Devotees of Air Crash Investigations, aka Mayday - the pond is one - will recall the strange case of Gameel Al-Batouti who flew EgyptAir Flight 990 into the ground while chanting "Tawkalt ala Allah" eleven times.
It wasn't a conspiracy, and his motivations are still disputed, but the odds are strong he wasn't a jihadist.
On the other hand, there's the matter of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, where it became clear over time that Russian-backed forces were responsible for the war crime, though Vlad the Sociopath's minions have never faced justice.
The pond generally tries to avoid rushes to judgements, common gossip and conspiracy theories that immediately erupt after an event.
The mad mullahs of Iran have enough on their plate with the murders of thousands of dissidents, and knee-jerk reactions that they're behind everything needs time and evidence before being shouted, Benji-style, from the rooftops.
This morning he'd retreated to talking about the pilot in the latest disaster as being "suicidal", infused with religious fanaticism, but his motivation is crudely obvious - he's got an election to win.
Naturally the Australian Daily Zionist News was all in ...
Luckily the intermittent archive is now working again so the pond could send that offering off to the cornfield: Radicalised Flydubai co-pilot ‘had discussed killing Jews,’ likely recruited in advance
Why everyone keeps quoting Benji, when his motivations are obvious, remains a mystery.
Besides, there's enough dismal news to hand with yet another example of the enormous cruelty and fatuous logic behind lethal injections as a punishment, as well as the odd bit of joy, as in the speculation - fuelled by gambling - that Mark Carney might score the Nobel Peace Prize and Time Person of the Year.
The pond would love it to happen, simply to make the mad King even madder, but won't be putting any money on it, just as the pond is a glutton for stories about the imminent fall of Vlad the sociopath, though he's been taking a very long time fall.
In the interim, there are simple pleasures like the folly of Eric Schmitt, whose name resonates with excremental behaviour.
The one thing that the pond can rely on each Friday is that Our Homeric Henry will turn up with yet another diatribe, littered with pompous, portentous references, and thereby provide a form of cosmic relief.
And so it came to pass this day ...and what a great day, because it's not the usual rampant Zionism, for which the pond had laid the groundwork yesterday, but rather "identity politics", confused and conflated with AI ...
The header: By Henry Ergas
French author’s AI scandal reveals how identity politics is degrading literature
The invitation to listen to a bot imitate Our Henry, shades of irony: Listen to this article
8 min
The caption for the plain Jane illustration: Copies of the book C'etait ca ou mourir (It Was That or Die), written by Canadian-Haitian novelist Thelyson Orelien, at a literature festival in France. Picture: Joel Saget/AFP
The plea for relevance in a world where paywalls breed irrelevance: Make us preferred on Google
Our Henry went right off, in a most satisfying way ...
Last week, France’s rentrée littéraire – the late-summer publishing season that marks the end of the summer holidays – veered from triumph to scandal. Thélyson Orélien’s C’était ça ou mourir (“It was This or Death”) had taken bookshops by storm and, after winning the FNAC readers’ and booksellers’ prize, appeared on the longlists for just about every major literary award – including the Goncourt, the most prestigious of them all.
Orélien, a Haitian-born writer now living in Quebec, tells the story of a history teacher from Port-au-Prince who is forced out of Haiti when his neighbourhood burns, taking only a diploma, a notebook of poems and a photo of his mother. After a harrowing escape he travels, always at great risk, through the Dominican Republic, Brazil and Mexico toward family in Canada, before facing the blatantly racist hostility of US immigration officials as he approaches the Canadian border.
The caption for the alleged thought criminal: Canadian-Haitian novelist Thelyson Orelien Picture: Joel Saget/AFP
An autobiographical saga of dispossession, forced migration and the desperate search for asylum, the book received gushing reviews. Then, on September 21, just three days after Le Monde, the progressive literati’s bible, hailed its brilliance, an anonymous account on X claimed the novel had been largely written by artificial intelligence.
That conservative outlets seized on the post immediately sparked accusations of racism, with Orélien denouncing a racially motivated conspiracy. But as mounting evidence confirmed the post’s claim, and revelations emerged of plagiarism in Orélien’s earlier work, the book was dropped from the Goncourt longlist.
None of that dimmed the ardour of his supporters: sales have risen and bookshops have turned promotional events into rousing displays of solidarity. Nor have any of the other major literary prizes followed the Goncourt’s lead.
