A Ukrainian Judge Joins the Nation’s Ferocious Resistance - How a forty-year-old father of three joined other civilians to help thwart the Russian Army’s attempt to seize Kyiv. - link
The Ketanji Brown Jackson Hearings May Be Only the Beginning - The final Senate confirmation vote of 53–47 sparked joy and relief that the ugly part was over, at least for Jackson. The rest of the country may not be so lucky. - link
Is Larry Summers Really Right About Inflation and Biden? - The Harvard economist is getting plaudits for the warnings he issued early last year, but some Administration officials and economists are questioning the basis of his arguments. - link
Surviving the Standoff with the Republic of Texas - Twenty-five years ago, an armed militia tried to secede. When will it happen again? - link
Aging and Abandoned in Venezuela’s Failing State - Like elderly across the country, professors and staff at one of the country’s premier state-funded universities are malnourished, unable to afford rent, and growing food to survive. - link
2003’s most famous politicians are begging the US to stop ignoring biosecurity.
A bipartisan group of retired public officials is begging Congress to finally get serious on preventing pandemics.
The Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense released a new report this morning urging policymakers to fund, and the executive branch to implement, what it calls the Apollo Program for Biodefense, a $100 billion, 10-year effort that would prepare the nation to meet any future viral threat head-on. The new report, called the Athena Agenda (they like Greek gods), takes the framework the Apollo report outlined and provides more detail on how to fund and achieve it. Commission deputy director Ambika Bumb, a medical scientist who served in the Biden White House and Trump State Department, told me that the new report aims to put the recommendations in terms that “Congress can directly take and put in legislation.”
Among other priorities, the plan includes funding for: creating vaccine candidates for each of the 26 families of viruses known to infect humans; developing antiviral medications that can work against a broad spectrum of viruses; building out manufacturing capacity for vaccines, antivirals, tests, and other countermeasures; deploying genomic sequencing as a way to track outbreaks; developing broadly useful diagnostic technologies and better regulatory processes for approving and disseminating plentiful rapid tests; and improving security in laboratories dealing with dangerous viruses.
The White House, to its credit, has already proposed funding around this level. Most recently, in its 2023 budget proposal, the Biden administration asked for $88.2 billion in funding over five years on pandemic preparedness. That includes $40 billion for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at the Department of Health and Human Services to “invest in advanced development and manufacturing of countermeasures for high priority threats and viral families, including vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and personal protective equipment (PPE),” as well as $12.1 billion in research funding for the National Institutes of Health for vaccine, therapeutics, and diagnostics development.
Bumb, who worked on the Biden administration’s pandemic preparedness agenda during her time in the White House, notes that the Biden proposal actually drew on the original Apollo plan put out by the bipartisan commission. That’s part of why the new commission report is so notable: This is a group that’s capable of driving policymaking at high levels.
That said, Congress has yet to appropriate money at the commission’s desired level to prevent the next pandemic. It’s barely interested in further funding response to the current, ongoing pandemic, which is still killing hundreds of Americans a day. A group of senators recently cut a deal for $10 billion to fund Covid-19 response, after slashing funding the White House wanted to help fight the pandemic abroad — only to have Republicans block the deal on the Senate floor over separate immigration concerns. Even if the funding eventually passes, it’ll have to wait until after the Easter recess ends on April 22.
The biodefense commission is a bipartisan group that has existed since 2014 and aims to “provide for a comprehensive assessment of the state of US biodefense efforts, and to issue recommendations that will foster change.” Its initial report in 2015 called for heavy investment to “prevent, deter, prepare for, detect, respond to, attribute, recover from, and mitigate biological incidents.” That call was obviously not heeded in time for the Covid-19 pandemic.
The group is chaired by former Sen. Joe Lieberman and former Pennsylvania governor and Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge. The other members include former Congress member and Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala; former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle; former Reps. Susan Brooks and James Greenwood; former FDA commissioner Peggy Hamburg; and former Justice Department official Kenneth Wainstein.
