What Chinese People Think of Their Government’s “Zero COVID” Policy - Many citizens don’t know anyone who’s had the disease, yet their faith in the country’s restrictive rules is waning. - link
The Averted National Rail Strike Is a Parable of Contemporary American Capitalism - Railroads are prioritizing payments to Wall Street stockholders over everything else, including serving the public interest. - link
Will Republicans Who Have Soured on Trump Turn Out for Herschel Walker? - With the Senate not in play, some conservatives fear that Walker won’t inspire voters. “I think a lot of people’s consciences will allow them to, like me, stay home,” one said. - link
Harvey Weinstein, the Monster of #MeToo - If Weinstein is acquitted in L.A., it will be tempting to conclude that #MeToo is over. But, even if he is convicted, some may reach the same conclusion. - link
What Elon Musk Doesn’t Know About Free Speech - The First Amendment does not protect one’s right to have a social-media account, but today’s dissent has mostly moved online, and, as a result, is privately owned. - link
Millions of lives are at stake as the country prepares to relax its Covid strategy.
China is in the midst of its largest Covid-19 wave yet after three years of a strict zero-Covid policy. But rather than impose another round of lockdowns, the national government is reportedly considering easing the Covid mitigation measures that have governed its people’s lives since January 2020.
It is an abrupt pivot for President Xi Jinping, who has prided himself on controlling the novel coronavirus’s spread compared to the United States and other Western countries. Though Xi himself hasn’t commented on the policy changes, it’s possible that he and the rest of China’s leadership may have felt they had little choice in the face of widespread protests opposing the zero-Covid rules.
But reopening the country does not mean the risk has passed. Experts anticipate an enormous so-called “exit” wave if China permits people to continue going about their lives even as Covid-19 is spreading in the community, rather than lock down entire blocks or even neighborhoods as in the past. While there is much uncertainty about how such a scenario would play out, one projection of what would happen if the strict zero-Covid rules are lifted anticipated as many as 279 million cases and 2.1 million deaths in just three months, the dead being mostly older unvaccinated adults.
The Chinese population is more vulnerable than places where the virus has spread widely for the past few years. Though vaccination rates are pretty high, around 90 percent, the vaccines China deployed are not as effective as those used in the US and Europe. And a much smaller proportion of the population has been infected by the virus, which does confer another layer of protection for people. The virus should find it easier to move from person to person.
For most people, Covid-19 will look like it has for their peers, in terms of age and health, across the rest of the world. But China has one additional vulnerability: the elderly, among whom vaccine uptake for critical booster doses has been particularly low. In most countries, vaccination rates have been lower among younger age groups. In China, the opposite has happened — and it could make the country’s exit wave out of zero Covid more dangerous and deadly.
A fair number of those elderly people with no Covid-19 immunity would end up in the hospital if the virus spreads widely. Experts fear those hospitals wouldn’t be able to handle the surge in patients while also caring for the rest of their patients who need hospital-level care. China has invested substantially in the physical infrastructure of its health system, but its workforce is still catching up. As in the US, staff shortages as much as a lack of beds or equipment could lead to the kind of crisis triaging that leads to deaths. It already happened in Wuhan’s 2020 wave.
“It’s very easy to strain resources and crash the health system,” Xi Chen, a health economist at the Yale School of Public Health, told me. “Reopening will generate a lot of stress.”
China’s zero-Covid policy up till now has arguably been a success, with one major asterisk. Outside of Wuhan, further outbreaks had been minimal until spring waves this year in Shanghai and Hong Kong that were at that point the largest of the pandemic. Jennifer Bouey, an epidemiologist who leads China studies for the Rand Corporation, told me that, aside from the large exception of the initial cover-up of Covid-19’s existence, she didn’t think China had necessarily had a bad pandemic response.
But Covid-19, especially in its evolved form, is so highly contagious that zero Covid was never going to last forever. Hundreds of millions of people are facing for the first time the possibility of widespread Covid-19 infections in their community.
“People are worried,” Bouey, who communicates with friends and relatives in China regularly over WeChat, said. They’ve asked her if they are going to experience a big wave.
