When Stephen Colbert shows a photo of someone in the news, he routinely gives an alternative description based on how they look in the picture, as in “Deputy Attorney General and man staring at you from the produce section Rod Rosenstein.” Here’s a collection of them running just over two minutes:
You can find the previous collection at this link.
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Over the past few nights Jimmy Kimmel has had a lot of intelligent, well-informed, and sometimes funny things to say about the Cassidy-Graham healthcare bill, and the bill’s defenders have struck back with name-calling and falsehoods. Senator “John Kennedy” (R-Bizarro World) dishonestly suggested that Kimmel and Bernie Sanders were the main opponents of the bill, leaving out the almost-universal opposition of healthcare organizations such as the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association, in fact pretty much any outfit that includes “American” and something related to healthcare in its name.
One major problem with the bill — one of many — is that the bill does not protect people with pre-existing conditions (like Jimmy Kimmel’s son, born with a heart defect). Anyone who tells you it does is either misinformed or lying. Nothing in the bill stops companies from pricing such polices so high that no one could afford them. Some of the bill’s defenders claim state laws would prevent that, but experience says otherwise. Until Obamacare came along, many people with pre-existing conditions couldn’t buy coverage, and only a few states helped them.
Even Fox News had the guts to ask Vice President Pence about it, and he simply changed the subject (and as a bonus falsely ascribed a Henry David Thoreau quote to Thomas Jefferson).
Here’s Kimmel’s latest:
For more intelligent commentary from Kimmel and others, see this post from yesterday.
Also, see this article by Ian Crouch from The New Yorker (posted yesterday on their website) about Jimmy Kimmel’s reluctant entry into politics, prompted by his newborn son’s nearly fatal heart defect, which at the time prompted him to say tearfully that no family should have to decide whether they could afford to save their child’s life. That led Senator Cassidy to promise he would support healthcare legislation that passes what Cassidy called “the Jimmy Kimmel test,” including on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. It was Cassidy’s breaking of that promise that prompted Kimmel to speak up.
by In 1990 the Galileo spacecraft successfully detected evidence of life on Earth. That wasn’t too big a surprise, but it did make the point that in some cases strong signs of life on a planet can be detected from space by remotely analyzing atmospheric chemistry via spectroscopy.
Spectroscopy means looking at the spectrum of light that’s emitted, reflected, or passing through a substance (including a gas) for bright and dark lines that are characteristic of elements and compounds in that substance. In this case we’re talking about dark absorption lines, wavelengths of light that are absorbed by the atoms or ions in question. If a planet’s atmosphere has a lot of methane together with oxygen, or a lot of nitrous oxide together with ultraviolet light, something must be replenishing the CH4 or N2O that would otherwise not last very long, and based on our knowledge of chemistry, that something is probably some sort of life.
Other than Earth, there are no planets in our solar system with spectroscopic evidence of life, and we can’t quite yet analyze the spectra of light from small, thin-atmosphere, Earthlike planets around other stars, so Earth is so far the only planet where life has been detected that way, and we already knew Earth has life.
But next year NASA hopes the launch the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be large and sensitive enough to potentially detect signs of life. Such life won’t necessarily be complex, let alone intelligent (not that we’re ones to talk), but if it’s discovered, it will of course be a major event. And it might be found in just a few years.
by You may recall that after Jimmy Kimmel’s newborn son nearly died in April, he talked tearfully about the experience when he was finally able to return to his show, and he added that nobody else’s child should die just because the parents weren’t rich enough to afford the necessary medical care. Soon after, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) promised that any healthcare law he supported would have to pass what he called “the Jimmy Kimmel test.”