This is not some group of big-spending left-wing ideologues. It’s a collection of old-fashioned moderates, one of whom (Lieberman) is perhaps most famous for frustrating Democratic spending ambitions on health care. Theirs is a dying breed given the extent of partisan polarization in 2022.
We at Vox argued for a number of these measures in our recent series, Pandemic-Proof. And the commission notes that had the plan been in place before Covid-19 (for instance, after the commission’s initial 2015 report), the US response to the pandemic would’ve been vastly improved. “Had we created a vaccine for SARS-CoV-1,” the virus that caused the 2003 SARS outbreak, “we could have produced a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2,” which causes Covid-19, “even faster,” they write.
“This is not about some theoretical future threat only,” Bumb told me. It might have been theoretical when the commission first issued its 2015 report, but after Covid-19, the consequences of inaction should be incredibly vivid.
This Apollo program pales next to the budget of the original Apollo project aimed at putting a man on the Moon. That effort, the commission estimates, cost roughly $280 billion in today’s dollars; the International Space Station cost about $255 billion.
The federal government can make major investments like this when it wants to. The question when it comes to pandemic prevention is, does it want to?
Kennedy v. Bremerton School District is the culmination of 60 years of fears about religious coercion by public schools.
Six decades ago, in Engel v. Vitale (1962), the Supreme Court held that the state may not pressure schoolchildren to pray in a particular way. “One of the greatest dangers to the freedom of the individual to worship in his own way,” Justice Hugo Black wrote for the Court, “lay in the Government’s placing its official stamp of approval upon one particular kind of prayer or one particular form of religious services.”
This basic premise — that government employees should not elevate one kind of faith or religious practice over another — is at stake in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which the Supreme Court will hear in late April.
The case involves Joseph Kennedy, a former football coach in Bremerton, Washington. For years, Kennedy incorporated “motivational” prayers into his coaching. Eventually, these prayers culminated in public sessions after games, where players from both teams would kneel around Kennedy as he held up helmets from both teams and led students in prayer.
Kennedy also engaged in other overt performances of his religion while he was coaching public school students. After each game, while players and spectators were still present, Kennedy would walk out to the 50-yard line, kneel, and pray. Initially, he did this alone, but after a few games students started to join him — until eventually a majority of his players joined him as well.
The school initially tried to work with Kennedy to find ways to accommodate his religious convictions, but eventually placed him on leave after he stopped cooperating — and after one of his prayer sessions inspired a crowd of people to rush the field, knocking over members of the marching band and potentially endangering students.
The Supreme Court’s decisions interpreting the First Amendment ban on “an establishment of religion” have, at times, relied on different frameworks to determine if this ban is violated. Legal scholars refer to these competing frameworks by names such as the “endorsement test” or the “coercion test.”
Under the first framework, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in 1984, government actions that endorse a particular religion or religious belief are disfavored because such endorsements send “a message to nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community, and an accompanying message to adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.”
Under the latter framework, endorsements are sometimes permitted, but not if they coerce individuals into a religious exercise. The Court’s decision in Lee v. Weisman (1992), moreover, suggests that school-sponsored religious activities are inherently coercive — both because of the power school officials wield over students, and because of the peer pressure facing young people who visibly refuse to participate.
Meanwhile, in a 2006 opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer appeared to propose a third framework, arguing that the establishment clause of the First Amendment must be interpreted to prevent “divisiveness based upon religion that promotes social conflict.”
There are important differences among these frameworks. The endorsement test, for example, disfavors many governmental displays of religious symbols that are permitted under the coercion test. But Kennedy’s actions violate any of these competing legal tests. He endorsed a religious viewpoint while acting as a representative of the school district. His actions pressured students into joining him in a religious activity. And he appears to have actively stoked religious divisions.
Kennedy should not be a hard case. It is well established that school officials cannot use their official government position to pressure students into religious exercise.
