{"id":304945,"date":"2025-03-12T08:06:03","date_gmt":"2025-03-12T08:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=304945"},"modified":"2025-03-14T07:23:14","modified_gmt":"2025-03-14T07:23:14","slug":"this-week-in-the-new-normal-97","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=304945","title":{"rendered":"This Week in the New Normal #97"},"content":{"rendered":"

Off-Guardian \u2013 March 11, 2025<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Our successor to This Week in the Guardian<\/em>, This Week in the New Normal<\/a><\/em> is our weekly chart of the progress of autocracy, authoritarianism and economic restructuring around the world.<\/p>\n

1.\u201dCan anything stop bird flu?\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n

So asks the headline of this piece<\/a> in New York magazine. A feverishly apocalyptic tale of a virus that could \u2013 and probably will \u2013 kill every human being in the United States.<\/p>\n

The tone is urgent from the beginning. Hitting dates and names like the voiceover of a true crime documentary. It\u2019s also tediously long so we won\u2019t break down the whole thing.<\/p>\n

The main takeaway should be this: Despite the winding down of bird flu in the wake of Trump Musk mania, it hasn\u2019t gone away yet. In fact, articles like this make me begin to doubt my bird flu prediction from back in January.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s fault. A potentially wonderfully violent public debate will ensue, I\u2019m sure, which is very much the point of almost all news media for the last few years.<\/p>\n

All that said, the article made me laugh. There\u2019s just something so darkly amusing about his Marvin-like defeatism. He\u2019s typing his ten-thousand words out to a readership of people who don\u2019t even realise they\u2019re already dead.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n