Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label John Oliver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John Oliver. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 05, 2022

Disturbing

You know the world is not in a very happy place when the comedy shows turn dark and a little creepy.

John Oliver - Beach Dolls

Monday, June 27, 2022

Water

Need to shower up? Find it on Craigs List for about 5 bucks.

John Oliver - Last Week Tonight


The feds have put up an entire website dedicated to the subject of Drought Conditions here in USAmerica Inc.

Monday, June 20, 2022

Today's Last Week Tonight

Cuz what we all need is to have some fun as we spiral into a national existential crisis.

John Oliver - Rent


Monday, May 09, 2022

Mr Oliver, If You Please

John Oliver - HBO

What's deeply rooted in our history? Taking anyone who isn't white and male, and turning them into a fraction.

Monday, February 28, 2022

Last Week Tonight

Q: "What on Earth am I here for?"
A: "To be scapegoated in a generations-long morality war that has nothing to do with you and everything to do with how we, as a society view money, sex, and power."

John Oliver - Sex Work

Monday, May 03, 2021

About That Vax Denial Crap

John Oliver

And again I have to ask: Why is a once-a-week comedy show doing more journalism than most "news" organizations?

Monday, April 05, 2021

Today's Econ 200

John Oliver - with a message about The National Debt from our children and grandchildren...

"... grow the fuck up."

Monday, March 22, 2021

John Oliver

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight is the show 60 Minutes wishes it still was.

Main story - Plastics


The manufacturers of all that plastic shit practically invented the modern version of Externalizing Cost.

The manipulative bullshit message is that pollution is a problem the consumer has to deal with - the makers of the materials that are polluting everything don't actually exist. Somehow, once they've released their shit into the world, they magically disappear and have nothing to do with any of it ever again - they are nowhere to be found in the cycle of production and consumption.

Monday, March 15, 2021

John Oliver

Doing the work of the lord.


If Tucker Carlson gets any weirder or more asshole-ey, he's an absolute shoe-in for the GOP nomination in 2024.

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Monday, June 22, 2020

This Week Last night

The American inmate population (2.2 million of us) comprises a patient cohort with some of the highest health risk in USAmerica Inc.

John Oliver


It's worth asking - "What the fuck are we doing?"

Monday, April 06, 2020

Tuesday, March 31, 2020

And Now This

John Oliver

Taking a chance on COVID-19 in order to get back to work and "save the economy" doesn't trade one bad outcome for the other - it gets you both bad outcomes.

Monday, March 16, 2020

It Gets Weirder

John Oliver


If somebody figures out how to do these shows in the absence of a live audience - how to do it without it feeling awkward and more than a little dismal - they're gonna be fuckin' heroes. People will write songs about it.

Monday, July 01, 2019

John Last Night

John Oliver


In spite of losing millions of manufacturing jobs over the last 25 years, we make more stuff here at USAmerica Inc than ever before.

The problem is that the labor force has been shut out of the benefits of the dramatic increases in productivity, and we can't get government to do anything that might help average workers adapt to an economy that changes so fast they have practically no chance to keep up.

I don't know what to do about it, but I do know that the corporate bosses are lying to us through their armies of lobbying firms and coin-operated politicians.

We don' get a fix on any of this until we can count on having a reasoned discussion about it, and we can't have that discussion until we figure out how to make the big money stop skewing the data.

Propaganda works.

Donate if you can - make it better

Monday, June 17, 2019

Last Week Last Night

John Oliver - Impeachment


Pelosi is playing the FDR card: "Sounds like a great idea - now go out and get the support we need to make me do it."

And she's not wrong.

To reiterate: Pelosi is in charge of The House. That's no small thing, but it's 1 part of a 6-part machine and the Repubs control majorities in all of the other 5 parts (ie: Senate, Executive, Judicial, State Governments and the Big Money Donors). 

And again, she's playing a pretty strong game (so far) with a pretty weak hand.

And also too, I can't presume to know everything she knows, so I have to presume she's working in the context of information I know nothing about.

That said, there's nothing wrong with keeping up the pressure. We just have to be a little careful not to express our frustrations in terms of "she's stupid" and "she's incompetent" and "she's not doing her job", etc.  We can't afford to get suckered again. 

Because this is not about "those bumbling dumbass Democrats".

We're in this pickle because of the GOP - because of Republican policies in service to the 40-year project of Radical Libertarians to shitcan our little experiment in self-government and replace it with plutocracy.

Don't fall for that shit.





Monday, June 03, 2019

Listen The Fuck Up

John Oliver:



Try to remember that right about 100 years ago, we had very little regulatory regimen in place, and there were people dying of all kinds of nasty shit because of things like Radioactive Water.




Radithor was manufactured from 1918 to 1928 by the Bailey Radium Laboratories, Inc., of East Orange, New Jersey. The owner of the company and head of the laboratories was listed as William J. A. Bailey, a dropout from Harvard College,[1] who was not a medical doctor.[2] It was advertised as "A Cure for the Living Dead"[3] as well as "Perpetual Sunshine". The expensive product was claimed to cure impotence, among other ills.[4]

Eben Byers, a wealthy American socialite, athlete, industrialist and Yale College graduate, died from Radithor radium poisoning in 1932.[5] Byers was buried in a lead-lined coffin; when exhumed in 1965 for study, his remains were still highly radioactive.[4]

Byers's death led to the strengthening of the Food and Drug Administration's powers and the demise of most radiation-based patent medicines.
A Wall Street Journal article (1 Aug. 1990) describing the Byers incident was titled "The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off".[6]

That regulatory approach worked pretty well. We fostered the world's greatest economy and the world's best and safest products (mostly) for a good long time.

There are always assholes willing to abandon whatever ethics they may once have had in the interest of turning a buck, so I'm gonna hafta insist on Gubmint Interference when it comes to trying to keep those assholes at bay.