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. Babies make you sad and ugly and ruin everything
Easter. Spring. The time of year to celebrate the rebirth of the world and bringing of new life into a freshly green world…
…or not, according to the MSM, who are all rather down on the whole going-forth and multiplying thing.
A new study has apparently found the having children doens’t make you happy, but does ruin your relationship, according to the Daily Mail:
Having children DOESN’T make you happy: Becoming a parent provides no boost to wellbeing, study claims – but it does ruin your relationship
Dispensing even with the pretense of science, BuzzFeed is just straight up reporting anonymous anecdotes:
“There Is Literally No Escaping This”: Moms And Dads Anonymously Confessed Why They Regret Having Their Kids, And Wow
In a variation on that theme, the BBC has a story headlined:
‘Like a trap you can’t escape’: The women who regret being mothers
In which alleged mothers say they would erase their children from existence if given the choice, and describe motherhood thus…
“Motherhood has taken my health, my time, my money, my strength, and my body […] The price is too high, and the cost is forever.”
Just in case you’re missing the finer points of the subliminal messaging: DON’T HAVE KIDS!
related articles
2. Unshrouding Turin
A new study on Shroud of Turin has found DNA of many different people, animals and plants on the centuries old piece of cloth. Surprising no one with even the most basic understanding of DNA or how time works.
The New Scientist writes:
Researchers have identified genetic material from a vast range of organisms contaminating the shroud, said to have wrapped Jesus’s body, further complicating the question of the cloth’s true origin
The “question of the shroud’s origin”? That was answered decades ago scientifically and centuries ago by common sense.
The Daily Mail has a separate story, also about the shroud, and headlined:
Shroud of Turin discovery places burial cloth at time of Jesus’ death
Which is just dishonest enough to tip-toe up the line of “lie”, without crossing it.
The “discovery” is a study of pollen from the 1970s. And when they say “places the burial cloth at the time of Jesus’ death”…they mean the time of year. That’s how dishonest the article is.
The pollen is only around at spring time. Which means nothing, since it is documented the shroud has existed for nearly 700 springs, all of which probably had pollen.
Why is this getting – if you’ll forgive a rather good pun – blanket coverage?
The shroud of Turin is not real. I mean, it’s a real shroud, but it was never wrapped around Jesus Christ’s body.
They found red ochre pigment on it over thirty years ago. It’s paint, not blood.
There’s no documented evidence of its existence prior to 1354. For the mathematically uninclined, that’s roughly 1320 years after the crucifixion. This lines up perfectly with radio carbon dating results, which date it to between 1260 and 1390AD
But, more importantly, just look at it:
No human has ever looked like this.
It is not a real face, it is a drawing, a clearly medieval-era painting of a very European-looking Christ, whose hair is somehow hanging perfectly straight around his oddly-rectangular face, despite supposedly lying flat on his back with a cloth wrapped tightly about his head.
With all the real mysteries hanging over the human race, the preoccupation with re-solving a non-puzzle seems like such a waste of time.
It’s a medieval fake, from the golden age of bought-and-paid for miracles. That has historical significance in its own right, but there’s no mystery or magic to it.
3. The Great Kit-Kat Kaper
In one of the more bizarre thefts I’ve ever heard of, some criminal (or criminals) have made off with a cargo shipment of 12 tons of KitKat chocolate, totalling somewhere close to 500,000 bars.
I guess someone really needed a break.
The more I think about it, the more I find it interesting. Why would you do this? Yes, alright, you can sell them for money, but any wholesaler is going to be immediately questioning someone offering massive numbers of KitKits – and ONLY KitKats – at below market price.
Which means selling them a couple at a time, hooking people up with black market chocolate bars in the alley behind a night club?
I just don’t get it.
As an aside, I’ve today discovered that I’m a victim of the KitKat Mandela affect. Apparently there is no hyphen, and never has been. Weird.
BONUS: Traumatising lunch of the week
Spectator Australia has set out to scar a few children with its suggestion of Easter dining…
Eating the Easter Bunny for Easter lunch?
Good luck explaining that to the little ones.
BONUS II: Artistic Injustice of the week
A 20-year-old Australian woman has been found guilty of vandalism and fined A$2000 for sticking googly eyes on a sculpture.
But you can’t tell me this isn’t an improvement…
I think death of the author applies here.