Or, at least, it is well established for now that school officials cannot do this. Three years ago, during an earlier phase of the Kennedy litigation, a total of four justices joined an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, which suggested that the school district violated Kennedy’s constitutional rights by denying him the free speech right to pray while at work.
The Court has only grown more conservative since then, and it has treated “religious liberty” cases brought by conservative Christian litigants as its highest priority since Republicans gained a supermajority on the Court in 2020.
There is a very real risk, in other words, that the Court could use this case to upend 60 years of established law.
As mentioned above, Kennedy spent much of his coaching career behaving like a preacher, holding public prayer sessions for students — many of whom Kennedy wielded authority over. And, while there’s no evidence that he ever ordered a student to kneel with him when he performed a religious ceremony on the 50-yard line, he did not discourage students from joining him, either, and a majority of the students on his team eventually did so.
At least some students felt pressured to participate in these prayer sessions, even though they did not share Kennedy’s religious beliefs. One parent eventually complained to the school district that his son “felt compelled to participate,” despite the fact that he is an atheist, because the student feared “he wouldn’t get to play as much if he didn’t participate.”
The school district first learned about Kennedy’s behavior in September of 2015, when an opposing coach spoke to the high school principal about it. After an investigation, school district superintendent Aaron Leavell ordered Kennedy to stop using his position as a public school employee to preach religion.
Though Kennedy was allowed to continue giving motivational speeches to students, Leavell told him that “they must remain entirely secular in nature, so as to avoid alienation of any team member.” Kennedy could also continue to pray after games, but his prayers “must be physically separate from any student activity” and “such activity should either be non-demonstrative (i.e., not outwardly discernible as religious activity) if students are also engaged in religious conduct, or it should occur while students are not engaging in such conduct.”
Initially, the coach complied. But he soon unleashed a coordinated legal and PR campaign against the school district. About a month after the superintendent ordered Kennedy to stop preaching religion to his students, Kennedy’s lawyer informed the school district that the coach would resume praying at the 50-yard line immediately after games.
What followed was a circus. Kennedy went on a media tour presenting himself as a devout coach who “made a commitment with God” to performatively pray after each game. Good Morning America did a segment on him. Conservative media ran with headlines like “High School Coach Bullied Into Dropping Prayer at Football Games.” By the end of the month, 47 members of Congress — all Republicans — wrote to Leavell in support of Kennedy.
At the conclusion of the next game, coaches, players, and members of the general public mobbed the field when Kennedy knelt to pray. A federal appeals court described the rush of people onto the field as a “stampede,” and the school principal complained that he “saw people fall” and that, due to the crush of people, the district was unable “to keep kids safe.” Members of the school’s marching band were knocked over by the crowds.
Eventually, the school placed Kennedy on leave, and Kennedy did not reapply for his coaching position the next year. But he did sue, claiming that he has a constitutional right to say “a quiet prayer by himself at midfield after” football games where he is a coach.
For what it’s worth, Kennedy does appear to have made some concessions to the establishment clause. His brief to the Supreme Court largely asserts a right to say a post-game prayer on the 50-yard line, not a right to hold “motivational” prayer sessions surrounded by public school students.
But Kennedy is still claiming that he had a right to make a public performance of his own religious beliefs, while he was very visibly acting as a representative of a public school district, and in full view of a crowd of students, parents, players, and spectators.
Under existing law, that’s not allowed.
In Engel, the 1962 school prayer case, the Court offered a historical account of why government officials should not promote a particular method of prayer.
In the mid-16th century, the English Parliament approved the Book of Common Prayer, which “set out in minute detail the accepted form and content of prayer and other religious ceremonies to be used in the established, tax-supported Church of England.” This led to perpetual lobbying, and frequent strife, over just what prayers the government should endorse and which ones it should reject. Powerful religious groups “struggled among themselves to impress their particular views upon the Government,” while less powerful religious believers literally fled the country — many of them becoming early American colonists.
