Monday – 11.9
We’re officially one year away from the 2016 presidential election, so things are about to REALLY heat up. Not if you’re listening to Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson speak, though. That guy always sounds like he’s three Xanax’s deep and isn’t too worried that he’s about to perform brain surgery. However, that’s not why he’s been in the news recently. Trevor Noah did an excellent job of highlighting the ways Dr. Carson has been trying to convince Americans that he’s anything but the upstanding citizen the media would have you believe. He insists that he stabbed a close relative when he was younger and frequently got in fights. The more people accuse him of lying about his violent past, the more he protests, even though you’d think a tendency to solve disputes through non-violence would be the more desirable trait in a potential president. In a further attempt to prove just how hard he is, Carson released a political ad in which he raps about personal responsibility. He also claims the media is scrutinizing him more closely than they did Barack Obama in 2008, but A. Trevor Noah quickly proves this assertion to be entirely incorrect and B. given the evidence Carson putting out, is it any surprise people are picking up what he’s throwing down?
Ben Carson believes this is a slightly more accurate historical depiction of the Great Pyramids.
Did you vote in the last election? How’d that work out for you? Pretty shitty with a lot of waiting, Trevor Noah is guessing. He really wanted to get an outsider’s opinion of the messed-up American voting process, though, so he sent correspondent Ronny Chieng—who was born in Malaysia—to learn more about it. Chieng found out some truly shocking facts about how votes are cast in our country—specifically, that most of the technology is more outdated than flip phones. Some command centers still use dial-up modems to call in results. When voting machine parts break down, they have to order new ones second-hand on eBay. The machines cost $6,000, and for that price Chieng says you should be able to use them to order Starbucks, go on Facebook, and have sex. Instead, poll operators can only cross their fingers and hope to god that the machines and their batteries make it through Election Day. Chieng comes up with a brilliant way to fix the problem: a voting machine that runs on ads. All people have to do is watch 10-15 minutes of painful political ads, and then they can cast their votes. If they don’t want to watch the ads, they can simply pay a subscription fee, like Spotify. The experts Chieng speaks to sadly aren’t on board. They think he wants to reintroduce the poll tax. Another out-of-the-box thinker brought down by The Man. It’s almost like they want a repeat of the 2000 election. Hanging chads. Never forget.
Sadly there won’t be any pop-up blocker on the 2016 Election voting kiosks.
Tuesday – 11.10
SeaWorld announced some major news this week: The theme park will be ending its killer whale show after the horrible conditions that came to light in the 2013 documentary Blackfish. Or, as Trevor Noah puts it, SeaWorld finally realized that “blackfish matter.” Noah also realized another helpful comparison: Jeb Bush is totally the Republicans’ blackfish. Just like a SeaWorld orca, he was born in captivity to a political family and forced to perform every night. Running for office and being involved in politics is the only life Jeb knows. If you release him, would he even know how to fend for himself? “He’s a Bush; he has no other skills,” Daily Show correspondent Hasan Minhaj points out. Does someone need to rescue Jeb, though? He’s at 4% in the polls, and like a SeaWorld orca before this week’s announcement, he’s just going through the motions at this point. This guy clearly needs to sink or swim, because no one’s making a documentary about his plight.
Clearly Jeb doesn’t see himself as someone who needs rescuing.
The Reddit crowd had some weird ideas, but I might steal this one https://t.co/GtVZ6cTjwd pic.twitter.com/JyQSule8RW
— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) October 9, 2015
It’s new segment time! This one’s called “Man, That’s F#%ed Up!” Ever wonder how the government spends your hard-earned tax dollars? You might not want to keep reading if you’re prone to fits of rage. You see, the Department of Defense has so much money to throw around, it needs a special task force called Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to monitor how the money is being allocated. In one instance, the money was used to build a natural gas filling station in Afghanistan. Except, no one there has natural gas cars. In order to rectify the situation, the U.S. spent an addition $700 per car to have some automobiles converted to use natural gas. Oh, and the whole station should have cost roughly $500K to construct, but it ended up costing $43 million. No need to question why it went so over budget; though, everyone at the Pentagon who was involved with the station’s construction has since moved on. The gas station isn’t even particularly nice, considering it cost $43 million and services the only cars around that run on natural gas. Just like the segment title and incredulous Trevor Noah say, “Man, that’s fucked up.”
Introducing the Pentagon Funding Survival Kit.
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