Is There a Smoking Gun in the January 6th Investigation? - As the Democrats discover what Mark Meadows, Donald Trump, and others did, experts say they must also enact reforms to safeguard democracy—while they still control Congress. - link
Boris Johnson’s Christmas from Hell - The “partygate” scandal, stemming from allegations that the Prime Minister’s office held a holiday get-together last year, while Britain was under a strict lockdown, has roiled the government. - link
What Has Omicron Changed? - Although the initial findings on the new COVID variant are encouraging, it’s important not to place too much stock in them prematurely. - link
bell hooks on How We Raise Men - In a conversation with David Remnick for The New Yorker Radio Hour, the social critic, who has died, discusses masculinity, patriarchy, politics, and parenting—including the dynamics within her own family. - link
Hannity Sent Texts Warning Trump That Capitol Riot Was Helping CNN’s Ratings - “You and I are on the same page as far as undermining democracy goes, but we need to think big picture here,” Hannity wrote. - link
From Vox
The downside to Biden’s electric vehicle charging plan -
Vice President Kamala Harris connects a charger to an electric vehicle at an event in Brandywine, Maryland on December 13. | Michael Reynolds/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Biden administration wants to build half a million chargers — but not the kind many people want.
Simply put, to build 500,000 chargers with half the budget, the Biden administration will have to opt for slower chargers. (The faster the charger, the more expensive it is to install.) The Biden administration’s plan, which draws on funds from the recently passed $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, prioritizes chargers that take hours to fully charge an electric car — a potentially hard sell for Americans who are used to filling gas tanks from empty to full in minutes. And while more chargers are great, the plan is an indicator of just how watered-down Biden’s energy policies have become over the last year. Democrats still haven’t been able to agree on a clean energy plan, and without one in place, those EV chargers could just end up getting their energy from fossil fuel sources.
But while energy policy is wonky, electric vehicles represent one of the most tangible changes regular folks can make in the fight against climate change, and the Biden administration seems to recognize that. “We have got to act, the transportation sector is the biggest part of our economy emitting greenhouse gases, and cars and trucks are one of the biggest parts of that,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told CNBC earlier this year.
The ubiquity of the right kind of electric vehicle chargers will play a big role in making that happen. There are currently three different types, or levels, of electric vehicle chargers. Level 1 chargers plug into a regular 120-volt power outlet and deliver power to electric cars at a glacial three to five miles of range per hour. At that rate, it would take a couple of days for most cars to go from empty to fully charge. Level 2 chargers convert the 120-volt connection to about 240 volts, charging cars around 10 times faster than Level 1 chargers and bringing a battery to full within a few hours. Level 3 chargers, also called DC fast chargers, are the fastest of the lot. They add anywhere from three to 20 miles of range per minute.That means your car can be about 80 percent charged in the time it takes you to use the bathroom and grab a cup of coffee at a rest stop.
You may have heard of DC fast charging, because it’s the technology behind Tesla Superchargers and the Rivian Adventure Network. Both of these proprietary charging systems offer high-speed charging exclusively for people who buy those company’s vehicles. (To its credit, Tesla has announced plans to open up its charging network to non-Tesla cars.) Whereas the owners of other electric vehicles have to contend with signing up for a plethora of competing charging services with a variety of charging speeds, the Tesla and Rivian networks promise the speed and simplicity that customers are used to getting at gas stations. “Simply plug in and charge automatically,” the Tesla website says. “Pull up and plug in without touching a button,” Rivian brags.
But for the most part, industry experts say, we don’t really need every charger to be a fast charger — which is why the Biden administration’s charging framework just might work.
“There’s a temptation to recreate the gas station model, where we say, ‘Oh I’m low on fuel, I need to go fill up now and be on my way in five minutes,’” Joe Britton, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association, told Recode. “That would be a mistake.” (Just don’t tell Harris, who said charging the Volt was “just like filling up your car with gas.”)
Instead, Britton said, it’s important to consider how most people actually use their cars on a regular day. Most folks aren’t driving hundreds of miles each day; they’re driving between home and work or running errands around town. For those folks, Level 2 chargers would work just fine. They can charge their cars at home, drive to a grocery store, plug in at the parking lot, and drive back home with a full battery. So while the Biden plan does include strategically installing faster chargers along highways and in rural areas, the focus on building lots of Level 2 chargers in local communities is a way to stretch that $7.5 billion a long way.
