Painting Fakes

Last year I paid a lightning visit to Adelaide for work.  Normally if I go to Adelaide it's to visit family and the visit consists of lots of cups of coffee with hospitable rels, but this time I was there for such a short time that I didn't tell anyone.  After I had finished work I went for a stroll around inner Adelaide, through the university, along the Torrens River and ended up in the Rundle Mall, drawn as if by a magical force towards a bookshop that was having a closing down sale.  There I laid out two dollars for a copy of Henri Alain-Fournier's The Lost Estate,  which is quite possibly the best two dollars I have spent for a long time. The front page of this edition says: " The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) was published in 1913, the year before Henri Alain-Fournier was killed on the Western Front."  He was just 28 when he died, and this was his only published novel. Its French title is simply drawn from the name of its central character, Augustin Me

Apparently, Australians are in the grip of toilet paper panic.  Supermarkets all around Australia have had their toilet paper aisles cleaned out as shoppers load up whole shopping trollies full of jumbo packs.  Poor pensioners who can only afford to buy a few rolls at a time are getting there too late, or worrying that the aisles won't get re-stocked in time.  And it's not just in Australia.  Our friends over the ditch in New Zealand, and over the sea in the US and UK, are also wiping out toilet paper supplies. We all know it's about COVID-19 and the possibility of widespread self-quarantining, but why toilet paper?  How much toilet paper do you need to get through a 14-day quarantine period?  While some Australians are stocking up, others are laughing at them, or scratching their heads at the stupidity of it all.  I think the main reason they are confused is because they have not yet seen my World Diagram™ on the subject.  Now is your, and the world's, chance to rec

Climate change is a toxic process for our (or God's) planet, and is also a toxic subject in Australian politics which has brought down, at last count, three Prime Ministers.  No aspect of climate change policy is more toxic than the idea of a carbon price. Most economists will tell you that if you want to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases in a capitalist economy, the most efficient tool in our policy toolbox is a price mechanism.  While the details of such mechanisms are complex and varied the concept is simple - companies that emit greenhouse gases (CO2, methane etc) need to pay a price for every tonne they emit.  This price will give them an incentive to reduce their emissions, and provide an advantage for no- or low-emissions technologies to be developed and deployed. As with so many things economists see as obvious, there are many reasons why this is not as easy as it sounds.  Chief among them is the fact that companies which emit greenhouse gases don't want to pa

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

Why would Yahweh, the God of Gods, choose to reveal himself to the Israelites, a tiny oppressed people group on the fringes of Middle Eastern society?  Why not to the Egyptians, the cultural and political leaders of the Bronze Age?  Why not the Babylonians, that magnificent, lordly civilisation at the heart of the fertile Mesopotamian plain?  There were so many options which had a better chance of success. And then, in the midst of the Roman Empire, when he chose to send his greatest Message by the hand of his only son, not only did he bypass the Romans for his previously favoured Jews, but he steered clear of the temple complex in Jerusalem, of the priests and civic leaders, and instead arrived in Galilee among the poor peasants and craftsmen.  How much harder could he make it for himself? Marshall McLuhan famously said 'the medium is the message'.  That is to say, the form and method of delivery shapes and determines the content.  A message delivered in a book will be dif

In her brief stint as the Independent Member for Wentworth, Dr Kerryn Phelps bequeathed the nation a gift, which has become known as the Medevac legislation.  A short explanation of this legislation is that when asylum seekers imprisoned on Manus Island and Nauru are sick in ways that cannot be treated there, the decision to evacuate them to Australia for treatment is made by a panel of doctors, not by Border Force officers with no medical training. Doesn't seem that controversial, does it?  They are not granted Australian residency.  They are not even released from detention.  They are simply moved from detention on a distant island to detention in Australia, close to the medical resources needed to treat their illness.  It's humane in a strictly limited, basically inhumane kind of way.  I think Phelps would have liked to do more, but this is the best she could get through with the help of Labor and her friends on the cross-benches.  Even then the Labor Party mostly voted fo