Jon Stewart blasts the Biden administration over Gaza

In a blistering piece on The Daily Show, he blasts Joe Biden and his administration for their hypocrisy in using high-minded language while avoiding doing anything meaningful to stop Israel from slaughtering tens of thousands of Gazans and laying their entire community to waste. He also focuses on something that is not being talked about much and that is how Palestinians in the West Bank are also being killed by Israeli forces and settlers and their lands taken, even though they had nothing to do with the October 7th attacks. It is clear that Israel is using those attacks to justify yet another land grab, even though those violate international law.

The negatives of food delivery services

Many people take advantage of the convenience of food delivery apps like Uber Eats, GrubHub, and Door Dash. Their popularity soared during the Covid lockdown era when people were reluctant to go out and they were a boon to restaurants struggling to stay afloat then. But they have stayed popular even after things returned to almost normal as people had got used to the convenience and. continued to use them. It definitely helps those who for whatever reason are unable to cook their own food or are unable to go out.

In his latest episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver takes a close look at this business and finds that the two categories that we think benefit most from this model (restaurants and delivery workers) are in fact benefiting the least.


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More on the right wing freakout over Easter and the Transgender Day of Visibility

The Daily Show show had fun at the expense of Faux News and other rightwing news sources losing their minds over the fact that this year, because of a calendar coincidence, Transgender Day of Visibility coincided with Easter. And let’s be clear, these people know better. They are just pretending to be outraged, like a lot of their other ‘outrages’.

Desi Lydic made the important point that what these people object to is not that the visibility day coincides with Easter, they dislike the fact that the transgender community exists at all.

Also, make sure you get to the very funny conversation she has with Michael Kosta that begins at the 6:35 mark.

Lina Khan interviewed by Jon Stewart

I have long said that the appointment of Lina Khan as head of the Federal Trade Commission is the best decision that Joe Biden made. She is smart and aggressive and not afraid to take on the business giants. On Monday’s episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviews her about how the FTC is trying to combat the monopolies that now exist in so many sectors of the economy, thanks to the relaxing of regulatory rules governing mergers that began with Ronald Reagan and have continued since then.

The Trump stock bubble

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) seems to be about to receive a huge financial windfall at exactly the moment when he most needed it, when he is facing a multitude of huge fines as a result of losses in sexual assault and fraud cases.

The windfall comes in the form of a merger between his social media company Trump Media & Technology Group (that is behind his social media site Truth Social) and a financial shell company, Digital World Acquisition. That combined company went public and as of Friday, it had a market capitalization of close to $8.4 billion, with SSAT’s share being around $4.9 billion.
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The UFO cult

I do not believe that we have been visited by extra-terrestrials. However, I do think it is quite possible, even likely, that intelligent life has emerged in many places in the universe. The universe is an immensely large place with an estimated 1022 stars within the visible part and since we know that the probability of intelligent life, let alone any kind of life, emerging is not zero (since it has happened here), it is not hard to imagine that it also emerged elsewhere.

What I do not believe is that they visited here, simply because of the vast distances that they would have had to travel, even if they originated on a planet of the nearest star to the Sun. To be able to traverse such distances would require some spectacularly new science and technology that is unlike anything that we know, that is also able to circumvent the limits of the speed of light and the lifetimes of organisms that seem to be so firmly based.

Furthermore, the idea that they have arrived and are playing coy by giving us just hints of their visits, and that the government is covering up those visits, adds another layer of implausibility. Why go to all the trouble of interstellar travel just to take a peek and go away? To arrive here would require incredibly sophisticated technology. To think that they were able to do that only to have their craft crash in the desert in the US, not just once but several times, just compounds the unbelievability.
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The student loan problem

John Oliver explains why so many students in the US acquire such large college debts and have a hard time paying off their loans. It is a familiar story. A government program meant to serve a good end is handed over to the supposedly efficient private sector to manage, which then turns out to be both inefficient and corrupt and results is people making loan payments for decades while making hardly a dent in the principal.

Oliver says that Joe Biden, over the objections of Republicans and obstacles placed by the US Supreme Court, has actually managed to eliminate or reduce student debt for a considerable number of people.

John Oliver takes on Boeing

His show Last Week Tonight looked at the decline in quality of aircraft produced by the company after the merger with McDonnell Douglas, when the focus shifted from producing high quality planes to worshipping at the shrine of the holy capitalist trinity of increased profits, share prices, and executive compensation.

Much of the factual information he presented had been covered in more depth in the 2022 documentary Downfall that I reviewed two months ago, but this was shorter, is more accessible to the general public, and Oliver adds his usual humorous touch.