Number Five. The Western Journal. New fast food law will deliver devastating financial blow.
Legislators in the California Assembly, supported by that state’s labor union leadership (which two groups demonstrably suffer from terminal thought-sameness) passed AB 1228. The new law mandates a $20-per-hour minimum wage for fast-food workers.
The trade group representing McDonald’s franchisees estimates it will cost each of their restaurants a quarter-million dollars a year to comply.
On average (admittedly an almost meaningless measurement, but let’s go with it) each McDonald’s sells about 466 hamburgers every day, or about 167,000 red meat death bullets to the heart per year. If it costs $250,000 each year to meet the new minimum wage legislation, that means the price of a Big Mac will inflate by $1.49, from $5.15 to $6.64.
Don’t worry, this only affects large national chain restaurants doing business in California. The Assembly expects no effect at all on smaller chains or mom-and-pop cheeseburger stands.
Those who work at those insignificant burger joints for $12.50 an hour will have absolutely no reason to apply across the street at Arby’s or Wendy’s or Taco Bell or McDonald’s for a mere 60% increase in pay.
And there is more good news yet.
In order to ensure that arbitrary, Draconian, productivity-killing, profit-smothering rules are met with compliance rather than subterfuge, a statewide governing board is also established.
The notion that the Board will employ armed, uniformed storm-troopers with knee-high jack-boots and peaked hats is not true; it’s an internet rumor I just started.
But we’ll see. If the Board is going to govern, then it will need data, and it will need the ability to audit records. And what if the field inspector finds some irregularity?
The issue of enforceability did not make it into this article. Of course not; it never does.
We will just have to wait for news reports of infractions, fines and penalties. By the time they come out we will have moved on, our collective consciences once again seared by routine, strangling regulation… just like an over-cooked chunk of ground beef.
Number Four. PJ Media. The next current thing: virus with 75% kill rate breaks out in India.
Monkeypox failed to get us riled up adequately last year. Most men in the U.S. concluded that if they would limit themselves to having intimate relationships only with women, rather than with other men, monkeypox would not touch them.
That did not seem a great hurdle for most guys I hang out with.
So now floats a story of the Nipah Virus. This contagion is not exactly new; it first appeared in 1998 in Malaysia, but it now promises widespread fear, panic, lockdowns, mandated masking, and will probably require mail-in ballots before we’re done with it.
The new surge is based on a total of 4 cases and 2 fatalities in India, a country of 1.4 billion souls. It is not clear whether the 2 deaths are part of the 4 total cases, or whether they are in addition; that would make a difference of 100% in the lethality of the condition, but never mind, because we are all at risk. Again.
This new virus is zoonotic — this word will be on the test — meaning that it can spread directly from animals to humans. In particular, we should all be careful not to interact with an infected animal’s saliva or urine, which means you should probably rinse the apple before you eat it, in case the critter has… well, never mind. Just be careful of fresh fruit shipped in from Mumbai.
Already in some jurisdictions of India, masking is mandatory. Schools, banks and government offices have been shut down. We have no idea if that actually helps, but it makes for great evening news video footage.
As for the lethality, the official estimates are a kill rate between 40 and 70 percent after an infection. Granted, that’s a wide range, but how one would derive such a number from a total of 2 corpses is something of a mystery. That percentage is something like a decimal point followed by 9 zeroes before you get to the numerals.
But fear not: This time, we are told, the transmission from animal to human is definitely, definitely, definitely natural through physical contact and has nothing — nothing! — to do with gain-of-function research.
Even though this one is more deadly than COVID (maybe), and would therefore spark a much greater panic reaction in America.
Or so some are earnestly hoping.
It is truly intellectually satisfying to see the marriage of hard science with soft literature, especially when the two are so mingled that one ends up not being able to discern science fact from science fiction. Although, in this case, the claim of “science fact” may beg the question.
A professor at John Carroll University (Cleveland, Ohio) has teamed up her English literature offering with a biology class for joint instruction. Students sign up for both classes and gain credit in each.
The biology class studies climate change in the Anthropocene era, a somewhat undefined period, maybe beginning with the advent of the atom bomb in the 1940s. It refers to that time when human activity began to generate enough carbon and methane to begin to destroy the planet.
Climate change, believes English Lit Professor Debra J. Rosenthal, is an existential crisis affecting us all. It should therefore be studied in light of how we are systematically killing the Earth.
However, vast swathes of the population will not be convinced by science textbooks. The way to really make a lasting impact is to make a movie about it.
Ergo, the English class focuses on fictional tales of natural disasters caused by mankind warming the Earth. The Biology class focuses on empirical data that supports the notion that the Earth is dying.