“We make it easier for people to go electric,” Harris told the crowd in Maryland on Monday. The biggest obstacle for most people looking to buy an electric car, she added, is “figuring out where and how to charge it.″
The stakes are high here. Despite being home to EV pioneers like Tesla and GM, the US lags far behind Europe and China in electric vehicle sales. The majority of American EV sales are also concentrated in major metropolitan areas, with nearly half of all EV sales in California alone. And while transportation is the sector with the largest greenhouse gas emissions in the country, energy is a close second.
Biden’s plan could make buying and charging electric cars easier, but electric vehicles are only as clean as the grids that power them. Studies have shown that electric cars drawing power from coal-heavy grids can actually be worse for the climate than hybrids. And so far, the president’s attempts to clean up the grid have been repeatedly thwarted by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who single-handedly gutted a proposal to replace coal- and gas-powered plants with solar, wind, and nuclear energy. Most of the energy policy that remains in Biden’s signature Build Back Better bill revolves around tax credits for clean energy, with few penalties for continued pollution-heavy energy production.
Inevitably, more electric vehicle chargers — even if they’re slower ones — are better than no chargers at all. But they’re not a solution on their own. The entire planet is fighting a losing battle against carbon emissions and climate change, and all those electric vehicles will need to get their energy from somewhere. Through the Build Back Better bill and the new infrastructure law, the Biden administration is making progress on a robust plan for clean energy and EV adoption in the United States. But the plan only works if the Build Back Better bill passes and the measures in the infrastructure law become reality.
Will these things happen this year, if at all? It’s not looking good.
This story was first published in the Recode newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!
Station Eleven made me want to live in the post-apocalypse -
HBO Max
Emily St. John Mandel’s beloved novel should be difficult to adapt for TV. The HBO Max version reinvents it.
The 2021 holiday season feels like an exceptionally strange and potentially awful time to launch a miniseries adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s brilliant 2014 novel Station Eleven.
Station Eleven is one of my favorite books of the 21st century so far, and its blend of magical realism, clockwork plotting, post-apocalyptic setting, and complicated structure offers enough imaginative detours for HBO Max’s 10-episode TV adaptation to have fun with. (The first three episodes debut Thursday. Two episodes follow every Thursday thereafter until the finale drops all by its lonesome on January 13.)
But Station Eleven is also a book about the world in the build-up to and aftermath of a devastating plague that kills most of humanity. Its resonance with the present moment is so strong that in March 2020, days before most of the US locked down, Vulture interviewed Mandel about her book’s overlap with the present. So it might seem ghoulish to tell a story about a disease so deadly only one in 1,000 people survives it (heavy air quotes) “at this moment in history.”
What’s more, Station Eleven makes several adaptation choices that change some of the core elements of Mandel’s novel. Two characters who have one chance meeting shortly before the Georgia Flu ravages the world are now boon companions for the early days of the apocalypse, and the book’s main villain has been drastically rethought. It would have been so easy to create a version of this story where those changes made the series toothless and without a point.
Yet few fictional works in the wake of Covid-19 have felt as restorative to me as this TV adaptation from Leftovers writer Patrick Somerville and Atlanta director Hiro Murai. Rather than imagining something bleak, Station Eleven takes Mandel’s book and amps up its sense of a cozy post-apocalypse, where humanity comes together, rather than drifting apart. I entered the series deeply skeptical, and I left it feeling at least semi- hopeful for what humanity might yet become, even after the end.
“This strange and awful time was the happiest of my life”
In book form, Station Eleven follows three characters who have a chance meeting onstage at a Toronto theater during a production of King Lear. Kirsten is a child actor, playing the role of one of Lear’s daughters as a child. Arthur is a brash movie star trying to burnish his reputation by playing one of Shakespeare’s greatest characters. And Jeevan is a would-be doctor who attempts to save Arthur’s life after he collapses from a heart attack during a performance.
The book then traces three timelines. It hops forward 20 years into the future to follow Kirsten as an adult, riding around the Great Lakes with the Traveling Symphony theater company in a world after the Georgia Flu killed so many. It stays with Jeevan in the present, as he holes up in an apartment with his brother and watches the world end from high above. And it jumps back into the past to trace the rise of Arthur alongside his many friends and colleagues. Mandel drops in short interstitial chapters that tell the stories of various other characters important to the narrative, particularly Arthur’s ex-wife Miranda, whose chapter is my favorite part of the book.
