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Welcome back to What Just Happened?!, a semi-comical digest of the most important news from the UK, US and the World. Look out for us every now and again, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
The Internet
Comedic Justice
The Onion buys Infowars at its court ordered sale of the business after Infowars was successfully sued for $1.5 billion dollars by the families of the Sandy Hook victims and survivors; following Infowars spouting out slanderous and reprehensible lies about the tragic school shooting. Last summer a federal judge ordered that (the now previous) Infowars owner, Alex Jones, would have to liquidate his personal assets in order to move towards righting his wrongs.
The lawsuit tab had wracked up $1.44 billion back in 2022; having started with a defamation suit in 2018 launched by 3 parents whose children were among the 28 people killed on December 14th, 2012. Twenty children aged 6 and 7 were killed in one of America’s grizzliest and most shameful pieces of history. The parents suing Jones were responding to claims that the school shooting was a staged event, a hoax, perpetrated by opponents of the U.S. 2nd Amendment right to bear arms. Jones whipped up lunatics and fanatics to the point of people desecrating children’s graves and threatening to dig them.
“The Court recognized the ‘intentional, malicious … and heinous’ conduct of Mr. Jones and his business entities”
Source: AP
It seems appropriate that these two similarly serious media outlets should merge. The Onion even published an absolutely hilarious joke article on the topic of the acquisition.
“Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron”
Source: The Onion
Don’t Bet on It
While many media outlets and polling organizations might’ve been wrong, again, in successfully predicting the outcome of the election, some folks saw it coming. Including prediction markets, such as Polychain; and, particularly, whomever won $85 million as a result of betting on Trump’s presidential win. On November 13th, the day after the election, the FBI raided Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan’s New York house and seized his electronics. Presumably a part of a DOJ investigation into allegations that US based users might’ve been placing bets on the site; Polymarket has been in legal trouble before, with a $1.4 million civil penalty from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in 2022 for operating an unregistered options market. Polymarket is not registered with the CFTC and isn’t allowed to support US users, also the CFTC has historically declined requests to enable betting on US elections.
Polymarket saw almost $3.7 billion wagered on the outcome of the 2024 US Presidential election. 11 accounts believed to be operated by the same individual saw a profit of $85 million in total as a result of ~$70 million bet. The owner of these accounts, known to the Wall Street Journal and Polymarket as Théo, is ostensibly a French/U.S. resident and trader. This individual has denied allegations of election interference and has claimed to have “absolutely no political agenda”, as George Orwell said “to be of no political opinion, is itself a political opinion”. Perhaps more to the point though, without revealing their identity, there is no way of verifying whether or not this person was managing funds on behalf of themselves, or a political action committee or other special interest group.
The US
A Basket of Deplorables
Susie Wiles, who co-chaired Trump’s campaign, looks set to be the first female White House Chief of Staff. In virtue of her uncontroversial career, including having worked as a scheduler on Reagan’s 1980 campaign, Wiles seems unlikely to face difficulties in being appointed to her new role by the senate; this isn’t obviously true of Trump’s other cabinet picks. One of whom has already withdrawn from consideration for Attorney General having failed to beat the allegations, so we’ll see who actually gets confirmed. Then there’s the “not actually a department” (but rather an advisory “function”) Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, named after a joke cryptocurrency, and the absurdity of appointing two people to lead such a thing.
Pete Hegseth has been picked for defense secretary, a retired major in the US national guard, who served in Afghanistan, and Fox news host, has historically been turned down from White House duties (perhaps not least) because of a Deus vult (latin for “God wills it”, a popular Catholic crusade rallying cry dating back to the 11th century) tattoo that had his military colleagues flag him as a potential extremist; this marking has been associated with white-nationalist groups, Christian nationalist, the far-right generally and similar themes were popular among Italian and Germany fascists in the 20th century.
Robert F Kennedy Jr has been picked for health secretary. The “tree-hugging conspiracy theorist” (as he was so creatively and succinctly described by a reputable news journal The Economist) previously ran for President as an independent, before ducking out and endorsing Trump at a convenient time in the electoral proceedings, is slated to be in charge of Health and Human Services (HHS). Kennedy is a vaccine skeptic, or at the very least has said that he does believe that “autism comes from vaccines”.
A prolific British fraudster popularized the nonsense meme that vaccines cause autism, and disgraced former medical professional, Andrew Wakefield, bears a lot of responsibility for what is widely regarded as one of the most serious medical frauds in history. Anyone in the medical profession (Naturopaths don’t count) wil tell you that someone who isn’t able to figure this out shouldn’t be in charge of national health policy.