Startling as that is, it is a sign of the times. The literary world no longer honours authors; it consecrates saints. What is rewarded is not the writing but the political virtue of the writer – a writer who, when exposed as a fraud, is promoted to martyr rather than demoted to sinner.
Actually it's not just literature. See the aforementioned Schmitt and his devotees ...
For MAGA politicians, there’s no such thing as a gaffe. (*intermittent archive link)
By Helen Lewis
...Some MAGA influencers fully embraced the idea that Schmitt had, in fact, completed le epic pwn of Smith. On The Charlie Kirk Show—still named for its late creator—one of the hosts played the clip of Schmitt’s question after telling the senator he had to “give you some flowers” for his acuity. The whole segment appeared to have been beamed in from a parallel reality where the exchange with Smith had gone well for the senator. “It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game going on at that time in Atlanta,” Schmitt said. “He claimed later that he was at another game. I don’t know. Now, here’s the thing—my job is to ask the questions.” This explanation opens up the possibility that the reason Schmitt and his team didn’t think Smith could be referring to the Hawkeyes was because they had forgotten the existence of women’s basketball. Not a great look for a party that has made a crusade lately of protecting women’s sports.
Other stars in the MAGA universe, however, seemed to realize that Schmitt’s failed gotcha would not delight their faithful, even if they could not say so out loud. The former journalist Benny Johnson, who has 4 million followers on X, posted that Schmitt had “pulled out the receipts” and left Smith “stunned.” Later, he deleted that post, without explanation. On Fox News, Sean Hannity’s recap of the hearing left out Schmitt’s screw-up but included a megamix of Republicans shouting at Smith, including John Kennedy of Louisiana telling the former special counsel that “you make me want to throw up in my mouth.”
Enough with the comedy, the pond has never been big on literary prizes. They're a useful way to flog a book, but have as much meaning as the honorific, "New York Times best seller".
Time is the only way to sort out books of lasting relevance - imagine Our Henry going off at Charles Dickens for being "woke" and full of identity politics as he scribbled about the miseries of Victorian life, yet in the pond's mind - having recently had another go at Vanity Fair - he's lasted better than Thackeray (on the other hand Thackeray's portrait of vanity has more than a hint of 'wokeness' and 'identity politics' about it).
Do such prizes need Homeric Henry wandering around with a blunderbuss, especially as he uses that prime doofus and epically stupid man Bret Stephens as a source? Not really ...
Literary prizes give that judgment its public seal: they hand out the halos to those whose identities are taken as credentials of merit. And in few countries is that clearer than in Australia.
We are, for sure, not alone. Bret Stephens recently noted that in the United States, nine of this year’s 10 National Book Award winners came from “minorities”. But the trend here is exceptionally stark.
From 2000 to 2008, 11 per cent of the writers shortlisted for our literary prizes were Indigenous or “culturally diverse”. Since 2018, that share has soared to 46 per cent. Over the same periods, “women of colour”, as Americans call them, rose from 5 per cent of those shortlisted to 31 per cent. Nor does the leg-up end with places on the shortlist: Indigenous authors, for example, now win at about twice their share of shortlisted books.
As authors’ identities have gained prominence in prize selection, so have identity-based themes among the winning books. In the 1990s, “identitarian” books accounted for no more than 10 per cent of prize winners. From 2000 to 2014, their share climbed into the 10-20 per cent range. Then the identity-themed share rose towards 30 per cent before surging to nearly 50 per cent.
That is not simply because authors who define themselves by their identity tend to write identity-based novels. Who judges them matters too: a five-member panel with two Indigenous or “culturally diverse” judges is statistically likely to shortlist twice as many novels with identity-based themes as a panel with none.
With those groups’ share of judges trebling, from 12 per cent in 2009-17 to 36 per cent over the following eight years, identity-themed works claimed a growing share of shortlist places – and a still greater share of winners.
But the effect doesn’t end with the verdict, because past winners have a strong chance of becoming future judges. The process therefore feeds on itself: the favoured groups win prizes, gain places on judging panels and select new winners in their image. Already represented on panels far above their share of the population or of Australia’s published fiction writers, they are likely to supply an increasing proportion of tomorrow’s winners, judges and then winners – expanding and entrenching identity literature’s dominance.
Far from stemming those trends, the government fuels them. The entity laughingly referred to as Creative Australia boasts that 13 per cent of its individual grant recipients are Indigenous, up from 7 per cent in 2015-19, as against a population share of just 3 per cent. “Minority applicants”, it reports, have a higher success rate on applications than those outside the favoured group – evidence it interprets as proof of success, rather than as a surefire way of discouraging outstanding applicants who do not fit its ideological straitjacket.