In TV series form, Station Eleven shifts several things around. The most notable change it makes is having Jeevan’s (Himesh Patel) encounter with Kirsten (Matilda Lawler as a child, Mackenzie Davis as an adult) at the theater result in him trying to help her find her parents. (In the book, they meet briefly, then go their separate ways.) As he tries to help Kirsten, his sister calls to say the Georgia Flu is in Chicago (the series’ new setting), and it’s very, very bad. He and his brother, Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan), take Kirsten in, forging a connection between the characters that didn’t exist in the book but grounds the series.
There are tweaks like this throughout Station Eleven, the TV series, all of which serve to underscore connections between characters, some more unlikely than others. Mandel’s book is a lovely meditation on humanity’s resilience and the ways in which art can bring us together, but it’s also a clockwork plot, where each and every element of the story has a reason to exist, all of which knit together at the end. Done well (as it is in the book), this technique can feel a bit like magic, as the author reveals all her cards. Done poorly (as it has been on so many TV shows), a clockwork plot can feel like a writer insisting that everything is connected, in a way that rings false.
Somerville’s previous miniseries — the Netflix Emma Stone and Jonah Hill vehicle Maniac — felt a little too much like Somerville insisting everything is important. So I had at least some trepidation about his take on Station Eleven, where so many things could have gone so, so wrong. But Somerville also learned how to create a clockwork plot for television from Leftovers co-creator Damon Lindelof, and he’s brought all of those lessons to bear on Station Eleven, but without the former series’ occasionally ultra-grim tone. (It was ultra-grim with purpose, but we are not here to relitigate this.)
An even smarter adaptation choice is to alternate between storytelling modes. The odd-numbered episodes expand the aforementioned interstitial episodes to entire hours of television. The Miranda chapter, my favorite in the book and now my favorite episode of the show, makes up the entirety of the third episode, as Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler) goes on a long, strange journey to try to get back home for the funeral of the love of her life, even as the world ends around her.
Meanwhile, the even-numbered chapters trace adult Kirsten’s journeys with the theater company, performing Shakespeare and exploring the sorrows and the joys of a post-apocalyptic world. What plot the series has pops up in these episodes more than in the others, but the plot wouldn’t work without the character development from the more standalone odd-numbered episodes. The alternation between storytelling modes also gives the show a pleasant rhythm once you fall under its spell.
Somerville’s approach to the material is perhaps best echoed by a line a character says in the series’ trailer: “This strange and awful time was the happiest of my life.” The TV version of Station Eleven utilizes all those unlikely connections to express wonder at the fact that human beings form any connection at all.
Jeevan and Kirsten should not know each other. In a vast universe, on a planet teeming with people, that they would find each other and form a familial bond has every odd against it. But they do find each other. And they do bond. Even amid the end of the world, there will be moments of raw beauty and hope.
What if the end of the world was also really beautiful?
HBO Max
Station Eleven has big Christmassy vibes.
The unexpected beauty of the end of all things is also reflected in the series’ direction, particularly in the two episodes directed by Murai (the first and third). Murai is one of the great visual stylists working in television right now, and the first few seconds of the series serve as a thesis statement for everything to follow.
In the opening series of shots, wild boars root around in the plant life inside a space once built and occupied by humans. A few scraps of paper mark this as the theater where Arthur (here played by Gael Garcia Bernal) died onstage playing Lear. Murai cuts to what remains of the seats, now covered in verdant greenery. And then he match-cuts to those seats on the night of Arthur’s final performance. The theater is now a living space, one where people will enjoy a great play. But it feels less alive than it did when its only occupants were plants and boars.
Television has been overwhelmed by a glut of series that lean too heavily on gray, murky visuals and digital color grading that reduces too much of the picture to dishwater mush. If Station Eleven failed on every other level, it would at least be worth watching for how it bucks this trend. The post-apocalyptic sections burst with a natural color palette, dominated by green. The mid-apocalyptic sections are stark white, thanks to the snow everywhere, with warmer tones for the apartment where Jeevan, Kirsten, and Frank hole up. And the sections set in the past are warmer still, as various characters remember their happiest moments.
