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Flat White

2020: The year in review with Alexandra Marshall

20 December 2020

5:00 AM

20 December 2020

5:00 AM

If we have learned anything from 2020, it’s ‘don’t eat bats’.

From Ebola to Covid, these winged Petri dishes have proved troublesome. In fact, it’s best for everyone if humans don’t touch bats at all. Don’t experiment on bats. Don’t crawl into bat caves looking for the next great pandemic. Don’t bring bats back to a slightly dodgy Level 4 bio lab. Don’t extract viruses from the kidnapped bats. Don’t take a ‘bat soup to go’ from the local wet market. Just – leave — the — bats — alone. Evolution made a mistake when it stitched wings onto rats. There is no need to make that situation worse. 

In completely unrelated news, Communist occupied China has suffered a severe case of bad PR. Polls conducted across the world in recent months show that the regime has crashed to the bottom of people’s Christmas card lists, sitting somewhere between North Korea and Somalia. Xi Jinping is at a loss to explain this seemingly random backlash against his empire, except to stress that it is probably racism. 

When asked about China’s role in the global economic apocalypse, 1.75 million Covid deaths, trade wars, Hong Kong freaking out, threats muttered in Taiwan’s general direction, organ harvesting concentration camps, slave labour, a Big Brother social credit system, re-education camps full of people who didn’t smile enough, the purchase of military assets inside Western nations, debt trapping, and the building of suspicious villages along India’s border,  Xi took the opportunity to politely remind reporters that he has spent a great deal of money purchasing the World Health Organisation and the United Nations Human Rights Council. These acquisitions make Xi Jinping the world’s undisputed leader in medical safety and human rights. Whoever these ‘nations’ were, they better give China a five-star review next time the survey comes around. 

That said, we must thank China for teaching us many things this year. Communism is the solution to everything, viruses obey curfews, racism is solved by looting Nike stores, Hunter Biden never owned a laptop, and the weather is controlled by taxation. 

I can feel you doubting the power of green tax, but honestly, it’s a perfectly sensible and properly costed policy produced by the World Bank. For the low price of four trillion dollars, the World Economic Forum has promised to reset the global economy (which is ruined anyway), and erase anti-collective things like property rights and personal savings to ensure that you’ll embrace life as a serf. 

You will be much happier after you free yourself of worldly possessions, according to the WEF marketing campaign –- a sentiment which is echoed by every wife who has tried to remove their husband’s dusty record collection from the garage. Working hard to acquire stuff to pass onto your kids is pointless. They don’t want your outdated crap so get your bar-code, submit to the state’s will, and whoever doesn’t starve in the resulting Mad Max film will inherit a pleasantly de-populated Earth. 

Presiding over this Eden will be the prestigious PETA, an organisation of entirely sane activists, who have made it clear that the primitive eating of meat will be forbidden. You can’t have a utopia full of blood and slabs of tasty BBQ steak, so humanity will feast on plagues of insects. Communism acknowledges that it isn’t brilliant at farming. As a backup, European scientists have suggested growing additional food in labs. Dedicated carnivores can try out a synthetic meat protein that almost looks like an uncooked McDonald’s patty. For the adventurous, a Swedish bloke has been diligently exploring the niche market of cannibalism, a cuisine which hasn’t been popular since Mao’s Great Leap Forward. 

Lab-grown food and crunchy Huntsman kebabs might sound extreme, but farms are simply a thing of the past – a symptom of our pathetic agrarian heritage. The Bureau of Meteorology has assured experts that Australia is too hot, too dry, too cold, and definitely too wet to support agriculture. According to the IPCC, our recent floods are the result of catastrophic desertification – just, uh, a different version of it. Too much water is practically the same as no water at all. Citizens are advised to sell up cheap, migrate to the city, and allow foreign corporations to come in and care for the land properly by levelling it and coating the whole thing with solar panels. Shiny. 

Twenty-twenty gave us the 2050 climate goal to de-carbonise the world, making Earth idyllic for carbon based lifeforms. Just not humans. Or farm animals. Or rare birds which – quite frankly – are a menace to wind turbines. 


As for freedom, I’m afraid it really does get in the way of safety. Locking the population up for nine months has allowed politicians to improve all sorts of important data stats, including lowering emissions for their international dick measuring contest the prestigious Climate Ambition Summit. Civilisation’s days of being a galactic libertine are over. We have progressed to a healthy New Normal, which roughly equates to a beige Volvo with a stalking app installed. 

