Our Review of 2021: Just The Important Bits
As we arrive at the end of the year, we can look back, dust off our hands and tell ourselves, “Wow I sure did get nothing done while the rest of the world went down in flames”. It’s been both a glacial and quick year, as the months disappear into various lockdowns and level announcements. It’s easy to forget all the big events that went down this year, so consider this your official refresher of the year that was.
Jan 6. Time to Riot
Things kicked off with a hiss and a roar when a crowd, whipped up by speeches by Trump and his allies calling for them to “fight like hell” marched on Capitol Hill. A massive lack in security meant that the crowd easily made its way into the Capitol Building itself, assaulting officers and raiding offices. Officials in the building at the time, reading in Biden’s victory were forced to evacuate. In the fallout, supporters have done their best to blame it all on Antifa, but at the same time admit that it was also pretty rad and they’d totally do it again.
As a consequence, Trump was finally kicked off all major social platforms. It turns out that threatening nuclear war with various powers around the world won’t land you a ban on Twitter, but getting the blood pumping for a bunch of flag clutching Looney Tunes will.
Jan 20. Biden’s Big Day
Finally after four long years, the world is offered respite from hearing about the American President and his shenanigans every bloody day. The inauguration was as reserved as you can expect for a private function operating in the age of Covid.
Jack Ma reappears
After talking smack about the Chinese banking system and the authority’s handling of digital finance, billionaire Jack Ma found himself on the wrong side of Xi Jingping in November of 2020. The normally outspoken entrepreneur faced the full onslaught of Winnie the Pooh, disappearing from the public eye entirely. His company, the Ant Group floating on the market was cancelled. Ma didn’t reappear until January 20th 2021. This bringing to heel of corporate giants signals a new level of control the CCP would start to push throughout the year.
Mar 7. The Oprah Interview
The newly un-royaled couple took to the world stage to air their family’s dirty laundry. They accused the Royal family of failing to protect them from the media they were now talking to, and that the pressure had made Meghan consider suicide. One story even mentioned concerns about what colour the baby would be. They later hastened to add that it wasn’t everyone’s first guess of Philip who had said that one. This would keep gossip mags in business easily for the next year as they lapped up all the spilt tea.
Mar 11. The Year of the NFT
Blockchain tech got a facelift this year as industry insiders traded non-fungible tokens for huge amounts of money to drum up interest in the tech. The most notable being a purchase by NFT entrepreneur Vignesh Sundaresan, who bought Beeple: The First 5000 Days for $69 million at Christie’s. This kickstarted a bubble of speculators buying all sorts of digital art and pretending that they’ve revolutionised anything. A few artists have also dived into the goldrush, hoping to make a few million from their difficult-to-monetise digital artwork. The big selling point for NFTs being that artists would receive ongoing royalties every time a piece is traded.
Apr 9. Long Live the Prince
Not to be upstaged by his grandson, Prince Philip steals the headlines one last time upon the announcement of his death. He served as the Queen’s husband for 73 years and passed away at the age of 99.
Apr 15. Monkey People
Scientists with nothing better to do announced they successfully injected human stem cells into the embryos of monkeys, creating chimera-embryos. They also succeeded with mixing human cells with pigs and cows. They hope that this sort of research could be used for better models to test drugs and grow human organ transplants. Has science gone too far? Yes, absolutely.
Apr 19. Travel Bubbles
People can once again visit loved ones over the ditch with less restrictions on managed isolation. The Australasian travel bubble is a tenuous one, but everyone’s confident everything will be juuuuuuust fine.
Mar 30. The Ever Given Wedged
During high winds across the narrow but oh so convenient Suez Canal, the 400m-long Ever Given suddenly became wedged, blocking the essential trade artery for six days. This caused a ripple effect in global trade, and not just for the 200 ships it had just waylaid. After it was freed, it was seized by the courts until the owners paid $900 million in damages.
May 3. Bill Gates Single Life
The charity Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation isn’t looking like so much of a foundation since the two jointly announced their divorce. This kicked up anxiety over the future for the largest set of philanthropic purse strings on the planet. It also kicked up a lot of dirt about Bill’s relationship with one Jeffrey Epstein. But people who understand the truth know what’s really happening. The Queen is looking awfully single moment.
May 15. The Iron Dome
Israel and Gaza continue to scrap with each other. Surreal videos taken on smartphones of Israel’s night sky show rockets from Palestine getting shot in midair by Israel’s Anti-Air defence system known as the Iron Dome.
In one week, four thousand rockets are shot out of the sky.
May 23. Fake Bombs
Ryanair Flight 4978 was going about its day when suddenly the pilots were informed of a bomb that would go off if they entered Lithuanian airspace. It diverted while in Belarusian airspace to Minsk airport while being escorted by a MiG-29. When it landed, the bomb threat magically disappeared. It turns out the only bombs being dropped from this plane were from journalist and activist Roman Protasevich. The orders for the MiG were done at the specific request of Protasevich’s biggest fan, the Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko. Protasevich was arrested at the scene and no actual bomb was found, obviously.