The use of color allows viewers to instantly know where they are in the show’s timeline, which could feel overly complicated otherwise. The series never manages something as visually astonishing as those opening shots, but there were several moments per episode where I found myself deeply impressed by the show’s willingness to tell its story in images, even as the dialogue concocted by Somerville and his writers is poetic and rarely overwrought. (I did say rarely. It’s sometimes quite overwrought.)
I can quibble. I think a couple of the series’ episodes try way too hard to either cram in too much story or spread too little story over a full hour of TV. (The episodes are all around an hour long, though some are as short as 43 minutes.) Dan Romer’s score is often lovely, but sometimes, the blaring music felt a little like it was trying to tell me what exactly I should feel. And I occasionally felt like I needed a chart to track the bouncing around in time, particularly in some of those odd-numbered flashback episodes.
But those are only quibbles. Most of all, I’m glad Station Eleven has arrived at the end of a long, hard year for so many of us, because its embrace of joy and melancholy and its love of snowy expanses mark it as an accidentally perfect holiday season miniseries. In one episode, for instance, young Kirsten, surrounded by a dying world, performs “The First Noel” for Frank and Jeevan, twinkling lights in the background. At the end of the year, in the cold and the darkness and melancholy, we come together to make things a little warmer, a little brighter, a little more joyful. So why wouldn’t we do that at the end of the world, too?
Station Eleven debuts Thursday on HBO Max. The first three episodes are available that day, with two episodes each debuting on December 23, December 30, and January 6. The finale arrives January 13. Yes, as mentioned, this is weirdly appropriate Christmastime viewing.
The January 6 committee’s showdown with Mark Meadows, explained -
Photo by Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images
The committee revealed more about its hoped-for endgame.
Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is the latest ex-Trump aide to face legal jeopardy related to the House of Representatives’ investigation of the January 6 insurrection.
The House voted to hold Meadows in contempt of Congress Tuesday after Meadows skipped a scheduled deposition and refused to provide documents the committee had subpoenaed. The move comes after Meadows himself sued the committee and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week, arguing their subpoenas were overbroad.
The contempt vote was 222-208, with only two Republicans, investigation committee vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) and retiring Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), joining Democrats to vote in favor.
The committee badly wants Meadows’s testimony because he was at President Donald Trump’s side on and before the events of January 6, and clearly has knowledge of several topics they are investigating, such as why it took Trump so long to intervene and try to end the violence on that day. Meadows doesn’t want to give that testimony, or hand over all of the documents the committee has requested.
The House vote is, in practice, a recommendation that the Justice Department charge Meadows criminally. In the last such referral in the insurrection investigation, the department acted quickly, getting a grand jury to indict Steve Bannon just a few weeks later. But unlike Bannon, who was a private citizen during the events in question, Meadows was an executive branch employee,so the Justice Department will have to consider the legal concept of executive privilege — the right of the president to shield communications from other branches of government like Congress.
Meadows argues he’s trying to protect presidential privilege by not testifying. But he’s handed over some documents already, including a bizarre PowerPoint presentation he was sent and text exchanges he had while the insurrection was taking place. Members of the committee have pointed out that he won’t even agree to testify under subpoena about these, which they say demonstrates contempt of Congress.
There’s much speculation about what Meadows might be trying to hide, but that question is unanswerable at this point. However, Cheney revealed more about what the committee might be trying to build toward, in comments alluding to questions about whether Trump obstructed an official proceeding with his actions “or inaction” on and around January 6. It remains unclear whether such a case will be made, or if the Justice Department will pursue it.
Still, the big picture of what happened after the 2020 election has been clear for some time: Trump tried to steal it. He tried to do so by pressuring GOP officials (including his own vice president) to seize power and overturn the outcome. He entertained proposals about more extreme executive actions, but did not follow through. He whipped his supporters into a frenzy, and when they stormed the Capitol, he was delighted, and slow to tell them to stand down.
And despite all that, Donald Trump is leading most recent polls of a 2024 rematch against President Joe Biden.
How Meadows got to this point
Since Meadows was with Trump in the White House as chaos unfolded inside the Capitol on January 6, and was involved with some of Trump’s attempts to overturn Biden’s win beforehand, the select committee has been keenly interested in getting his testimony.
