John Oliver's Last Week Tonight

According to Larry Gonick (The Cartoon History of the United States), a territory is totally different from a colony because we didn't like being a colony and we would totally never have colonies ourselves.

And then there's CGP Grey.

Interesting! I wasn't aware of that deal with Micronesia et al.

This week's story is about March Madness...it's madness that these athletes do not get paid....

And thus John continues his trend of pissing off every unscrupulous, fabulously wealthy organization in the world by telling the truth about them.

Legislators looking to make a good name for themselves and get some attention could just watch Jon's show and start drafting legislation regarding whatever his latest main topic is.

I'm grateful for the official You Tube channel. Clips are better than nothing.

This week's story is on Tickets.....and not the ones to go see the live taping of Last Week Tonight...

The most important question of this episode: When will John's Hawk have a Bird-of against Colberts Eagle?

I love how visibly afraid of the hawk John was.

Those claws are scary!

Also that beak does rip and tear with remarkable power and efficiency.

Time for John to tackle a story so big it takes as long as the show itself. Which is why this show has an extra 15 minutes....

Edit: Just finished the thing and it was awesome. A clever way to frame the issue.....

edited 6th Apr '15 2:19:11 AM by TwilightFalchion

I think it's funny watching Snowden's reaction to people not knowing who he is. Like, he's legitimately hurt. Also, being so late for an interview doesn't make him look good. Unless he had a legitimate reason, kinda wonder why it wasn't mentioned.

Can't wait to watch this. From what I've seen, it takes something of a middle ground on the subject, which I look forward to because I can't find anyone besides myself who says anything other than "he's committed treason and should go to jail" and "he's a saint and we should make him double-president for life."

The segment doesn't offer an opinion on Snowden one way or the other, aside from discussing the scariness of the Patriot Act and how far the NSA has run with it. In fact, Oliver grills him on the irresponsibility of the media to whom he committed all the data he took.

It says something about Snowden that he failed to hit back to the nobody recognising him bit with "I'm the messenger, it doesn't matter if they forget me, what's important is if they know about the programs I revealed"

edited 6th Apr '15 12:14:22 PM by Silasw

If it wasn't a comedy show, they probably wouldn't have mentioned him being late. Since it is a comedy show, they couldn't pass up the best parts of watching a comedian think he got stood up.

Well, it's pretty cruel to tell a guy who went into exile to warn the country that he loves that nobody remembers that warning anymore. The most hurtful were the ones that described him as hurting national security.

I do think LWT (that still makes me think of London Weekend Television) could have done done follow-up questions about the issue itself, not the person.

And people still don't. Nobody they talked to believed that the government had access to their genitally-inclined photos.

When the interview covered national security it kinda looked like he was trying to deflect John's questions. Even when John points out the Times screwing up a redaction on our actions against Al Queda, he doesn't even go "Yea, I have to live with that, but....." and then continue on with his "free from risk" thing.

Yeah the "we have to accept some crew ups for the greater good" argument works for the NSA to if it works for him.

I did love the "So am I on a list now?" bit, because John was obviously genuinely surprised that he would now be on a list.

I think it was on Science Friday that there was some expert talking about how it made sense for the government's security agencies to be in the business of breaking codes when the Enemy's codes and media were different from our own, but now everyone uses the same tech, the same frequencies, and the same encryption, and the choice is whether our security agencies are in the business of making our information less safe or if external threats are more important. This expert was on the side of "they should be making the internet more safe, not less".

This isn't really the place for that debate, but I would say personally that the role of security agencies, public and private, should be to make the electronic data space safer for consumers, even if it comes at the cost of privacy.

I think there might also have been an element of "these agencies should be merged into one, because they're all working in the same internet space now" to his argument.

Which, I understand why the FBI and the CIA are separate (FBI is domestic, CIA is international), but what's the NSA's niche? What other seemingly redundant security agencies are there?

I'm kinda surprised. This is the most critical I've ever seen anyone be of Snowden. No other itnervew has ever called him out for his irresponsibility in what he did with the documents. Or called him out on the "I understood everything in them" lie.

This one did?