This Week in the New Normal #119
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. CBDCS JUST KEEP ON TRUCKIN’
With war and Trump and Epstein et al. dominating the headlines, we’ve stopped getting our regular updates on the global move toward central bank digital currencies.
This is entirely accidental, I’m sure. But don’t worry, they’re still out there doing their thing.
In India, for example, a pilot scheme was launched, testing the digital rupee as a payment platform for state welfare plans.
In South Korea, the new Chief of the Central Bank – Shin Hyun-song – announced in his inauguration speech that the second phase of “Project Hangang”, the central bank’s scheme testing digital currency across payment platforms, is still ongoing.
In New Zealand, “experts” are telling the press that a digital currency is needed to “help NZ’s monetary sovereignty”.
And that’s just from the last three days.
Technocracy is coming, no matter who sinks what in the Strait of Hormuz.
2. Space Race 2.0
Fresh from Artemis II (allegedly) going around the moon and then coming back, we’re about to be launched into a new space race. Or even two!
First, there’s the private race between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. Who’s going to win? It doesn’t matter. In the long run, it will be related to us as a symptom of billionaire hubris. Irresponsible use of private wealth to harvest something that should belong to all of us – the sky.
The real space race will be national and geopolitical – mostly US/China, but maybe Russia and others too. What nation will be the first to mine on the moon? It’s going to be so exciting to find out!
My prediction is that America will “push too hard”, and maybe get a photogenic (and totally real) astronaut killed, while China’s “grown-up” approach means they win long-term rewards and “international respect”.
The current characterisation of these nations in the news narrative makes this an easy-ish guess. The Guardian even calls them “the tortoise and the hare”.
In the long run, the “successful team” will be the one who cooperates with the “international community”, and it will be a sign of all the great things that are possible when we have a global government telling us all what to do…sorry, I mean “when we work together”.
That’s what Nature thinks, anyway.
3. Norway comes to the PArty
Every country of the world is announcing, one at a time, that they are banning social media for the under 16s, or the under 18s, or under 14s or…whatever.
It’s actually becoming pretty much a joke at this point.
Like an episode of a sitcom where, by pure coincidence, all the characters turn up at a Halloween party dressed in the same costume.
And, just like this, that contrivance would be the rather predictable and derivative work of writers who are paid more than they are worth but think they’re very clever.
If you’re interested in Norway’s particular brand of online anonymity-ending legislation, it will be for under-16s, and they are introducing it because…
[We] want a childhood where children get to be children,”
…according to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere.
As I said on Twitter, politicians are constantly playing a game where they all have to say the same sentence in slightly different words.
And they all suck at it.
BONUS: Poorly chosen date of the week
Multiple reports this week claimed that Germany was concentrating resources into re-arming, with the aim becoming “the strongest military in Europe” by a particular date…
Hmmm. That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
It’s hard to believe a media machine so saturated in WWII imagery and references could possibly have chosen that year by accident.
It’s not all bad…
The good news this week is that the UK’s Assisted Dying bill is, well, dead. For now.
The House of Lords stopped the bill with a successful filibuster on Monday. So, no state-backed murder yet, or at least no legal state-backed murder.
Backers of the bill are up in arms, complaining about the will of the people being thwarted by a “handful of zealots” in the Upper House.
So the good news comes with a rider: it is temporary. They will push “reform” of the Lords, citing this as an excuse, and then force the bill through again in the future. They’ve been floating that since January.
It takes only a glance over the always-educational Guardian comments to see where this is going.
Kim Leadbetter, the MP driving the bill, said after the defeat:
“We will go again. The issue is not going away. There’s a very clear direction of travel around the world.”
Somewhat ironically, the Assisted Dying bill is going to be kept alive by artificial means until it can be fully resuscitated.
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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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I bit the bullet! I donated. I bitched and I was rewarded for my bitching. Ten pounds. Had no Idea how it would look in my credit cart account. $13.62 in American dollars. I expected my finicky bank to reject the charge. Not so. Not yet. There you go! We are on our way to restoring normalcy. First things first, now that I have given up all that cash. Disband the United Nations.
