Painting Fakes

So, in honour of the Gas-Fired Recovery (TM) and the Technology Roadmap (TM) I have included the Minister for Energy and (ensuring there is no) Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor in my latest Dear Scomo letter. My source of hope (and don't we all need hope?) is that the federal Liberal and National Parties are part of a small and decreasing number of people and organisations who still don't get that climate action is essential.  The climate war is over, but our current Commonwealth Government is like one of those Japanese soldiers still holed up in some remote jungle, not having heard the news and still holding their posts for the Emperor.  We need to entice them out and give them the good news so that they can get on with their jobs. *** Dear Prime Minister and Minister I trust you and your families are well and thriving through the COVID crisis. Thanks to your success in keeping COVID-19 at bay so far (and trusting we continue to do a god job on this front!) we are now able to...

 As a kind of bonus on the whole Freud/Jung thing, I also treated my self to a read of  H. Rider Haggard's She , which Jung refers to several times as an exemplar of the archetype of the anima , the female (for men) figure who represents our souls, our unconscious or our inner life in both dreams and myths. She  was Haggard's second novel, following the phenomenal success of  King Solomon's Mines  in 1885.  Before publishing his first blockbuster Haggard was a British civil servant and, in the role of secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal, spent six years in Southern Africa where both novels are set.  Afterwards he retired to his native Norfolk and became a writer of fanciful and massively popular adventure stories, many set in exotic locations which at least in theory were in Africa.   Haggard was an early exponent of what these days we would think of as pulp fiction.  He was a forerunner of such prolific writers as Edgar Rice ...

 Among the backlog of unread books on my shelf was a copy of Sigmund Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.   It consists of a course of 28 lectures delivered by Freud at the University of Vienna in 1915 and 1916, designed to introduce students to the main ideas involved in psychoanalysis.  I gave this book to my father many years ago, I forget why, and eventually it made its way back to me and sat on my shelves until this year, when I finally read it.  Perhaps there is some kind of subconscious significance to the fact that the volume fell apart as I was reading it, so I had to bin it when I got to the end. My first introduction to Freud's ideas was not encouraging.  When I did introductory psychology subjects at the University of Queensland in 1979 and 1980 as part of my social work degree, the psychology faculty there was very much dominated by the idea of psychology as an experimental science, driven by scientific methodology and randomised co...

Continuing my trawl through some of the books that have been waiting to be read for way too long....  Quite some time ago I bought a second-hand copy of Jacques Ellul's Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes,  probably at a Lifeline book sale.  I remember starting to read it, finding it dense to the point of incomprehensibility, and putting it on the shelf for later.  I'm not the only person who felt this - the book's previous owner covered the pages with underlining and illegible marginal comments for about the first third of the book, after which its pages are completely untouched. If this memory is accurate then I must have got smarter in the intervening years. His writing is not nearly as impenetrable as I remember it.  Not that it is exactly an easy read - he's a French intellectual, after all - but I found it clear, highly logical, and completely disconcerting.   Ellul was a prominent Christian intellectual in the second half of the 2...

One of the things I've been doing over the past few months is reading some of the books that have been sitting untouched on my shelves for a long time. A while ago, a friend passed on a copy of a book called Wealth and Poverty: Four Christian Views on Economics,  published by the evangelical publishing house Inter-Varsity Press back in 1984.  It had been sitting on her shelf for a long time, and has been sitting on mine for the past year or two.   Back on the 1980s IVP published a number of 'four views' titles, designed to present readers with some alternative Christian views on contentious subjects.  This one is edited by Robert G. Clouse, with contributions by Gary North, William E Deihl, Art Gish and John Gladwin.  Each contributor contributes a lead essay outlining their viewpoint on the topic - these are around 30 pages each - and then provides a brief response to the other three.  North is touted as representing 'Free Market Capitalism' , Deihl's...

A little after 8.00pm on Monday, 15 June, Noel Henry was riding his bicycle to his home in the Adelaide suburb of Kilburn when he was pulled over by the police.  They told him they suspected him of being in possession of drugs, and ordered him to put his hands on his head so they could search him.  According to the police statement released the next day, he 'originally was compliant and after a short time he began to refuse. Police attempted to arrest the man who resisted and a struggle ensued.'   The noise of this struggle alerted his friends who came out of the house.  Some of them filmed parts of the incident and subsequently posted their films on social media.  They show three police officers holding Henry on the ground, one of them hitting him, and his head being forcibly pushed down onto the concrete footing of the fence they have pinned him against.  All this while his friends yell at the police to 'get off his head' and 'let his head up'...