According to Engel, the First Amendment was drafted in large part to ward off this kind of strife among religious factions. The founding generation, Justice Black wrote, were not willing “to let the content of their prayers and their privilege of praying whenever they pleased be influenced by the ballot box.”
Alternatively, several justices have warned against government endorsements of religion. As Justice O’Connor warned in her 1984 concurring opinion, such endorsements undermine the basic liberal democratic notion that all citizens enjoy equal political standing. They tell “nonadherents that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community” while simultaneously telling “adherents that they are insiders, favored members of the political community.”
Then, in Lee v. Weisman (1992) a majority of the Court embraced a third reason why schools should not pressure students into religious exercise: because school-sponsored religious activity is inherently coercive. In Lee, a public middle school invited a rabbi to open and close the school’s graduate ceremony with prayers. This melding of government and faith, according to Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion, was not allowed — at least in the context of a school.
“The undeniable fact,” Justice Kennedy added, “is that the school district’s supervision and control of a high school graduation ceremony places public pressure, as well as peer pressure, on attending students to stand as a group or, at least, maintain respectful silence during the Invocation and Benediction.” Such pressure, “though subtle and indirect, can be as real as any overt compulsion,” as it leaves a young nonadherent with “a reasonable perception that she is being forced by the State to pray in a manner her conscience will not allow.”
Coach Kennedy’s very public prayer violates any of these constitutional standards. It was an inherently divisive act, which rallied members of the public — and members of Congress — who share Kennedy’s faith into a disruptive conflict with the school itself. It communicated to non-Christian community members and students that they were less a part of the Bremerton community than people who share Kennedy’s faith. And it coerced football players who may not share Kennedy’s religious beliefs into joining his prayers, out of fear that they may anger a school official who wields considerable authority over them.
In the face of these arguments, the coach’s legal team attempts to flip this case on its head, presenting it not as a dispute about whether a school official violated the rights of nonbelievers, but as a case about whether the school violated Kennedy’s free speech rights and his right to practice his faith.
This claim turns on whether Kennedy was acting as a private citizen when he performed a religious ceremony on the 50-yard line, in full view of players and spectators, or whether he was acting as a representative of the school district when he did so.
Public employees retain broad free speech rights when they are not performing their official duties, and a public school teacher or coach should also be allowed to engage in ordinary acts of religious devotion while on the job — such as bowing their head before lunch or quietly asking for God’s blessing before a game — so long as those acts do not suggest that the school district is itself expressing a religious viewpoint.
But the Supreme Court has also long recognized that “when a citizen enters government service, the citizen by necessity must accept certain limitations on his or her freedom.” As the Court held in Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), “when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.”
There’s no reasonable question that Kennedy was engaged in his official duties when he knelt before his players and the gathered spectators in a public display of prayer. For one thing, as the school district emphasizes in its brief, Kennedy was only allowed on the football field in the first place because he was a school employee performing official duties. And as a federal appeals court held, Kennedy was selected by the school district specifically to “teach on the field, in the locker room, and at the stadium.”
Thus, when Kennedy walked out to the 50-yard line to performatively pray, “he was clothed with the mantle of one who imparts knowledge and wisdom,” and he was clothed in this mantle specifically because of his employment by the school district. The whole point of Coach Kennedy’s prayer was to wrap himself in the moral authority given to him by the school district, and to use this authority to convey a religious message.
Given that existing law so clearly favors the school district in the Kennedy case, the Supreme Court’s decision to hear this case at all suggests that a majority of the justices are eager to change the law to make it more favorable to government-sanctioned religious activity.
For one thing, when the case reached the Supreme Court in 2019, a total of four justices signed on to Alito’s opinion claiming that a lower court that ruled against Kennedy demonstrated an “understanding of the free speech rights of public school teachers [that] is troubling and may justify review in the future.”
Alito appeared unconcerned that a school official might wield his authority to pressure students into religious exercise. Instead, he fretted that coaches should not be told that their “duty to serve as a good role model requires the coach to refrain from any manifestation of religious faith.”
