Painting Fakes

  Back in late March and early April we had buckets of rain and the mushrooms appeared as if from nowhere.  For a couple of weeks they dotted our parks, footpaths and yards.  They appeared in long grass, on bare dirt, out in the open, under trees.   They came in different shapes.  Little circular tables appearing in clusters like an open air dinner party.  Dense forests of tiny, fragile flowers sheltering under shrubs.  Little balls like maracas which may have been buds waiting to open.  White stalks with upturned plates on top that look like tiny water towers.   They lasted for a week or two, and then they disappeared again. I've lived most of my life not really thinking about fungi.  Most of the time you don't see them, then they seem to appear out of nowhere.  Where do these marvellous growths come from?  I got interested and decided to find out what thousands, millions of people already know. Turns out that mushrooms are not organisms themselves, they are the fruiting bodie

 I've been reading a couple of books about trees.  It's made me think, are trees just chemical factories, or are they intelligent? The Overstory  by Richard Powers was nominated for the Man Booker Prize in 2018.  It has human characters, because otherwise no-one would read it, but it is quite clearly a novel about trees.  Powers has one of his characters sum up what seems to be his ambition for the book, as Ray and Dorothy Brinkman read their way through The Hundred Greatest  Novels of All Time. The books diverge and radiate, as fluid as finches on isolated islands.  But they share a core so obvious it passes for given.  Every one imagines that fear and anger, violence and desire, rage laced with the surprise capacity to forgive - character  - is all that matters in the end.  It's a child's creed, of course, just one small step up from the belief that the Creator of the Universe would care to dole out sentences like a judge in a federal court.  To be human is to confuse

I just wrote my eighth letter to our dear Prime Minister on the subject of climate change.  I haven't had a sensible reply to the previous seven (one spin letter in response to the first , one brief acknowledgement of my praise of the Government's handling of COVID in the fifth which fails to mention the actual subject of the letter) but that's not the point.  The point is that he and his minions hear, repeatedly, that there are Australians who are not happy with inaction on climate change. For this eighth letter I have widened the audience.  Along with the original to the PM I have sent a version to all Queensland Senators, my local Commonwealth member and the Minister for Emissions Reduction (sic.), and to my State and Local Government representatives.  This is the main content of the letter, without the opening bits which were tailored to each audience. *** As we roll out the COVID 19 vaccines and we can see the containment of the virus approaching, all of us are turnin

Well now.  I am at a loss to understand how it is considered OK in Australia to imprison people for eight years for arriving in the country without the right paperwork, when serious sex offenders can get two and a half years for abusing children.   A few months ago I wrote a letter to the (then) new Immigration Minister, Alex Hawke, asking him to give his attention to freeing the detainees who are being imprisoned in immigration detention in the Mantra Hotel at Kangaroo Point, at the inappropriately named Brisbane Immigration Transit Centre and elsewhere.  Strictly speaking I should have written to the Home Affairs Minister but since that was Peter Dutton I thought I would try Hawke. A couple of weeks ago I got a much-delayed reply from an official of the Home Affairs Department.  It was predictably appalling.  I was angry, and wrote a detailed response.  As fate would have it, we now have a new Home Affairs Minister, Karen Andrews, so I sent it to her asking her to do better than her

In my recent post on Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics I promised you a review of Mariana Mazzucato's Mission Economy .  I got to the top of the library queue for it this week and I know you're all sitting on the edge of your seats waiting for it, so here it is.... Mariana Mazzucato is a serious economist, and an influential one.  She was born in Italy, raised and educated in the US and now lives in the UK.  She teaches at University College in London and sits on a dizzying array of advisory boards for the English, Scottish and Italian governments and the EU.  In her previous writings  she's talked about how the role of government as a creator of value is greatly underestimated, while we place great store on activities like finance which add little or no value to our economies or our lives. Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism  was published just this year.  In reviewing her previous book I wished she would get more specific about what we should do

Recently Kate Raworth posted a triptych on twitter of herself, Stephanie Kelton and Mariana Mazzucato holding up each others' most recent books, with the comment: 'Doughnut  + Mission + MMT = Let's transform economics. Here's to the synergy of ideas.'  This trio form a neat little group of subversive women economists who challenge mainstream thinking - and don't we need that challenge right now! I've yet to read Mazzucato's latest book (coming up soon) but from what I've read so far, all three women push the envelope of economic thinking in an attempt to move it towards a more just and sustainable discipline.  Of the three, Raworth's Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist is the most comprehensive, and the most radical. Raworth is an English economist who has worked for much of her life in the development field.  Her gigs include doing fieldwork in Zanzibar, working on the UN Human Development Program, and worki

So, Donald Trump is gone.  At least, he's not President any more.  True to form, he didn't go quietly, and he keeps hinting he'll be back in 2024.  He could be in jail by then, or at least convicted of one of the many crimes for which he is currently being investigated.  But since he's so far been a Teflon man, I wouldn't like to count on it. Trump has raised untruthfulness to a pitch you would only ever expect to see in a totalitarian regime with a State-controlled media.  His daily storm of tweets, not to mention his speeches and press conferences, involved a steady stream of lies.  These are not a secret because the US has a free press which employs fact checkers.  The Washington Post has been keeping a tally and in October 2020 it passed 30,000 untrue statements for the four years of his presidency, an average of over 50 per day.  In one single day, on 11 August 2020, he made 189 untrue statements.   Some of these are trivial and silly, but some are serious.  H