Let me explain.  …

No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

So I have chewed through 156 stories about Formula One all published in the last 6 weeks covering the two winter testing periods and this week of practice before the first race.  You can see them below if you want to poke around.  There are also 2 videos from The Guardian about the personnel and rule changes.  I’ve also watched 5 hours of Practice and Qualifying so I could get the Vs. TV crew take on things.

THAT… is a lot.

We’ll get more into things as the season forges ahead, but to sum up-

We won’t be seeing Fernando Alonso until Malaysia.  His McLaren caught a cross wind in Barcelona during the second Winter testing session and he ended up in the wall and suffered an extremely bad concussion.  How bad?  Well, they’re denying it of course but there are reliable reports that he thought he was a 17 year old Karter who wanted to be in Formula One someday instead of a 34 year old Champion who is arguably the best person in the world at driving bricks.

Speaking of bricks, the Honda engine (if you can call it that) is a terrible piece of crap they can barely keep on the track.  Check out these lap figures from the Winter tests-

Testing Laps

We also know that Ferrari has finally put together an engine that’s better than the Renault.  Of course that’s not saying much.  Red Bull and Toro Rossa are the Renault ‘Works’ teams and the only ones running their slightly less than the most terrible piece of crap and relations between Renault and Red Bull have gotten so bad that Red Bull is offering to buy Renault out and take over engine development themselves (there must be a pot of money in energy drinks, they sure spend enough).  During Practice 3 they had to push one of them back to the pit after replacing the power plant that morning.

Everyone else except for Sauber is running Mercedes and no wonder.

Ah, Sauber.  Seems that they have sold their two seats three times.  Van der Garde has taken them to court on that and won on every level.  As of P2 they were under Court Order to race him or the Victoria Supreme Court would impound their assets and send the team owner to jail for contempt.  Van der Garde relented on Qualifying Day and will sit this one out, but it’s not over by a long shot.

Which would have left us with 16 cars (remember, Bernie has to put 14 on the grid or the Tracks start taking money out of his wallet and he hates that.

“But ek,” you say “aren’t there 10 teams with 2 cars each?”

Let me tell you the sad strange tale of Manor Marussia.  As you’ll note below Marussia was questionable at best for this season, what is not made clear by the contemporary articles that Wikipedia explains is that Manor Motorsports is the original founder of the team and has elected to rescue it.  Since this deal was sealed about 2 weeks ago and Marussia was liquidated to the garage walls (they sold the laptops man!) they don’t have a car yet, but they do have a 3 race pass to get one up and running.  Expect that to be extended if necessary because Ecclestone is hanging on by his teeth.  Anyway they are Sir Not Appearing in this Film.

“How bad is it?”

Well, you’ll hear people say that 20 races are scheduled this year including the restoration of the Mexican Grand Prix.  What they won’t tell you (until it gets actually saved or officially dropped) is that the German Grand Prix (at the Nürburgring) is only a 50% proposition according to Niki Lauda.

Rule Changes

You are only allowed 4 engines for the entire season.  This is incredibly stupid and doesn’t even save any money for the backmarker teams which is what it’s ‘designed’ to do because it’s an anti-competitive barrier to development.  Expect many teams (especially McLaren) to blow through their allotment in a flash.  Formula One, to mitigate this has divided the “power plant” into 5 sections and instituted a complicated system of “development” tokens you can use to fix your broken bits by “improving” them.

If your Qualifying position is insufficient to sustain your grid penalty you can be subjected to multiple ‘stop & go’ penalties to supplement and a new, sterner 10 second ‘stop & go’ has been introduced.

Formula One is cracking down on the uniform rules in terms of helmet painting but the fines are so paltry that most drives have already given them the bird.

Because of the Bianchi crash the cockpit walls are higher and there is a ‘virtual’ safety car to regulate dangerous sections of track before a real safety car can gather up the field.

Speaking of Bianchi, he’s still in a coma which he has been since October 5th 2014.

Driver Changes

Blah, blah, blah Vettel.  He’s a total asshole who’s only talent is getting out in front and staying there.  Last year he showed his ability on inferior hardware with Red Bull and while Ferrari is surprisingly competitive I expect Räikkönen to thump his ass unless team orders forbid it.  Daniil Kvyat is joining the surprisingly good Ricciardo (how come he had wins last year Vettel and you didn’t?  Well?).  His replacement on Torro Rosso, Verstappen, seems to be the real deal despite being so young that Formula One has just instituted a new rule that would not only have banned him, but Alonso, Vettel, and Hamilton too (way to go guys).  Massa and Button still have rides which is good because they deserve them.

