This Easter in the New Normal

Our successor to This Week in the Guardian, This Week in the New Normal is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world.

1. Climate Change is altering time!!!

A new study published this week caused multiple papers to run headlines along these lines:

Climate change is altering Earth’s rotation enough to mess with our clocks

That particularly egregious example is from the Washington Post, but CNN, the New York Times the BBC and many others went the same way with it.

It’s pathetic clickbait nonsense. Here’s an accurate summary of the situation:

The truth is that micro-alterations in the speed of the Earth’s rotation mean we add and remove so-called “leap seconds” every few years. They have added 27 seconds in this fashion in the last 45 years. They were due to add another in 2026, but new calculations show it may not be needed until 2029.

One study published in Nature claims this potential change might possibly be caused by melting ice caps which are allegedly due to climate change which is theoretically anthropogenic.

So while the papers report “climate change is altering our time”, the more accurate headline would be “our time is altering less than we expected, and one guy thinks maybe it’s because of climate change.”

But I guess that’s not a catchy title.

2. “Flexitarian” Diets to save us from climate change

Speaking of climate change, the Guardian reported earlier this week that:

Plant-heavy ‘flexitarian’ diets could help limit global heating

Yes, yet another study has found yet another establishment-serving conclusion:

The researchers found that adopting a flexitarian diet could lower methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture and lower the impacts of food production on water, nitrogen and biodiversity. This in turn could reduce the economic costs related to human health and ecosystem degradation and cut GHG emissions pricing, or what it costs to mitigate carbon, by 43% in 2050. The dietary shift models also show limiting peak warming to about 1.5C can be achieved by 2045 with less carbon dioxide removal, compared with if we maintain our current diets.

For those of you wondering, a “flexitarian diet” is supposedly a diet which “focuses on whole, plant-based proteins and other minimally processed foods, while enjoying meat, dairy, eggs and fish in moderation.”

It’s basically how they are going to pitch quasi-forced vegetarianism to people who don’t want to stop eating red meat.

The Guardian article quotes Professor Jason Hill of Minnesota University, who gives us a hint on how they plan to subtly twist the rhetoric on red meat [emphasis added]:

“The overall food system has many players…There’s the producers, the consumers who choose what to eat, and in the US especially, the government, which supports the type of agriculture that leads to excess production of red meat.”

See, they’re not going to forcibly reduce the amount of red meat people eat to the point of near-rationing, they’re just going to stop “excess production”.

Slimy language.

3. Baltimore Bridge Collapse…the first of many?

You likely already know about the cargo ship crashing into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing a collapse of a huge section of the span.

The internet has been abuzz with theories and discussions. The predictable crowd are blaming immigrants, and others blaming capitalism. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was a conspiracy.

Did you see it in that Obama film? Was it because of a cyber attack?

Whatever the truth of the situation, there’s no denying it’s already being used to further the ever-present anti-human agenda, specifically the forced scarcity driving up prices. As the Daily Mail reports, the collapse has “wreaked havoc on the supply chain”

Global shipping has been being sabotaged for a few years now with crises – or claimed crises – being blamed for a quite deliberate policy of increasing the basic cost of living.

CNN is now warning that “1 in 13” of America’s bridges are vulnerable to such collisions. Is this true? Will there be more “accidents”? Will there be some super-corrupt trillion-dollar “bridge refurbishment bill” passed in the near future?

Or are they just trying to scare people?

The situation mirrors the Boeing “leaks”, which I half suspect were put about to discourage people from flying.

BONUS: Missed point of the week

Today CNN published this piece on the historical Jesus’ skin color, and rarely has a point been so thoroughly missed. It contains this beauty of a sentence:

In a rapidly diversifying multicultural America, more Christians want to see a Jesus that looks like them.

Never before has our society’s collapse into a self-worshipping narcissism been better illustrated.

If you can only relate to the Jesus who looks like you, there’s no hope for you anymore.

It’s not all bad…

It’s Easter, the chocolate-delivering rabbit has been, daffodils are flowering and Ben Hur is being endured the world over. That’s nice to think about, isn’t it?

I made a carrot cake.

Here’s some Beethoven.

*

All told a pretty hectic Easter week for the new normal crowd, and we didn’t even mention hot cross buns being a fire hazard or TikTok’s new campaign against “misinformation”.

There’s a lot of change in the air, a lot of agendas in the works, if you see a headline, article, post or interview you think is a sign of the times, post it in the comments, email us or share it on social media and we will add it to the next edition.

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