Side View: Democracy? Overrated!

COP OUT

A new book details why the goal of net zero is simply not enough, even if it can be achieved. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere hit a record last year and is rising fast enough that we’ll shoot way past 1.5 degrees of heating. Just a quick reminder that it makes a huge difference if we can’t limit heating to 1.5 degrees but let it go to 2 degrees.

But hey, luckily we have political journalists writing unadulterated drivel like this — which explains how Scott Morrison was motivated to embrace net zero because he bought Bill Gates’ book on Amazon. You might think Morrison had an entire department and a world-leading science organisation to find out the most up to date information about options for dealing with greenhouse emissions, but apparently he goes to Amazon instead. (Just think, both the PMO and the stenographer who transcribed this for the Nine newspapers thought this was a positive story.)

Let’s not forget that Gates’ book is out-of-date and a dud — and completely blinkered as to the political resistance to genuine climate action. So kinda perfect for Scott Morrison, I guess.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS

Is it a thing that Americans obsess about the real meaning of Halloween like we do about Australia Day? American Christians are unhappy about the louche, pagan aspects of the event, while American Jews are worried about how appropriate participation is.

I used to have an implacably hostile attitude to the importation of anything American (and it’s spring here for god’s sake, not autumn!) but softened on Halloween once I had kids. Watching my local area spring to life on Sunday evening with a street party atmosphere, teeming with families, dogs in lion costumes and grinning littlies clutching buckets, I couldn’t help but think if that’s what it takes to get people connecting at community level then that’s no bad thing.

ASTOUNDING SCIENCE STORIES!

You might know that height — AKA distance from a mass — makes a difference to the passage of time: someone in a valley ages more slowly than someone at the top of a mountain, albeit not by enough to notice. But the effect extends all the way down to the tiniest distances: time is slightly different at the bottom of a millimetre-high cloud of atoms than at the top, and it can be measured. A millimetre-high pile of atoms — by remarkable coincidence, or not — is about the size of a jumping spider, which turns out to have the most remarkable cognitive abilities.

Meanwhile, having a bachelor’s degree means years of extra life in the United States — and those extra years have been increasing.

THE LONG MARCH OF THE FAR RIGHT

Democracy? Overrated! The academics who are developing the mechanics for a right-wing coup for Trump. Why Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz quit, and why he hopes to come back as Austria’s right-wing leader. An essay on totalitarianism and the origins of the undemocratic worlds of Trump and Johnson.

Fox’s Tucker Carlson has made a series purporting to show the January 6 insurrection was a false flag operation by the FBI (bonus points for an anti-Semitic reference in it as well). But Fox would like you to know that’s it not actually on Fox News, thank you very much.

BANKING — WHERE MORALS GO TO DIE

A cracking week for banking in Britain: in the UK, half of all corporate crime is committed in one sector: finance. Wonder what the figure would be here? Banks have already been fined $2 billion globally in 2021 for money laundering offences. The UK’s NatWest will paying hundreds of millions of pounds in fines after failing to spot money laundering.

And there’s no evidence that banks are getting any better at stopping money laundering. As a lovely grace note, the head of Barclays has stepped down because of his links with the rapist Epstein.

MISCELLANEOUS

How Ireland’s anti-choice movement split after losing to modernity — and the Irish electorate — over abortion.

I’ve always had a passionate loathing of the wretched, painfully unfunny Michael Leunig and his dire “whimsy”, but it took Robbie Moore in a superb piece to explain exactly what is so objectionable about him: his work reflects an intellectually lazy, privileged individualism, which is exactly why he and the wellness industry deserve each other.

And Tim Dunlop on the future of work after the pandemic.

FINALLY

Look, for prime dog content, despite the repetition for Crikey readers, I can’t go past this photo essay on Istanbul’s Boji the commuter dog, brought to my attention by m’colleague Emma Elsworthy. For bonus Istanbul cat content and an entry in the long-running but wholly fallacious “are cats or dogs smarter” debate (as a young Hugo Weaving once said, “dogs are, but cats have got a lot of people fooled”), this Istanbul commuter cat ain’t going anywhere.