Predictions

No one can touch Mercedes which suits me just fine.  Ferrari seems to have finally stopped putting any kind of brick they felt like on track and decided to race.  Williams shows spunk on a limited budget and could contend (not for the top spots mind you, that’s all Mercedes, but they could eek a second), Red Bull is in a downward spiral because of Renault and they resent it bitterly (did I mention getting pushed back to the garage?).

In the middle Force India is the historic class but they are hobbled by strife and mis-management, Lotus is looking good with their new Mercedes power, Toro Rosso is a collective 34 years old but show talent and could surprise.

At the bottom Sauber is a soap opera, McLaren a mess, and Manor Marussia a cruel joke of an unfeeling universe.

We’ll be using Mediums and Softs today.  Coverage starts at midnight on Vs. (or NBC Sports if you prefer) with race time at 1 am since Australia, Malaysia, China, Japan, and Russia have been moved forward an hour so the 4 hour race time window will surely take place before sunset.

Pump up the volume-

Umm… more when I get to it.

UK Parliament Committee, Calling For Reform, Shows Its “Evidence” to Justify Mass Surveillance

By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

3/12/15

The Intelligence and Security Committee of the UK Parliament (ISC) issued a lengthy report today on the surveillance practices of GCHQ. Invoking the now-standard Orwellian tactic of claiming that “bulk collection” is not “mass surveillance,” the Committee predictably cleared GCHQ of illegality, but it did announce that it has “serious concerns” over the agency’s lack of transparency and oversight. Citing the Snowden disclosures, it called for a significant overhaul of the legal framework governing electronic surveillance.

…

The report follows a British court decision last month finding that GCHQ did act illegally in spying without the transparency required by human rights laws. In light of the numerous official findings in the U.S., U.K. and the EU of illegality and the need for reform when it comes to electronic surveillance, it is hard to imagine how anyone could say that we’d have been better off if Edward Snowden had not blown the whistle on all of this and instead allowed us to remain ignorant of what these governments were doing in the dark. Given all these findings even from these governments, is there anyone who still thinks that way?

One of the most contested questions in the surveillance debate is whether mass collection stops terror attacks, as these agencies claim. A U.S. federal court, Obama’s own commission, an independent privacy board of the U.S. Government, and members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee have all categorically said no convincing evidence exists to show this is true.

But the 8 members of the UK Parliamentary Committee – one of whom is The Most Hon. The Marquess of Lothian – have concluded otherwise, claiming “that GCHQ’s bulk interception capability is used primarily to find patterns in, or characteristics of, online communications which indicate involvement in threats to national security.” The alleged basis for this conclusion is that “GCHQ have provided case studies to the Committee demonstrating the effectiveness of their bulk interception capabilities.” Here is the entirety of the discussion in this report of those successful “case studies”:

* * * * *

You’re just going to have to take their word for it: these mass surveillance programs were crucial in stopping these extremely dangerous terrorist plots. “Unfortunately,” you can’t know about any of this, but if those official asterisks don’t convince you, what will?

…

GCHQ literally collects billions of emails and other electronic communications events every day. But don’t worry: they don’t read every single one of them. They only read “***%” of what they collect, or “fewer than *** of *** per cent of the items that transit the internet in one day.” So what’s the big concern?

The great irony of this is that the Committee here is marching under the banner of greater transparency, even as their principal arguments rest on asterisks of concealment. But this is how the largest western democracies generally function: they make highly dubious (often disproven) claims to justify radical powers, and then demand that you accept them on faith, because allowing you to see the evidence for yourself would endanger your life. That tactic, as much as anything, is a very compelling explanation for why Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers decide to do what they do.

(Ok, maybe you are somewhat unfamiliar with popular French comic strips.  I admit it’s an acquired taste.)

Training Games

This is a variation on a pretty common Leadership Training game (been at many, moderated more than a few) that I also saw a takeoff of today on Girl Meets World.  In the game I played you broke into problem solving groups where you were treated according to your label.

These were not randomly assigned and I knew my moderator and later worked with him as State Membership Recruiting Co-ordinator.  It was a job I thought I’d loathe because I hate selling and I only took it to keep an eye on this guy and keep him 100 because at the time my Rebel Alliance thought the primary problem with the Club was fake growth and cooking the Memberships books.  I had no reason to trust him nor he me.