The day after the arrest, Protasevich appeared on TV with dark marks on his head and a willingness to confess to organising “mass unrest” and to not having health problems.
This is what true power looks like, phoning in phony bomb threats and not being the one that gets in trouble.
Jun 4. Musk Crashes Bitcoin
Elon Musk made Bitcoin his personal plaything this year, highlighting just how manipulatable the value is of this burgeoning currency really is. Early pumps were recorded after he said that Tesla would accept Bitcoin as payment. Further tweets regarding Bitcoin being overvalued, and that maybe he wouldn’t be accepting it after all, caused massive dips. A final tweet of a meme hashtagging Bitcoin and a broken heart emoji was enough to create a 7% dip, and for holders of Bitcoin to cry out for his blood.
Win For Bitcoin
Any damage to Bitcoin Elon is willing to inflict is tempered by El Salvador, which passed legislation to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender in the country. It’s the first country in the world to embrace the future.
Jul 6. Who’s the Richest?
Bezos and Elon Musk jockied each other for the top spot as the world’s richest man, swapping places numerous times throughout the year. Bezos took a small hit when he and his wife, MacKenzie Scott, announced their split. In July, it was formalised and Bezos sent MacKenzie 9.7 million shares of Amazon.com Inc. worth $38.3 billion, making it one of the most expensive divorces ever. It made MacKenzie 22nd on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Bezos still first, with Elon close on his heels. If that doesn’t give you a perspective on how rich the richest people are, I don’t know what will.
Jul 23. Billionaires in Space
Within mere weeks of each other, Richard Branson and Bezos both went to space as tourists, marking the beginning of civilian space flight. The flights turned into somewhat of a dick waving contest, at least by the media, who were all too eager to measure their heights and staying power (in space), which amounted to a few collective minutes. Later in the year, Elon Musk’s Space X would send an actual all civilian crew into space for three days.
Oh yeah, the Olympics were a thing
A severely neutered Olympic Games finally took place in Tokyo, amid protests it shouldn’t be on at all. But Japan had already sunk so much into it, and refusing to host would also incur added fines and penalties. What we got were empty stadiums with lone competitors, self driving trams, isolation, and anti-sex beds made of cardboard. One Ugandan competitor went AWOL to start a new life in Japan. He left a note stating he had no intention of going back to Uganda due to life being ‘particularly difficult’. With the help of Japanese police finding him later in the day, the Ugandans probably aren’t going to help make his life any less difficult.
Jul 28. Einstein Confirmed
Boffins at Stanford saw for the first time light from behind a black hole. It’s seen due to the massive disfiguration of gravity black holes cause, curving the light temporarily around it. This direct observation confirms Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Now let’s get back to subjects I actually understand, like divorce.
Aug 15. The Taliban Captures Kabul
Throughout August, America finally pulled out of Afghanistan, and with it all the safeguards they thought they had put in place crumbled into dust. The Afghan Army, after years of training, dissolved. The President, Ashraf Ghani, fled the country, and Trump pretended like he had nothing to do with the whole thing. Everyone abandoned Afghanistan, and in so doing left a power vacuum that will have ripple effects across the Middle East as powers both local and abroad reposition themselves in America’s decreased presence. Horrific scenes of desperate Afghans clinging to landing gears of ascending aircraft will haunt us all forever.
Aug 17. Delta Arrives in NZ
The Australia-New Zealand travel bubble came crashing down when new community cases suddenly flared up in New Zealand, featuring Covid’s brand new flavour, the Delta variant, which spreads even quicker than the base 2019 edition. New Zealand swiftly got a taste of what the rest of the world has been dealing with and worst of all, takeaways everywhere closed.
Sep 3. NZ Terror Attack
A fresh terror attack lands far too close for home for this writer in New Lynn, Auckland. The attacker had been radicalised and was a supporter of Daesh. He was shot on the scene by plainclothes police who had been worried about this exact eventuality, but had no power to arrest. This is as much page space as this guy’s getting.
Aug 26. Scrubbed from the Web
Pop stars and celebrities are in the crosshairs in China as certain actors are scrubbed out of existence. In the instance of one celebrity, Zhang Zhehan, their socials were deleted online, their scenes in TV shows snipped, and their name removed from credits after photos resurfaced of them visiting a shrine in Japan in 2018. Various other artists also cop it, prompting pundits to wonder if China is amping up for a new cultural revolution. In fairness, that shrine DOES contain interments for war criminals, so much so that even Japanese emperors haven’t attended it since 1978.
Oct 22. Cocaine Hippos
100 or so hippos in Colombia who decended from four escaped hippos belonging to Pablo Escobar in 1993 officially get recognised as people by courts in the US. This is after locals in Colombia decided that the hippos were becoming an invasive species and needed to be sterilised.
Arguments to allow them to flourish are now being made citing their filling of roles left behind by extinct giant llamas and other extinct mammals.