This Week in the New Normal #97

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.”Can anything stop bird flu?”

So asks the headline of this piece in New York magazine. A feverishly apocalyptic tale of a virus that could – and probably will – kill every human being in the United States.

The tone is urgent from the beginning. Hitting dates and names like the voiceover of a true crime documentary. It’s also tediously long so we won’t break down the whole thing.

The main takeaway should be this: Despite the winding down of bird flu in the wake of Trump Musk mania, it hasn’t gone away yet. In fact, articles like this make me begin to doubt my bird flu prediction from back in January.

The angle that looks to be shaping up, if this article is anything to go by, is that if there is a bird flu pandemic, it will be all Trump/Kennedy’s fault. A potentially wonderfully violent public debate will ensue, I’m sure, which is very much the point of almost all news media for the last few years.

All that said, the article made me laugh. There’s just something so darkly amusing about his Marvin-like defeatism. He’s typing his ten-thousand words out to a readership of people who don’t even realise they’re already dead.

There’s no comfort in where we are. Our government has spent the past year allowing H5N1 to spread throughout the country and the past two months dismantling some of the best defenses we have against pathogens of all sorts. We’re beleaguered and suspicious and seemingly incapable of collective action for the common good. The only thing keeping us safe, for now, is the virus itself.

2. Goodbye freedom of religion

A New York court has found that Amish children are not exempt from the state’s “compulsory vaccinations for schoolchildren” law.

The St Vincent Times headlines:

Amish children in NY face compulsory vaccination as court crushes religious freedom

To be clear, these are Amish schools run by Amish people for Amish children. The children in question are not attending public schools. The Amish are not asking for special treatment, only to be left alone.

This is the entire purpose of the Constitution: to protect people who want to be left alone. A terrible precedent is being set.

3. “Food security requires alternative proteins, upscaling innovation is crucial”

That’s a headline from Euractive, warning that we need to change the way we eat because of climate this and sustainability that.

You know the drill. And you know what they mean by “alternative protein”.

My favourite line claims that “decreasing meat consumption could save the lives of 80 billion animals a year”, which seems to suggest that – should we stop eating pigs and cows and such – that farms are going to become like boring zoos where all the animals are just left alone to live their lives in peace.

Reality check – those animals won’t be saved, those animals will never exist. We’ll need the land they live on to grow soy paste and bug milk (see below).

It’s like arguing that contraception saves children’s lives because babies who were never born can’t die in car accidents.

It also discounts that 80 billion pigs/sheep/chickens/cows – by weight – is probably several tens of tillions of insects, none of which want to be eaten. But I guess those lives don’t count.

BONUS: Superfood of the week

Did you know that cockroach milk is four times as nutritious as cows’ milk?

It’s true. They did a study:

It’s the next superfood.

The hard part is finding the teeny tiny udders.

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All told a pretty hectic week for the new normal crowd, and we didn’t even mention whatever is about to go down in Serbia or how we should redefine making weapons as “ethical”.

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.