The final project in each class is to pitch a Hollywood movie script that “portrays a changed world due to planetary heating, while also getting the science right.”
The rationale seems to be that appropriate responses to a threat only come about with emotional engagement.
Thus, the lit class studies books, short stories and poetry portraying fictional scenarios: A low-income Appalachian family afflicted with millions of butterflies confused by warming temperatures; tales of economic injustice and racial disparity caused by climate change; a story of a submerged town where residents’ feet are perpetually wet due to rising ocean levels; a fictitious documentary of towns abandoned for lack of water, and a golf course turning into one big sand trap.
The good professor explains that fiction can tell us things that science simply cannot.
And in that, I believe we can find a point of common agreement. Fiction does indeed speak of things that science does not tell us.
After abruptly resigning the office of Prime Minister earlier this year, claiming that one “should not do the job unless you have a full tank,” Jacinda Ardern is back in the news. As Prime Minister of New Zealand, Ms. Ardern’s tank was about empty after mandating 18 months of a forcible COVID lockdown of the entire island beginning in 2020.
This time, she is at the United Nations freely speaking of how to make speaking unfree if it disagrees with her.
During her time in office, Prime Minister Ardern chalked up an impressive record on social issues. She has used government resources to tackle not only COVID but also child poverty (with 1,000,000 free meals), homelessness (18,000 new housing provisions), gun control (after a domestic terror attack killed 51 Muslims), $155 million in reparations to the Maori tribe (and wearing a Maori coat to Buckingham Palace), and also banning cigarette sales to anyone younger than 14. Which tells us something about New Zealander pre-teens.
This time she is after those who promote disinformation about climate change.
Disinformation is apparently any position which disagrees with hers.
Although the presenting issue, according to Ardern, is climate change, her position appears to be to oppose any protection of free speech. Free speech is a weapon of war, she says, and in order to take away the ruinous power of free speech, censorship is required.
In only this way can the correct sort of free speech — which is to say, the free speech that agrees with her climate agenda and never questions climate change — be guaranteed.
In other words, we must kill the speech in order to save it.
This “kill it to save it” approach is becoming a recurring theme in The Alligator News Roundup. Such are the times in which we live.
It seems there are a lot of words wrapped around this concept of appropriate speech. Former Prime Minister Ardern might find it easier to simply come out with the real plan: If anything you say does not give full-throated endorsement of what the government tells you to believe, you will be subject to arrest, imprisonment and possible capital punishment.
Just call it what it is, already, and let’s get on with it.
Number One. The Blaze. Biden to announce creation of a federal gun control office.
That pesky U.S. House of Representatives has once again forced President Biden to take direct action to fix a problem those unscrupulous Congressmen simply will not tackle.
With Republicans in the majority and some squishy Democrats unwilling to face their electorate, the President is planning to create a federal “gun violence prevention” office.
He has apparently received a joint letter from 117 gun control groups asking for this.
Can 117 different activist groups possibly be wrong?
They want a full-time director of gun control; they want foreign-built firearms banned for sale in the U.S. if such firearms have “no sporting purpose;” and they want the President to declare a national emergency about gun violence.
That phrase “gun violence:” If a thug shoots another thug, that’s gun violence. If a thug shoots a police officer, that’s gun violence. If a police officer shoots a thug who is shooting civilians, is that not also gun violence? Violence is violence.
So what sort of gun violence does “gun violence prevention” prevent, exactly?
Perhaps the use of the term “violence” in “gun violence prevention” means that only those who perpetrate violence against another will be targeted by the force of the federal government. However, that would already seem to be covered by local authorities who can call on federal assistance as required.
Because we were not born yesterday, we suspect the office of gun violence prevention will include administration rules involving the usual suspects: Waiting periods for purchases, red flag provisions, crackdowns on gun stores, laws requiring pistol range training coupled with crackdowns on the existence of pistol ranges, and expanded background checks such that virtually no one can acquire a firearm legally.
If you are in a situation where you really need one, such as seeking to join yourself to an inner city gang where murdering an innocent civilian with a 9 millimeter is required for full recognition, then you may have to resort to means other than going to Academy Sports to get one. For instance, you may have to access the black market in firearms, which will probably be with us forever.
There may be one positive side to this, however. It may cause such a big news story to dominate the headlines that Hunter Biden’s next plea deal to get out of his own gun troubles may quietly go away.
And that’s The Alligator News Roundup for this week. Stay safe out there! Be sure to stay out of crowds, because almost anything out there can kill you, from a new virus to climate change to law-abiding gun nuts! It might be best to remain inside your own home! Unarmed, of course!
Enjoy your weekend!
Curt
The Alligator News Roundup