“I said yes. Every country had to go through that.”
To date, China has reported less than 4 million Covid-19 cases and about 16,000 people have died. (Bouey said these days she tends to trust the numbers from China, subject of dispute early in the pandemic.) The US has recorded almost 99 million cases and is now approaching 1,090,000 deaths.
Even accounting for some asymptomatic cases and other undercounting, with more than 1.4 billion people, China is home to hundreds of millions of people who have not yet been exposed to the novel coronavirus.
Most of those people have been vaccinated, about 90 percent according to the official data. But there are two reasons that isn’t necessarily as much protection as it may sound like.
First, China developed its own vaccines, which rely on dead virus rather than the mRNA technology mostly used in the US and Europe. China’s vaccines have not been as effective, according to the available clinical data. Nevertheless, Xi has refused any suggestion that his country import the mRNA vaccines that are already on the market. The Chinese state media had also, earlier in the pandemic, stoked conspiracy theories about the Western mRNA vaccines, which may have made importing them a political nonstarter.
So Chinese leaders instead insisted on the country developing its own version. But shots may not be widely available in time if the country is reopening now.
Making matters worse, older people have the least protection among the Chinese population. They are the age group with the lowest Covid-19 vaccination rates, and the numbers are even lower for critical booster doses. As of August, just two-thirds of people over 60 had received an additional dose, worse than even the United States’s relatively abysmal rates and significantly below countries like Germany (around 85 percent at the time) and Japan (around 90 percent). For people over 80, the most vulnerable, fewer than 40 percent received a booster shot.
China has faced a few challenges in protecting its most vulnerable. First, older Chinese people are less likely to be vaccinated in general, with many born before the country began a major childhood vaccination campaign. Fewer than 7 percent of people in this age group get their yearly flu shot and fewer than 2 percent get the pneumonia vaccine. The Chinese health system adds obstacles because it doesn’t use primary care doctors, the physicians who are seeing these patients most often, to get people vaccinated. Patients must instead go to specialized vaccination clinics, which may be more difficult for the elderly to reach.
And seniors’ low vaccine uptake is also, indirectly, a result of the zero-Covid strategy. China could not readily test its vaccines within its borders because there were not many cases. Clinical trials in the US and Europe relied on the rampant spread of Covid-19 to evaluate their vaccines’ effectiveness. But China didn’t have that opportunity and so it had to outsource those natural experiments, mostly to developing countries.
The populations in those countries are generally younger, however, so it took longer to collect data for older age groups. That is why China rolled out its vaccine in the opposite way to almost any other country: The vaccine was authorized for younger people first and then later, once the data was in, for seniors. Experts say it created some confusion among that population about whether or not they should actually get vaccinated.“The communication wasn’t that clear,” Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong, told me. “People thought, ‘Previously you said I didn’t need to get it.’”
For elderly people who have not gotten the booster shots, their last shot may have been a year or more ago and, based on available evidence from other countries, their immunity is likely to have waned substantially. That raises the risk that they will develop serious symptoms, end up in the hospital, and possibly die.
There are a lot of unknowns about how this reopening might look in reality, which will dictate the extent of any exit wave. Cowling pointed out that the Chinese government could quickly revert to its stricter measures if cases start to spiral out of control. But, according to the experts I spoke to and the reports they have received from people in China, Chinese hospitals are preparing for a significant wave of infections. According to a report Bouey saw over WeChat and shared with me, “the government is planning to open up and anticipating the large increase of hospitalizations.”
The omicron variant already sparked the kind of major wave in Hong Kong that experts fear in mainland China. Within just a few months, 10 million people there had been infected and 10,000 had died. The health care system strained under the weight.
“There was a flood of people waiting outside emergency rooms, stuck in wards shoulder to shoulder,” Cowling said. “We know in Hong Kong what the risk is for China.”
Chinese hospitals may struggle to handle the flood of Covid-19 patients they are about to see, according to the experts I spoke to. The consequences could be grave for people infected with the coronavirus as well as other people with serious medical needs.
