Amazing really, that the reptiles should at last have become aware of the war that's been going on in Ukraine, no thanks to Vlad the sociopath, but there it was, right at the top of the page as an EXCLUSIVE ...
The pond suspects it was only so that the reptiles could find another stick with which to beat Albo, what with the King Donald stick having gone MIA ... but still for those who might care ...
Ukraine’s top diplomat in Canberra argues Labor has a moral obligation to give Kyiv a share of the ‘many billions of dollars’ in extra revenue as a result of soaring commodity prices.
By Ben Packham
No doubt Ukraine would like to thank News Corp for the many pieces denouncing Vlad the Sociopath that have featured in reptile publications over the years (we keed, we keed).
Also on hand was a moving, inspirational piece by garrulous Gemma, who for reasons that escape the pond has something of a cult following amongst correspondents ...
The death of 80-year-old Suzanne Rees on the solo trip of a lifetime was a tragedy. But it also highlights a generation who have torn up the retirement rule book to make the golden years the bolder years.
By Gemma Tognini
Columnist
Sheesh, talk about an inspiration for hardy old boomers who dare to enter the hive mind on a daily basis.
And there was an obligatory EXCLUSIVE climate science denialist piece by Mattie boy ...
Stop treating cows and cars the same: farmers revolt over climate blame
Eating a steak should not be equated to driving a petrol car in the climate debate, say cattle farmers. They’re pushing a plan to end their global warming ‘whipping boy’ status.
by Matthew Denholm
The only thing the pond noticed while giving that a cursory glance was this bizarre splash labelled "Landing page banner" ...
Well it was a change from this sort of nonsense ...
Over on the extreme far right there was plenty of action ...
Joe "just sign Pentagon Pete's waiver" Kelly, a lesser member of the gang, but these days on the rise, offered ...
Donald Trump needed to strike a bargain with Xi Jinping at their meeting in Busan, and not just to boost his credentials as a wheeler and dealer on the international stage.
By Joe Kelly
Washington correspondent
He was backed up by Will of Glasgow fame, offering ...
The two self-styled strongmen of the US and China appeared to be in a mood to de-escalate the economic and trade tensions that have reached extraordinary levels at times this year.
By Will Glasgow
But this was fabulous reptile Friday, with Halloween hovering in the air, so the pond had no time for any of that.
Killer of the IPA was on the prowl, and there was also Our Henry, so the pond's morning course was set.
It should go without saying that Killer of the IPA loves a bloody good bail out ...
The header: Why Javier Milei’s anti-socialist revolution holds lessons for Australia, Thankfully, Australia is a long way from embracing anything like Peronism but the political class is showing worrying signs.
The kaption for the kavorting llown, a Killer inspiration: Argentina's President Javier Milei celebrates after winning in legislative midterm elections in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Killer began with a stern flourish ...
However damaging it is to nations and people, socialism is addictive and, like all addictions, giving it up is extremely difficult.
Others might have started this way ...
However damaging it is to nations and people, bail outs are addictive and, like all addictions, giving it up is extremely difficult.
Jackie Calmes in the Trump-appeasing, fellow travelling LA Times had had enough in Argentina bailout shows that Trump’s Cabinet has no adults in the room (*archive link):
Ah Jackie, how little you understand, it's totally normal in the world of IPA Killernomics ...
Please, stand back, allow Killer to explain ...
For all the successes of his presidency – dramatic falls in inflation, a balanced budget, falling poverty rates and instilling a sense that this beleaguered nation might return to the prosperity it once knew – the shallow slogans of his big-government Peronist opponents were as alluring as ever. You can be sure very few of the 50,000-odd federal civil servants laid off since the chainsaw-wielding economist-President got to work – more than a fifth of the total – were about to support his libertarian La Libertard Avanza party.
The media, mainstream polls and the financial markets expected his wings to be clipped just as the fruits of his reform agenda were bearing fruit, especially following the poor showing of his party in provincial elections only a few weeks earlier. But voters chose to stay the course, providing as big an endorsement of Milei’s reform agenda as the President’s supporters could’ve hoped for.
The reptiles immediately offered a distraction, celebrating the marvellous Milei ...Newsweek Senior Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer reacts to Javier Milei’s win in Argentina’s midterm elections. “South America is a mess with the seeming exception of Argentina, which is really good news,” Mr Hammer told Sky News Digital Presenter Gabriella Power. “Milei has been able to achieve a lot in a very short period of time.”
Speaking of that election some offered a bit of snark, and the massive bribery and foreign interference that featured...
