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. “Biometric Payments Will Keep You Safe”
There’s a big push on the biometric payment issue at the moment, with numerous platforms and outlets talking them up as the next big thing.
This piece in TechRadar from April 29th is the best example, claiming that PayPal is “battling the beast” of online fraud, and that biometric payment systems using fingerprints and face scans will help keep us all safe from hucksters, charlatans and Nigerian Princes:
The biometric verification system not only enhances security but also makes it user friendly. The traditional approaches to authentication, with their repeated entering of passwords, attempts to remember some kind of passwords, or secret questions, are rather cumbersome and slow. Biometrics suggest a seamless alternative. A quick touch of a glance at a camera secures access to your account—this adds up to great convenience in login time with high efficiency customers prefer, without compromising security.
So, go ahead and let Google/PayPal/whoever scan your face and retinas and fingerprints and record your voice patterns.
After all, it’s not like there’s advanced AI technology out there that could use your face and voice scans to create fake videos of you.
2. De Santis’ Lab-Grown Meat Ban
Florida Governor Ron De Santis signed a ban on lab-grown meat in his state this week, claiming it will protect the beef industry.
The real reason is to steer the conversation. By associating reluctance to eat “cell cultivated meat” products with prominent right-wingers they turn it into a partisan issue.
This way they are encouraging the young liberal set to embrace the “food transition” as a way of “owning and trolling right-wing chuds”, while simultaneously making left-leaning types who are reticent to “eat ze bugs” afraid of speaking up for fear of being associated with MAGA hats.
(Just wait for the “I ate lab-grown meat and it was better than the real thing” reviews to appear in Vox or the HuffPo and the like.)
Then, sometime down the line, a prominent right-winger will claim “lab-grown meat causes AIDs” or something equally asinine, and totally discredit any-and-all resistance to the fake food revolution.
3. Gaza Protests and Celebrity Arrests
Student protests against the ongoing bombing of Gaza by the IDF have been raging across US college campuses for weeks now, with increasing ferocity. They have inevitably been accused of anti-Semitism.
At the same time, counter-protests from dude bro types made the news as well, this time for being potentially racist towards black people,
It’s all so wonderfully divisive. And has allowed the US Senate to further criminalize free speech by “expanding the definition of anti-Semitism”.
Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was arrested at one such protest, this was totally an organic thing that happened, and not even slightly a contrived event to increase her pro-peace bona fides before the election in November.
BONUS: Cringe of the week
Here is actor Mark Hamill chairing the White House press briefing on “Star Wars Day” (May 4th), during which he calls Biden “Joebi Won Kenobi”.
If this isn’t the lamest thing to happen this year come January 1st 2025, then somebody had a very bad summer.
RIP Bernard Hill 1944-2024
British actor Bernard Hill died yesterday, he was 79. A long and storied career on stage and screen, with highlights including Boys From the Black Stuff and I, Claudius, he will forever be remembered for his performance as King Theoden in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
A personal favourite, he will be missed.
*
All told a pretty hectic week for the new normal crowd, and we didn’t even mention Canada trying to have their cake and eat it by claiming “foreign interference impacted our election” but also that “it didn’t change who won”.
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2. De Santis’ Lab-Grown Meat Ban
The real reason is to steer the conversation.
A rare pun: well done!
And conspiratorially paranoid as all fuck ! Couldn’t even read the rest after seeing that. And ALL without one shred of proof!
Student protests against the ongoing bombing of Gaza by the IDF have been raging across US college campuses for weeks now,
So the media reframed the protest against the genocide of unarmed civilians into protests against jews/anti semitism.
Unfortunately the news ran 200 days of absolutely zero Palestinians so much as holding a gun.
nope. Not one.
Instead it was hundreds of days of bombing shooting and killing around 380,000 unarmed civilians.
[They always move the decimal point to the left when genociding unarmed people.
Interesting note?
Multiple interviews with IDF soldiers reveal they view every Palestinian, even new born babies, as “Hamas terrorists”
So they are admitting they are genociding the dirt peope.
Even more fun, at a couple of the counter-protest incidents, it was discovered that some of those ‘counter-protesters’ weren’t only not students … but were active duty idf military … but, then, the idf has been active here in the US for decades, whether training our local police to use their battlefield combat gear (courtesy of Uncle Sugar), to train jews in weapons and tactics at private gunnery ranges in OH and PA and NY, etc., to supervising jewish students here in the US in censoring online content …
The Senate hasn’t passed the anti-semitic hate speech bill yet