The country’s health system relies heavily upon hospitals. General practitioners are not as prevalent as they are in the US and European health systems, Chen said. Instead, people will generally go to the hospital for most of their health care needs. In more normal times, that may be fine — but when thousands of people descend on hospitals because they are infected with Covid-19, some of them needing serious assistance, chaos could soon follow.
China has plenty of hospital beds, experts said. Since 2010, it has built hospital buildings across the country. The problem is there are not enough people to staff them. If there isn’t a doctor on call or a nurse who can tend to patients in between doctors’ visits, the quality of care is going to suffer. Some of the hard-hit areas could live through something similar to what happened in parts of Italy in 2020, Bouey said, when people died because there was no hospital staff to treat them.
Here is the problem in crude numbers: China has more hospital beds than the United States, 4.3 versus 2.9 per 1,000 people, according to the most recent World Bank data. But China also has fewer doctors than the US (2 versus 2.6 per 1,000 people) and significantly fewer nurses (2.7 versus 14.6 per 1,000).
“You have all these hospitals, but what’s the quality of the health care?” Bouey said.
And patient care could suffer beyond the Covid-19 wards. Because the Chinese health system is so reliant on hospitals, if those facilities cannot maintain their typical standards of care, people with chronic conditions or who experience a medical emergency could end up worse off.
That is what happened in Wuhan during its initial outbreak. According to a February 2021 study published in the BMJ, people in the immediate area with diabetes and certain heart conditions (including those experiencing a heart attack) suffered higher mortality rates than patients elsewhere in China. Drugs that are critical for managing those diseases (insulin) or procedures that can avert a medical emergency (like stenting) were harder to get when the city’s hospitals were overwhelmed by Covid-19 patients.
“We saw patients waiting in long lines at the hospital, with no family doctor to call,” Chen said. “Any consideration of a quick reopening is going to give all this pressure to the health care system.”
Hospitals are doing what they can to prepare, but there are limits. Increasing the number of ICU beds by 10 percent, as the government recently ordered according to the WeChat report that Bouey shared with me, should not be a major problem. But finding the personnel for them would be. Every nurse who expected to enter the workforce through 2025 would need to work in their hospital’s ICU in order to fill the estimated 480,000 nursing positions that the country needs to staff 80,000 new ICU beds.
“This can be a major barrier,” the report concluded.
The experts I spoke to also said that adequately staffing the Chinese health system, given the recent building bonanza, would take years. While the United States has also had staffing struggles during the worst of the pandemic, Chen pointed to traveling nurses as one way the US health system could fill staffing shortages (albeit imperfectly and at significant cost).
No such reserve exists in China. They haven’t had time to build it.
The country’s insistence that a zero-Covid strategy could work over the long term may end up making the exit wave worse, experts said. Countries like Australia and New Zealand that also employed zero-Covid plans were buying time to vaccinate their people and then they prepared for the reopening. But China has struggled to vaccinate its most vulnerable and it has not invested enough in building up its health system’s capacity in the meantime.
“The government was so convinced zero Covid would work, so focused on measures necessary to sustain that, that not enough investment and preparation and planning” were put into a scenario in which it failed, Cowling said.
More vaccinations would help, and the government recently announced that it would particularly target people over 80 in the weeks ahead. Cowling told me that, in an ideal world, China would try to maintain its zero-Covid strategy for three more months and go on a massive vaccination campaign. But the social and political climate may not allow that.
The national government is trying to make the new normal more manageable and less disruptive for people and for the health care system. One of the changes it is expected to make is that, instead of locking down an entire apartment building or neighborhood when an infection is found, a person could quarantine at home.
But a huge number of infections appears inevitable and a small but significant share of them will turn serious. As Cowling put it to me, even a small fraction becomes a problem if the denominator gets big enough.
So the world’s most populous country faces an uncertain future. It has spent three years holding Covid-19 back, but the virus is on the precipice of breaking through. Their health care system may not be ready. The stakes are high.
“I know the wave will come once they open up,” Bouey said in our interview. When it does, Chen told me, “the health care system is not ready.”
Tuesday night was yet another defeat for Donald Trump.