As it turns out we made quite a team.  Flushed the paper, organized 10 new locals, added 300+ members.  I worked hard, but no harder than he did.  Capped 5 consecutive years of growth.  I thought I’d hate selling but I didn’t understand what it was that we sold-

Opportunity, success, and leadership to people who might otherwise go through their whole lives thinking that they were hopeless and inferior.  As I look back it’s perhaps the best work I’ve ever done.

You may ask what this moderator labeled me on my team.

Expert.  Listen to him.

Tonightly we’ll be talking about Boxing and Brain Damage.  I’d have more thoughts about this if I hadn’t been pounding a deeper dent in my desk today.  Was that a bell?  I’m sure I heard a bell.

Continuity

Why is it NEVER about racism?

Next Week’s Guests-

• Monday 3/16: Andrew Cockburn
• Tuesday 3/17: Amanda Seyfried
• Wednesday 3/18: Kevin Hart
• Thursday 3/19: Will Ferrell

Rob Corddry will be on to pitch Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (some people say it’s funny, I’ll probably never know) and most definitely NOT to remind Jon that he’s getting old and quitting.

Honest.

Just a gentle reminder. We’re coming up on Silly Season (me for doing it) with March Madness looming and Melbourne Sunday.  Expect more incoherence and distraction.

Common’s web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.

So yesterday the DJI took a 300 point tumble as the European Central Bank instituted Quantitative Easing.  What is that and why is it unhelpful at best.

Quantitative Easing is a monitary policy to create liquidity when interest rates are already at zero.  The Central Bank redeems it’s old bonds at face value and issues new ones reflecting the zero interest environment.

Now there’s already a mechanism to do that called a Bond Market where you can take your paper and sell it to someone else at the current interest rate BUT you have to do so at a discount to face value to reflect the current interest.  A trivial example-

If the interest rate is 10% over 10 years you can buy a bond from the Central Bank for $900 that has a face value of $1000 redeemable in 10 years.  Now during that 10 years you get nothing, at the end you get $1000.

If you need the money now (liquidity), you go to the Bond Market and sell your bond at the going rate which has several complicating factors like the current interest rate and the date the bond comes due but is less than the face value promised if you hold the bond until it is paid (discount).

Quantitative Easing pays you face value now.  Whether this is a good deal for the Central Bank (and it almost never is because that’s not the point) depends on the amount of time between now and when the bond comes due and what interest rates are (if interest rates rise steeply and there is a lot of time between now and when the bonds are due it’s a good deal for the Central Bank).

So what is the point?  Central Bank bonds are mostly held by regular Banks who are required to hold a certain amount of assets in the form of these bonds.  The Banks cash out their Central Bank bonds, buy zero interest Central Bank bonds and pocket the difference.  In other words, just another bailout disguised with accounting tricks.

This is thought by Keynesians who think this new influx of money will be put to productive economic use to be slightly stimulative.  It’s thought by Modern Monitarists to be meaningless and by Austerians a debasement of the currency.

In fact most of the money simply goes into the pockets of Banks, the Billionaires, or gets wiped out in speculative bubbles like… oh, say the Stock Market.

So what we have here is a policy that might make a minimal amount of sense if there were a demand for productive use but will really only be used to make our insolvent Banks seem more solvent when they are in fact bankrupt.

This will become very apparent in Germany and throughout the Euro-Zone after Greece, Spain, Italy, and France repudiate their Euro debts and return to their own devalued (but for who?  Banks and bond holders, that’s who) currency.

Transcript

Transcript

Michael Hudson is a Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.

Ferguson police chief Thomas Jackson to resign

by Jon Swaine, The Guardian

Wednesday 11 March 2015 16.16 EDT

The embattled police chief of Ferguson, Missouri, is to resign a week after his department was accused of racial bias in a scathing report by the US government, an aide to the St Louis county executive told the Guardian on Wednesday.

…

The resignation of Jackson has long been anticipated after he was heavily criticised for his handling of the furore over a white police officer’s fatal shooting of a black 18-year-old in Ferguson last year.

Residents were appalled that Jackson’s officers left the body of Michael Brown lying for more than four hours in the residential side-street where he had been shot dead by Darren Wilson on 9 August. Successive nights of protests followed Brown’s death.

