Jon Oliver interviews Keith Alexander

In order to try and build up buzz for the new show, HBO has out the entire first episode of Jon Olver’s new show Last Week Tonight on YouTube that you can see here. It seems to be similar to The Daily Show in style. To his credit, Oliver covered the Indian election currently going on, something ignored by much American media, and he excoriated them for it. He also covered the POM Wonderful v. Coca-Cola Supreme Court case in which there are no good guys.
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Parody of Matrix Reloaded

As long-time readers know, I am a sucker for parodies and if there was one set of films that were just begging to be mocked in that way, it has to be the Matrix series. I saw only the first one and while the special effects were fun, the story made little sense and its earnest attempts at philosophizing were so risible that I decided not to see anymore. I tend to avoid sequels anyway.
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Measuring cost-effectiveness of health care

There is always some rationing involved in providing any service and health care is no exception. In the US, rationing is largely determined by the ability to pay because the limitations are largely set by the for-profit health insurance companies. If you are rich and/or have good employer based health insurance coverage, you get more and better services than if you are poor and do not have an employer who provides it. The Affordable Care Act tried to close that gap by increasing the affordability of health insurance for those with lower incomes.
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Philomena as a metaphor for the Catholic church and pope Francis

In the film Philomena that I reviewed earlier, the nuns that took in the young pregnant Philomena and then sold her child into adoption against her will were portrayed as overtly mean and cruel, mostly older women with stern expressions, except for the young nun who assisted her with her delivery and gave her a surreptitiously taken photograph of her child that she treasured all her life.
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Goodbye ‘Stephen Colbert’, hello Stephen Colbert

With the announcement that Stephen Colbert will leave his current show and replace David Letterman as the host of CBS’s The Late Show, there has been speculation of what he will do in his new venue and what Comedy Central will place in his time slot. Of course, Colbert going on broadcast TV, the supposedly mainstream entertainment channels, has made his right-wing enemies apoplectic as a further sign of traditional values being destroyed, with Rush Limbaugh fuming that “CBS has just declared war on the heartland of America. No longer is comedy going to be a covert assault on traditional American values, conservatism. Now it’s just wide out in the open.”
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The Israel-Palestinian issue in rap

The so-called Middle East ‘Peace Process’, which needs to be relabeled to the more accurate ‘Delay and Deny Palestinian Rights Process’, has been called off for the umpteenth time since the Israeli government objects to the fact that the Palestinian Authority, that governs the Occupied Territories in the West Bank, has applied for recognition from various international agencies and has also arrived at a unity agreement with Hamas that governs Gaza.
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Why are diamonds clear while coal is black?

In the Superman folklore, he turns a lump of coal into a diamond by compressing it in his fist, cementing the idea in popular culture that diamonds are compressed coal. But in reality, while both diamonds and coal are both made of carbon, they are formed differently and at different locations underground. Coal and other fossil fuels are formed in the Earth’s crust (see the comments to an earlier post for some excellent information from readers about how fossil fuels form) but diamonds are created at much greater depths within the Earth’s mantle.
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