One month later after Election Day, Sen. Raphael Warnock’s win in the Georgia Senate runoff finally ended the 2022 midterms on Tuesday night. The Democrat incumbent’s victory over former Georgia football star Herschel Walker served as the grand finale of the entire election cycle, and strengthened Democratic control over the United States Senate while setting the stage for 2024.
These are three of the biggest winners — and three of the biggest losers — of the night.
It wasn’t just that Herschel Walker lost on Tuesday night. It was how he lost.
Walker became a national laughingstock during his campaign. The losing Republican seemed to be a constant font of scandal. Almost daily, there was a new revelation about Walker fathering children out of wedlock, about his alleged domestic abuse, and about the anti-abortion politician paying for abortions. Walker has denied the latter two allegations. It was so bad that his son even celebrated Walker’s loss on Twitter.
On top of that, Walker was a historically awful candidate. He was prone to confusing riffs on topics like werewolves fighting vampires while on the stump and managed to fumble interviews even with friendly conservative outlets. The result was that he was often chaperoned by incumbent Republican senators like Lindsey Graham or Ted Cruz when appearing on television and sat smiling while they answered questions.
Walker had a problematic history and had even written a book about his history of mental illness, in which he confessed to domestic violence. But before his run, he was best known as a legendary football player at the University of Georgia who led the Bulldogs to a national championship in 1980.
Now, he has become a political punchline who is as much known for his failed, scandal-filled Senate bid as his football stardom.
The midterms were a disaster for Donald Trump, and Warnock’s win merely added an exclamation point to the former president’s failure to establish himself as a general election kingmaker.
Walker had been Trump’s personal choice as a Senate candidate in Georgia and turned out to be the only Republican statewide candidate to lose in the Peach State in 2022. In contrast, other Republicans like Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger not only romped to victory in their primaries against Trump-backed challengers but won comfortably in November, running far ahead of Walker.
In other swing states, Trump-backed Senate candidates suffered embarrassing losses, including Blake Masters in Arizona and Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, along with a host of other candidates who embraced the former president’s lies about the 2020 presidential election. While Trump has still maintained his base in the party, Walker’s loss serves to reinforce why so many other Republicans are skeptical about his 2024 campaign: It’s increasingly clear that Trump drives away the swing voters that the GOP needs to win.
Warnock’s win means that Democrats now have 51 seats in the Senate, and that gives Sen. Joe Manchin a lot more freedom.
While the West Virginia Democrat will no longer play kingmaker on policy as he has for the past two years in the Senate, he now faces a reelection bid in 2024. Although any campaign in deep-red West Virginia will be an uphill battle for Manchin — already, Republican Rep. Alex Mooney has launched a campaign bid and incumbent Gov. Jim Justice is exploring as well — the extra Democratic vote in the Senate gives Manchin breathing room to distance himself from more progressive Democrats and make the case to voters about his political independence. It means Democrats don’t need Manchin’s vote for everything and that the West Virginia Democrat can safely vote against his party.
Warnock’s win means that after two long years, Vice President Kamala Harris doesn’t have to do the job that the Constitution mandates her to do. The Founders only gave the vice president one explicit duty: “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.”
And, for the past two years, the Senate has been 50-50 with equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats. That has meant that Harris has had to cast 26 tiebreaking votes in less than two years in office. Now, with Democrats having 51 seats in the Senate, Harris is slightly less tied to her day job and has more freedom to serve a role in the executive branch.
The Democratic majority in the Senate would free Harris up to leave Washington and not only fulfill a traditional duty of vice presidents, attending funerals overseas as a representative of the US government, but also to hit the road as a surrogate for the White House.
Georgia is still a swing state. Even after Democrats had key victories in there in 2020 with Joe Biden winning the general election and Warnock and Sen. Jon Ossoff winning their Senate seats in a runoff, there was still some question over quite how much Georgia had shifted.