Initially, Meadows hoped that Biden’s White House would save him from a congressional subpoena by asserting the former president’s right to keep his aides’ communications secret under executive privilege. But they announced last month they would not do so. So since then, Meadows has been in a back-and-forth with the committee about just what he might do.
By November 30, it appeared they’d made some progress. Meadows provided a substantial number of records to the committee that he made no claim of executive privilege over, and said he’d agreed to appear for a deposition. But over the next week, things fell apart.
First, news broke that Meadows had a book coming out in which he’d revealed that Trump tested positive for the coronavirus before his debate with Biden in October 2020 — an earlier timeline for Trump’s illness than had previously been known (though Meadows says Trump also tested negative on a rapid test shortly after that). Trump was furious about this revelation.
About a week after that, on December 7, Meadows’s attorney sent a letter to the January 6 committee saying he was withdrawing from an agreement to testify the next day. The attorney, George Terwilliger III, claimed Meadows made this decision because he didn’t believe the committee would respect executive privilege in its questioning, and also complained that the committee had subpoenaed Meadows’s phone records from Verizon. Shortly afterward, Meadows filed suit against the committee, trying to get those subpoenas blocked.
The committee countered with a joint statement from its chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and vice chair Cheney, claiming there were “voluminous official records” in Meadows’s personal phone and email accounts that may not have been properly turned over to the National Archives. (An Archives spokesperson confirmed this to Politico soon afterward.) Thompson and Cheney also made clear they would find Meadows in contempt of Congress and refer him for possible criminal prosecution. And, this week, both the committee and the full House did so, with the committee outlining their rationale in a report on Meadows’s conduct.
What Meadows has turned over
Meanwhile, some of the documents Meadows did turn over to the committee spilled out into public view in recent days.
One was a PowerPoint presentation titled “Election fraud, foreign interference, and options for 6 JAN” put together by a retired US Army colonel named Phil Waldron. The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell tweeted parts of one version of this presentation, which claimed there had been “foreign interference” in the election on Biden’s behalf, and recommended declaring a “national security emergency” and declaring all electronic voting “invalid.” Waldron briefed Republican members of Congress, and a version of his presentation ended up being sent to Meadows.
But while the PowerPoint presentation is certainly revealing of what kind of extreme ideas Trump supporters were entertaining at this point, there’s no indication that Meadows acted on it or did anything with it — for all we know at this point, it is just something that showed up in his inbox.
January 6 committee members also revealed various texts Meadows had received after the election and particularly on the day of the attack. In the texts, Fox hosts Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Brian Kilmeade all pleaded for Meadows to get Trump to do something to stop the violence — and so did Donald Trump Jr.
The texts show the hypocrisy of some of these figures, who have since downplayed the import of what happened that day. They also refocus attention on central questions of the committee, which Meadows could theoretically shed light on — why did it take so long for Trump to intervene that day, and what was the president saying and doing privately in those first few hours after the Capitol was stormed? These are the questions that Meadows clearly does not want to answer.
It’s unclear what lies ahead for Meadows — and the investigation
Mere weeks passed between the House’s referral of Bannon for prosecution and Bannon’s indictment by a Washington, DC, grand jury. Yet Bannon was so openly defiant of the committee’s subpoenas — and he quite obviously had no claim to executive privilege, since he had left the government in 2017 — that his was basically an open-and-shut case.
The same may not be true for Meadows. In part, this is because at various points Meadows has at least tried to make a show of willingness to cooperate with the committee. But the Justice Department will also have to sort out the thorny issue of executive privilege. They may conclude Meadows should indeed be indicted, but it could take more time.
As for where the investigation is headed, comments from Cheney this week were particularly interesting.
“Mr. Meadows’s testimony will bear on another key question before this committee: Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress’s official proceeding to count electoral votes?” Cheney said.
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake points out that this language alludes to the language of a federal criminal statute for obstruction of an official proceeding. That is: Cheney is floating the possibility that Trump himself could be charged with a crime related to January 6, a prospect that has seemed quite remote for much of the year.
Again, it is unclear how strong a case can be made, and whether Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department would take the enormously controversial move of charging a former president. But this may well be the committee’s endgame.
It’s been a rough year for those outraged by the insurrection, though, with Biden’s popularity dropping, Democratic congressional majorities looking imperiled, Trump polling well for 2024, and media coverage mostly moving on to other issues. If the committee hopes to make the former president face serious consequences for his actions that day, well, the clock is ticking.