Less than two years after Alito wrote these words, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and she was replaced by conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Almost immediately after Barrett’s confirmation gave Republicans a supermajority on the Supreme Court, the Court’s new majority started handing down transformative new religion decisions granting broad new rights to the religious right.
Thus, while the weight of established law should crush Kennedy’s case, the biggest open question in Kennedy is most likely to be just how much leeway the Court will give public school teachers and coaches to preach their religious beliefs to their students.
The boring, crucial work that happens now that Starbucks and Amazon have unionized.
Union membership in the US has been in decline for decades, but there’s recently been a potential shift. Seventeen corporate Starbucks locations in the US have voted to form a union since the end of last year, and another 170 or so are slated to vote in the coming weeks and months — all in an industry where unionizing is rare. And in early April, workers at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse also voted for a union, making them the first to organize in a company known for quashing organizing. These successful votes are historic, and they’re an optimistic sign for unions in America.
But while the hard-won union votes might be the most cinematic part, it’s not the end of the story. The lengthy and difficult process of negotiating a contract that benefits workers has only just begun — and its conclusion is far from certain.
To move forward, the union must write a contract with the company, the union and the company must agree on it, and then union members vote on whether they also agree. The process can take anywhere from six months to a few years — and some don’t end with a contract at all. Some 30 percent of unions don’t establish a contract within three years.
The unions representing Starbucks and Amazon workers are off to a good start because, for the most part, their goals are clear. The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) has said its main objectives are to raise wages to $30 an hour, give workers longer breaks, and mostly eliminate mandatory overtime. The first Starbucks Workers United union, at the Elmwood Avenue store in Buffalo, New York, has been in contract negotiations since January 31; it has so far proposed “just cause” firing, better health and safety protocols, and giving customers the option to tip on credit cards. Future proposals include better wages and benefits.
The harder part, experts say, will be getting Amazon and Starbucks to agree on contracts. That’s not for lack of trying on the unions’ part. Rather, unions often face uphill battles with uncooperative companies and toothless labor laws.
Companies can find any number of ways to stall. Amazon is already objecting to the historic Staten Island vote, accusing the union of threatening voters to vote for the union, among other complaints. Starbucks has filed appeals that have delayed union votes but has said it will respect the bargaining process for the stores that have voted to unionize.
Companies are supposed to bargain in good faith, but there’s no timeline on when that should happen, nor are they compelled to agree to the contract. “Our law has no mechanism to force management,” Harry Katz, a professor at Cornell University’s labor relations school, told Recode. If the NLRB, the federal body charged with enforcing labor law, finds that they’re stalling unnecessarily, there’s not much it can do.
It’s clear why many companies stall: It can make unions lose momentum. If years pass without a contract, workers might wonder what the point of the union is at all. Additionally, both Amazon and Starbucks are in industries with high turnover, where the people who were so keen on unionizing might not be in that job long enough to see the contract through, which could potentially stunt the union drive.
The trick for the unions will be leveraging collective action like strikes, as well as public and political pressure, to try to get these employers to agree to a contract.
The Amazon Labor Union, which was created to organize the Staten Island warehouse, is not affiliated with an older union, so it doesn’t have the infrastructure — or cash — from unions that have been collecting dues for years. That means the union, which has so far been funded by crowdsourced money and pro bono help, will have to figure out on its own the labyrinthine processes of writing, negotiating, and enforcing a contract. Most importantly, its lack of affiliation might stymie workers’ ability to strike. Unlike established unions, the ALU doesn’t have a fund to help workers — many of whom make a low hourly wage and might not have cash reserves — get through a protracted strike in which they would forgo their pay.
However, a strike at an 8,000-person warehouse in New York City wouldn’t take that long to be effective, according to Rebecca Givan, a professor at Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Studies. “It’s possible that fairly modest actions can cause significant disruption,” she said, saying that one-hour or one-day strikes might be enough to push management to agree. It would be very difficult for Amazon to quickly replace striking workers at such a large warehouse.