After all, Biden’s win was so narrow it took days to call, and the runoff happened in early January as Trump was loudly pushing his complaints about the 2020 election. And, this November, Republicans swept their statewide races with Kemp easily brushing aside Democrat Stacey Abrams in a rematch of their 2018 race. Georgia’s realignment was made clear by Warnock easily winning Cobb County, prosperous suburbs north of Atlanta that had been the fulcrum of Republican efforts to turn Georgia red in the late 20th century. Southwest of Atlanta, Warnock almost won Fayette County where the metropolis’s suburbs turn to exurbs. With metro Atlanta dominating the state, Warnock’s margins in these areas hint that demographic trends in Georgia will only continue to boost Democrats in the short term.
For the third time, Mitch McConnell will fail to regain the Senate majority in a cycle where Republican primary voters nominated weak candidates.
In 2010, Democrats held the Senate by the skin of their teeth after Republicans nominated weak candidates in states like Delaware, Colorado, and Nevada. In 2012, the same thing happened as Republicans nominated candidates like Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana, who both made gaffes about rape during their campaigns. The cycle repeated itself in 2022 when Trump-backed candidates like Masters, Oz, and Walker cost Republicans seats.
The result is that McConnell will spend another two years in the minority, being forced to play defense against Senate Democrats and unable to block Joe Biden’s nominees.
Warnock’s win gives Democrats more power in the upper chamber.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D), also a pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, has won the Georgia runoff, giving Democrats an even larger — and more powerful — majority in the Senate.
In a closely contested election, Warnock defeated former football star Herschel Walker (R), winning 51.2 percent of the vote to the Republican’s 48.8 percent, as of an Associated Press call late Tuesday evening.
Warnock’s win follows a tempestuous election cycle that centered heavily on Walker’s many scandals and numerous policy gaffes, including allegations that he paid for two women’s abortions, despite being anti-abortion himself. He’s denied doing so. Walker has also faced allegations of domestic violence and claims that he misrepresented his business experience, charitable donations, and work with law enforcement.
While Walker faced scrutiny for his personal issues, Warnock focused his campaign on the legislation he’s helped pass — including out-of-pocket caps on insulin for Medicare beneficiaries — and his willingness to work with Republican senators like Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) on issues like infrastructure and trade. He stressed, too, that the election was less about partisanship and more about “right and wrong.” That message was intended to appeal to cross-over voters who this year backed Republicans like Gov. Brian Kemp, but couldn’t stomach Walker and the allegations against him.
Warnock’s victory is not quite as decisive for the Senate majority as it was in 2021, when his win determined control of the chamber. But Warnock’s success still gives Democrats a pivotal seat. With Warnock in office, Democrats will have a 51-person majority instead of the 50-50 majority they’ve been working with for the last two years.
That extra seat guarantees Democrats will hold majorities in committees, an arrangement that means they can expedite their judicial nominees as well as more contentious legislation that Republicans may not support. It also means that Vice President Kamala Harris will no longer have to serve as a tiebreaker on particularly polarizing nominees and bills, and it will dilute the power of conservative Democrats like Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) to stymie legislation.
“One seat may not seem like much for most folks, but for Sen. [Chuck] Schumer and the rest of his colleagues, it could mean all the difference in the world,” said Jim Manley, a former staffer for Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Currently, since the Senate is split 50-50, committees are also split 50-50, meaning nominees and legislation can wind up getting tie votes if they are divisive. A tie vote doesn’t block a nominee or bill from advancing, though it does add time to the process, and makes it a more complicated one. In the case of a tie on a judicial nominee, Senate Majority Leader Schumer has to file a special resolution on the Senate floor to discharge them, for example.
As HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery has explained, those resolutions add an extra four hours of floor time to the consideration of any nominee, and they’ve already had to be used on five of Biden’s selections, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Another four judges that are in committee right now will also need them due to Republican opposition. That extra time only serves to lengthen an already slow process in the Senate.
With Warnock’s election, Democrats now have a firm majority in the upper chamber, and will have majorities in different committees to pass bills and judges along party lines. The main benefit of this is that they can move more quickly and get more done. That’s important since the GOP will have control of the House starting in January. Without much ability to pass legislation through Congress, confirming judicial and executive branch nominees will be a key area that the Senate has purview over. As progressive advocacy group Demand Justice previously told Vox, there are still upward of 100 federal judicial vacancies that Democrats could help fill in the next two years.