None of this troubles the pond, though it surely troubles bigots and rancid racists.
Those who want to stick with the own kind and celebrate exterminations and apartheid always have Quad-rants, and the lizard Oz as home for their literary endeavours ...Arts Minister Tony Burke at the launch of Creative Australia in 2023. Picture: Creative Australia
Clearly the hole in bucket man got out of the wrong side of the bed and wanted something to rant about, and so inevitably ended up dragging in the Soviets...
Nor is the outcome politically neutral. Eight recent award winners received Creative Australia funding. Most are on the keffiyeh-clad hard left; all believe writing is a political task; none has enduring aesthetic merit.
That is hardly surprising. The books today’s panels select are almost invariably mediocre. They are not so hopeless as to entirely miss the mark; but they lack anything that makes a book truly unique – each is interchangeable with the next. The emotions we are intended to feel do not arise from a challenging encounter with the text. They are stuck on, announced as part of the package and supplied by a plot that demands no real work from the reader.
Many, moreover, are indifferently written inversions of Soviet-era Socialist Realism. In Socialist Realism, Andrei Sinyavsky observed in the 1965 book that brought him a seven-year sentence to the Gulag, “each work is assured of a happy ending”, for “even when it produces a tragedy, it is an Optimistic Tragedy, in which the hero may die but Communism triumphs”.
Actually Soviet Art has its recherché charms ... Seven decades of Soviet propaganda – in pictures
So sweet and aspirational.
Even the great Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich couldn't occasionally avoid reverting to the banalities that Stalinism required - think the 5th Symphony - but it's still a fun and rousing listen.
But when Our Henry gets on a drum roll, stand clear ...
Our authors don’t promise Communism’s happy endings. But their taxpayer-funded writing is no less formulaic, featuring protagonists who, like Orélien’s history teacher, compete in the victimhood Olympics, relentlessly battling “whiteness”, racism and, more recently, the evil of evils, Zionism.
This is, in short, a state-sponsored system that produces clones, not masterpieces. Two continental literary prizes that have resolutely bucked the “diversity” trend show what could have been: the Prix Goncourt and Italy’s Premio Strega. Since 2000, the Goncourt has rewarded at least eight genuinely outstanding books; the Strega, at least five. Apart from Tim Winton, whose most feted work predates 2000, and Christos Tsiolkas, it is hard to think of an Australian winner whose award-winning book will stand the test of time.
If the pond might be so bold, Tim Winton leaves it cold, but that's the joy of personal taste ...Australian author Tim Winton at Ningaloo, WA.
Xians of the Simon Smart kind are welcome to him ... The Sacred Fragility of Life: Tim Winton, Faith and Fundamentalism
In an age so dominated by a hard materialism Winton stands out as someone who believes the material aspects of life are bound up in the spiritual. Which means questions of justice have an eternal ring to them. He takes on the persona of the raging prophet in his Palm Sunday Speech ("Stones for Bread") that picks up on Jesus's Sermon on the Mount to castigate modern Australia for its treatment of asylum seekers. "Something is festering in the heart of our community, something shameful and rotten," he warns. "But to live as hostages to our lowest fears we must surrender things that are sacred: our human decency, our morality, our self-respect, our inner peace." Winton continues to have faith in our better instincts and it is to these that he appeals.
Is Our Henry remotely interested in that epic tale turned by Phil Noyce into Rabbit Proof Fence?
Probably not, that would be a step too far for the old bigot ...
But the damage does not end with the prizes. In the increasingly intense competition for attention, the likelihood of winning inevitably influences what is published. Life will therefore become ever harder for authors who buck the party line; far better to “sing in chorus”, as they used to say in the USSR.
The results are predictable. Identity fraud and political conformism will flourish as failing to tick the right boxes becomes a red flag. So will identity literature’s answer to chick-lit: post-colonial tales of suffering, struggle and survival “authored” by AI.
Perhaps that is the upside: at least the machines will be intelligent. And since we are determined to become an economic backwater, why not be an intellectual wasteland too?
No Zionism, no Thucydides? Ah well, as Ned is alleged to have said, and as Joseph Furphy once wrote, such is life.
There's enough of an intellectual wasteland at the lizard Oz to satisfy the pond for several lifetimes.
Have an immortal Rowe for a break...
And so to the difficult matter of picking a bonus.
The reptiles' spoofing of the intermittent archive seem to have gone awry, so it's possible to do a survey of what's troubling the hive mind ...