“As Deer explains, the GMC set out to unpick the ethics of Wakefield’s research, including whether the Lancet study had been properly authorised and whether Wakefield had been paid by a lawyer to find a link between MMR and autism. It hadn’t, and he had. But while the GMC panel pored over the children’s anonymised case records, Deer compared these with what was published in the Lancet. He found that their data had been substantially misrepresented in order to give the result Wakefield needed.”
Source: BMJ
The World
Glory to Ukraine?
In the first four months of 2024 almost 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers had officially deserted, abandoned their posts or gone Absent Without Leave (AWLO); that’s of about 50,000 in 2024 to date, and 80,000 total since the war began. On the ground sources have suggested to reputable media outlets that as many as 1 in 5 of the Ukrainian soldiers on the front lines have gone AWOL. It’s been such a significant challenge after two and half years of trying to fight-off the Russians that in Ukraine actually decriminalized desertion in August.
In the first incursion into Russian territory since the second world war, last summer Ukraine took a portion of Russian territory, in the Kursk region, and after months of demurring on the issue the Americans have just granted the Ukrainians permission to use long range (~200 miles) missiles to strike inside Russian territory in an effort to hold onto this strategically significant gain. The recent escalations of the conflict include ~10,000 North Korean troops being deployed inside Russia.
These missiles were used to strike inside Russia for the first time on the 1,000th day of the war to strike an ammunition depot about ~110 km into Russian territory. U.S. officials said the Russians intercepted 2 of the 8 missiles and Russian officials said 5 of 6 were intercepted.
The UK
Famous Blue Raincoat
After 15 years of Conservative government Labour were due a chunky honeymoon period when they took the reins of power in July, but it seems like the public were not so obliging. Data from Ipsos Mori (a leading market research firm) showed that in September only 25% of Britons thought Keir Starmer was doing a good job, shockingly 1% below Bris Johnson’s ratings at the end of his disastrous tenure.
The painful aspect, to many of those so inclined as to give Starmer’s government the benefit of the doubt, was that with an overwhelming majority Labour could afford to make some really unpopular decisions at the start of their government that may pay dividends before the next election. But they didn’t. That they didn’t really appear to do a whole lot of anything during the all-important first 100 days, seems to have hurt their popularity almost as much as making some of the hard choices could have.
It appears though, that we may have been too quick to judge. There is a palpable sense that the government is starting to get down to the nitty-gritty of making decisions that make people hate them, and this may well work. Remember the UK is now led by the only world leader who checked the weather forecast before the olympic opening ceremony; Starmer is a navy-blue rain jacket personified, dull but moderately reliable.
That all assumes that the left tried not to eat itself like it usually does. The center and left-wing press seem determined to undermine even commonsense tax legislation (like the means-testing of Winter Fuel Payments, see WJH 29th October) while the party themselves have shot themselves in the foot with the debacle over whether the rise in employers National Insurance contributions was a tax on ‘working people’ and bizarre semantics about what a ‘working person’ actually is. (For the record, entrepreneurs and small-business owners do not fall under Labour’s definition.)
The latest communications debacle is set to be over changes to inheritance tax levied on farmers. Farms have long been exempt from the taxes owed when large estates are transferred following the owner’s death in the UK. For most mere mortals we would owe 40% on anything over £325,000, a tax only payable by 4% of people. We can all argue about the fairness of double-taxation, but given how easily the wealthy avoid this tax through the expedient use of trusts, it’s all somewhat a moot point.
The changes to the law mean that for the first time farmers would pay inheritance tax… a ghastly 20% on anything over £1.5m if you’re single or over £3m if a couple is passing this on. Not only this but they’ll be gifted a 10-year period to make these payments, interest-free (while the rest of us must pay the balance almost immediately.
Celebrity ‘farmer’ (to make rather heavy use of inverted commas) Jeremy Clarkson has led the protests against this great injustice, staging how “96% of farmers will [pay the tax]”. In an embarrassing street interview with the BBC, he looked aghast that he should be asked to give the source for these figures. He also tripped up over having penned an article in the Sunday Times in 2021 stating how he bought a farm to avoid inheritance tax, and went on to boast that he’s just put his farm in a trust to avoid the tax anyway, but it was “time-consuming”. In fact, it’s around 25% of the richest land-owners who would be forced to pay half what the rest of us do.
There’s no question that there could be some asset-rich, cash-poor hard-working farmers who slip through the gaps here, but it seems bizarre that taxing landowners has propelled people to wear wellies to the shops in sympathy with farmers whilst our public-services collapse around our ears for lack of funds.
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What Just Happened? 
I’ll read this over scrolling through Facebook at night. Very well written.
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