The Peril of Not Vaccinating the World - Absent a concerted global commitment to vaccine equity, the virus will continue to evolve, and humanity may be consigned to a never-ending pandemic. - link
The Unique Dangers of the Supreme Court’s Decision to Hear a Mississippi Abortion Case - The most pressing question now may be not whether Roe and Casey can survive but how reproductive rights can be sustained without them. - link
The Purpose of Political Correctness - A conversation with the columnist Nesrine Malik about who makes the changing rules of public speech. - link
Protests in Colombia, Elections in Peru, and Other Chaos in the Andes - Hopes for a sustained democratic rebirth in the seven Andean nations have waned, again. - link
The Age of Reopening Anxiety - What if we’re scared to go back to normal life? - link
From Vox
May’s solidly meh jobs report -
A pedestrian walks by a “Now Hiring” sign outside of a store in San Francisco on June 3. | Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Love it or hate it, the newest jobs report means we’re going to have to wait to understand what’s happening with work.
The US economy added 559,000jobs in May, according to the monthly report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday. It’s a bit short of the 671,000jobs economists expected. The unemployment rate dropped to 5.8percent from 6.1 percent last month. Black unemployment fell to 9.1 percent while white unemployment dipped to 5.1 percent.
The numbers this report contains both do and don’t matter. It matters in that it’s a snapshot of what is going on in the labor market during an unprecedented and uncertain economic moment that should inform policy decisions going forward. It doesn’t matter that some of the discourse around workers and the economy has become quite disconnected from any interest in what’s actually going on. Whatever the data shows, plenty of people have their talking points set anyway — and many Republican-led states are acting on them.
As highly anticipated as any jobs report can be at the start of the summer, this was a big one, in large part because of the prior report. The April jobs report released at the end of last month fell well below economists’ expectations, showing just 266,000 jobs added instead of the expected 1 million. The latest report increased April’s numbers slightly.
May’s report was neither stellar nor disastrous. “This number’s OK. We wanted it to be higher,” said Austan Goolsbee, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama, in an appearance on CNBC Friday. He added that it’s “weird” to view adding over a half-million jobs in a single month as only modestly better, given that in normal times, such a figure would be terrific. But these aren’t normal times: The US is still digging itself out of a pandemic-size hole and is still 7 million jobs short of where it was when the virus hit.
Jobs picked up particularly in leisure and hospitality, education, and health care. Construction shed jobs for the second consecutive month. The number of people who have been out of work for over half a year fell significantly, though it’s unclear if that means those people went back to work or stopped looking for jobs. The labor force participation rate has been in about the same range since June 2020.
The path back to “normal” is going to be rocky
The word “unprecedented” gets thrown a lot lately but for good reason: We really are in some pretty uncharted territory. The US economy is emerging from a global pandemic that cost millions of jobs and has distorted the economy in all sorts of ways. From computer chips to cars to lumber, it feels like shortages are everywhere. There’s some concern about inflation, but the answers to whether price changes are temporary or permanent, something to worry about or something to consider, are that nobody really knows. (The Federal Reserve and the White House hold that it’s temporary.)
Any single point of data says something, but it doesn’t paint a complete picture. As J.W. Mason and Mike Konczal of the progressive think tank the Roosevelt Institute wrote ahead of the May report, the numbers are “noisy,” and it’s important not to put too much weight on a single month. What’s important is to look at the trend. And what the trend shows is that in the labor market, jobs are coming back. Maybe not as fast as the most optimistic people thought they would, but they’re coming.
“The big picture over the past year is a rapid recovery of employment as pandemic-related restrictions have been lifted,” Mason and Konczal wrote. “This is very different from the last several recessions, which were followed by long ‘jobless recoveries,’ with employment continuing to fall for months or even years after economic growth resumed.”
To be sure, Friday’s numbers are unlikely to change some of the political narratives on the right and on the left around the economy. Especially given that they didn’t really signal anything strongly positive or negative. Democrats are going to keep insisting that their economic agenda needs time to work and that the economy is coming back, and they’ll continue making the case for infrastructure proposals. Republicans, meanwhile, will make their arguments, too.
Many Republicans and business groups insist that generous unemployment insurance is a major hindrance to the recovery, arguing that people are sitting out of the workforce because they’re making more money staying home and collecting the extra $300 a week in pandemic benefits put in place by Congress. Half of states, all Republican-led, have decided to shut off unemployment benefits early over the coming weeks. They all made that decision before the May jobs report, a move that even JPMorgan’s economists said was political, not economic.