And so on and on, but Killer couldn't be shaken in his devotion to marvellous Milei...
Since 1950, Argentina has spent more time in recession than any other nation, according to recent analysis by Cato Institute researcher Ian Vasquez. In 2021 Argentina, which in the late 19th century was among the richest nations in the world, ranked 158th out of 165 nations in terms of economic freedom, according to the Fraser Institution’s annual index. Argentina’s constitution is modelled on the US, affording the parliament or congress significant power to disrupt any reforming president. While Milei’s party still doesn’t command a majority in either the Chamber of Deputies or the Senate, its bigger representation makes it much harder for the opposition to throttle the President’s agenda.
“Today we passed the tipping point – the construction of a great Argentina begins … Now we are focused on carrying out the reforms Argentina needs to consolidate growth and the definitive takeoff of the country – to make Argentina great again,” Milei said after his weekend victory, echoing the language of his ally and fellow disrupter, Donald Trump.
Cue a snap, avoiding the temptation to burst into song about crying for Argentina, Argentinian leader Juan Domingo Peron making a speech in Buenos Aires.
Ah, fellow disrupter, King Donald.
How that Killer talk set Jackie off ...
Killer's Killernomics thought all that was perfectly normal and he tossed off the bail out with tremendous sangfroid ...
Whatever their success, Milei has already demonstrated rapid cuts in government spending need not prompt a recession, as most economists in Australia would immediately suggest should even modest pruning be proposed Indeed, for the first time Argentina is providing economic lessons to the world that stagnating Australia should heed.
Provinces must reduce debt, cut government spending and taxes, simplify their labour laws, sanctify the importance of private property and remove impediments to the extraction of raw materials, in which Argentina, like Australia, is extraordinarily well endowed. It’s worrying that Australian governments are doing the opposite across every dimension: locking up resources, increasing taxes and debt, and re-regulating the labour market. Indeed, Victoria is riding roughshod over property rights by forcing wind farms and solar panels down the throats of communities that don’t want them.
Pshaw, don't we just need a bail out or three?
The reptiles interrupted with a snap ...Ken Henry
Killer couldn't resist a little climate science denialist flourish ...
Let’s not swap places in the 21st century. Australia, thankfully is a long way from embracing anything like Peronism but the political class is showing worrying signs. Perhaps it’s no surprise underlying inflation remains stubbornly high at an annualised rate of more than 4 per cent, while Argentina’s has plunged from almost 290 per cent last year to around 32 per cent.
Health statistics show addicts have a dramatically higher chance of recovery after two years’ abstinence. Let’s hope that holds true for nations and socialism too.
Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.
And that was IPA Killernomics done for the day.
All the pond has to do is sit back and wait for the IPA bail outs to flow into its coffers, so that the pond might pose as an economic wonder, a marvel for the ages...
Please celebrate with the infallible Pope, because we're looking good for that bail out ...
The pond almost shrieked with delight.
Our Henry does the y'artz!
And as soon as the pond spotted that shifty-looking dude with beard and head gear, the pond knew that there'd be trouble in Our Henry land, because nothing sets the hole in the bucket man off more than Muslims...
The header: There is a concerning shift happening in Australia’s arts sector, Far from promoting creativity, Creative Australia funds politics disguised as art that has all the mediocrity of socialist realism.
The caption: Museum of Contemporary Art Khaled Sabsabi work entitled You
According to the reptiles, Our Henry ranted for a full five minutes, though whether it was fair to start off with a still taken from a ten minute AV piece did cross the pond's mind ...
The pond read the MCA pitch ...
Sabsabi took the image and sound from a televised rally which took place in Beirut in 2006 marking the end of a 34-day war with Israel that was mainly fought in the south of Lebanon. Thousands attended the rally, held in Beirut’s heavily bombed Shiite Muslim south, to hear Nasrallah claim victory on behalf of Hezbollah. The Australian Government listed the entirety of Hezbollah as a proscribed terrorist organisation in 2021.
With YOU, Sabsabi looks to draw attention to the brutality of war and of the media-controlled image in the service of ideology-driven propaganda. The title of the work is significant in that it addresses each of us, as individuals, invited to make choices when confronted with media’s ability to vilify or deify.
Khaled Sabsabi is an Australian artist of Lebanese descent, who fled the civil war in Lebanon for the suburbs of south-western Sydney in 1976. His works address the experience of migration and the relocation of culture in the context of the Lebanese diaspora. In their reflections on the many expressions of Islamic and the Arab culture that are woven through his works, Sabsabi looks to highlight the common humanity existing within cultural diversity.