“Sen. Warnock’s victory is a big boost for the Democratic effort to rebalance the courts,” Demand Justice chief counsel Chris Kang told Vox in a statement. “Now, a larger Democratic majority can limit Republicans’ ability to gum up the works.”
A 51st senator also gives Democrats a bit more of a buffer for close votes on nominees in case a lawmaker is absent and unable to vote on the floor. It makes it tougher, too, for one Democratic senator — like Manchin or Sinema — to sink a nominee or bill if they are opposed, though a Democrat-only budget bill like the Inflation Reduction Act or American Rescue Plan is probably off the table now that the party no longer has House control.
Additionally, having committee majorities also gives Democrats more oversight power if they want to use it to scrutinize former President Donald Trump and his administration’s policies. Previously, Democrats would have needed Republican cooperation to move forward with things like subpoenas on investigations, and now they no longer do.
Beyond the impact it could have on the Senate’s daily workings, a 51st seat also helps Democrats hedge against future losses. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop has explained, that extra seat is especially important since Democrats could lose seats in 2024 when the Senate map is set to be a lot less favorable to them.
As such, Warnock’s win may not be the game-changer it was in 2021, though it still has significant implications for Democratic power in the new term.
Mirabai makes light of a wrist issue to claim silver at the Worlds -
Alexandre Dumas, Sir Baffert, Albinus, Loch Lomond and Rubirosa catch the eye -
Son Of A Gun shows out -
Prague and Turkoman work well -
India vs Bangladesh, 2nd ODI | Mehidy ton lifts Bangladesh to 271-7 against India - Mehidy Hasan Miraz got a lot of his runs square of the wicket as his picked his gaps, especially against the spinners
Woman’s murder case cracked -
Delhi riots | Court to pass order on Umar Khalid's interim bail plea on December 12 - Umar Khalid has moved the plea seeking two-week interim bail for his sister’s marriage
“Neither ignorance nor stature can provide an excuse for plagiarism” -
Doctrine of separation of powers among govt's three organs must be respected: Dhankhar - Mr. Dhankhar also noted that it is disconcerting that on “such a momentous issue, so vital to democratic fabric, there has been no focus in Parliament, now for over seven years”
Protracted legal battles await accused in Vizhinjam port protest cases - The police had booked cases against 3,000 identifiable persons, including priests, following violent protests at port project site
Germany arrests 25 accused of plotting coup - A far-right group is suspected of planning to storm parliament and install an aristocrat as leader.
Spanish train collision outside Barcelona injures scores - Two trains collide near Barcelona on Wednesday morning, leaving at least 155 people injured.
Ukraine war: Operating on a baby in the dark after missiles hit Kyiv - Doctors at Kyiv Heart Institute performed 10 surgeries without electricity after Russian missiles hit.
Ukraine war: US neither encouraged nor enabled Kyiv to strike inside Russia - Blinken - Russia says a third site was attacked by drones on Tuesday, a day after two of its airfields were hit on Monday.
Ukraine war: Zelensky visits troops near ‘most difficult’ front line - Ukraine’s president says the defence of the eastern Donetsk region is crucial to protect the entire nation.
New find suggests ankylosaur’s tail clubs were for bashing each other - The evolution of this weapon may have had little to do with threats from predators. - link
Adobe Stock begins selling AI-generated artwork - AI-wielding artist must assert ownership and label each piece as “Generative AI.” - link
Apple announces sweeping changes to App Store pricing - Changes may help devs handle inflation, exchange rates, and new content types. - link
Europeans gain access to Apple parts, manuals in Self Service Repair program - The countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. - link
Android Automotive is getting its 38th app: Waze - For now it’s only in Europe, with a worldwide rollout coming in 2023. - link
Greta thunberg began screaming, -
“I will not fly private!” She said to her manager as they pulled into the parking lot.
“The conference is two days away and across the ocean, would you like to fly coach?” He replied.
“On a commercial airline produced by slave labor? I don’t think so!” She screamed.
