2024 Year In Review
2024 sure was a year. It had all the days and everything. World events that happened at the beginning felt like a lifetime ago. Fortunately we remembered them all so you wouldn’t have to.
On the war front Israel and Russia grinded their way slowly forward and here at home our maritime excursions ended with surprise autopilot groundings. Our Navy ship sinking In Samoa would end up being one of the two major international headlines. The other would be the Hikoi marching down the country culminating with our youngest MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke tearing David Seymour’s bill in half and performing a haka with the rest of Te Pāti Māori.
Of course since it was an election year in the States most of us news watchers pretended we were American for the majority of the year so we could be properly emotionally invested in the outcome. In 2020 one of my friends bet that Trump would swing into a second term easily. The only thing that came close to making sure he didn’t win the $100 our other friend laid down were a couple stray bullets.
When I was a kid I didn’t realise “may you live in interesting times” was a curse. It seemed awfully pessimistic. But when life gives you interesting lemons you make interesting lemonade. Here’s everything interesting that went down last year that we could fit on the pages I was allocated.
Jan 16 – Golriz resigns from parliament
The Green Party puts a bow on one episode after Golriz Ghahraman who had been caught shoplifting from clothing stores resigns from parliament. She sights stress and mental health issues for her behaviour.
“With that in mind, I don’t want to hide behind my mental health problems,” she says in her resignation speech. “and I take full responsibility for my actions which I deeply regret. I have let down a lot of people and I am very sorry.”
9 February – Tucker Carlson Kills Democracy With Putin Interview
Ex-News anchor Tucker Carlson continues his run of bagging interesting interviews as he sits down in the Kremlin to talk to Putin who proceeds to give him a Russian history lesson. This is the first western interview with Putin since the invasion of Ukraine started. There is no point in the exchange that isn’t considered controversial. Even a fluff piece where Carlson marvels at Russian escalators, supermarkets, and subways is considered the most heretical propaganda. Although everyone does begrudgingly admit that the subway does look pretty good.
… Has Tucker ever seen an escalator before? America does have those, right?
23 February – First commercial moon landing
The land of the long white capitalist, the USA, becomes the first country to do a private commercial touchdown on the Moon, near its south pole. Houston-based lunar services firm Intuitive Machines is in charge of getting a NASA payload onto the moon in preparation for a properly crewed human return one. It is a wee bit of a rough landing though, so not all objectives are met. A Second flight with a drill and mass spectrometer is scheduled for 2025.
2 March – Haiti belongs to the streets
Gang violence in Haiti comes to a head while Prime Minister Ariel Henry is out of country begging for support from the United Nations-backed international police force to come help deal with the problem for him. While he’s doing this the gangs rush two of the countries largest prisons and releases 4,000 inmates. From there the country goes into a state of emergency as the gangs take control of the airport. Henry suddenly finds that getting back into his own country is a lot harder than leaving it. The intrigue in this story is massive and could take up the rest of this piece, but in short there are fears that Henry has been attempting a power grab, and there are also links between him and a suspect in the killing of President Jovenel Moïse. Either way gang violence still reigns supreme in the country as Henry lives in exile in Puerto Rico.
24 March – Chlöe Swarbrick Becomes Greens Co-Leader
Chlöe Swarbrick’s time in politics has been positively meteoric. It was only 2016 when she ran for Mayor of Auckland, and instead overshot to now become the co-leader of the dysfunctional ship the Green Party. It’s this writer’s opinion she could blow that lemonade stand and be Labour leader one day if she wanted. For now she’s in the deep end dealing with the beehive’s equivalent of a herd of cats.
31 May – Maori party declares intentions to start it’s own government
@newshubnz Following a nationwide hīkoi on Budget Day, Te Pāti Māori issued a Declaration of Political Independence, Te Ngākau o Te Iwi Māori, beginning the process to establish its own Māori Parliament. #fyp #foryoupage #tepatimaori #rawiriwaititi #nzpol #nz #newshub
National’s new budget goes down like a lead balloon with people around the country, spurring a protest that culminates outside the Beehive.
“We now begin the process of establishing our own Parliament,” said Rawiri Waititi outside the Beehive. “Our people will design what this looks like for us, nobody else.”
On Monday they show up for work, business as usual.
3 June – Trump pronounced guilty in Stormy Daniels case
When Trump isn’t wooing the public he spends most of the beginning of the year sitting inside courtrooms looking equal parts pissed off and bored. He has different legal cases lined up all over the country against him but the New York Stormy Daniels case is the first to get over the line to a conviction, somehow fluffing out to 34 separate counts of falsifying business records. This makes Trump the first president to become a convicted felon. Which is wild considering [Insert any president here].
21 June – Cook Straight Ferry Grounds Itself
On a routine trip the Aratere along with its 47 passengers and crew decide to go where no ferry has dared to go before, dry land. Conspiracies swirl and accusations are made but the culprit turns out to be mistakes over how to take over from Autopilot, which needs the button pressed for five seconds to return rudder control to the helmsman who was desperately trying to turn things around.