…

The resignation was welcomed by protest groups and lawmakers critical of Jackson’s leadership. “This is long overdue,” said Antonio French, a St Louis alderman. “There were grounds to fire or ask for the resignation of Chief Jackson months ago.

“But the details in the Department of Justice’s report of how his department operated meant there was no way for him to remain in that position if the city is to move forward”.

…

Jackson, 58, is the sixth senior Ferguson official to lose his job since the Department of Justice last week sharply criticised the city’s criminal justice system. Investigators concluded that police and court authorities targeted black people disproportionately and frequently violated their constitutional rights.

John Shaw, the city manager, was removed from his job on Tuesday evening. His departure followed the resignation of municipal court judge Ronald J Brockmeyer, Brockmeyer’s court clerk, and two of Jackson’s senior commanders.

Jackson presided over a police force that was 94% white in a St Louis suburb whose population is two-thirds black. African American residents reported feeling badly alienated from the officers who aggressively policed their driving and daily lives. The Justice Department’s report blamed the community disintegration on the city’s aggressive policy of raising revenue through small court fines.

The police chief was named along with Shaw and Brockmeyer as one of the driving forces behind the revenue-generation policy.

Investigators found an email from Jackson to Shaw in March 2011 reporting that court revenue in the previous month was $179,862.50, which “beat our next biggest month in the last four years by over $17,000.” The city manager replied: “Wonderful!”

Racist emails unearthed by the federal investigators prompted the resignations of veteran officers Sergeant William Mudd and Captain Rick Henke, who was effectively Jackson’s second-in-command, and the firing of Mary Ann Twitty, the city’s court clerk.

The Guardian

So it’s 4 years on now from the Fukushima disaster.  What do we know?

Well we know a little bit more about the extent of the damage.  There are 6 reactors at Fukushima Daichi only 3 of which were in operation at the time, but all of which are involved.  You don’t hear much about reactors 5 and 6 which were off line, but the reason they were off line is they were experiencing cooling problems.  They sit today fueled, hot, closely monitored but unapproachable due to the high levels of radiation, slated for decommissioning.

Unit 4 was in a similar stand down.  What makes it unique is that it still experienced massive damage from a hydrogen explosion and the bulk of its nuclear fuel was stored in a pool on it’s roof.

The good news is that all 1533 fuel rods have been removed as of just this last December, the bad news is that the ground is subsiding underneath it and the building is in danger of collapse.  Even without the fuel the structure is still highly radioactive in operating areas and thoroughly contaminated by fallout.

All of the active reactors, 1, 2, and 3 experienced both hydrogen explosions and core meltdowns which almost certainly in the case of Unit 1 and probably in all of them has breached every level of containment and is sitting partially buried in plain old soil.

The salt water used as an emergency measure during the early stages of the disaster has corroded and ruined almost every installed control system and massive amounts of water continue to be pumped to this day to contain the reaction.  This highly radioactive water is stored in big steel tanks (think Power Plant size) that are starting to rust and leak.  There is no plan for how to dispose of it.

Speaking of radioactive water, it leaks out of the big holes in the bottom of the reactor containment units into the ground and natural ground water continues to flow through the site to the sea in a large and permanent plume.  All efforts, including the much vaunted ‘ice dam’ created by freezing the dirt around the site have been an utter failure.

There doesn’t seem to be a Plan B.

Speaking of radiation, in most critical areas it remains high enough that even specially hardened electronics fail within hours, humans would die in days from exposure.  Even in outlying areas of the 30 km exclusion zone workers can receive a lifetime dose in weeks or months.  Thyroid cancer (an early indicator) has risen from 2 – 7 cases in a population of 100,000 to over 100 reported in a population of 300,000 so far.

Does that seem gloomy enough?

TEPCO (a zombie company, effectively bankrupt) and the Japanese Government continue to delay, obsfuscate, and minimize the impact of this event.  Independent science is actively discouraged in favor of happy fun time propoganda.  The Japanese Government, which is paying Billions for fossil fuels to maintain energy capacity, is actively pushing for the resumption of nuclear power production and the re-activation of the remaining 40+ plants despite the fact that they are no safer than they ever were.

In the mean time Solar is getting cheaper and better than ever to the point where it is price competitive with Oil even at $50 a Barrel.

Remember, it’s safe, clean, AND makes you glow in the dark so it’s easy to find your way to the bathroom at night!