The evidence suggests that extra unemployment might deter a small sliver of workers but not the vast majority. A working paper out of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco estimated that if seven of 28 workers receive job offers they would normally accept in the early months of this year, just one would say no in order to hold on to the $300.
Hard to argue that restaurants can’t hire workers when >50% of added jobs in a single month are in leisure and hospitality. Compared to construction and manufacturing numbers, seems much more like a supply shortage than a worker shortage.
There are plenty of other factors influencing work right now: People are still nervous about the virus, parents lack access to child care, or people are waiting to see if they can get a job at their skill level. A massage therapist who shut down her business at the start of the pandemictold meshe doesn’t want to work for minimum wage at McDonald’s; she wants to reopen her business.
Some are also trying to find something better. Heather Long at the Washington Post recently wrote that we might be in the midst of a “great reassessment of work in America,” a moment where people who worked low-paying, thankless jobs before the pandemic are reconsidering what they might want to do. US businesses have sort of assumed there would always be an endless pool of low-wage labor, and the economy might work differently if that’s not the case.
Friday’s numbers suggest the economy is improving, and people are headed back to work. But they also exemplify that the puzzle of the US economy is going to be a bit challenging to put back together, and we don’t know where all the pieces fit anymore.
A weed dealer in NYC on how legalization could affect his business -
Will corporate cannabis threaten the livelihoods of independent dealers? | Getty Images
Weed dealers might have the opportunity to go legit. Should they?
Jeff, a weed dealer who’s been active in New York for six years, read the news during a morning bathroom trip. Suddenly, it was a brand new world. On April 30, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that made the production, possession, and use of recreational cannabis legal in New York City. By 2022, the New York Times speculates, dispensaries will begin to propagate throughout the metro area, ushering in the downfall of one of the last major dominoes in prohibition. New York joins 22 other states that have fully authorized marijuana, and currently there are only six states — Idaho, Wyoming, Kansas, Tennessee, Alabama, and South Carolina — that maintain an outright ban on all CBD or THC commodities, medicinal or otherwise.
Jeff, who is being referred to by a pseudonym for this story to protect his privacy, knows that his job doesn’t carry nearly the same risks as some of his peers in the field. He is white, and tells me that law enforcement is far more likely to be lenient on him and his business than other dealers in more surveilled neighborhoods in the city. The American Civil Liberties Union reports that Black Americans are nearly four times as likely to be arrested on marijuana charges as white Americans. But the prohibition rollback still has Jeff, and many of his friends, considering all the anxieties and possibilities of the future. Could he go legit? Should he go legit?
Maybe he has a real chance to break ground on his very own cannabis delivery app or a brick-and-mortar emporium, and to reach a much higher economic ceiling in the process. Or maybe instead, a swath of moneyed investors will end up descending on the city to lobby the state assembly, and will dump a bureau’s worth of paperwork on top of the independent dealers. If the financialized weed sector slowly squeezes out the, uh, “mom-and-pop shops”? Everything could change.
Jeff learned everything about his business from his mother, who’s spent her career running a small wine retailer. She’s nurtured great relationships with vineyards and her clientele, while building a true community around her storefront. The same mindset can be easily applied to his work, Jeff tells me. Weed is an industry about people and connections, just as much as it’s about the product. We talked about how that system is threatened by private equity, the dysfunctionality of the underground trade, and how much longer he sees himself in the cannabis hustle.
So how long have you been selling weed?
I got into the game when I was 13 or 14, and I moved to New York in 2013. For the first year or two I wasn’t really dealing, but I got back in around 2015 for a number of different cannabis delivery services. But for the past few years, I’ve been working independently.
Was it hard breaking into the industry up here in New York?
In the city, you can get anything you want. The hardest thing for me up here is filling out your clientele. Anyone with five grand in their pocket can start dealing. It’s not hard to do. It’s about how you want to cultivate your business. But you can’t advertise yourself — not until recently, I guess, on Craigslist. But accessibility has never been an issue.
When the news broke, did you have a clear idea of what exactly was legal in the city? Weed legalization can be pretty confusing sometimes.