30 June – Newshub Closes
I am in the process of writing a letter to Newshub begging them to stop reposting hysterical CNN articles when the news comes down that they are closing. 294 staff lose their jobs and 3 News and the morning show are cut. Likewise the website also gets the axe. Stuff steps in to pick up the remnants, preserving 200,000 pieces of content stretching back to 2014. Stuff also takes over the 6pm news broadcast.
5 July – Sunak concedes defeat in Britain
Richie Sunak breaks records in Britain’s general election for leading the party to historic numbers. See that’s how you spin a story. I’m leaving out the bit about it being a historic loss with the lowest number of seats won ever for the party. He need not worry though, the Brits continue their hotstreak for having terrible taste by electing Keir Starmer who himself breaks records for approval… Going down 49 points just months after his win. In comparison it took Tony Blair, or just about any leader on earth a couple years before they saw large declines after an election win.
11 July – Trump Attempted assassination
Trump gets the photo op of the century after a kid with the appropriate last name “Crooks” takes a potshot at him at a rally in Pennsylvania. Trump has just turned his head to look at a graph on immigration when Crooks takes his shot, grazing Trump’s ear where his head had been seconds earlier. “I love that chart. I sleep with that chart. Every night I kiss it.” he jokes later.
Earlier in the day security sees Crooks scouting with a range finder. Members of the crowd also spot him getting into position. The sheer number of bungles at the event fuels conspiracies which aren’t helped by stonewalling from the FBI and Secret Service boss Kim Cheatle who testifies before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. After a bizarre grilling she steps down as director.
19 July – International Court of Justice Weighs in on Israel and Gaza
The ICJ declares Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem unlawful. Israel takes the wet bus ticket slap in stride.
The conflict remains top of mind all year as protests in support of Gaza break out globally and US presidential hopefuls dance around trying to appease both sides. Except Trump who picks a side and sticks with it.
19 July – Crowdstrike Outage
Cybersecurity is about keeping things secure, what’s more secure than a computer that doesn’t work anymore? Security company Crowdstrike pushes a half baked update that affects about 8.5 million systems running Windows. This becomes the largest outage in history, and affects businesses all over the planet. Home computing is unaffected as Crowdstrike is aimed at protecting organisations. 4.6% of flights are cancelled, Christchurch Airport in particular gets pinged. A Health NZ incident report reveals patient care had been affected. St John Ambulances switches to VHF radio and paper notes.
Russia and China, who mostly haven’t tapped into American tech, are largely unaffected.
It is a brief walk-up call that maybe being so tech reliant isn’t a good thing. But it’s soooo handy when it works!
22 July – Biden drops out of presidential race with a Tweet
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024
In perhaps the most low key quitting letter of all time President Joe Biden lets his country know that he would no longer be standing for re-election via Twitter Or I guess X as it is now called by at least one person. He couldn’t even be bothered using the official White House stationary or letterhead. This is even worse than the time my coworker wrote their resignation letter with ChatGPT.
Pior to this he told the press “If the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race,”
There is currently no word from the Vatican about the Lord Almighty being an 84 year old former Speaker of the House.
12 August – Paris Olympic Games
There are a lot of shenanigans this year at the Paris Olympics. There is the low thrumming of culture wars as usual, and a Seine full of alleged feces for the swimmers to cut through. New Zealand brings home 20 golds, 7 silver, and 3 bronze. A star is born in Australia in the form of Raygun, a breakdancer who’s “moves” I’ve been waiting to see show up in Fortnite but have so far only cropped up in Call of Duty.
29 August – Maori King Pass Away
Kiingi Tuheitia Pōtatau Te Wherowhero VII is surrounded by family as he passed away at 69, just days after celebrating the 18th anniversary of his coronation.
September 12 – First Commercial Spacewalk
While earlier in the year we saw the first commercial moonlanding, closer to home with more lives on the line we see the first commercial spacewalk. The SpaceX flight of Polaris Dawn hosts four members lead by American billionaire Jared Isaacman, because that’s who space belongs to right now. On their third day of a 5 day trip Isaacman sticks his head out the hatch to utter some lines he hopes will go into the history books. “SpaceX, back at home we have a lot of work to do, but from here it looks like a perfect world”.
Later they reach an altitude of 1,400.7 kilometres. The highest anyone’s gone since the Apollo missions. This is also a chance to try out SpaceX’s very slick EVA suits that do away with the bulkiness of the suits used by NASA currently.
September 15 – Second Trump Assassination Attempt
While the first shooter appeared to not be particularly picky about which famous person he shot (according to his Google searches), the second is very much radicalised by the news that Trump isn’t super keen on bankrolling the war between Ukraine and Russia anymore. A secret service agent spots the shooter squatting in the bushes on Trump’s golf course and opens fire. The guy, Ryan Routh fled but was quickly apprehended.
Routh is a weird figure who crops up everywhere prior to his attempted shooting, including in videos in Ukraine, where he is reportedly a real pain in the ass for military recruiters. He is also sitting on a few prior convictions for firearms, including one in 2002 for possessing a Weapon of Mass Destruction, a fully automatic machine gun. I guess was before standards for WMDs shifted to things like nukes. Standards have really skyrocketed.