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

–Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Science News and Blogs

• Gamma Rays May Be Clue on Dark Matter, By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times
• Nine new dwarf galaxies full of dark matter found just chilling around the Milky Way, By Rachel Feltman, Washington Post
• NASA’s Dawn Probe Begins Orbiting Dwarf Planet Ceres, By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times
• Ancient Mars Had an Ocean, Scientists Say, By MARC KAUFMAN, The New York Time
• Astronomers Watch a Supernova and See Reruns, By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times
• Anthropocene: New dates proposed for the ‘Age of Man’, By Rebecca Morelle, BBC
• Saturn’s moon suggests the question of life beyond Earth may soon be answered, By Terrence McCoy, Washington Post
• Fossil Tells of 520-Million-Year-Old Creature Like a Giant Lobster, By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times
• Mount Everest’s Poop Situation Is About To Go From Bad To Worse, by Emily Atkin, Think Progress
• Neanderthals Wore Eagle Talons As Jewelry 130,000 Years Ago, by Megan Gannon, Live Science

Science Oriented Video

Obligatories, News and Blogs below.

Your Racist Update

Tonightly we are talking about banning words.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me.”  You know, I never let words bother me, but I’m a child of privilege and maybe I don’t experience them the same way.  If I can provoke you to a mass of incoherent rage and name calling, good for me.  That means I win, you got nothing.  Now get your sorry ass back to a dictionary and learn some vocabulary fool.

On the other hand I am sensitive to the fact that other people may have different life experiences so I’m as careful as I can be to avoid inflamatory language.  I may call you a pea brained ignoramous right to your face, but because of your mental deficiencies you probably won’t notice anything other than the sneering tone with which I deliver it.  I rarely curse, and only for effect.

Do you think Twain should be shunned or bowlderized because he uses a certain term that accurately conveys how people thought about the Institution of Race Slavery?  I don’t.  It may surprise you to learn that the initial complaints about the language of Huckleberry Finn didn’t involve that term at all and were instead that Huck spoke the dialect of itinerant Missouri and the Victorian prudes were afraid that children would copy his ‘ghetto grammar’ in admiration of the character and defiance of the proper English of parental authority.

Heaven forfend we should give our kids any freedom.  Next thing you know they’ll be talking street and wearing hoodies and their pants around their ankles.

Banning words never makes the ideas go away.

Continuity

Heffalumps and Woozles

This Week’s Guests-

• Wednesday 3/11: Common
• Thursday 3/12: Rob Corddry

Common is a Chicago rapper, writer, and actor.  In Selma he portrayed civil rights leader James Bevel and co-wrote the Oscar-winning song “Glory”.

The real news below.

Republicans are drawing more and more of their support from an increasingly shrinking pool of White Males and Evangelical Christians.

This is why Rand Paul and his Libertarians (I really wish they had chosen a better self-identification like ‘Selfish Randian Nutjobs’ just as I wish Corporatist Democrats had used anything except ‘Liberal’ since they’re nothing but ‘Bootlicking Billionaire Courtiers’) are so important to the future of the Party because they’re the only ones in the room that don’t have a foot in the grave.

Likewise the impassioned debate about Immigration (where mainstream Business Republicans are eager to toady to their Masters who want cheap and easily exploitable Labor and which is being spun as ‘outreach’ to more socially conservative demographics)  and their Voter Suppression (about which there is hardly any debate).

They’re desperate and they know that they have a constantly declining ability to influence national policy before they literally die out.

Just so the NRA-

American gun ownership and hunting rates at record lows, survey says

Associated Press

Tuesday 10 March 2015 10.48 EDT

The number of Americans who live in a household with at least one gun is lower than it’s ever been, according to a major American trend survey that finds the decline in gun ownership is paralleled by a reduction in the number of Americans who hunt.

According to the latest General Social Survey, 32% of Americans either own a firearm themselves or live with someone who does, which ties a record low set in 2010. That’s a significant decline since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when about half of Americans told researchers there was a gun in their household.

The drop in the number of Americans who own a gun or live in a household with one is probably linked to a decline in the popularity of hunting, from 32% who said they lived in a household with at least one hunter in 1977 to less than half that number now.

…

(Guns) are concentrated in fewer hands than they were in the 1980s, the General Social Survey finds. The 2014 poll finds that 22% of Americans own a firearm, down from a high of 31% who said so in 1985.