The seven who filibustered with hundreds of amendments tabled were all life peers mainly either Tories or cross-benchers ( no party affiliation) with one being originally a Tory hereditary peer.
They are being slammed for being anti-democratc by the likes of pro-assisted dying NGOs. Also, by Ester Rantzen who did say that she was going to go to Dignitas in Switzerland to end her life because she couldn’t off herself in the UK. That was back in 2023 after her supposed terminal cancer diagnosis. Yet, here she is three years on, still alive and kicking, campaigning to end the lives of others while continuing to claim she hasn’t got long to live herself.
I feel sorry for the Grim Reaper – looks like he’s got a long wait with this one.
The Assisted Dying Bill has always seemed likely to be one of those ‘timewasting’ exercises where the only objective of the rulers is to create ‘passionate’ debate from both sides with nothing ever likely to happen. Governments don’t like suicide, as a rule, for political as much as humanitarian reasons – obviously you can’t pretend the country’s future is rosy if too many people are topping themselves, and plainly think otherwise. Certainly in the UK you can barely cross a pedestrian bridge or stand on a railway station platform without signs with the Samaritans’ number. Assisted Dying always seems a dubious concept given that by definition you have to be severely depressed or incapable to want to end it all and that fact could be exploited by unscrupulous relatives.
Every country should have their own Space programme that the taxpayers should pay in to and see on National TV.
Because it is a competition about values and who get first to the valuable resources on the moon.
Either you are inside the game, or you are left out in the cold.
Artemis is a huge waste of resources, a giant ego trip with no function apart from subsidizing the aerospace corporations that make the components. They effectively freighted four people around the Moon, something of an achievement 50 or 60 years ago, but now rather pointless. This theater used resources that could have been used on viable science missions (many canceled or scaled back) and on maintaining a kernel of expertise.
Its the times we live in, I suppose. All window dressing and spin, no substance, just reality TV competition. It truly is the dystopia sci-fi writers promised us.
So you actually think there were astronauts on the Artemis II spacecraft?
Werner Herzog, “Beware the Internet”.
https://archive.org/details/wernerherzogbewaretheinternet_202004
I think South Korea is well down the line to CBDC’s as well – CBDC’s will be the beginning of the end for us.
What do you mean the US will finally kill an astronaut, they’ve already killed three, because they wouldn’t go along with the actornaut proramme, they were Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee.
As for Germany they are in the process of upping their reservist age to 70 Finland is upping its to 65.
Two nice ones for you, point to point:
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/world/europe/turkey-ban-children-social-media.html Turkey… lol
3. https://rumble.com/shorts/v78g34u By the way none of the actornauts have a PhD, and all of them have been through the military. Figures…
No one is paying attention to the creeping Agenda because “there’s a war on”. Yeah, sure there is.
You wouldn’t have noticed ‘the war’ if you lived in the US. Our corporate media have taken to barely mentioning it. It is completely absent from the front page of our local rag, the Los Angeles Times, with the only mention being a page 3 article on the lack of talks in Pakistan. The Washington Post also appears to have stopped mentioning it.
Because we now have a much brighter, shinier, thing for our news attention. Someone attempted to gatecrash the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner last night carrying a shotgun and was, as you could guess, tackled and arrested. This fellow checks all the boxes (except for not having an Islamic sounding name) — he’s obviously a leftie (is a teacher from California(), has a manifesto and so on. All the good stuff you need to take peoples’ minds off the debacle in the ME and maybe pump up our Dear Leader a bit (not to mention the need for ‘extra security’, a secure venue like a White House ballroom and so on). Now, for better or worse I seem to be slightly notorious on this site for not being over enamored of conspiracy theories. Well, now meet the exception that proves the rule this little incident is just too convenient, too well timed and (from a purely practical perspective) too damn silly.
In 20 years a statue of trump made of posies (peace president) inscribed Trump stopOIL by blocking traffic
Trump fired the USA’s top navy man – because he wasn’t implementing a new suer warship quickly enough, called the Trump Class – which he (Trump) calls the Golden Fleet, however the expensive Zumwalt class, is expensive to run and repair – and the proposed railgun and hypersonic missiles that it was meant to have didn’t materialise.
They remind me of the USA’s Littoral Class which turned out to be lame ducks.