It’s changed a lot. They’ll put one thing on the docket, and people will hear all these rumors, and that’s not what ultimately passes. I don’t think the general public has easy access to that kind of information. I think that’s intentional, too. I don’t think the police department wants people to know all the rules. They like that gray area. But I encourage people to go on the NYPD website and read what you’re legally allowed to carry and where you’re allowed to smoke when the new law is passed.
From your conversation with other people in the business, what’s the consensus opinion about it?
It’s definitely long overdue. I have a lot of friends who’ve had bad encounters with the law. It depends on the cop you get, or the judge, and all sorts of factors. But if you’re dealing with strictly cannabis charges, it’s usually just a slap on the wrist. If you’re high enough up, you don’t worry about the legal ramifications as much. You have a lawyer or a retainer. A lot of these guys have been in the business for 20 or 30 years. They know what they’re doing. That isn’t the worry. Instead, people are talking about the capital. You have customers who are curious. They want to go into dispensaries and see the options. There’s a novelty of going into a brick-and-mortar location and purchasing something that’s been so taboo for so long. But I did that in California, and when I got back in the car, I was like, “How the hell did I spend that much money?”
A lot of my business partners, and the people I work with, we’ve developed our own customers. We’ve developed our own family and relationships with them. Think of restaurants — that’s how I like to compare it. In New York, you can have a block with five or six restaurants, and some make it and some don’t. How do you make it? What’s your niche, who’s your clientele? But the shops that are gonna open might be able to go for five or six years without making a profit because they have the investors that are willing to fund that. It’ll be huge for tourism, but I think if you live in New York, you’re gonna want deals, you’re gonna want to establish relationships, and you’re not going to want to go into a Circuit City-type dispensary.
Have you thought about ramping up your own advertising efforts? Would you be open to posting on Craigslist?
Personally, I’m not interested in expanding and taking on new clients. I’ve got a close-knit network, and a bit of a waiting list. It’s not something that I’m worried about. But I’ve given it a lot of thought. I know of 15 different delivery services operating in Brooklyn right now, and they all talk to each other because they like to source from the same growers. If someone runs out of a certain strain … again, back to my restaurant metaphor. If the restaurant across the street has their ice machine break, and they run over to you to borrow a couple buckets of ice, you’re not going to say no. It’s better business for you later on when your ice machine breaks. When I think about those guys trying to expand, all of the money is going to need to go into app design. You’ll need a team. And if you don’t have some serious investors backing you, you’re looking at a lot of money.
Could you see that for yourself? Now that prohibition is over, could you see yourself growing your business into an app-based, or even brick-and-mortar-based, legit business? Or are you happy with how things are now?
I’ve gotten into the dirty side of the business. It was an illegal infrastructure, so there’s no checks and balances. I’ve had guys steal $30,000 from me. I’ve been in debt. One business was using my credit line and said they weren’t paying the bill. What do you do? You’re not gonna call the cops. Now that things are becoming legal, there are still just as many ugly demons that will raise their heads.
In an ideal world, where I could put together my dream team of people, I’d give it a shot. But the way I’ve seen things go with these Fortune 500 companies, something toxic is going to get involved.
My mom runs a wine shop. She’s sold wine for 30 years. I base my entire business model on what she taught me. She worked with wine wholesalers for the first 15 years, and she made a lot of awesome connections with vineyard owners. With her own private enterprise and those connections, she was able to beat Costco or Total Wines or whatever. That’s what I’m going to be able to do. I’ve got an awesome clientele base, and connections to my growers. It’s a mom-and-pop shop. Let’s keep America authentic.
Do you expect to be in cannabis long term?
The world is all opportunity. I didn’t see myself staying in it this long. I use cannabis. I medicate for anxiety. As soon as I had access to cannabis and could smoke independently of the confines of what’s taboo, it really helped me a lot. I’ve made a lot of friends along the way. A good percentage of my customers are hospital patients or the elderly. It really does help a lot of people, and there’s not a lot of access to it — even medicinally. I never intend to stop helping those close to me. Eventually, I’d prefer to set up something that can stay in place and run itself. But at the end of the day, it’s a job. You retire. Everyone has an endgame in sight.
The fastest way to get more people to buy electric vehicles -
A person charges an electric vehicle at an EVgo charging station at Union Station in Washington on April 22, 2021. | Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
America’s EV charging station infrastructure is woefully lacking.
Whether the United States can get to net-zero emissions by 2050 hinges hugely on our love of cars: They’re the dominant mode of transportation in America — ridership on trains, buses, and other public transit pales in comparison.
