Raising Hell: Issue 67: New Year, New Hellscape
"Anyone who's got anything to fear from such revelations should be scared," - Alexander Korzhakov, Boris Yeltsin's former bodyguard, discussing the secrets he held about his enemies, 11 February 1997
You take a few weeks off and it all goes to hell. There’s an attempted coup in Brazil; Nicholas Cage snubbed the Star Wars franchise because he is too much of a trekkie; a photo of New South Wales Dominic Perrottet dressed in a Nazi uniform may exist and is potentially being held over his head by his political enemies; Sultan Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the twelfth largest oil company in the world by production, has been appointed head of the Conference of Parties (COP) — in short, this is why we can’t have nice things.
This last one in particular is something of a biggie. The COP is the only international mechanism for getting world governments to act on climate so that humanity does not collapse the food web and render a good swathe of the Australian continent uninhabitable. If we don’t get it right in the next couple of years, we’re cooked.
But then let’s not dwell on that right now, as I have news: a while back I applied for the SA Government’s Arts Fellowship program to research and write my next book. The fellowship offered a grant of $50,000 to offset living and travel costs over the next year so I can expand a long feature I wrote for Rolling Stone AU and turn it into a book.
At the bitter end of last year, when I was physically and spiritually dead to the world, word came I had been successful — which is huge for me. My previous four books were written largely off my own initiative, with whatever advance I could get at the time and whatever I had lying around. Thanks to this, I’ll be spending the next year, and certainly the next six months, primarily focused on the book. In practical terms this money is going to allow me to travel more widely, to get out into the field and find those stories to help bring the book to life. It also means that, with the book my primary focus, I’m going to be picking up less general news and fewer features in the short term. And if you have the displeasure of knowing me in person, a word of warning: I’m going to be pretty scarce on the ground.
This is also a point where I have to say thank you to those who have subscribed to Raising Hell. It was your ongoing financial support that helped make that initial research trip happen and from which this project has grown. When I first set up this newsletter, I thought we might break a couple of stories together but to embark on a book is something special. This project will be as much your win as it is mine.
In service to this, over the next year I will be using Raising Hell to help drive my research forward. My current plan is to use the top-third of the newsletter to write up bits and pieces from what I find, without giving the whole game away. As the book gets closer to completion, I’ll also be giving a look behind the curtain. I’ll be sharing some early drafts, chapter outlines, and other materials as subscriber-only content for those curious about what it takes to write commercial-length creative nonfiction, those who are interested in the subject or those who just want to know what the hell is going on.
As always, tips, tricks and ideas are welcome — you know where to find me.
For the Fortnight: December 21 to January 17
Reporting In
Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …
‘Inside Labor’s Voice strategy’ (The Saturday Paper, January 14).
‘Winning bidders of ‘despicable’ Nazi memorabilia urged to donate items to Sydney Jewish Museum’ (Guardian AU, January 10).
‘The strange case against electric vehicle incentives’” (The Saturday Paper, January 7).
‘New cars charging into Australia’s electric vehicle market in 2023’ (Guardian AU, 3 January).
‘River Murray fish kill concerns grow as flood waters peak in South Australia’ (Guardian AU, 1 January).
Emergency landing strands Sydney-bound passengers on Pacific island – never to see midnight on New Year’s Eve (Guardian AU, 31 December).
"‘Evergreen: saving Sydney’s struggling bowlos’ (Guardian AU, 30 December).
‘Lee Lovell believed wife would survive North Lakes stabbing and was shocked to learn of her death’ (Guardian AU, 29 December).
‘Fossil fuel interests revealed to have sponsored more than 500 Australian community organisations’ (Guardian AU, 27 December).
I’ve also been working on a new personal website — nothing special — but unfortunately technical issues mean I couldn’t do a big reveal like I had planned to.
You Hate To See It
A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…
The Internet Remembers
The New Year has already proven a bad time for a select number of high profile billionaires. Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial for fraud and Musk has knocked over $160b off his net wealth. Meanwhile, one of the figureheads in effective altruism — an new ideology basically uses stats to help rich people decide how their money will best help the poor people they’re giving to — Nick Bostrom is on the defensive. It seems Bostrom authored rather racist thought experiment post to an old email listserver where was discussing the best way to communicate the view that lower IQ scores among people of colour meant black people were stupid on average. Or somethin — though the man that has listed the risk that dumb people may outbreed smart people as an existential threat to humanity has sought to apologise saying it was a badly misunderstood attempt to use an extreme example to make a point. Lot of that going around lately…
The Myth of Sisyphus, But Rhodesia
In other international news, a group of people claiming some kind of relationship to the failed white nationalist ethno-state made their way to the whitest place on earth — Antarctica — where they unfurled a flag to represent a political project that never found legitimacy, no longer exists and engaged in a racially motivated terror campaign targeting its black population. Unfortunately the group did actually not make it to the south pole as they appear to have decamped from a tourist boat along the coast to amble about for a while. As author Joe Kasabian put it: “They saw another place nobody recognizes as a country and said hell yeah.”
