakes

I have so many things stored up to write about, but having to work hard for my living lately means I haven't had time to write about them. So sometime soon there'll be a flood of posts. In the meantime, let me tell you about this weird article I read in last Saturday's Australian. I should preface this by saying I have a dilemma about newspapers. Rupert Murdoch owns most of Australia's newspapers, including the only daily published in Brisbane, the crappily tabloid Courier-Mail, and the nation's only real national paper, the Australian. This means I have a choice - buy a Murdoch paper and be assaulted by right wing propaganda, or a more moderate Fairfax paper full of stories about Sydney or Melbourne. Every Saturday Murdoch wins because I get a Brisbane TV guide. So anyway, last Saturday they reprinted an article from the New Republic (right wing US rag) about the "Cult of the President". Apparently this bloke called Gene Healy has written a book of ...

This is not so much a post as an ad. I'm sitting here at my computer and trying to work while listening to The Leisure Society . Laid back group of beautifully melodic Englishmen. Check them out - lovely! And they didn't even pay me.

I've always been a sucker for a good post-apocalyptic tale. Even a bad one can do it for me at a pinch. As a teenager I loved "Hothouse" by Brian Aldiss, in which a small group of humans travel through a massive tropical forest. It's a fantastic 1960s version of the greenhouse effect in which either the trees have grown, or the people have shrunk, so they're the comparative size of beetles. This week I've been reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", to make up for missing the movie. In between was the book I've loved more than anything I've read in the past couple of years, Jim Crace's "The Pesthouse". Part of the fascination of these books is imagining what the world might become in the future. In "Hothouse" it's just that, a supercharged landscape of exuberant vegetation. In "The Road" it's almost the precise opposite, a nuclear cataclysm (one presumes) leaving everything dead - blackene...

I'm going to break one of my blogging rules and talk about my work. After all, it's my blog and I can do what I want, and besides it's not the first time . When I was a young housing activist in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent a bit of time on the executive of National Shelter. This organisation was, and still is, Australia's peak non-profit housing advocacy organisation, and is basically a federation of State and Territory organisations. At this time, we had a small amount of funding from the Commonwealth Government so we had a couple of underpaid staff and were able to be active on the lobbying front in a low profile kind of way. However, the organisation as a whole was struggling. Very few of our State branches had any money, and most were like the Queensland branch I represented, a few people who would get together in whatever time we could make in our regular jobs. Representatives from the State and Territory branches used to meet once a quarter, over a Fri...

If we needed any more evidence that the relentless campaign by climate change deniers is working, we need look no further than the Australian Government's late April decision to delay introduction of its carbon trading scheme until at least 2013. The Prime Minister provides two reasons - his government can't get the sceme through the Senate, and global responses have been slower in coming than expected. I was a bit cheered up, but not much, when immediately after this the government had a sharp fall in its popularity. Only a bit, because what's happened is our government has gone from aspiring to global leadership to being just another follower. The loss of momentum resulting from the failure of the Copenhagen talks, and the last minute refusal of the Opposition to support a modified scheme, has resulted in the whole thing grinding to a halt. The Government is clearly in a difficult position. It has only 32 seats in in the 76-seat Senate , which means it needs to attract at...

Kutz has posed the question, "what does the bible say about competitive sport?". An important question for us Aussie blokes because we love our sport. In one sense it's an easy question to answer because the bible says nothing (or virtually nothing) about it. Well, not directly. I think the closest the Bible comes to sport is the story of David and Goliath. Goliath wanders about in front of the ranks, challenging the Israelites to send someone out to fight him one on one and decide the whole battle on that one contest. This is representative sport at its most serious, but they obviously don't mean quite what they say, because after David kills Goliath they have a massive battle anyway, which the Israelites win with great slaughter. Still, this is one way to look at sport - as a symbolic battle between competing groups of people. It took on a slightly different form at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where the Nazi regime tried to use the contest to show the supremacy of...

