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Biden Calls For Two Weeks Of Not Cooking On Gas Stoves To Flatten The Curve

POLITICS · Jan 14, 2023 · BabylonBee.com

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Joe Biden has called on Americans to refrain from cooking with gas stoves for the next two weeks to help “flatten the curve”.

“It’s real simple, folks,” said President Biden. “These gas stoves have brought upon us a terrible pandemic of asthma, brain damage, and scurvy! Now folks, I still believe in America. I believe we can beat these stoves! And it starts with us coming together to flatten the curve of, you know, the thing! For just two weeks, America! Not a joke!”

In addition to the two week ban on gas stoves, the Biden administration has also recommended social distancing from gas stoves for the foreseeable future. “After the two weeks, if you must cook on a gas stove, we recommend doing so from a safe distance of six feet,” said Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. “We advise all kitchens be marked six feet from the gas stove, and ingredients be lobbed at your pans from that safe distance. The science on this is settled. All of these precautions should be continued until Moderna comes out with their brand-new gas stove vaccine.”

While many Americans have heeded the President’s call, the administration has expressed deep frustration at the stubborn refusal of Republican-leaning areas. “We have to have consequences for people who refuse to follow the science, and risk the lives of others by continuing to cook with gas,” said MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “The first step ought to be a stove passport, which only allows those with electric stoves to participate in society. If that’s not sufficient, then we must refuse hospital beds to those who brought sickness on themselves with their ignorant choice of stove.”

At publishing time, the Biden administration had extended the two week timeframe to whenever the next President is sworn in.

From Babylon Bee, here.

Medicine: Playing God

Where Are the Intellectually Curious Doctors?

By Brian C. Joondeph, M.D.
American Thinker

January 9, 2023

Medicine, like most sciences, entails thinking and hypothesis creation to explain the myriad complexities of the healthy and diseased human body.

Hypotheses are tested and refined, with new information or insights nudging or abruptly shifting current knowledge in a new direction.

For examples, bloodletting with leeches is no longer standard medical practice for most ailments as it was up until the late 19th century. More recently, Vioxx was considered a safer painkiller, until it was found to cause heart attacks and strokes, similar to another “safe and effective” product introduced about two years ago. Oxycontin was marketed as a nonaddictive pain killer until it devasted hundreds of thousands of lives and families and was shown to be otherwise.

Physicians, upon medical school graduation, recite the Hippocratic Oath. Quoting from the revised version (simply because the language is easier to understand), physicians swear, “I will not be ashamed to say, ‘I know not’” and “Above all, I must not play at God.”

Saying “I don’t know” is what drives the pursuit of new or alternate hypotheses. Physicians of a few hundred years ago saw their bloodletting patients die and didn’t know why, so they devised better treatments by asking questions and not playing God.

Some modern physicians play God by declaring, “I am the science,” as if they are the final arbiter in all of medicine. I assume Dr. Anthony Fauci recited the Hippocratic Oath when he graduated medical school.

What questions should physicians have been asking over the past two years? Are they staying mum because they believe the science is settled and challenges to the status quo are heresy? Or are they cowed into silence over fear over losing their ability to practice the profession which they spent a decade learning and from which they earn their living?

Start with the highly touted COVID-19 vaccines.

In the United States, 80% of the population have received one dose and 68% two doses. Yet almost three years into the pandemic, this recent headline from ABC News suggests that there is no end in sight, “WHO sounds the alarm: New COVID variant is most transmissible yet.” And the Washington Post cautions “COVID hospitalizations rising post-Thanksgiving.”

Continue reading…

From American Thinker, here.

Vietnam, Afghanistan, Ukraine… Seeing a Pattern Yet?

The Evil Strategy of “Degrading” Russia

By 

The Future of Freedom Foundation

January 7, 2023

 

One of the fascinating aspects of the war in Ukraine has been the extreme reluctance of the mainstream press and Pentagon-CIA supporters to acknowledge, much less condemn, the Pentagon for its role in bringing about this war. After all, the two concepts — the Pentagon’s bringing about the crisis and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — are not mutually exclusive. You can have both things happening — the Pentagon gins up the crisis with the aim of “degrading” Russia and then Russia falls into the trap by getting mired down in a deadly and destructive war against Ukraine.

But when one raises the first part of this equation — that is, the Pentagon’s role in ginning up the crisis — the mainstream press and Pentagon-CIA supporters go ballistic. For them, it’s heresy to point out what the Pentagon did to gin up the crisis. For them, the Pentagon and the CIA are innocent, virtuous babes in the woods that would never do such a thing. For them, the Pentagon and the CIA are nothing but a “force for good” in the world. 