The hole in bucket man wasn't going to swallow any of that guff ...
Why it was almost Wilcoxian ...
Go get 'em, and don't spare the bigotry or the hysteria...
It is, as the saying goes, art imitating farce. Having forgotten everything, Creative Australia seems to have learned nothing. It has doubled down on its generosity to Khaled Sabsabi while wrapping its grants process in secrecy so dense it suggests paranoia. The more questions are raised – of favouritism, insiderism, quiet patronage – the tighter the curtains are drawn.
John Maynard Keynes would have been aghast. The great economist, who designed and chaired Britain’s Arts Council – the model for all that followed in the Commonwealth – saw state support for culture as a civic duty, not a political indulgence.
In a May 1945 broadcast, he hailed it as proof that “at last the public exchequer has recognised the support and encouragement of the civilising arts of life as part of their duty”.
Please, a reminder of Our Henry's mortal enemy, Visual artist Khaled Sabsabi in Granville. Picture: Anna Kucera / Creative Australia
That sent the hole in the bucket man into a laissez-faire rage ...
Underlying those aspirations were assumptions now almost forgotten. As Lord Annan later observed, Keynes and his contemporaries believed “that reason could order society and that art could refine the emotions”. They also shared a clear sense of aesthetic value, grounded in competence of execution, merit of content, intellectual coherence, seriousness of purpose, artistic integrity and originality – all combining to achieve emotional resonance. And they could not imagine those criteria would ever be overthrown.
“They were wrong, if gloriously so,” Annan concluded, for it is “the irony of liberal civilisation that it breeds minds that question the very civilisation which makes them possible”.
The first casualty of that irony was the belief that there even is such a thing as a work of art. As art historian Thierry de Duve observes, the hallmark of the contemporary oeuvre is that it risks not being recognised as art at all.
There had, of course, been precursors, most famously Marcel Duchamp’s porcelain urinal, Fountain (1917), but the decisive rupture came in the 1950s. In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg obtained a drawing by Willem de Kooning, painstakingly erased it, then exhibited the blank sheet, neatly framed and labelled Erased de Kooning Drawing, Robert Rauschenberg. Five years later, Yves Klein pushed the logic further by “exhibiting” an entirely empty gallery, The Void (1958).
Damn it, that's not art, my five year old could do that sort of art, at least if there was a five year old in the house, and as for Gough and that bloody insulting piece of p*ss-splattered paint (watch out for the fireplace Peggy), James Mollison and Robert Hughes with Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles.
Dammit, those reptiles were determined to send Our Henry back to the Victorian era, where a man knew art was art, and a cigar was a fine bloody cigar ...
Soon after, the Viennese Actionists turned provocation into spectacle, producing ritualised performances of bloodletting, mutilation, animal sacrifice and physical ordeal in which audiences became complicit participants.
The result was the disappearance of any distinction between good work and bad, while much of what passed for contemporary art became incomprehensible to the public. As the art world slid into a kind of gnostic cult, a new class of curators emerged as all-powerful arbiters of taste, issuing ever longer and more tortuous labels to explain the inexplicable to puzzled spectators and to exceptionally wealthy, if at times woefully semi-educated and uninformed, collectors, most recently from the Gulf.
At the same time, the hollowing out of aesthetic criteria – combined with the restless pursuit of novelty – cleared the terrain for the protest movements of the 1960s to seize the artistic stage. “Artivism”, defined by its champions, Benjamin Barson and Gizelxanath Rodriguez, as art “rooted in the struggle against patriarchal capitalism”, did not merely march through the institutions; it elevated the assault on excellence to new heights.
“Protests by blacks, students and women,” claimed feminist art historian Whitney Chadwick, had decisively exposed “the fiction of an art world isolated from broader social and political issues by ‘objectivity’, ‘standards’, and ‘aesthetics’ ”. With “quality” mocked as the last refuge of “the conservative wing of the art-for-art’s-sake crowd”, what mattered was no longer what a work was but what it did: first and foremost, “for the cause”.
The reptiles finally remembered who had set Our Henry on this path ... John Maynard Keynes
On the Hole in Bucket man ranted, with a singular failure to point out that none of this had anything to do with the glorious days of ancient Roman art, when emperors decided who'd get work ...
Those ideas proved to be the intellectual equivalent of crack cocaine, spreading through the arts world with epidemic speed and ruinous effect. By eliminating any criteria of merit, they stripped funding institutions of their moorings, allowing what Keynes had derided as “welfare” to triumph over aesthetic value.