…

The survey also finds a shrinking gender gap in personal firearm ownership as a result of a decline in the percentage of men who own one, from 50% in 1980 to 35% in 2014.

Maximalist Second Amendment advocacy is a failing ideology and as with Marriage Equality and Cannabis Prohibition you could see a rapid evolution in attitudes in a very short time.

And they know that this ground, once lost, will never be theirs again.

Energy Superpower Ambitions of US and Canada

America is literally on fire: How out-of-control oil spills are destroying our population centers

David Dayen, Salon

Tuesday, Mar 10, 2015 06:30 AM EST

It’s a good bet that someplace in North America is on fire right now, raging so out of control that officials have to let it burn itself out. And it happened because highly flammable oil was placed on a train for shipping, and something went drastically wrong. Because so much oil is transported by rail these days, the probabilities of catastrophe have elevated significantly. We haven’t ruined a major population center yet only through dumb luck; and we haven’t cracked down on this treacherous practice only because of the enormous power of the industry.

…

Those who respond to oil train derailments by claiming that the Keystone XL pipeline would solve the problem neglect the fact that a pipeline would not be able to carry even half of what flows from the Bakken region. More important, because of the collapse in oil prices, new infrastructure like a pipeline has ceased to make economic sense, relative to the existing infrastructure of transporting by rail.

Perhaps the scariest part of all of this is the perilous financial state of the oil industry today, which if anything will increase the danger. Energy companies are rapidly going bankrupt, as they cannot service debt with lower oil revenue. Companies on the edge will have to cut costs to keep afloat, and when costs are at issue, traditionally safety goes out the window.

…

According to a report in Reuters, the White House considered a provision to remove these volatile gases (known in the industry as “light ends”), but ultimately punted, letting North Dakota rules govern. Federal officials were concerned about their jurisdiction to dictate treatment of light ends. But critics believe the federal government relying on North Dakota – a conservative state not exactly known for its strict adherence to regulations – increases the risk of shipping oil by rail. That’s especially concerning when you consider that the trains travel all across the country, and that some Bakken shale comes from neighboring states like Montana. For their part, the White House denied they held off on improving oil train safety.

…

Increased domestic oil production is always depicted as an unalloyed good, with no discussion of the costs, like turning trains into bombs nationwide. There’s reason to believe that no tank car is safe enough to carry something this volatile, and that the risks exceed what the public should reasonably bear. DoT has nonchalantly predicted 10 derailments a year on oil trains, with billions in damages. If anything that’s an underestimate.

One reason the planet continues to boil is that oil companies have been allowed to externalize their costs onto government. Oil appears “cheaper” than solar or wind, because these costs never come into account. But solar power doesn’t blow up while being carried through a major city on a train. And if we want to seriously talk about what kind of energy we can afford in the future, that has to enter the conversation.

Amish Comedy

Well it’s somehow appropriate that on a night Jon is hosting Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, two of the names mentioned by The Great Mentioner as potential replacements for Jon (the other being Amy Schumer) the topic is Women’s Rights, but it’s not surprising given that it’s Women’s History Month.

It’s an extremely broad subject and as usual Larry’s site is singularly unhelpful.  He doesnt have the topic up, you have to glean it off the segment subjects, and forget about listing the panelists.  It’s rare when he does.

For my part I consider myself a raging feminist and it comes down to this-

Women’s Rights are Human Rights.

I’ve always tried to treat people the way people should be treated.

Continuity

I always did hate this house.

This Week’s Guests-

• Tuesday 3/10: Abbi Jacobson, Ilana Glazer
• Wednesday 3/11: Common
• Thursday 3/12: Rob Corddry

Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer are the two principal writers and characters of the TV series Broad City, now in it’s second season and renewed for a third.

Broad City follows Ilana and Abbi, both are self-professed Jewish feminist women who perpetually experience misadventures of carelessness and frivolity in New York City. Ilana seeks to avoid working as much as possible while pursuing her relentless hedonism and Abbi tries to make a career as an illustrator, often getting sidetracked into Ilana’s hijinks.

At least the episodes I’ve seen are much raunchier and cruel than the synopsis.  Think of a cross between Sex and the City an It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  Unlike the gross out and violent prank comedy that fills so much of what’s considered the ‘cutting edge’ it’s actually funny at points if you don’t think about the human misery and degradation that drives many of the plots, kind of like Seinfeld on steroids.

Your web exclusive two part extended interview with John Lewis along with the real news below.