But we know that the Pentagon and the CIA do engage in these types of evil machinations. In fact, they did the same thing to Russia in 1979. They lured the Russians into invading Afghanistan, with the same goal they had with their Ukraine machinations — to give the Russians their own “Vietnam,” which meant “degrading” Russia through the killing of massive numbers of Russian soldiers. 

“Conspiracy theory”? Well, not exactly. That’s because National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, in a remarkable degree of candor, admitted that they had knowingly, deliberately, and intentionally done it. He was proud of it. He was bragging about how they had gotten the Russians to fall into their trap. The entire national-security establishment loved the fact that tens of thousands of Russian soldiers were being killed in the process. The more soldiers being killed, the more Russia was being “degraded.”

Continue reading…

From LRC, here.

SHORT AND SWEET: Walter Block Illuminates So-Called ‘Pay Gap’

Can Wage Transparency Fix the Pay Gap?

By Walter E. Block

The Libertarian Institute

January 6, 2023

 

Will wage transparency reduce or eliminate the pay gap between men and women?

Yes and no.

Let’s take the no side first. Wage transparency will not reduce or eliminate this pay gap because it emanates from real differences in productivity (actually discounted marginal revenue productivity, but we’re going to keep it simple, here). That is to say, there is an economic law that maintains that wages tend to reflect productivity. What is productivity? That is the amount by which you increase your employer’s bottom line for every hour you are on the assembly line, or shop floor, or driving a truck or pecking away at a computer at your desk.

Suppose that your productivity is $20 per hour. Any other wage apart from that is unsustainable, at least in the long run. If you are being paid $30 hourly, your employer is losing $10 per hour by hiring you. If this practice of his is widespread, he will tend to go bankrupt. If your pay is $15, he is profiting from your labor to the tune of $5 per hour. This, too, will not and cannot last. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, the economy abjures a profit: some other employer will offer you $16, since he can then earn a $4 profit from your work, another will up this to $17, with the intention of “exploiting” you at the rate of $3 per hour. Where will this process end? It can only culminate at equilibrium, assuming nothing else changes, at $20 per hour.

Why do women earn less than men? It is simple: they bring lower productivity levels to the market than men, on average. A century or two ago this was easy to see. Most jobs required upper body strength, and males, on average, are stronger than females. This of course applies to a far less degree in the modern era. How, then, to explain the gap that remains even to this day? The best theory out there is the marital asymmetry hypothesis: married women do the lion’s share of housework, child care, cooking, cleaning, shopping, etc. Whenever you do anything, you do it at the cost of doing something else less well. Their focus is more on the home, not the business world. Hence, lower productivity in the latter realm.

There are two bits of evidence that support this contention. One, there is a wage gap between all men and all women, but when broken down by marriage status, this divergence between never married males and females virtually disappears into thin air. Two, if women of equal productivity were really paid less than men, greater profits could be earned in industries that hire more females, and this is just plain silly: profits tend to equalize, given risk, in all areas of the economy. Any divergences are met with investment reallocations, toward high profit areas, reducing profits, and away from low profit industries, raising them there.

Here is the yes side. Greater wage transparency will make it unavoidably clear that there are indeed sexual wage gaps. Given the economic illiteracy of not only the general public but also on the part of most of the political leadership of this country, stringent laws will be enacted requiring equal pay. They will not mandate that male wages be reduced; rather that female compensation be raised. This will increase unemployment for the latter group. Returning to one of our earlier examples, if employers are compelled to pay $30 per hour to females with a productivity level of $20 per hour, they just will not be hired at all in the first place, and, if already on the job, will be fired.

A similar occurrence takes place at present with the minimum wage law. If it is set at $7 per hour, then all those with productivities less than that amount are unemployable. If it is set at $10 per hour, then all those with productivities less than that amount are unemployable. If it is set at $15 per hour, then all those with productivities less than that amount are unemployable.

I have no problem with employers and employees sharing information about salaries. It is a free country. But it is not a free country when the government compels either to do so. Will this narrow the pay gap? Of course not. Wages are dependent upon productivity. Women earn less than males because their productivity, on average, is lower. Publicizing statistics about wages will not change productivity by one iota. Therefore, it will not alter wages. Ergo, this pay gap will remain.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

From LRC, here.