Easter Recommendations
This Easter, we should take some time out to remember a real man who has too often been overshadowed by embellished account of his life published over a century after he died.
That’s right, D’Artagnan.
…who did you think I was talking about?
In honor of the discovery of his burial place I’ve been revisiting my love of Dumas’ Musketeer romances and cannot reccommend them enough. In terms of viewing, no movie or television version has ever really captured the brilliance and dry humour of the novel, but the all-star 1973 version comes closest. A fantastically fun watch for the Easter weekend.
Or you could watch Ben Hur. Again.
*
All told a pretty hectic week for the new normal crowd, and we didn’t even mention how “shrinkflation” is ruining Easter just like everything else, Canada “criminalizing the bible” or the renewed debate on Daylight Saving Time.
Happy Easter, everyone. And here’s to a fresh new start.
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Whether you are a believer or not, or somewhere in between (as I am), it says something of the power of the story of Jesus Christ that evil is always in retreat at Christmas and Easter. Whether it is family toxicity, petty local evils or genocidal tyrants, they have to take a break. That is something to celebrate. Happy Easter!
I am shocked people still believe this Jesus backstory.
The story was fake, but by now, this Jesus fake story should have been on April 1st .
as a 60 year old, I have lost count of the women who have said they had a baby by accident.
AN AHA MOMENT IN A TIME OF REBIRTH
I’ve always thought the great proof that we are being cheated is that technology has made us so much more productive, and yet our standard of living hasn’t improved. Yes, we have nicer cars & tech innovations we didn’t have before– mobile phones & computers, but our standard of living hasn’t really gone up: In the early 60s we were anticipating a 4-day work week. Instead, what we got is the necessity for both parents to work, often more than 40 hours. Better machines allow us to produce more, but clearly the additional wealth is somehow concentrated in the hands of the Epstein class.
I’ve always thought one of the reasons that some billionaires want to rule us is that they know their wealth is the result of crime, of a kind of theft– and if they don’t rule us we’ll take back what’s been stolen from us.
I know you know that our money comes into existence with the debt of interest attached to it. This is the great crime of the “Federal” ” Reserve” system. And so the Great Solution from this point forward would simply be honest money, printed by the treasury with no interest attached, said money not to exceed the growth in production.
However this is only a solution going forward, and we’d still have the problem of all the debt; we’d have to assign it to be paid in part by the billionaires, and the huge remnant just to be written off.
Also we’d have the problem of the billionaires and their corporations still controlling a tremendous fraction of global production. It seems likely that the only way we get to a society in which the Epstein class isn’t set on surveilling and controlling us is to redistribute the wealth.
But one problem at a time: let us look for the moment at only producing a just currency going forward, and defer the rest. What would a just currency look like and how–PRECISELY– would it differ from what we have, and how would we get there?
All the factors that I thought I understood about what’s wrong w our present entrapment — well, there’s another layer to understanding it. And sometimes the Truth will set you free. I feel an Aha moment coming:
How to Survive the “Final Reset” of the Economy
Jeff Booth interviewed by Peter McCormack
The Daily Fail is a mostly nonsense filled newsrag, however I’d say white folk are in decline -births I mean, as well as fertility rates – white folk are the Neanderthals of the future, reproduction wise that is.
As for the Shroud of Turin, I don’t even believe that Jesus existed – never mind a shroud supposed to have covered his face, ALL religions are man made, controlling and divisive.
That so called sculpture looks like a pregnant anteater – rearing up on its hind legs, the eyes definitely make it look more presentable, and at least its not another statute of Baal or Moloch.
Eating rabbit I’d say is a good idea at anytime, never mind Easter, you get little yellow chick at Easter as well, so kids shouldn’t be surprised where their chicken nuggets come from – mind you kids noses are stuck to their phones 24/7 maybe they think they grow on trees – if Gates has his way they’ll be grown in a lab, and made out poison – what am I saying they are already made out of poison.
Alexander Dumas…hmm… I was read somewhere a million years ago, well it feels like it, that Dumas fought a duel, and during his duel his trousers fell down – and everybody in attendance laughed at him – Dumas got the last laugh though, for he went on to win the duel.
I saw Ben Hur as a kid, and the Greatest Story Ever Told – and the Robe, all on the same Easter weekend, boy they didn’t have force it down our throats when I was a kid.