And what of those glorious days when princes and Popes ruled?
As Uncle Ben so succinctly put it to a young Peter Parker (AKA Spiderman), with great power comes great responsibility. Perhaps because no renaissance rulers enjoyed the superhuman talents awarded to Spiderman, they had to use other means to communicate their suitability for the job. The objects and buildings a prince and his family patronized were reflections of their taste and learning, their dignity and their magnificence. Visual art helped a prince self-fashion as an ideal and rightful ruler...
...Art commissioned by the ruler and his family displayed in public spaces and within the princely household served to legitimize and stabilize the sovereign’s power. Works of visual art were also often given as gifts to courtiers and to rulers of foreign territories (recall that “foreign” often meant another Italian state) as strategic acts of diplomacy. In short, everything patronized by the prince and his family was a reflection of his authority.
(It's only an art history site for students, but the pond does wish Our Henry had thought for a nanosecond about other funding mechanisms, whether it involved railway robber barons, profiteers from the first world war, or filthy rich folk with as bad a taste and as appalling a sensibility as Our Henry).
Perhaps Our Henry missed out on a grant early in his career, and that's why he became a failed economist...
Worse still, the erosion of merit encouraged a form of institutionalised corruption, with panels dominated by the artistic-curatorial complex allocating taxpayers’ money on what too often appears to be a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” basis. The lack of transparency, the dismantling of safeguards such as limits on successive grants, and sheer managerial incompetence did the rest, entrenching defects worthy of scrutiny by the National Anti-Corruption Commission.
Little wonder then that so many grants and awards – which conveniently boost the market value of recipients’ work – have gone to “creatives” who lack nearly every quality that once defined a serious artist: originality, complexity, universality, ambiguity, depth and insight into human nature. And little wonder, too, that publicly supported “art” so rarely rises above affirmative, prolix kitsch.
There's really nothing to say when Our Henry is in full rant mode, and the next snap seemed designed to set him off yet again ...Dmitri Shostakovich
How he raged ...
There are, no doubt, some who prefer Dmitry Kabalevsky’s Song of the Party Membership Card to Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No.8 in C minor. And there are, by the same token, those who think Khaled Sabsabi deserves taxpayers’ Croesian largesse.
Indeed, indeed, how wise of our Henry to remind us that what the y'artz really needs is funding by princes, Popes and potentates ...
Or if you happen to be Shostakovich, down on your luck and persecuted by the sociopathic Stalin, inspiration for Vlad the socipath, by writing music for films approved, funded and controlled by the state... pre, and then mercifully post Stalin...
...Composing for the stage and the screen was a lucrative undertaking. The New Babylon netted Shostakovich the tidy sum of 2,000 rubles. Directed by Sergey Yutkevich and Fridrikh Ermler, “The Counterplan” was a 1932 Soviet drama film with a rather primitive propaganda message. It centers on a Leningrad factory constructing a powerful turbine under the enthusiastic leadership of committed Party Secretary Vasya. He is secretly in love with Katya, his friend Pavel’s wife, but will be disappointed. Construction of the turbine is interrupted by the careless work of the old drunk Babchenko and errors in the drawings, which the bourgeois wrecker Skvortsov had spotted but deliberately ignored. Nevertheless, the factory successfully delivers the turbine and Babchenko learns to forego vodka and use modern methods, and wants to join the Party. The delighted boss raises a toast. Supporting this romantic tale of the heroic efforts of young workers, Shostakovich composed one of his brightest and most popular scores.
So it goes, so it went, and that way we'll be certain to be given genuine art ... something to move the soul and the spirit ...
Damn you Muslim artiste, how dare you infringe in Our Henry's dedication to Zionism, and perhaps a devotion to a little ethnic cleansing while we're at it ...
But that is what happens when a culture loses its bearings. Theodore Adorno is said to have observed, in lamenting the collapse of aesthetic standards, that “in the twilight of a civilisation even dwarfs cast long shadows”. It is, alas, in those shadows that Creative Australia now proudly takes its place.
Indeed, indeed, none of those bloody Islamics please, and if we have to have arts funding, perhaps we could discover a J. Paul Getty to provide alternative funding, so at least we could all make jokes about the need to have a pay phone installed in the home...
And having finished with the embittered bigot, time for an immortal Rowe ...
As Our Henry took the name of Shostakovich in vain, perhaps also a musical tribute featuring one of the pond's favourite pieces...
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