Off-Guardian – Nov 28, 2024
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. This special Thursday edition marks Thanksgiving for our American friends
Happy Turkey Day
1. Grocery Gaslighting?
Have you noticed that groceries have been getting steadily more expensive for years?
Well, you’re wrong. They haven’t.
In fact, according to a report from NBC…
Thanksgiving dinner is historically affordable this year
Apparently the cost of a family feast this holiday season is the lowest since 1984*.
*After adjusting for inflation, and not including Covid-hit 2020.
They cite a new report from the American Farm Bureau Federation, which claims that the average price of a family dinner for ten people this Thanksgiving is $58 (£45). Just about 6 dollars per person.
That’s insane. You can maybe get a turkey for half that in the UK, if you go as cheap as possible.
But it gets even dumber. To quote the report…
“If your dollar had the same overall purchasing power as a consumer in 1984 … this would be the least expensive Thanksgiving meal in the 39-year history of the AFBF Thanksgiving survey, other than the outlier of 2020,”
Which is technically true I suppose…only, your dollar doesn’t have the same overall purchasing power as it did in 1984 does it?
Its one of the few ways our current world doesn’t resemble 1984.
The purchasing power of the dollar is what makes things cost what they cost. Food hasn’t got more expensive because apples are rarer or turkeys have unionised and demanded fairer wages.
“If food were cheaper dinner would cost less” is up there with the dumbest sentences ever reported in the news.
2. Bird Flu Season
And while we’re on the subject of food being expensive, let’s discuss one of the reasons for that ever-increasing cost of living: Bird flu.
Or rather, fake bird flu pandemics trying to scare people into going vegan and massively inflating the cost of poultry and eggs. The terrifying H5N1 bird flu – which has infected fewer than 1000 people in the last 30 years – is back in the news this week, just in time for the holidays.
You can expect a longer-form piece on this in the coming week but, for now, let’s limit ourselves to the Thanksgiving-related content.
The Sacramento Bee is asking…
Is it safe to eat turkey this Thanksgiving amid bird flu outbreak?
…before grudgingly answering “yes” after about 900 words on the danger of bird flu.
The San Francisco Chronicle goes the same way, headlining…
Bird flu is spreading in California. What does that mean for your Thanksgiving turkey?
…and again concluding, “Yeah it’s fine.”
WebMD does the same thing
There are a ton of these articles out there, and none of them need to exist. People don’t need to ask these questions, it’s just so much cultivated anxiety.
It makes me sad. People just want to have a nice day, and they are being bombarded with fear porn for no reason at all.
3. Divide and conquer
Having successfully campaigned to divide society along race, gender, and orientation fault lines, the powers that be are moving to divide families along political lines.
The trend on social media – especially among liberals – is to publicly declare that they are “cutting off” their wrong-side-voting family, and refusing to invite them to, or accept invitations from them, for thanksgiving dinner.
Too many outlets to name are fueling this fire (here’s one, two, three, four, five for a start). It’s a familiar method – this is not a trend being reported on, it’s a trend being manufactured by pretending it already exists.
I’m old enough to remember 2021 and 2022 when the undesirables at Thanksgiving and Christmas weren’t Trump voters, but the unvaccinated and “Covid deniers”.
The messaging was the same, only the labels were different.
Disagreements are final. No discussion. No agreeing to disagree. No compromises. Anyone who doesn’t share your values and opinions to the last syllable is irredeemably evil.
No happy families. Families are bad.
BONUS: Cranberry Bye Bye
An old story with a new Thanksgiving twist. we’ve reported, many times, on programs in the UK and the US that pay farmers to “rewild” farmland in the name of saving the environment.
Well, this year the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is launching a scheme that will pay farmers millions in government grants to convert cranberry farms back into wetlands in order to mitigate the “climate crisis”.
What We’re Thankful for…
So, with all the bad stuff going on in the world, what is there to be thankful for?
Personally, I’m thankful for my cat. He’s sleeping next to me as I type this with dumb little paws up in the air. I’m thankful for the home that keeps me warm and the family that keeps me company.
I’m thankful for memes that make us laugh:
I’m thankful for Kamala Harris’ first video since losing the (s)election, and I’m thankful to the person who made this edit of it…
Kamala Harris finally breaks her silence after election loss
— Sean (@Xcellent78) November 27, 2024
I’m thankful for great art that entertains and inspires, like our weekend movie recommendations A Man For All Seasons (1965), The Edge (1998), and Barton Fink (1991)
And, last but not least, we’re all thankful for our readers and supporters.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
*
All told a pretty hectic Thanksgiving week for the new normal crowd, and we didn’t even mention the carbon footprint of your dinner or how sweet potato pie is a symbol of black resistance.
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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In 1983 a UFO crashed into the mountains in North Wales
news is only now leaking out
The farmer thought it was a crashed aeroplane and called the authorities
and as a security cordon was thrown around the area, he was threatened to never speak of it
Watching from a secure vantage point obscured from those who came on the clear up, was shocked to see USAF people take total control
All UFO and top security issues in the UK are run and overseen by the USA
since Churchill gave the UK to America in ww 2
Cosmic magazine got the story from a Michael Ranger from nearby
village of Groeslon North Wales
The lead article said ” UFO crashes among the sheep-shaggers”
in a very mocking piece on the front page.
Not all of these are crashes, many are actually shot down, but what annoys me is why are welshmen always described as sheep-shaggers ?
this is really very offensive, its a filthy disgusting despicable habit,
but damn nice.
“Mommy, I’m scared of COVID, carbon, Caucasians, Colonialism and Christianity. Can I be a Moslem?”
Scumbag author of article posts an anti-white meme regarding the Amerindians. What these commies & white libtards don’t tell you is the Amerindians started the hostilities/killing between the white refugees fleeing Europe & the Amerindian savages. Nobody stole the land of these animals anymore than the white man stole the land of the deer or buffalo. There was plenty of land to share, but the Indian didn’t want to share, so they attacked first. And there’s more Indians presently existing in North America (5 million) than there were when Columbus arrived (1 million). Some ‘genocide’ eh? These subhumans should be thanking the white man for coming & lifting them out of a perpetual primitive Stone Age environment/technology.
Another good piece…and a couple of those memes at the end literally made me laugh out loud! The one about the prostitutes made me reminisce about past family Thanksgivings. We had a rather large dining room for a time, one that could seat almost 30 people, and my mother loved to entertain, so she would invite all sorts of people for Thanksgiving and have her kids do the same. There were a few years in which we had a very colorful assortment of people, including rather loose women (but they weren’t hookers, for God’s sake) at my invite, a variety of musicians at the invite of me or my sister, a drunken cop and whatever misfit girlfriend (who probably were prostitutes) he had who were at the invite of one of my brothers, and a variety of shady but interesting characters at the invite of my step-father who was a CIA spook, unbeknownst to my mother, for 30 years….she would say, “I have no idea where he meets those people.” Stay naive, Mother. But injecting such a mix of people and personalities sure made for some raucous and fun holidays! Now, the nefarious forces of Jewry are doing all they can to destroy the family unit.
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” Supposedly William Casey CIA
You would need a very stupid population …. oh wait……..
@Crowley
yep more ‘white guilt’ being pushed on us