Donald Trump
Donald Trump (Image: AP/Gerald Herbert)

Perfect timing If lockdown has you feeling trapped by the hellish monotony of it all, if your life is beginning to feel like a Sisyphean mockery of all endeavour, if every day bleeds into the next until time is meaningless, you know what would help? Mental Health Australia has a theory: get out there and socialise!

Very cool. Thanks, guys!

One, two, three, Forbes The annual measurement of America’s plutocrats, the Forbes 400 rich list, has two particularly surprising absentees this year: former president Donald Trump and media mogul Oprah Winfrey.

Trump fell off the Forbes 400 rankings for the first time in 25 years, coming up US$400 million short with a net worth of $2.5 billion; Winfrey’s US$2.6 billion is just shy of inclusion. Forbes had earlier pointed out that Trump had fallen 300 places on the list during his presidency.

They weren’t alone — 49 other billionaires dropped of the list this year. But don’t shed tears just yet:

Of the 51 moguls to fall out of the ranks, 31 are actually richer than they were in 2020. That includes tobacco billionaire Brad Kelley and Columbia Sportswear CEO Timothy Boyle. Both got hundreds of millions of dollars wealthier over the past year — but were outpaced by newcomers like Brian Armstrong, of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, and George Kurtz, of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike.

Similarly, Amazon founder and list-topper Jeff Bezos’ US$201 billion is up US$22 billion, even after his divorce and COVID. Meanwhile, Tesla’s Elon Musk’s US$190.5 billion is three times what it was in 2020.

A good and working system, I think we can all agree.

Going Ape It’s almost reassuring. Technology changes, but the human instinct to grift remains entirely the same. Investors in non-fungible token project “Evolved Apes” — a collection of NFTs nominally to be developed into a game — just got scammed out of US$2.7 million in cryptocurrency (it’s always fun to write a sentence that until very recently would have been baffling gibberish to me). Via Vice:

A week after the project launch, the anonymous developer known as Evil Ape who promised that game vanished along with the project’s official Twitter account and website. But they left traces behind on the blockchain that shows they siphoned 798 ether ($2.7 million) out of the project’s funds in multiple transfers.

But if you look at the NFTs in question (presented here via the “hack” of pressing the “printscreen” button) you can see why people were so eager to get on board:

Corporate compassion A nice example of the slightly wonky relationship between certain kinds of bright-eyed feel-good approaches to progress and actual material conditions: among the nominees for Globe Victoria’s Transgender Inclusion award is Ravenhall, the country’s “largest private correctional centre” for providing “gender-diverse staff with a safe space to grow, giving them encouragement and help on their journey to becoming their true selves”.

Or to put it in unbearable faux-progressive tweet form: “Once again for the people at the back: More. Transgender. Prison. Guards.”

New York minutes Crikey has long noted the curious way American culture war topics echo into the Australian right wing and its mouthpieces in the media, regardless of its relevance to life in Australia. In the COVID era, we’ve seen some of that traffic reverse, thanks largely to the country’s long-term lockdowns and the work of “citizen journalists” covering them, echoed by hateful grifters in the US mainstream.

And so, inevitably we saw hundreds of anti-vaccine mandate New Yorkers chanting “Save Australia” outside Australia’s consulate in the city. A proud day to see Australia at the forefront of a internationalist movement, feeding rhetoric about tyranny and medical apartheid and vaccine scepticism.