In my newspaper today I read that Belgium has beaten France to become the first European nation to ban the burka and other face-covering garments in public places. The vote was carried 136 to nil, with two abstentions. Amnesty International was quick to condemn the ban as a violation of human rights. The law has also outraged Muslims. Islamic scholar Michael Privot says Belgium "now joins Iran and Saudi Arabia in that exclusive but unenviable rare club of countries to impose a dress code in the public domain". If you think he's right, you should try going shopping in your underwear. But beyond such silliness, there are some real issues at stake here about religious freedom, prejudice and fear of the "other". In general, liberal societies (of which Belgium is one) are based on the premise that citizens are free to make their own choices on matters that concern them, provided these don't interfere unduly with someone else's freedom. You can listen to w...

I've been following (and participating in) a very interesting discussion at Simone's blog about whether people can accept the statement that the earth was created in six days. Personally I find a six day creation hard to accept scientifically and unnecessary theologically. But it made me think about how we can paint ourselves into a corner defending a position that never needed defending in the first place. The US in particular has a huge ongoing controvery about the six day creation, and this has led to the elaboration of "creation science" and its love-child, the Intelligent Design movement. I'm hardly competent to assess the science, but it's always seemed to me that the primary argument of creation scientists is a theological one. Years ago I heard Ken Ham speak, and his basic message was that if you don't believe in the literal truth of Genesis then the whole authority of Scripture collapses and you may as well give up on Christianity. Oddly e...

Here's a distressing further thought on my post on abortion . I mentioned there that to sort this out ethically you would first determine whether an embryo is human, and if it is, in what circumstances it is OK to kill a human being. You will be aware that in the US (and no doubt here as well) doctors who run abortion clinics regularly receive death threats from people saying they are pro-life, and that on rare occasions they are even victims of murder or attempted murder. My first reaction is that the people who make such threats are probably quite disturbed and the threats or acts of violence are a sign of their mental illness. This may well be the case. However, the really disturbing thing is that their behaviour can be easily fitted in to my framework. As pro-lifers, they assess that the embryo and the doctor are equally human. Why not respect the doctor's life, then? Well, the most obvious answer is that the person making the threats is a believer in capital punishme...

While I'm writing about controversial issues, I may as well jump in with both feet (in my mouth, probably) and talk about sexual abuse in the church. The Catholics are in the spotlight at the moment so us protestants can take a breather, but we shouldn't be too compacent. Remember it was only a couple of years ago that the Anglican Church here in Queensland was under scrutiny and our former Archbishop had to resign his plum job as Governor-General after defending an abusive priest on national television with the idea that the underage girl initiated the relationship. However, the story at the time that made me most angry was the one about the school counsellor at a prestigious Anglican school, who over a number of decades had used his position to abuse vulnerable young boys. Finally one of them went to the police, they started to investigate, and the man committed suicide. That was bad enough, but what really made me feel sick was that after his suicide, and knowing full we...

A recent Facebook discussion with some rellies has made me think some more about abortion, so at the risk of alienating half my friends and readers whatever I say, here's what I thought. Thanks to Andrew, Shiloh, Steve and Mike for the inspiration, but I won't blame you for the content. I don't know the answers, I'm just thinking about the questions. There are two basic ethical issues in the abortion debate. The first is this - is an embryo (foetus, whatever) human? Or to put it another way, at what point does an embryo become human? I really don't know the answer to this, but a lot of the answers I hear don't make sense to me. You can go to the far end of the debate, as per official Catholic doctrine, and say that any attempt to prevent pregnancy is immoral, although "for your hardness of heart" you can practice the rhythm method if you must. For them clearly, and for most other "right to life" groups, an embryo is at the very least human ...

Apologies have become a popular way of addressing historical wrongs in Australia and in other places. It's just over two years since the Australian Prime Minister issued his formal apology to the stolen generation , those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were forcibly removed from their families and communities. Since then there's been an apology to people brought up in State institutions. The British government recently apologised to people forced to emigrate to Australia as children and live in awful, exploitative "orphanages" even though most weren't orphans. These apologies don't necessarily change people's situation, but they make them feel vindicated, acknowledging publicly the wrong they knew had been done to them. Apparently apologies aren't so popular in Turkey. A festering sore in that part of the world has been publicised this week, bizarrely, by a resolution of the US Congress Committee on Foreign Affairs , calling on the US...