Her manager sighed heavily before responding, “Thats why I’ve brought you to this decommissioned military base. There are lots of old boats and airplanes on this lot, why don’t you look around, try to relax, and I’ll talk to the owner about what we can do.”
A few minutes later Greta’s manager and an old man with a cane came out walking slowly together.
“This is a one time offer, but I suppose for a price, I could rent you that F16 over there.” The old man said.
Greta replied quickly, “Are you insane?! What about that Cessna?”
“That’ll never make it.” Her manager and the old man replied in unison.
“Well that settles it then.” she said, “We’re taking the submarine.
The old man looked confused as he replied, “No one has ever rented the r/jokes before, why that one?”
“We’re taking the r/jokes because that sub is made using 100% recycled material.”
submitted by /u/putinpunter
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There once lived a strong, Native American man who had only one testicle -
Everyone in the village called him “One stone” because of this, but nobody dared to say it to his face because he would kill anyone who directly said it him. Unfortunately, a woman in the village named Bluebird did not know about this. One morning, while she was walking past One Stone, she greeted him by saying “Hello, One Stone”. He immediately took her into the woods, and made love to her until she died from exhaustion.
Another woman by the name of Yellowbird, who also did not know about One Stone’s hatred of his nickname, greeted him one morning, saying “Hi, One Stone!”. Once again, One Stone took her into the woods and made love to her all day and night, but she didn’t die…….
Because you can’t kill two birds with one stone.
submitted by /u/69UwU69420
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Three men are standing at the pearly gates… -
Three men die and are standing at the pearly gates in front of St. Peter. St. Peter tells them, “To gain entry into heaven, you must tell me how you died.”
The first man steps forward and says “Well, I got off work early today, and came home to my 10th floor apartment. Walked in, and found my wife naked in bed. I looked out the door to our balcony, and saw a man’s hands holding onto the edge. In a fit of rage, I ran out and stomped on his fingers, and he fell. I looked over the balcony, and he had landed in some bushes and was still moving. So I unplugged our refrigerator and pushed it off the balcony, and it landed on him. Then I shot my wife and killed myself.”
St. Peter thinks for a moment and says “Well, there’s some bad stuff there, but given the situation, we can let it pass. You may enter.”
The second man steps forward. “I was exercising on my trampoline, on my 12th floor balcony, when I jumped a little too high and accidentally fell over the railing - but luckily I caught myself a couple floors below. I’m hanging there, holding on for dear life, when I hear someone come out - I’m thinking he heard my scream and was coming to help me. But this guy..he starts stomping on my hands! I lose my grip and fall to the ground. Luckily, I landed in some thick brush, and I was hurt, but I was still alive! I’m kinda moving around, checking to see what’s broken and stuff, when I look up to see this maniac push his refrigerator off the balcony! It lands on me and kills me.”
St. Peter is shaking his head, “Son, that is some horrible luck. Of course you may enter and enjoy paradise.”
The third man, having heard the stories of both men before him, steps forward with his head hung low and starts, “So…..I’m sitting naked in the refrigerator….”
submitted by /u/yungingr
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A blind pilot walks into a plane waving his walking stick -
The passengers all look at each other in disbelief. The flight attendant gets on the PA and says,
“Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, the captain is legally blind, but rest assured, he is one of the best pilots in the world with over six thousand successful flights.”
Next the co-pilot makes his way to the plane and he is also blind and uses his walking stick to make it to the cabin. The flight attendant gets on the PA and says,
“Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, the co-pilot is also blind, but rest assured, he is the second best pilot in the world with over five thousand successful flights.”
At this point the plane begins to take off from the runway. As it gains speed, the passengers grow tenser. The plane keeps accelerating more and more and as it approaches the end of the runway, it still hasn’t left the ground. The plane is approaching the end of the runway at high speed and the passengers scream, “Oh my God, we’re all going to die!!”
Suddenly, the plane takes off and begins its ascent.
The pilot turns to the co-pilot and says, “The day they stop screaming, we’re screwed.”
submitted by /u/Accomplished-Ice-644
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There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team,’ -
But there are six in ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder.’
submitted by /u/adamzam
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