Apr 14, 2025
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This Week in the New Normal #100

This week is our one hundredth edition of This Week in the New Normal!

…except it isn’t really. Due to some special editions going unnumbered I think we’re actually around 104.

But we at OffGuardian are nothing if not on trend, and since these days cool kids are simply saying stuff that is provably untrue because it’s more narratively convenient…

This week is our one hundredth edition of This Week in the New Normal!

In those one hundred (and four) issues, we have tackled over 600 articles, posted over 1700 links, embedded lord-knows how many tweets and mentioned edible insects at least fifty times.

It’s been a real rollercoaster. Have a bumper issue to celebrate!

1. Good old Gordon does it again

It’s early Spring, a huge globe-circling propaganda drive has just begun, and Gordon Brown is in the Guardian calling for a global government.

No, we don’t mean March of 2020, we mean this week.

Now, in fairness to Gordon, he may not actually have blurted out the killer before the murder has even happened this time, but he’s close. He doesn’t actually use the phrase “global government”, like he did before, but he does use the phrase “great reset” again, when they’ve all been trying so hard to avoid that phrase.

Then, in his second part of his article, he concludes…

All countries that believe in international cooperation should pledge that through a new multilateralism this generation will deliver global solutions to what are now inescapably global problems that cannot be resolved by nation states acting on their own or in bilateral deals alone. Second, as building blocks of that future, this collation of the willing should immediately engage in practical cooperation on urgent concerns for which no nation state-only answers are possible – global security, climate, health and humanitarian needs as well as the flow of trade. They should work to modernise the international institutions that deliver them.

Which is pretty much what you’d get if you were to put “describe a one-world government without using that phrase” into an AI text generator.

Methinks maybe there’s a familiar stink to this whole tariff thing. How surprising.

2. Shhhh! It’s a secret!

Prince Harry is so supportive of Ukraine, and so uninterested in good press, that he secretly went to Ukraine to talk to wounded veterans without telling anyone or anything.

But wouldn’t you know it? It only ended up on the front page of the Telegraph anyway!

Don’t you just hate it when you’re trying to do something on the down-low, and the high definition photographs the professional photographer you hired took of you doing it accidentally end up in the national press?

3. He’s just like me!

Mark Carney has emerged from almost nowhere to be Canada’s Prime Minister and looks odds-on favourite to win the first election he has ever stood in later this year. He’s a wealthy ex-banker and a globalist who wrote a creepy book…but he’s also a real human being who is relatable and down to earth and just like you and me.

Don’t believe me? Well here’s a video where he talks about liking rock music…

Checkmate cynics.

4. What Lily Philips is really for

Lily Phillips is currently more famous than anyone justifiably should be for making and selling pornography. Apparently, she is now so culturally relevant she went on the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire.

In that interview, she talked about having access to pornography age 11, and how it shaped her and impacted her later choices.

It’s one of those “oooh, I see” moments.

Nobody in the interview said “we should stop children from having smartphones”, or “we must ban online anonymity to prevent children seeing porn and being turned into celebrity prostitutes”, but those are the ideas such interviews are designed to introduce into the heads of their audience.

It’s perfectly possible that the entire point of the increasingly degenerate celebrity OnlyFans culture is to disgust people so much they call for censorship and surveillance. That’s the point of most things recently.

5. De-Extinct Dire Wolves?

The big science is that a bio-tech research firm called Colossal Animals claims to have “de-extincted” the prehistoric Dire Wolf.

You can read all about it in TIME, which described the process as follows:

Relying on deft genetic engineering and ancient, preserved DNA, Colossal scientists deciphered the dire wolf genome, rewrote the genetic code of the common gray wolf to match it, and, using domestic dogs as surrogate mothers [brought dire wolves] into the world during three separate births last fall and this winter—effectively for the first time de-extincting a line of beasts whose live gene pool long ago vanished.

Now, I have questions regarding every single step of this, not least of which is how they “deciphered the dire wolf genome” with 10,000 year old DNA.

More importantly, I would say changing a gray wolf to make it bigger and white IS not “restoring” anything, it is at best recreating something based at least partly on guesswork.

A vital distinction, I think.

It’s not all bad…

First, some very good news – you may remember that, on OffG’s anniversary, we mentioned Catte Black was not well. We’re happy to report – after a very long hospital stay – she is now recovering at home!

Welcome home Catte! Keep getting well!

In other fun news: We’ve charted the absolutely bizarre (and entirely manufactured) hype around Netflix’s show Adolescence, this week that culminated in the leader of the opposition being grilled – to the extent that BBC reporters are capable of grilling anyone – on whether or not she had watched the show.

What that (highly peculiar) interview was supposed to achieve I’m not yet sure, but it generated memes, which is always fun. Here is a handful of our favourites:

And, since it’s the week before Easter, here is the ever-brilliant Bob Moran’s wonderful “Palm Sunday”:

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All told a pretty hectic 100 issues for This Week in the New Normal, and since this particular new normal is getting older and stranger all the time, it looks like we might need 100 more.

How exhausting that sounds.

Oh, and we didn’t even mention the remarkable discovery that you can make coffee at home or the fact they (allegedly)  launched Katy Perry into space (and then, sadly, let her come back).

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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Categories: latest, This Week in the New Normal