March 30, 2026, US: Farm Action’s Letter to Congress, Lambasting the Concentration of Fertilizer Makers and its Impact on Prices
On the Turin shroud thing…”but there’s no mystery (or magic) to it.”
Really, though it may be true there’s no historical evidence pre 13th or 14th century(the strongest piece of evidence against it’s authenticity)….there are still many mysteries, unanswered and unresolved questions.
Too many for such a certain assertion I would think.
For instance a Freedom of Information request was necessary to access the raw data from the 1988 (original) carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin. For nearly three decades, the laboratories and the British Museum refused to release the original data that concluded the Shroud was medieval…but without explanation as to why
So there’s that mystery for one.
Calm down.
Turin shroud was as fake as jesus and nothing magic about it.
You also don’t have to dig very deeply to see how (just like with viral identification) the science isn’t quite as robust as often claimed:
1. Contamination (The Biggest Issue for Cloth)To date a piece of cloth, scientists must measure the carbon inside it. However, cloth is highly porous and absorbs materials from its environment.
And in fairness, conversely…
2. Fluctuations in Earth’s AtmosphereCarbon dating relies on the assumption that the amount of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere is constant. It is not.
Because of changes in solar activity (sunspots) and fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field, the amount of Carbon-14 in the air has varied throughout history. Therefore, an object that died in a year with high solar activity will absorb different amounts of carbon than an object that died during low solar activity.
To fix this, scientists use “calibration curves” (comparing carbon dates to ancient tree rings). However, this calibration process creates ranges, not exact dates. Sometimes, due to atmospheric wiggles, a single carbon measurement can actually match three entirely different time periods!
I don’t hold an opinion on the shroud. I just dislike it when science is used as as definitive proof when the facts mean conclusions are far from definitive.
The only succour during this Faith Less Time during which we live is Conspiracy Theories… Even The Shroud must be analysed, dissected, subject to cynicism & skepticism, and nailed down (aka – crucified) by Science !!
“O Ye of Little Faith.”
Dont need no ‘Research. (TM)’. The Facts on The Ground are parents these
days are eager to outsource the care and raising oft their kids to Day Care
Centers, then to Schools, and The Kids get no say in it…
Maybe you cant be a Consumer and Parents at the same time ? (The principle
of Consumerism being: “Dont Deny Yourself !”) …
There are reports that Chocolate, like Virgin Olive Oil, is being adulterated. What
ever happened to “The Real Thing” ? Was it only “The Real Thing” in name only ?
Another great TWITNN roundup as an Easter edition, thanks OffG. I shall throw my latest offering into the hat: Trump Is Jesus: Political Messianism
Why do the vast majority of artists stay on the reservation? Because otherwise:
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/coronavirus-second-undoing-of-eric-clapton/
Expect something like this on, for example, Bowie for his Nazi sympathies and underage sex…. sometime never.
Just another Drainstream journo kissing corporate arse to pay his bills.
They breed like vermin.
Wow. That article is a nauseating read. A perfect example of using character flaws to infer all opinions the person holds are invalid. A character assassination plus narrative reinforcement rolled into one.
The Daily Mail tweeted their anti-kid message with this:
“Having children DOESN’T make you happy: Becoming a parent provides no boost to wellbeing, study claims – but it does ruin your relationship”
An AI “corrective” said
“The referenced study found parenthood has a small positive effect on sense of purpose (stronger in women) but no significant effect on happiness or life satisfaction, and slightly lower relationship satisfaction. It does not claim parenthood “ruins” relationships.”
The irony is that the corrective seems even more inhuman than the original tweet. The arrival of a whole new human life has a “small positive effect on sense of purpose” for the one taking custody of this momentous event? Also the unfortunate custodian feels “no significant effect on happiness or” (and here comes the truly brutal solipsism) “life satisfaction”? The unhappy recipient of this troublesome new arrival even experiences “slightley lower relationship satisfaction”?
Our wretched “science” itself is couched in utterly selfish solipsistic terms where all people are regarded as totally isolated monads.
Trust “The Research” !!
Dunno about the shroud of Turin, but the shroud of obfuscation forced upon us over the last 100-150 years
needs to be DESTROYED as soon as possible.
Kids? Can’t live with em, can’t live without em.
Love them always.