Other transportation options are limited, and cars are ingrained in American culture. This makes switching to electric vehicles an attractive way to decarbonize.But in order to encourage more people to buy electric vehicles (EVs), the US needs a better charging station infrastructure.
That is a key part ofPresident Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan, which proposes spending $174 billion on EVs, a sum that would boost supply chains for automakers, help subsidize the cost of cars for American drivers, and dramatically scale up the number of public electric vehicle charging stations along the nation’s roadways.
There are currently about 42,490 public charging EV stations in the US, counting Level 2 chargers (taking about an hour of charging for 10 to 20 miles of range), and DC Fast chargers (taking about 20 minutes of charging for 60 to 80 miles of range). In comparison, there are about 115,000 gas stations in the US, most of which have multiple pumps.
Biden’s plan would increase the number of charging stations more than tenfold by establishing grant and incentive programs for state and local governments and private companies to build 500,000 charging stations around America’s highways and in hard-to-reach communities by the year 2030. With a number of US carmakers pledging to go totally electric by 2035, that buildout could make EV charging ports as ubiquitous as gas pumps.
At the moment, there aren’t enough reliable charging stations to accommodate a sudden increase in EV usage. About 627,000 plug-in EVs were bought in 2019 and 2020, and demand is expected to increase — especially as carmakers phase out gas-powered cars.
“We’re so much better off than we were even five years ago … but we still have a huge gap,” a Biden administration official told Vox. “This is an essential piece of the shift to EVs and it’s not going to happen on its own.”
Transitioning American car drivers to electric vehicles is a crucial piece of the Biden administration’s overall plan to get the United States on a path to net-zero emissions by 2050, as well as its more immediate goal oflimiting catastrophic climate change bycutting greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent relative to 2005 levels by 2030.
The US is the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, after China, and cars are a big part of that. Transportation emissions account for 29 percent of total US greenhouse gas emissions (more than the electricity sector and industry), and light-duty vehicles like cars account for the vast majority of transportation emissions — close to 60 percent, as of 2018.
Getting EV charging stations to be as ubiquitous as gas stations would help change that, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle. Even more important is increasing the availability and access for home and work charging stations — where experts believe most people will ultimately charge their cars.
“Home charging is the most important; that’s where the highest number of charging [stations] will be needed,” said Scott Hardman, a researcher studying hybrids and EVs at the University of California Davis Institute of Transportation Studies. “It’s the cheapest; it’s the most convenient.”
In addition to building public charging stations, the Biden administration plans to propose expanding tax credits for private infrastructure for home EV chargers, giving people an incentive to install them. This is key, experts told me; making charging station access equitable — ensuring they are affordableand accessible— is as important as increasing the total number of charging stations.
Both are doable but will take serious government investment. But as with the rest of Biden’s agenda, the fate of this proposed network of charging stations could hinge on the fate of bipartisan infrastructure negotiations and whether the president decides to pass his plan with only Democratic votes.
A charging station is not the same as a gas station
Because gas stations are the most common method of refueling cars in the United States, powering up electric vehicles might call to mind clusters of charging stations next to convenience stores next to a highway or road.
But the two modes of powering up are fundamentally different. For one thing, driving into a gas station, filling up, and driving out typically takes just a few minutes.
The fastest EV charging stations — like DC Fast — on the other hand, take up to 20 minutes to charge enough to power the vehicle to a 60- to 80-mile range. Some state and city planners and EV experts are working on putting charging stations outside of restaurants, grocery stores, and shops, so that people can go off and eat a meal or shop while their car is refueling.
“Most charging, we would hope and expect, is happening while people are doing something else,” said Eric Wood, a research engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Center for Integrated Mobility Sciences. “The idea that charging is happening slowly can be convenient for the driver as well as the grid.”
More rapid charging technology is being developed, but the vast majority of available public charging stations currently in the US are the more sluggish Level 2 chargers, which require far more time to get to a full charge. There are just 5,141 DC Fast chargers in the US, with big gaps in parts of the Midwest and Mountain West, according to the Energy Department’s map of charging stations.
“If your battery’s down to 20 percent, you’re going to have to stay plugged in for hours and hours,” said Ellen Hughes-Cromwick, the former chief global economist at Ford Motor Company, now a senior resident fellow at Third Way.