Lockdowns have revolutionised policing. When you do away with free movement, criminals become super easy to spot standing alone in the middle of the street loitering beside a shonky looking trailer. You can’t actually arrest them, but at least police can monitor their activities. As for ‘Defunding the Police’, politicians were mostly kidding about that. As it turns out, arbitrary medical mandates are more profitable than speed cameras. It’s basically the Covid gold rush. Defund? Ha! 

Covid is a bit of a problem, but the Common Cold has been cured so there will be absolutely no reason for you to take a sickie in 2021. Health officials stress that the mysterious vanishing of a thousand year pandemic has nothing whatsoever to do with a self-medicating population mainlining lozenges, too afraid to visit the doctor in case they’re quarantined in a gulag. 

As a species, we have discovered that isolation is the key to a quiet life. Interacting with other people and seeing your family is wildly overrated. With Zoom, you don’t even have to wear pants to work. As for trying to conduct your business across state lines, why would you want to do that anyway Federation wasn’t meant to be a free pass on movement! 

Speaking of free passes, 2020 has seen the liberation of the most repressed person in the entire world. No, not Julian Assange. Joe Biden’s wife, Jill Biden – sorry – ‘Dr’ Jill Biden, has been liberated from the patriarchy. Sick of reading household cards addressed to Sen. and Mrs Biden, she went out and got herself a suitable prefix. Like pronouns, qualifications are the new identity class to divide women up into groups – those who are worth something, and those who aren’t.

Liz Plank, MSc. PhD ADHD added, “Can every woman who sees this change their handles to reflect their credentials?”

To which one woman replied, “If I dropped out of high school, can you recommend some initials to put at the end of my name that will make me worth something as a person?”

Plank’s scorn was swift. “Trying to correct the systemic and historical erasure of women’s contributions and accomplishments doesn’t (and shouldn’t!) preclude us from also fighting against the myth of meritocracy.”

To fight the myth of meritocracy you must provide evidence of your merit in your Twitter name. Got it? I don’t know why you’re struggling with this.

Jill Biden concurs, “Together, we will build a world where the accomplishments of our daughters will be celebrated, rather than diminished.”

While we’re talking about stupid people, Matt Kean BA GDip, the NSW State Minister for Environment and Energy (are those portfolios meant to be together?), has discovered that he can just ‘say things’ and that makes them instantly true.

“The debate on climate change is moving fast and is about to get faster.” Kean said, in a December tweet. “Net zero at 2050, once seen as a radical target, is already entrenched as a middle ground or centrist stance, the place where the Prime Minister likes to be.”

Australia is so lucky to have escaped the grasp of Malcolm Turnbull BA BCL LLB and found sanctuary in the arms of Scott Morrison B.Sc. who, if Kean’s facts check out, likes to stand in the centre of a revolutionary, anti-capitalist, global bureaucracy of socialists using eco-fascism to enact world domination. If nothing else, this stance should smooth things over with China.

Finally, Emma Alberici – the woman who was so annoying that even the ABC got rid of her – has looked at China’s trade war against Australia and decided:

“China has banned Australian coal? Perhaps now it is time to move to renewables?”

A completely sensible and well thought out opinion.

Brexit is still Briexiting-ing, with Germany playfully suggesting that it wants the UK to ‘walk through broken glass’ before concluding negotiations. Boris Johnson insists that it’s just a bit of good natured joshing from Merkel and not a reference to the Night of Broken Glass. Search parties are out looking for French President Macron to see if he intends to surrender to Germany before or after the continent goes tits up.

Royals Harry and Meghan have also escaped their life of servitude by running away to a backwater colony to raise their child. To prove just how much they despise attention from the press, the pair have signed a multi-million dollar Netflix deal. They will now embark on a philanthropic life devoted to helping poor white people recognise their privilege through a series of Spotify podcasts. Bargain.

We must acknowledge the outstanding work of the illustrious journal ‘The Post Millennial’ who has bravely declared that puberty is a biological hate crime committed by nature. Becoming an adult will now be considered an act of violence against young people who do not consent to ‘growing up’. Choosing a gender is the most important decision a child will ever make. Thank you, Big Pharma, for finally vanquishing the tyranny of chromosomes. If Time magazine can make Biden and Harris identify as a ‘person of the year’, I’m sure they’ll consider giving it to a medical conglomerate next time around. 

Look, I accept that 2020 has been a bit of a mess, but don’t let yourself get too depressed about it. Remember, even if you find yourself living in a concrete box under a Covid curfew – you can still count yourself as a carbon unit. Carbon, my friend, is a trade-able commodity. The more you eat over Christmas, the heavier you’ll be and the higher your price at the New Year markets. 

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