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. Bacon causes cancer?
A new study blames nitrate chemicals used to preserve bacon and ham on over 54,000 cases of cancer, according to the ever calm and measured Daily Mail headline:
Scientists demand ban on mass-produced bacon after 54,000 cases of cancer are linked to the nitrates-rich meat
As usual with “ban bad food” headlines, the angle is how much money [INSERT BAD THING} is costing the NHS:
A coalition of leading scientists says the refusal to ban nitrites – preservatives used to keep processed meats pink and long-lasting – has come at a devastating human and financial cost, with the NHS footing an estimated £3 billion bill to treat preventable cancers over the past decade.
…you don’t need to explain this. Meat bad, bugs good. Ban and tax and blah blah blah.
2. “Assisted Dying” for autism?
The Lords Select Committee on the pending Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill — aka the Assisted Dying bill — heard interesting testimony this week.
Representatives from the Royal Colleges roundly came out against the bill, with one claiming it went against everything he became a doctor to protect.
Meanwhile, the Bill’s proponents had a rocky week. First, Kim Leadbetter MP admitted that the panels proposed by the would not be courts, and therefore would not be bound to hear witnesses from both sides. Then, Lord Falconer came out with this:
The mood is slowly turning on this, partly because they are doing such a poor job of selling it. There’s a good write-up on this in The Critic.
3. German court finds doctors not responsible for vaccine injuries
A German Federal Court has ruled that health care practitioners who administered Covid vaccines are not liable for resultant injuries. Instead, local state authorities must bear the responsibility.
According to Christof Plothe of the World Council for Health, this puts Germany roughly in line with the US system of liability shielding.
But it’s not just the US, but the UK and most of the rest of the world. We know from leaked contracts that vaccine makers are protected from liability, and that all compensation for the “vaccine injured” has come from state programs.
Essentially – worldwide – tax payers paid for the manufacture of the vaccine, the acquisition of the vaccine, the distribution of the vaccine and are now paying to compensate the people injured (or killed) by the vaccine.
The Covid vaccine remains one of the greatest financial scams of all time.
You can read a full report on this on The Defender.
BONUS: Nothing burger of the week
Google has hailed another “breakthrough” in quantum computing, following the publication of a paper in Nature, “Observation of constructive interference at the edge of quantum ergodicity”.
The press coverage is fairly unapologetically bigging this up, but there isn’t much to really talk up at this point.
The truth is, as it stands, quantum computing barely exists. It’s a system of theories and simulations and algorithms running on classical computers.
So don’t take swaggering bragging about their technological prowess to seriously just yet.
So when they talk about “quantum computing”, they mean a program on a normal computer “simulating” what a quantum computer might be like.
It’s not all bad…
Our fellow Independent Media Alliance members at Above Phone have released a great new report on the global state of Digital ID titled “Life Under Digital ID: A Global Analysis with Solutions”. You can claim a free copy of the report by signing up to their mailing list here.
In other good news, Bill Gates’ “alternative protein” company Beyond Meat is facing serious financial problems after a debt restructuring caused its share prices to collapse.
What a shame.
Also, the UK puts their clocks back this weekend, but the US doesn’t until next week. Take advantage of the temporarily shrunken time difference and call your friends and relatives on the other side of the pond.
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All told a pretty hectic week for the new normal crowd, and we didn’t even mention Justin Trudeau’s collapse into pathetic “celebrity romance” or the rise of private prosecutions in the UK.
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