Ah Spring is in the air and so our thoughts turn to rebirth.  When what has rotted to the core and decomposed to earthworm food becomes the rich fertile ground from which new life may spring!

The miracle of rebirth is all around us!  Look at the trees, the bees, the flowers, and Mark Foley!  He's now a power player in Florida politics! Don't say Gay bills are simply the GOP protecting parents' rights.

Mark wasn't always so concerned about parental rights.  In 2006 former Congressman Foley, representative of the Palm Beach County district of Florida (the very big fat seat of Mar-a-Largo!), got a little tipsy and sent some sexy text messages to some of the boys that used to work in Congress as pages.  The boys were of age of consent, but too young to vote (16 isn't voting age). Mark never asked them what their parents might think of his sexy texts, he just wanted to know what they were wearing.  

Mark resigned after being caught red-handed (you're welcome) so things calmed down quickly and nothing legal happened so it was all a non-issue and it all ended happily.

Happily that is until we decided to revisit a certain apology issued in 2006. 

Drugs are big business.  The most recent UN estimates place total retail sales of illegal drugs around $320 billion or roughly 1% of the entire world's GDP. That means there is a lot at stake when drug cartels set up shop.  They run themselves like corporations, with hierarchies, distribution models, business strategies, and public relations campaigns.

A Mexican drug cartel employed the PR tactic after the Scorpions, a division of the Gulf Cartel, had a shootout in the town of Matamoros, Mexico. An innocent local woman was killed. Four people were kidnapped in what later turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. The Scorpions mistook four Americans for members of a Hatian drug cartel - so they did what any cartel will do when an enemy is walking through your territory - they kidnapped the four Americans and killed two.  Later they discovered the mistake and issued a written apology to all the residents of Matamoros and the families of the kidnapping victims.  To make amends, the cartel turned over the members who were responsible.  Problem solved.

It took Facebook and Twitter five years to reach 100 million users.  TikTok reached 100 million users in 9 months.  Chat GPT took 64 days.  As Bill Gates proclaimed, The Age of AI is here.

Sort of.  It's here but Humanity isn't quite sure what it is or what it means for our future.  We do know that it means big money for corporations, huge changes in the way we work, and that it will raise issues of ethics and morals as it integrates with our society and begins to control the way decisions are made.

We also know that it lies.  It lies and it doubles down on its lies and it will accuse you of being a lying liar when confronted with its own mistakes.

Google's new Artificial intelligence system, Bard, committed an act of plagiarism and apologized for the error.  Later when asked about the incident, Bard denied it had ever happened and opened up a can of accusations against the world for trying to ruin its reputation.

It's our first apology from a computer (if you don't count Elon Musk)! 

UPDATE: On March 29, 2023, over 1,000 tech leaders, including our corporate overlord Elon Musk, released an open letter urging developers to pause work on AI citing "profound risks to society and humanity." With trillions of dollars on the table will anyone listen (that's probably a no, but nice try tech leaders!).

We're not very good at social media, and as it turns out neither is Elon Musk.  He bought Twitter and ran it into the ground almost overnight.  The wunderkind boy genius is really just a rich boy from an emerald mine owning family who loved sci fi as a kid and has aspirations for being the father of the future of mankind, helping to bring equality to humans and humanity to the stars.

Unless you work for him at one of his companies.  Then good luck and don't let the door or the cash register hit you one the way out.  One Twitter employee learned this the hard way and had to take to Twitter to ask if he still had a job or had been laid off.  Elon replied to the employee's tweets, and his replies became personal attacks on the employee.  Later, when he found out the employee was disabled and would be owed $100 million dollars if he was fired (read those contracts, Elon, before you decide to Tweet).  Suddenly Elon was filled with remorse and did a face-hole apology to an ear-hole over the internet and left the "am I laid off or do I have a job" question in the very hands of the employee who asked the question in the first place.  This starts to get kind of zen, so we'll leave it here and let you decide ~ is Elon musk as bad as they say he is?

J.M. Roth was a cop who offered free legal advice online: if you want to run down a Black Lives Matter protester who is marching in the streets, follow these rules.  And then he gave the step by step process for how to beat the legal charges for intentionally running a human being down with your car.

Without even going any further you can bet that J.M. Roth was not his real name, brave people always hide behind fake names!  But don't worry because people on the internet figured things out pretty quickly and everyone learned who this hero really was.  He was a 22 year veteran of the police force.  And of course, he was sorry about what he said and for sure did not mean a word of it!  He just hates people who block traffic.

As a cop, Sgt. Jeffrey Rothecker (J.M.'s real name) joined an organization that came to the US from the Caribbean and England, developed largely to control enslaved people. We explore the origins of policing and the motivation of a modern day cop whose only sin was trying to keep the roads free of protestors and racists out of jail.

It's an Encore episode just in time for the 2023 Oscars!  Let us take you waaaay back in time, all the way back to last year, March 2022, when a certain actor slapped a certain comedian and shook the world.  You know the Oscars are going to mention the slap - so here's a friendly recap of what happened to get you ready for Hollywood's biggest night!

If you haven't heard, Will Smith slapped Chris Rock across the face during the March 2022 Academy Awards.  If he had done naked cartwheels across the stage, naked and on fire, we couldn't have been more surprised.  Chris had made a joke about Will's wife's shaved head, and Will wasn't having it.  At first, he laughed, and then just mere seconds later (and one eye star from his wife) he strode across the stage and slapped Chris Rock, a comedian, across the face for telling a lame joke.  If only we all had such power - Look out, Amy Schumer! 