It’s also possible that the Amazon Labor Union could accept formal or informal help from an existing union, like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which is affiliated with the Starbucks parent union. Mary Kay Henry, international president of the SEIU, told Recode in a statement her union would “offer whatever support we can to help workers at Amazon who are fighting for a voice on the job to bargain a better future.” The Teamsters, a union that represents warehouse and distribution workers, may also get involved: On Thursday, ALU leaders Christian Smalls and Derrick Palmer met with Sean M. O’Brien, the Teamsters’ general president. They discussed resources and assistance the Teamsters could provide to help them get their first contract with Amazon, according to a Teamsters spokesperson. Amazon Labor Union did not respond to requests for comment.
Growing union membership across the US, even if it’s not for their own union, is in unions’ best interest, according to Givan. “Amazon is a huge threat to the quality of jobs in the shipping and logistics sector, many of which are Teamsters jobs,” she said.
Part of what has made the Starbucks and Amazon unions successful is their worker-led structure, which has allowed them to largely avoided the criticism that they are outsiders. Starbucks workers themselves are negotiating their contracts — not union lawyers. That will most likely be the case with the Amazon union as well, which is formed entirely of Amazon workers.
The Starbucks union, however, is part of a larger, established union called Workers United. That means it has a lot more resources to guide them through writing and negotiating a contract. That union could also help it with a strike fund if it chose to do so. However, Starbucks stores are a lot smaller than an Amazon warehouse, so a strike at just one of its 9,000 stores would have less of an impact. It would also be relatively easier to replace 20 or so striking baristas.
Something that could work in the unions’ favor is that both Amazon and Starbucks are widely known, customer-facing companies, making it potentially easier for workers to attract political and public boosters.
Politicians from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to President Joe Biden have shown support for these union efforts. Public approval of unions is at its highest level since 1965, according to Gallup.
“The whole country is watching and working people everywhere are watching, and they are judging Amazon and Starbucks by their actions,” Givan said.
Public and political union supporters could help pressure the companies to agree to union demands. Perhaps more directly, Starbucks’ own investors have asked the company to remain neutral on unions and quickly come to collective bargaining agreements with stores that unionize.
As to whether the recent spate of successful organizing and current contract negotiations are enough to reverse long-declining union membership, Katz said, “I think it’s going to lead to more [organizing] but I don’t think it’s yet an indication of a massive turnaround.” He added, “We need more Amazons, we need a lot of the Starbucks to get organized. And then we need more signs [of increased unionizing] in the more traditional sectors.”
Deadly spell by Sanjay Kumar - Deadly spell by Sanjay Kumar
IPL 2022 | Batters have stopped taking risks against me: Rashid Khan - Rashid has taken six wickets from four matches at an economy rate of 6.68
IPL 2022 | Mumbai Indians in transition phase every team goes through: Bumrah - MI have already lost four games on the trot and lack of bowling options is hurting the five-time champions badly
IPL 2022 | Winless Mumbai Indians seek change of fortunes against Punjab Kings - It has been a nightmarish beginning for the five-time champions who are known for their slow starts.
Back injury rules Deepak Chahar out of IPL-15 - Deepak Chahar suffered the back injury during his rehab at the National Cricket Academy in Bengaluru.
Andhra Pradesh: NRI seat fee at SVIMS College slashed - Special round of counselling to be done by NTRUHS
Stalin unveils new buildings - They were constructed at a total cost of ₹66.48 crore
Andhra Pradesh: Bodies of train accident victims sent to their native places in Assam, West Bengal - Five people run over by Konark Express near Batuva village in Srikakualm district on April 11 night
Grocery shop owner held for selling banned gutkha products near Villupuram - Over 3,000 packets of banned tobacco-based products seized
Andhra Pradesh: TTD lifts curbs on ‘sarva darshan’ tokens due to surge of devotees - Footfalls at the hill town peaked on Tuesday morning
Ukraine conflict: ‘Russian soldiers raped me and killed my husband’ - The BBC has uncovered first-hand evidence of Russian soldiers raping and killing civilians in a village west of Kyiv.