Commentary
By Michael Easson
The war on China is best left to the bromancer ... and the bulk of the meretricious Merritt is best off in an archival cornfield:
Legal Affairs
By Chris Merritt
Sure there's a requisite amount of Zionist flourishes.
Sure there are ironies to relish in the meretricious Merrit rabbiting on about "civics education" in a paper dedicated to division and hate and fear-mongering, but is that enough to justify going through the usual hysteria about furriners? Not to mention blather about "Australian values".
Consider this. The corporation for which Merritt works absolutely avoids paying tax, as good citizens should do.
The keen Keane scribbled News Corp celebrates more than a decade of paying zero tax in Australia for Crikey, which might involve a paywall:
Despite its pretensions to lecture Australia about its values and how it should be run, the Murdoch family’s News Corp really has nothing to do with Australia. It is a foreign company, and it serially pays no tax here, despite earning billions in revenue on our shores.
In 2024-25, according to the Australian Tax Office’s corporate tax data released today, News Australia Holdings — the official name of News Corp’s Australian subsidiary — racked up 10 years of paying precisely zero tax. For that year, it earned $1.89 billion in revenue, made more than $300 million in profit (a record for the past decade) and paid nothing in tax.
Indeed, there’s a peculiar steadiness to News Corp’s tax dodging. For the past four years, it has earned around $1.8 billion in revenue and paid no tax on around $300 million in profits in 2023-24 and 2024-25, and $200 million in profits in 2021-22 and 2022-23.
You can go all the way back to when the first corporate tax transparency data was released for 2014-15 — the result of a Rudd-Gillard government initiative (opposed by the Coalition) — and find News Corp’s main company has paid no tax across those years, on revenue of, in total, $23.9 billion and profits of $1.38 billion.
The only News Corp entities to pay tax in that time were an investment company, which paid $200,000 (sic) in 2017-18 on $291 million in profits, and a pay TV financing arm, which paid $8 million in 2015-16. Real estate listing oligopolist REA Group, which News Corp part-owns, paid $246 million in tax.
Otherwise, News Corp’s only contributions to Australia are social division and the fostering of hate and resentment.
In contrast, Nine Entertainment paid $76.7 million tax on $290 million in profits; ailing Stokes family company Seven West Media — since folded into ailing Southern Cross Media — managed $3 million on $11 million profits, based on $1.3 billion in revenue. Southern Cross paid $4 million on $14 million. Ten Network, as usual, made nothing and paid nothing.
The 2024-25 data — which, as the ATO is always eager to note, contains details of corporations that pay no tax for perfectly good and legal reasons — show that fossil fuel and energy companies dominate the ranks of those paying zero tax.
And remember that Faux Noise is behind one of the most incompetent and deeply corrupt regimes in the history of the United States...
The pond did think about giving AI another run ...
By Adam Slonim
But now that the intermittent archive is back, why bother?
The pond should note it was deeply touched at the presence of a new Oz bot ...
... but that's as far as the pond's enthusiasm went, because the day the pond asks the reptiles about anything is the day their MAGA hero becomes a decent president, somewhere past the twelfth of never, a very long time ...
Instead the pond settled on the luddite lizard Oz editorialist's yearning for more coal...
To hell with the planet and to hell with taxes.
Heap on more coal, me hearties... and have a hearty infallible Pope to help with the heaping ...
Desperate, the pond realised that there's always reheated Mein Gott to hand ...
Ways to fix the plight of suffering workers?
Ways to avoid paying company tax?
Perhaps blather endlessly about red tape?
Gott it ...
Ask the lizard Oz about ways to avoid paying tax while purporting to good citizenry and with a solution to everything?
Gott it ...
The madness never seems to end ...
I was waiting for Henry to out himself as a percentage population vs percentage damage and ignore and out group equality...
ReplyDelete"The entity laughingly referred to as Creative Australia boasts that 13 per cent of its individual grant recipients are Indigenous, up from 7 per cent in 2015-19, as against a population share of just 3 per cent. “Minority applicants”, it reports, have a higher success rate on applications than those outside the favoured group – evidence it interprets as proof of success, rather than as a surefire way of discouraging outstanding applicants who do not fit its ideological straitjacket."
Total bigot Henry.
Why doesn't Henry argue population vs wealth "have a higher success rate on applications than those outside the favoured group", indicating Henry's one eye and vile disingenuousness...
1. "Not straightforward or candid; insincere or calculating:"
Aka, Henry of NewsMort.