Representing For All The Gangstas Across The World
The Republicans may have taken back the House and have immediately moved to kill any investigation into how oil companies have lied about the science of climate change for a generation, but it hasn’t been all roses for the American right wing. Marjorie Taylor Green, woman who had to physically travel to Auschwitz to learn the Nazi’s were bad and certified Dr Dre fan has been in a bit of a pickle. When the rappers found out she had been using one of his songs to promote herself, he had his lawyers fire off a spicy cease and desist letter in the tone of an impatient parent scolding a small child. “It’s possible the laws governing intellectual property are a little too arcane and insufficiently populist for you to really have spent much time on,” it said about the politician’s use of his 1999 release Still DRE. As a result of the copyright infringement, her Twitter account was taken offline.
Interspecies Cultural Dialogue
In 2017, a firefighter in Arizona fired off an incendiary device that emitted blue smoke and ignited a blaze. That same year, a plane that was supposed to dump pink water to reveal the gender of a couple’s baby girl crashed. In 2020 and a gender reveal party in Southern California started a wildfire in El Dorado which led to the couple facing manslaughter charges. In 2021 a bystander was killed when a gender-reveal cannon fired in Michigan broke apart in the explosion. In December last year, the world’s strongest man revealed the gender of his new infant using a tank that fired confetti from its mounted machine gun. The growing body count of killed and maimed persons is growing so large, even the woman who invented the gender reveal, Jenna Karvunidis, said she wanted them to stop back in 2020. If it wasn’t enough to ritualistically taint the atmosphere and torching whole regions, the cultural practice has now jumped to the animal kingdom thanks to Adelaide Zoo’s media team who conducted an elaborate gender reveal for the new Sumatran Tiger cubs born as part of its breeding program.
“I woke up in hell”
If the hangover hasn’t lifted by the time you stumble back to the office, give some thought to the poor bastard who heavily invested in NFTs before going into a five-month long coma after a bike accident. Having woken up just before New Years, he went from posting about how excited he was to rediscover the world before discovering he had lost a significant sum in the FTX collapse and that the rapper formerly known as Kanye is an anti-semite. After some hesitation, he finally told his wife and an update posted to Twitter explained how “this is going absolutely terrible” before heading to his car to drink beer and wallow in self-pity. To top it off the guy was left with a $164,763.73 medical bill.
Failing Upward
Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…
Happy New Year, esteemed readers of Raising Hell, isn’t 2023 off to a bang? Who could have guessed we’d kick things off with New South Wales Premier confessing in a teary-eyed press conference that he had, in fact, worn a Nazi uniform to a 21st birthday party to head off the release of kompromat held by his rivals. Oh, the trials of youth. The Premier issued made repeated apologies for that mistake, but of course the Premier could not remember if there was anything else in the photo of him, or if the Fuhrer-curious future Premier was performing a salute — or even if such photos exist! The question, to anyone paying attention, was who was responsible for making the threat that forced the Premier to get ahead of the story himself? Did it have anything to do with the pokies industry that his government had just gone after? Who knows? The only question that matters to use here at this newsletter’s elite satire unit is that, with two months before the state election, will it hurt the Premier’s re-election chances?
Good Reads, Good Times
To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight…
JSTOR had this interested read by Lina Zeldovich on the wasted resource that is raw sewerage.
If you can get access to it, The Washington Post had a good profile by Dan Zak on the illusion created by the boring centrism of Matt Yglesias and how is success has been owed to his willingness to carry water for the rich and powerful.
There was this great interview on rentierism with Mark Blyth and Brett Christophers.
Paddy Manning in The Saturday Paper had this great story on the Australian’s governments embrace of greenwashing.
Here is how The eXile once responded to a request by Jordan Peterson to hang out upon his visit to Moscow.
Before You Go (Go)…
Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal — contact me first for how. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!