September 18 – Hezbollah Pager explosions
On the 17th of September across Lebanon and Syria pagers belonging to members of Hezbollah explode after receiving an encoded message. The next day Walkie Talkies explode as well. The combined attacks kill at least 42 including two children as well as maiming thousands more. No one claims responsibility but everyone assumes it was Israel. Hezbollah had attempted to go low tech to get away from easily tracked cellphone use. However they weren’t expecting their large orders to be fulfilled by a shell company in Hungary that would lace the batteries with explosive PETN.
Hezbollah have now had to resort even more primitive methods of communication: Myspace.
6 Oct – Navy Ship Becomes Submarine
While surveying a reef in Samoa the HMNZS Manawanui prangs straight into it, not realising the autopilot was engaged. Attempts are made to unground it, but eventually it lists, catches fire and sinks. All 75 crew are evacuated although 3 need medical attention. This is New Zealand’s first Navy ship loss since World War 2, and the ship will cost well over $100 million to replace. When we said AI was coming for our jobs I didn’t realise it meant physically sinking them.
22 October – Darleen Tana Kicked from Parliament.
The Greens continue to have a rough time of it as they force the ejection of Darleen Tana after a situation involving her husband’s bike business and investigations into migrant exploitation. She hangs onto her seat after leaving The Greens but is eventually booted via The Waka Jumping legislation the party had once famously opposed.
5 November – Trump Wins the Election
Reports prior to the election are hyping everyone for a drawn out election with a clear winner unknown for days or weeks. In the end it becomes clear pretty quickly that Trump is romping to victory with his rag tag team of ex-democrats and MAGA faithfuls, this time nabbing the popular vote while he is at it.
19 November – Hikoi lands in Wellington
Act Party Leader David Seymour decides to drop kick the hornets nest by submitting a bill that would define the Treaty of Waitangi in legislation.
A broad protest movement rises up in response to what is seen as a steamrolling of the original signed document. A hīkoi is organised and the protest marches from the upper North Island all the way down to Wellington outside the beehive. Within the hive Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke gets global attention as she tears up her copy of the bill and leads other members in a Haka for Seymour’s pleasure.
This may have been the one time the whole world is paying attention to New Zealand’s problems in 2024. The bill isn’t expected to pass, with National being gun shy about such a controversial push. Seymour points out it is supposed to stir up debate, and that it does in spades.
19 November – Biden Greenlights Long Range Rockets to be shot into Russian Territory
As Russia bolsters its lines with fresh faced North Koreans Biden green lights the use of longer range ATACMS missiles to be used within Russian territory. Proponents see this move as too little too late to protect Ukraine’s slow territorial losses. Others see this as Biden making sure the hole he’s digging is far too deep for Trump to scrabble out of once he inherits this mess.
4 December – United Healthcare CEO Shot
United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson is brutally assassinated while entering a hotel for a shareholder meeting. Depending on their paygrade Americans react in a variety of ways. The shooter is quickly held up as a hero of the people due to United Healthcare’s shocking record on denying people critical care, the worst in the industry. Investigators are able to detain a suspect within days. The suspect, Mario Mangione grows a cult following and is praised for his looks. Groupies stand outside his court appearances. He’s like an apex predator for True Crime girls. Any future shooters are going to have to be runway models if they want to garner any level of star power.
4 December – South Korea Martial Law
With great excitement I discover that South Korea is going into Martial law less than 24 hours after one of my co-workers landed in the country to see family for Christmas. I am looking forward to them getting combat experience for some character building and more interesting water cooler talk later but unfortunately the Koreans are faster than Auckland Transport. The coupe finishes before I even finish my bus ride commute.
President Yoon Suk Yeol kicked off Martial Law “to rebuild a democratic and free Korea”. MPs were quick to enter parliament and cast a vote quickly thwarting the attempt. The votes went across the aisle going 180 – 0 to end his order. Yeol retreated to his home, surrounded by secret service and supporters.
7 December – Romania Cancels Election over Tik Tok
As election results come in for a shock win by Calin Georgescu against Elena Lasconi in Romania the Romanian Intelligence service drops a report saying the election is under assault by “aggressive hybrid Russian attacks” in an influence campaign promoting Georgescu, who’s considered far right. The hybrid part relates to claims that 25,000 Tik Tok accounts were spun up in support of Georgescu, with one spending over $300,000 on boosting his posts.
The election is promptly cancelled to give voters time to think the right thoughts. The election is now set in May. A recent opinion poll finds that Georgescu is still leading the election.
8 December – Bashar Al Assad flees to Russia
After years of internal conflict opposition fighters led by Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham make a rush for the capital, ejecting Bashar Al Assad into Russia like the last dot of toothpaste. This ends Al-Assad’s presidency he had held since 2000. The slow downfall started after an armed movement sprung out of the Arab Spring in 2011. They were initially just protests but grew after they were bloodily opposed by the government.
In a statement Assad would like everyone to know he didn’t flee but the base he was at was under intense drone attacks and “with no viable means of leaving the base, Moscow requested that the base’s command arrange an immediate evacuation to Russia”.
He didn’t flee, it was a tactical retreat.