From The Hindu: Sports
‘Leave it to the BCCI’, says Ganguly, declines to comment on Kohli’s bombshell PC - “No statements, no press conference. We will deal with it, leave it to (the) BCCI,” said Ganguly
Mercedes withdraws appeal of Formula 1 season finale - Mercedes was protesting over the use of the safety car following a crash with five laps remaining in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix
The Ashes | Back in charge, Smith wins toss and bats against England - Steve Smith is the third captain in three consecutive tests for Australia.
Tennis Premier League | Hyderabad Strikers pips Bengaluru Spartans - Vishnu, Karman steal the show
Indian bridge team wins - The Indian team of Sumit Mukherjee, Jaggy Shivdasani, Keyzad Ankelsaria, Sundeep Thakral, Rajeswar Tewari and Debabrata Majumder defeated UAE to win t
From The Hindu: National News
Yechury asks for dismissal of J&K Chief Justice - Justice Pankaj Mithal spoke against Preamble at a meet held by an RSS-affiliated body, he says
Charter firm launches helicopter service from Bengaluru to Coorg - The service would reduce travel time to an hour as compared to 7 hours by road
Aged man found dead in house - The post mortem of a 70-year-old man, who was found dead inside his house at South Bazaar here, has revealed that he might have died of malnutrition.
Insufficient coal stocks at plants from Apr-November due to rise in power demand, heavy rains: Power Minister - Due to second wave of the pandemic in April-June, 2021, the production and logistic arrangements were also affected as a huge number of manpower got infected, R.K. Singh said
Karnataka considering implementing NEP at pre-primary level from 2022 - State Government is yet to take a call on implementing at primary level
From BBC: Europe
Covid: France to drastically restrict travel from UK - Non-residents will need compelling reasons to travel, as France tries to slow the spread of Omicron.
Dutch royals regret holding party amid surge in Covid cases - The party was held to celebrate the 18th birthday of the country’s heir apparent, Princess Amalia.
Russia Ukraine: EU to warn Moscow against action - European leaders meeting in Brussels are expected to say hostile action could come at a “high price”.
Beijing 2022: Putin tells Xi he will attend Winter Olympics - The Russian president is one of the first major world leaders to indicate his attendance at the Games.
Dutch MP ordered to delete Covid Holocaust social media posts - Thierry Baudet is ordered by a court to delete social media posts comparing the unvaccinated to Jews.
From Ars Technica
Current vaccines are enough to fight omicron, but massive wave is coming fast - With just 17% of the US boosted, a massive omicron wave could peak in January. - link
New York City bans new natural gas hookups in step toward all-electric future - “The next generation of buildings is going to be electric.” - link
Patch fixing critical Log4J 0-day has its own vulnerability that’s under exploit - If you’ve patched using Log4J 2.15.0, it’s time to update again. Stat! - link
Today’s best deals: Apple Watch Series 7, gaming gift cards, and more - Dealmaster also has last-minute deals on AirPods, good board games, and 4K streamers. - link
Tesla sexual harassment lawsuits multiply as 6 more women sue Musk-led firm - Lawyer: Musk “enables the pattern of pervasive sexual harassment and retaliation.” - link
From Jokes Subreddit
A British soldier returns from war after 4 years against the Germans. -
His faithful wife, longing for sex all these years, dresses up in her sheerest lingerie, hoping to entice her returning husband. She waits by the door as her husband enters and her lingerie gently slips off her body and she stands there naked. “Darling, look what the wind blew away”, she says seductively. The husband, looking sad and dejected, drops his pants, and says “Sweetheart, look what the Germans blew away.”
A beautiful woman approaches him. The woman asks the man, “How would you like to get out of here?” and the man is stunned. He never thought a woman like her would ever approach him, so he agreed. They both get into his car and drive really far. He stops at a cliff with the view of the whole city. Within seconds they start taking off their clothes. After minutes of passionately making love they finally finish. They both put their clothes on and just sit there awkwardly. The woman speaks up and says “I’m a prostitute and its going to be 100 dollars for my service.” The man is stunned and saddened that she didn’t really like him. He gives her the money and she tells him that she is ready to leave and the man replies “I’m a taxi driver and its going to be 150 dollars for the ride here and back.”
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HBO Max