Hidden wealth of one of Putin’s ‘inner circle’ revealed - Leaked documents show how sanctioned oligarch Suleiman Kerimov used shell companies to move $700m.
French elections: Macron targets Le Pen as run-off campaign begins - The French president fires up his re-election campaign visiting a stronghold of his far-right rival.
Marina Ovsyannikova: German outlet hires Russian protester - Marina Ovsyannikova staged an anti-war protest on a live broadcast of Russian state TV last month.
Could Marine Le Pen win? - Marine Le Pen will go head-to-head with President Macron in an election run off in a fortnight.
“Implausible:” Zero deaths in Shanghai’s COVID spike spurs skepticism - Low vaccination among elderly and reports of deaths in hospitals raise questions. - link
Fitbit gains FDA clearance for new atrial fibrillation-detection feature - The Google-owned company adds a feature previously seen in the Apple Watch. - link
The simple 9-minute, no-attack method for beating Elden Ring - Speedrunners use glitches to warp through the entire map without killing a single enemy. - link
Apparent software signing issue breaks updates for some Studio Displays - Apple appears to have fixed the server-side update issue as of Sunday night. - link
Check out the portable, cranky Playdate before our review goes live next week - Unboxing and cute intro video for now; full crank-filled review coming in a week. - link
Me: I can’t afford that
Pizza guy: well you’re gonna have to pay some other way, then
Me: [takes out wallet] wait I forgot I had 30 bucks
Porn director: Cut, WTF?
submitted by /u/karatekid430
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He looks around, and takes a seat neat to a very attractive women.
He gives her a quick glance, then causally looks at his watch for a moment.
The women notices this and asks, “Is your date running late?”
“No”, he replies, “Q has just given me this state- of-the-art watch. I was just testing it.”
The intrigued women says “A state-of-the-art watch? Whats so special about it?”
Bond explains “It uses alpha waves to talk to me telepathically”.
The lady says “Whats it telling you now?”
“Well, it says you are not wearing any panties.”
The women giggles and replies, “Well , it must be broken because I am wearing panties”
Bond smirks, taps his watch and says,
“Bloody thing’s an hour fast”
submitted by /u/B-L-O-C-K-S
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He got arrested after the police saw people actually letting him in.
submitted by /u/Kyle______
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However, the gorilla is their most popular attraction by far, and they can’t afford to go a day without it. So the zoo owner asks one of his workers to wear a gorilla suit they have in storage for an extra $100 a day if he will go in the gorilla cage and pretend to be the gorilla until the zoo can afford a new one.
Quickly, the new “gorilla” becomes the most popular craze at the zoo. People from all over are coming to see the “Human-like” gorilla.
About a month in, the craze has started to wear off. So, to get peoples’ attention back, he decides to climb over his enclosure and hang from the net ceiling above the lions’ den next to him. A large crowd of people gather watching the spectacle in awe and terror. Suddenly the man loses his grip and falls to the floor of the lion’s den. The man starts screaming “HELP!! HELP!!!” Suddenly a lion pounces him from behind and whispers in his ear, “Shut the fuck up right now or you’re going to get us both fired.”
submitted by /u/MrGuttor
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[Dumb joke I just thought up.]
So he says “wrap your hand around my dick and I’ll see if I can feel it.”
She does so and he shakes his head. She tells him “honey, go to the doctor!”
The next day he thinks up another idea and asks her, “maybe if you put your mouth on my dick I can feel something?”
So she rolls her eyes but gives it a shot. He shakes his head. She tells him again, “honey please go to the doctor!”
The next morning he wakes up, kisses his wife and tells her he’ll be back. He’s off to see the doctor. He arrives home later in the evening and she asks, “well what did the doctor say?”
He says “not very much. He put his mouth on it too and I still couldn’t feel anything.”
submitted by /u/apaluq
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