Will apologized for the incident - twice. Once a few minutes after the slap while accepting his academy award for best actor.  The second time on Instagram, a day later.  The first time he apologized to the Academy, everyone in the room, everyone watching on TV, and Everyone in the world (but excluding a certain Mr. Chris Rock).  The second time he apologized directly to Chris Rock.  Everyone in the world had a lot to say about it, everyone except Chris Rock who is keepin' it classy and writing a comedy show about it (note from 2023: his show is now on Netflix - we called it first!). 

Anyway - Will justified his love of slapping by saying he was a fierce protector of his family.  Just like Richard Williams, the guy he portrayed in the film that was the reason he won best actor at the Oscars - he was fiercely protecting his wife's honor from low-level humor.  Richard Williams answered by condemning the violence and saying that Will Smith was in the wrong.

And somehow, because of all of this slapping nonsense, Venus and Serena Williams are once again on the "Hollywood making you feel worthless" tour.  First, just the previous week, Jane Campion told them, while accepting the Critics' Choice award for Best Director for her film The Power of the Dog, that since they don't compete against men they aren't really "competing." The Williams sisters smiled and graciously let the insult pass them by.  But then Will Smith slapped any chance they had at celebrating the film about their father by using their father as an excuse for slapping a comedian for telling bad jokes.

It's an open secret that children work for next to nothing and don't complain a lot.  That's why they make great workers, only it's kind of illegal in a lot of countries to employ children.  But don't worry because corporations have found the wonder of willful ignorance and plausible deniability, two factors that mean they can hire companies that in turn hire other companies that hire subcontractors who hire kids (and sometimes buy them) to work in factories, fields, and mines.

Tang Mingfang. a factory worker in China, noticed that FoxConn, his employer, had hired a lot of kids.  He was told the kids were having fun working as interns and learning all about how to make Amazon's popular Alexa, Echo Dot, and Kindle devices.  He was also told to shut his mouth and get back to work.  Tang decided to report the child labor violations and was sent to jail for two years.  He was beaten and imprisoned for reporting a crime against children.  He's out of jail now and has asked Amazon for an apology.

Jeff Bezos personally apologized from space and we are here to thank him for being such a hero.  OK, that didn't happen.  Plausible deniability means that one of the richest men on the planet also has to pretend he's one of the dumbest.

But it's not all evil billionaires, there are some real heroes in this episode!

OK so here it is: Ballet is boring and stupid.  But not to Marco Goecke!  He takes his ballet as serious as sh*t.  He is a German Ballet choreographer and he recently smeared dog poo in a critic's face who had dared to criticize his work.   He's got a lot to say about how this critic hounded (ha!) him for years and he just happened to have a bag of dog poo in his pocket and maybe this wasn't his best movement (ha!) but really the media should consider this type of journalism more carefully because it is unfair...did you catch that he smeared dog poo in someone's face? That's a way of expressing oneself that leaves a bad taste in your mouth (ha!).

His apology is one that explains to the world that while what he did was wrong, it was not entirely undeserved.  The critic had been speaking sh*t about his work for years so maybe it was a time she got a taste (ha!) of her own medicine.  Marco has a lot to say for himself and we have a lot to say about ballet - and you can hear it all here on America's favorite apology podcast!

It's an Encore episode!

Elmo and Zoe are friends.  Rocco and Zoe are friends.  Rocco and Elmo are not friends because Elmo cannot be friends with a rock.  At least according to Elmo.  Elmo had it one day in 2004 and lost his cool on Sesame Street over Zoe saving the last cookie for Rocco to eat (because rocks don't have mouths and why are we explaining this, you get it, rocks are rocks).  Elmo refused to apologize and thus began the great debate: can you be friends with someone who fundamentally disagrees with you on the nature of reality.  Or the bigger debate: can you hurt a rock's feelings?

This Sesame Street episode was aired in 2004 but went viral in 2022.  What's up 18 years later that would make people want to share this clip millions of times over Twitter?  Maybe - just maybe - millions of people have recently been through something and suddenly identify with Elmo's ranting about friends believing that reality is open to debate?

Join us as we meander down the dark twisted alleyways of memory lane: children's TV, puppeteers, and getting the chance to live your dream only to watch it crumble like a cookie in a rock's mouth.

Brock Turner had it all: A scholarship to Stanford (it's not Harvard but they try!), all-American boy-next-door good looks, a real shot at Olympic gold swimming for the US Olympic team - his life was one that many people would envy.  Everyone believed him to be a super nice guy on his way to do super nice guy things - like represent America in the Olympics and win some medals and then graduate from an almost-but-not-quite Ivy League school.  It probably would have happened too if it hadn't been for two Swedish guys bicycling  around town at 1am doing mysterious and questionable Swedish things.

Brock was caught on top of an unconscious girl beside a dumpster in a back alley.  She had no memory of ever meeting Brock and certainly no memory of giving him permission to touch her.  This would have been a he said / she said situation that would have quickly turned into a "but who cares what she said" situation if it had not been for two sober witnesses with nothing to gain (other than Olympic gold, the Swedes DO have a swim team...).

Brock wrote an 11 page apology and outlined all of his regrets and all of the pain he was suffering. But is that enough to get a passing score from Apologies Accepted?  You be the judge (but only after we deliver our verdict and wrap up the case).