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This Agreement is entered into between You, a Person Who Enjoys In-Person Entertainment (hereinafter “Fan”), and Me, an Introvert Who Avoids Crowds, Noise, and Congregated Delight (“Non-fan”), as a condition of Non-Fan’s attendance at a Live Musical Event (“Event”).

RECITALS¹:

WHEREAS, Fan is (select one):

• A middle-aged person who, in their impending dotage, wishes to recapture the merest spark of their misspent youth;
• An underage minor who resents Non-fan’s existence in the extreme, but who has neither the financial nor vehicular means to attend Event unaccompanied;
• A small child who saw an ill-timed commercial for a live performance by puppets, princesses, and/or a shrill-voiced, brightly-dressed performer who is, inexplicably, a grown-ass man.

WHEREAS, Event is (select one):

[C]onservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family winin a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made amockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unbornchildren. But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. Conservatives in the statesand in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, shouldpush as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. Inparticular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact themost robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deployingexisting federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying withstatutory bans on the federal funding of abortion. Conservatives should ardentlypursue these pro-life and pro-family policies while recognizing the many womenwho find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations and the heroism of every choice to become a mother. Alternative options to abortion, especiallyadoption, should receive federal and state support.

SCOTUS could make bad worse across the U.S. You’ve heard by now that a container ship leaving Baltimore harbor struck and collapsed the Key Bridge at 1:28 a.m. Rescue operations are underway. A few people have been rescued from the water; others are believed missing. The FBI’s Baltimore field office declared it saw “no specific and credible information to suggest any ties to terrorism at this time.” That did not prevent X shitposters from suggesting it. Sure, 1:28 a.m. would be the perfect time for a mass-casualty attack. Morons. CNN (about 9:20 a.m. ET): Frightening video: Stay tuned. Just now, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in a case brought to roll back FDA access to pharmaceutical abortion via widely used mifepristone, first approved in 2000 (Washington Post): The justices will examine rule changes in 2016 and 2021 that, among other things, made the drug available by mail and from a medical provider other than a doctor. Their eventual ruling won’t remove mifepristone from the market but could make it harder to obtain.

Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat shared he doesn't believe it's the show's job "to reflect people's culture back at them; it really isn't."

If you read Frost for the snow, but don’t feel the cold, then you’re not really reading Frost

The White House released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025 on March 11th, and the news was depressingly familiar: $895 billion for the Pentagon and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. After adjusting for inflation, that’s only slightly less than last year’s proposal, but far higher than the levels reached during either the Korean or Vietnam wars or at the height of the Cold War. And that figure doesn’t even include related spending on veterans, the Department of Homeland Security, or the additional tens of billions of dollars in “emergency” military spending likely to come later this year. One thing is all too obvious: a trillion-dollar budget for the Pentagon alone is right around the corner, at... Read more

Source: Spending Unlimited appeared first on TomDispatch.com.

There are rules here? The Biden-Harris campaign has taken off the gloves. That was clear from Joe Biden’s State of the Union address. But that night was not a one-off. Donald “91 Counts” Trump is overwhelmed with so many legal fights and threats to his liquidity (and freedom) that he has nearly run out of bandwidth for campaigning for president. Biden-Harris means to increase the pressure and prod Trump’s delicate ego at every opportunity. “This is the campaign I’ve been waiting for,” Ron Filipkowski posted in response to a bruising press statement from the Biden-Harris campaign (CNBC): A court ruling that slashed Donald Trump’s civil fraud appeal bond was a financial win for the former president. But the campaign of his rival, President Joe Biden, found a way to capitalize on the news. “Donald Trump is weak and desperate – both as a man and a candidate for President,” the Biden campaign said in a searing statement Monday afternoon.

The simple question that was raised during a recent conference … was to what extent has — or should — the teaching of economics be modified … The simple answer is that the economics profession is unlikely to change. Why would economists be willing to give up much of their human capital, painstakingly nurtured for […]

The social media frenzy around the Princess of Wales' absence from public life reveals the most fundamental tension in our modern monarchy: the codependence of the Royal Family and the press, writes Jonathan Lis

In the days after October 7, Meta said it removed more than 2 million pieces of Hebrew and Arabic content, but didn’t break down the data.

The post Meta Refuses to Answer Questions on Gaza Censorship, Say Sens. Warren and Sanders appeared first on The Intercept.

GARY BUSEY: They’ve robbed twenty-six banks in three years. And all we know about them is one thing: They’re surfers. You need to learn to surf, infiltrate the local scene, and find out exactly who these guys are.

ME: Great. I’ll get a boogie board.

GARY: What? No! They won’t accept you into their tribe on one of those things, punk!

ME: It’ll be an expensive one. I’ll call it a “body board.” That’s what the guys who are serious about boogie boarding call them: body boards. It’s surfing, but on your stomach.

GARY: Jesus H. Christ on a cracked crutch, rookie! Did I stutter? You need to learn to surf! Actual goddamn surfing! The only way to earn their trust and be accepted into their scene is by becoming a surfer.

ME: Skimboarder.

GARY: What?

In today's BCTV Daily Dispatch: Star Trek: Prodigy, Ronna McDaniel/NBC News, Euphoria, X-Men '97, Doctor Who, Bluey, 3 Body Problem & more!

Right-wing federal appeal judges signal they support repeal of the no-cost preventive care mandate, all but guaranteeing a Supreme Court showdown.

You open the app and immediately the algorithm shows you what you want. All the drivers in the world—and the algorithm someone finds the one who will get you where you want to go, as cheaply as possible! Uber makes it harder to sustain the myth of “the algorithm.” As I wrote in Mother Jones last month, […]

Sadiq Khan is the latest victim of a sustained campaign of misinformation and outright lies from the Conservative party

Scientific narratives project social hierarchies onto nature. That’s why we need better metaphors to describe cellular life

- by Charudatta Navare

Read at Aeon

They’ve been studied by researchers and recruited by police forces, but what’s it actually like to be a super-recogniser?

- by Shayla Love

Read at Psyche

In 2022, the median wealth gap between U.S. men and women who had never married shrank to its smallest since 1989, but the gap remains significant.

Charities have accused the Government of making 'unsafe and frankly irresponsible' decisions concerning mental health

Julian Petley and the Good Law Project argue that the channel is being held to different standards on impartiality from those governing public service broadcasters

I’ve written, prescriptively, that money shouldn’t buy anything that matters: not healthcare or education, for example.

Anything we can do, we can afford

But at the top level money can’t buy anything you couldn’t do anyway. Anything we can’t do, we can only buy from others. The Britian of the thirties was still, despite all its problems, a great industrial power. They could do most things, and it was ridiculous to pretend they didn’t have the money. They could build ships and buildings and refine medicines and so on.

There we some things they couldn’t do: they couldn’t produce as much food as they wanted: they bad to buy that from others. But since other people wanted what they could do, they would accept British pounds.

And there were things no one could do, and money wouldn’t buy those things: go to the moon, for example.