The lack of charging infrastructure can mean headaches for drivers going on road trips, who need to plan their route to hit available charging stations. An October 2020 poll from YouGov found that charging time, hassle of charging, and cost of charging at home were all top reasons buyers who were looking for a new car weren’t considering an electric vehicle.
As climate expert and activist Bill McKibben recently found while on a road trip from Vermont to Boston, if you’re in need of some juice and another driver is already using a public charger, you could be in for a nerve-wracking drive home.
“The plug was in use once more, so I swallowed hard, did a little math, and drove on, arriving home with red lights flashing on the dashboard and a display indicating that my range was down to two miles,” McKibben recently wrote in the New Yorker.
Competition and congestion around EV charging stations has gotten particularly bad in cities like San Francisco, where there’s a growing number of electric car drivers. (The places with the highest density of charging stations per 100,000 people are Vermont, California, Colorado, Hawaii, and Washington, DC.)
“In San Francisco, there’s a huge congestion problem, and there are simply not enough plugs for EVs in that metro area,” said Hughes-Cromwick. “There is congestion in areas where EV demand has flourished. If we don’t get going on this, we will have roadblocks, especially for longer trips.”
Another complication is that some electric car companies like Tesla — frustrated at the lack of investment in EV charging stations — have built out their own networks of superchargers that are only compatible with their cars. So if a driver of a Chevy Bolt or Nissan Leaf is running low on battery and the only charger around is a Tesla, they’re out of luck.
The White House official I spoke to told me that any federal investment in EV charging stations will require universal chargers that can work with the full range of electric vehicles on the market.
“It’s been incredibly important for Tesla to have done that buildout, but we’re thinking about this investment as chargers that can support any vehicle,” the official said. “It’s very clear it needs to be accessible for any driver of an EV.”
That accessibility — along with the sheer number the White House hopes will be built — ought to, in theory, eliminate lines and congestion around chargers, while also ensuring charging is affordable. One thing it won’t do is solve the problem of charging times, but charging companies are developing faster chargers, and the second part of the White House’s proposal hopes to address that issue as well.
Home charging is really important
The most common and easiest way to charge an electric car doesn’t necessarily happen alongside a roadway; an at-home charging station “ends up for a lot of Americans being the only place they’d need to charge on a regular basis,” said Wood.
Home charging is especially convenient for people who primarily use their electric car for short trips around their town or city; especially if a car has a 200- to 300-mile range, that could get them a couple of days or weeks on a single charge. This is important because Americans do the vast majority of their driving for short trips: Nearly 77 percent of vehicles drove distances of 10 miles or less per trip, according to the 2017 National Household Travel Survey (the most recent available). In other words, it’s far more often that we’re driving home, to work, or to run an errand than going on a long road trip.
Home charging may be the most convenient, but home charging is also typically relegated to higher-income people who can actually afford to charge from within their home. For lower-income people who don’t have a garage or a dedicated parking spot with easy access to a charger, the logistics of charging at home become much more complicated.
Just as policymakers are figuring out how to make EVs cheaper, experts told me that any expansion of charging stations needs to focus on how to make home charging more equitable and accessible for middle- and lower-income people.
One option is getting more charging stations on residential streets, powered by the same electrical lines for street lights. This was piloted in London in 2020, with a number of street lights converted. But this is a relatively small project, and it hasn’t been adopted widely yet in other countries. Another option is increasing the number of charging stations at people’s workplaces, giving them another place to charge while their car is parked for hours.
“Everyone parks their car somewhere at night; that’s where we need to get the charging to,” said Hardman. “We have to be careful it’s not just the privileged households that get the lower running costs.”
The Biden administration official told Vox that the president’s infrastructure plan is proposing an extended or expanded tax credit to expand private infrastructure like charging stations at home.
“There’s an outsize public role for that infrastructure,” the official said. “You have to have a mix of home charging, workplace, and public.”
Overall, Biden’s goal is to make EVs more attractive in large part by making charging more convenient. But it will take significant government investment for Biden’s desired 500,000-EV network to become a reality.
Getting a bipartisan group of lawmakers — particularly in the Senate, where Democrats need 10 Republican votes to pass legislation under normal rules — to agree to spend nearly $200 billion on EVs won’t be easy, as prolonged infrastructure negotiations have shown. But the US will need to make this change in order to meet its climate commitments, and to decrease its contribution to climate change.
From The Hindu: Sports
Olympic 100m hurdles champ Brianna McNeal banned for doping violation: AIU - McNeal, 29, can still take part in the US trials for the Tokyo Olympics later this month.