So when Cassidy sponsored the new bill that would take away a lot of needed coverage, Kimmel quite justly called him on it a couple of nights ago. Asked about that on CNN, Cassidy accused Kimmel of not understanding the subject. Last night Kimmel demonstrated that he understands far better than Cassidy and his allies do how seriously bad the new bill really is, and why almost every major healthcare organization opposes it:
Below, pediatrician and medical school professor Dr Aaron Carroll more briefly and dispassionately summarizes what the Cassidy-Graham bill currently before the Senate would do:
Finally, on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, perpetually enraged comedian Lewis Black offers his own take:
My only objection to Black’s segment is that he’s nowhere near pissed off enough in response to the blatant lies told by politicians and other weasels in the clips shown in his segment. Just to list a few:
by When Stephen Colbert shows a photo of someone in the news, he routinely gives an alternative description based on how they look in the picture, as in “Commerce Secretary and Jeff Dunham puppet gone rogue Wilbur Ross.” Here’s a collection of them running just over three minutes:
You can find the previous collection at this link.
by A regular bit on Comedy Central’s Key & Peele show (which ran 2012-2015) featured Jordan Peele as the unfailingly level-headed President Obama and Keegan-Michael Key as Luther, whose job was to translate Obama’s calm remarks into something reflecting the anger, outrage, and frustration one might have expected Obama to feel internally. This became so popular that Key appeared with the real President Obama during a White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2015.
Some of us have been missing Luther, so it’s good news that he’s apparently back. In mid-July Key appeared on an episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to talk about his latest role as Horatio in a production of Hamlet. (Key studied as a Shakespearean actor before getting into comedy.) But Colbert invited Key to revive the character of Luther, and he did, quite gloriously.
As a bonus, here’s Luther at the 2015 White House Correspondents’ Dinner:
by The Daily Show host Trevor Noah acts out the thoughts read to him by Trevor Noah with no rehearsal. It turns out to be reasonably funny:
by In the video below Hank Green does a good job of addressing one of my hobbyhorses, namely the popular misunderstanding of life expectancy.
Current U.S. life expectancy at birth is about 76.5 for men and 81.2 for women, but if you’re an American working out when to start collecting Social Security, those averages are misleading. They include people who die in childhood or as young adults or in middle age. Once you reach, say, 65, you’re obviously not going to go back and die younger. According to the Social Security Administration, at age 65 American men live an average of 19.3 more years, until the age of 84.3. American women at 65 average another 11.6 years, reaching 86.6.
You occasionally hear that when Social Security was first set up with a default retirement age of 65, most didn’t live to be 65. That’s true only if you include those who died before reaching adulthood and paid little or nothing into Social Security. Even in 1940, when Social Security payments began, a majority of Americans who reached 21 lived long enough to draw Social Security benefits. And while retirees are living longer today, remaining life expectancy at age 65 has risen only about five years since 1940. (There’s more on life expectancy and Social Security on the Social Security Administration website.)
A major reason life expectancy at birth is so much better today is the tremendous reduction in childhood and infant mortality, largely thanks to vaccines, antibiotics, and improved sanitation. Giving birth is also much safer for mothers than it used to be.
I suspect most people don’t fully realize how many children used to die as a matter of course. Disasters typically happen suddenly and attract notice, while good news, even astoundingly good news such as saving the lives of untold number of children, is more likely to develop more gradually and pass unnoticed.
by Most explanations given for how airplanes fly, or more specifically how airfoils create lift, turn out to be either dead wrong or seriously incomplete. I found the explanation below, by Professor Mike Merrifield, animator Pete McPartlan, and prolific filmmaker Brady Haran, surprisingly interesting and quite clear, despite what turns out to be some inherent complexity.
Granted, not everyone is interested in such details, but if you are, take a look. It runs just 10 minutes:
by Ta-Nehisi Coates has published a widely discussed article in The Atlantic Monthly titled “The First White President” about Donald Trump. I don’t entirely agree with what Coates has to say, but he certainly makes some valid points that are worth reading. Among other things, Coates suggests that Trump to a fair extent defines himself as the anti-Obama, taking positions reflexively opposite those of his predecessor and working to erase the legacy of the president Trump had suggested was too unintelligent to write a book and whose birth certificate he had charged was fake.
(A brief aside: If by some remote chance anyone reading this still takes seriously the ridiculous notion that Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii, rumor-debunking website Snopes has a whole collection of articles about that.)
On the other hand, Trevor Noah amusingly took the exact opposite position from Coates during a break in a taping of The Daily Show back in July, weeks before the Coates article was published. Two minutes:
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