Usman Khawaja working with Cricket Australia to ensure more South Asian representation in Australian cricket - When he made his international debut at the SCG, his home ground, in an Ashes Test in 2011, the top-order batter became the first Muslim and the first player of Pakistani descent to represent Australia
Tennis player arrested in Paris on suspicion of match-fixing - French newspaper Le Parisien reported that the player is Yana Sizikova of Russia.
India, NZ pretty even but Black Caps might have edge in WTC final because of conditions, says Lee - India and New Zealand will fight it out from June 18 in the marquee clash for which the Indians landed in England on Thursday
Bindra congratulates Tokyo-bound athletes for “exceptional” feat amid the pandemic - So far, 100 athletes have qualified for the Tokyo Games, including 56 men and 44 women.
From The Hindu: National News
Hydrographic survey ship INS Sandhayak decommissioned - It was the first of its class indigenously designed and built.
Cong. petitions President seeking free vaccination for all - The Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee on Friday made a representation to President Ram Nath Kovind through Governor Vajubhai Vala to demand free un
Maharashtra caps rates for black fungus treatment - Different rates set for rural and urban areas to ensure affordable care
NIOS cancels Class 12 exams in view of COVID-19 - Students who are not satisfied with the assessment will be given the option to appear in a public examination.
B.1.617 variant of SARS-CoV-2 drove surge in the COVID-19 cases in last 2 months - According to INSACOG, the B.1.1.7 lineage of the virus, which was first identified in the United Kingdom, is declining in proportion across India in the last one and half month
From BBC: Europe
Roman Protasevich: Belarus journalist’s confession was forced - family says - In a tearful interview, Roman Protasevich appeared to admit to organising anti-government protests.
Brexit: UK announces trade deal with Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein - Liechtenstein - another non-EU country - is also included in the post-Brexit deal.
Top German cleric asks to quit over Church sex abuse failures - Top Catholic cleric Reinhard Marx calls sexual abuse by Church officials “a catastrophe”.
French Open: Yana Sizikova arrested amid match-fixing inquiry - Russia’s Yana Sizikova is detained as part of an investigation into fixing at the French Open.
Covid-19: Portugal queries amber status as UK tightens rules - Robert Jenrick says the government is being “cautious” to protect the UK’s progress against Covid.
From Ars Technica
Ransomware will now get priority treatment at the Justice Department - Directive comes as ransomware is exposing the fragility of critical supply chains. - link
Rocket Report: SpaceX breaks streak of used launches, FAA clears Electron - “Listen to customers, don’t listen to pundits and market analysts.” - link
What to expect from WWDC 2021: iOS 15, M2, and more - Software is usually the focus, but we’ll probably see a new Mac chip. - link
Researchers rewire the genetics of E. coli, make it virus-proof - A revised genetic code is a pathway for bacteria to do things that seem unnatural. - link
Supreme Court reins in definition of crime under controversial hacking law - Justices reject US gov’s broad interpretation of Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. - link
From Jokes Subreddit
Professor X asks a girl, “what is your mutant power?” -
Girl replies: “I can guess how many pulls to turn a ceiling fan off on the first try!”
She points up and says: “3 pulls”
Professor X stands up and pulls 3 times. After the third pull the fan turns off.
Professor X: “Yeah thats cool and all, but not really a super power…”
Girl: “Yeah I was jut kidding, I can heal paraplegics”
A man loses his hat and decides the easiest way to get another one is to steal it. -
He goes to the church cloakroom to get a hat. A sermon about the Ten Commandments was going on. The man pauses to listen and then changes his mind. On nearing the exit, he runs into the pastor.
He says, “I came here with sin in my heart. I must say, you saved me from crime.”
The pastor replies, “That’s nice to hear. What sin were you about to commit?”
The man replies, “I came here to steal a hat, but your sermon made me change my mind.”
The priest says, “May I know what part of my sermon made you see the error of your ways?”
The man replies, “When you reached the ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ part, I suddenly remembered where I left my hat.”
An elderly man is stopped by the police around 2 a.m. and is asked where he is going at this time of night. The man replies, “I am on my way to a lecture about alcohol abuse and the effects it has on the human body, as well as smoking and staying out late.” -
The officer then asks, “Really? Who is giving that lecture at this time of night?” The man replies, “That would be my wife.”
