Apologies Accepted

Hi everyone!  It's a two week vacation while Juliette travels and Theo moves and we're rereleasing one of our classic episodes about child labor!

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 and child workers, there are some real heroes of note in this episode!

Maria da Graça Xuxa Meneghel, Xuxa for short, is a world famous entertainer, singer, model, and businesswoman.  She's worth over $300 million dollars thanks to her talents and it all started thanks to her looks.  She was (and still is) beautiful.  Tall, thin, blond, and white, she not only met the beauty standard, she raised it.  People called her the Barbie of Brazil and her fans around the world adored her for her beauty and charm.

Recently Xuxa issued an apology for being used by corporations and the entertainment industry to reinforce racialized beauty standards.  Brazil is a country filled with people of many colors, but on Xuxa's show everyone was white.  Over the years Xuxa has realized that not only was she used to reinforce a racialized beauty standard, but that she inadvertently contributed to making non-white unbeautiful people feel bad about themselves.  She's take it all back if she could, but she's keeping the money!

Is Xuxa really sorry, or is this a chance to grab some headlines now that the Barbie movie is set to become the top grossing box office film of all time? 

Kathrin Mentler wasn't in a good space and went to Vancouver General Hospital to get some help. She'd been thinking about harming herself and the doctor asked if she had ever considered asking for medical assistance in dying.  MAID is a program in Canada that allows terminally ill people the option of dying in a controlled environment.  

Kathrin was shocked.  She had come to the hospital for help in staying alive, not help in planning her death.  To think that death was being offered as a choice along with aspirin and bed rest seemed not only uncaring but also defeatist.  The hospital offered an apology, along with an explanation that shows health care systems worldwide are all a bit messed up.

You know who she is so you don't need the backstory!  She is a hip hop artist who seemingly overnight was recording duets with Beyonce and Beyonce (seriously what other artist do you need after Queen B?).  And then she was famously shot in the foot and the entire world had something to say about it.  Megan is now accused of being a liar, called a hero, a prime example of misogynor, the imperfect black woman victim, a champion for truth - her story has been twisted by anyone with a hand to twist - but what really happened and why did it happen?

Tory Lanez is the artist found guilty of shooting her and he has something to say about his innocence and how you don't understand that he couldn't have shot that gun - he's Canadian and Canadians don't shoot people so he's not apologizing!  Except he kind of did sort of maybe and we're here to rate the apology and offer guidance to his PR team - don't let your clients on social media or pay phones from jail!

Miranda is a character created by comedic actress Colleen Ballinger.  For a hot minute in the pre 2010s Miranda was all over YouTube and had a army of adoring fans. Miranda is oblivious to her lack of talent and her entire life is dedicated to becoming a star.  But while Miranda's dreams never left her bedroom, Colleen's dreams took her to Netflix for her own Miranda special, around the world performing before live audiences, and across the internet, smashing subscription numbers and raking in the dough.

Most of Miranda/Colleen's fans were teenagers, and it seems Colleen forgot that 14 year olds aren't really equipped to hear about your divorce or participate in adult conversations of any sort.  Colleen treated her fans like friends, and allowed some fans to become super close.  Which later created problems when some of those fans called out Colleen's lack of judgement and inappropriate behavior towards minors.

So Colleen started to get some negativity online and decided to answer the world's judgement with a song.  An apology song!  And since we are the Billboard Magazine of apologies, we decided to see where this song ranks on the charts.  Colleen sure is talented, but is she a good apologizer?

Carlee Russell called 911 to report a toddler walking along the side of the highway at 9:30 at night (21:30 for the rest of the world!).  Her car was found with the car door open and engine running on the side of the road.  Her belongings, her purse and cell phone remained behind, untouched.  The takeout dinner sat in the back seat, unopened and still warm.  She was missing for two days before appearing at her parents' home, frightened and distraught.  In the two days of her disappearance, her story had caught national attention and her return was a miracle.

But her story did not add up and the police quickly realized something was wrong.  Her car was tracked during the 911 call and she traveled a distance of 600 yards in 2 minutes claiming she was following a 3 year old child.  The kid basically ran 6 football fields in 2 minutes - catch that kid and sign him up for the big leagues!  She couldn't describe her kidnappers and had little memory of what had happened - but she knew what had not happened or maybe she didn't not know she knew she forgot...?  It all became terribly confusing and eventually her attorney came out to speak behind a microphone and offer an apology.  People had feelings about the woman who faked her kidnapping to punish a boyfriend or hide the fact she wasn't going to graduate, the details are still unclear.  But what is clear is this segue from her apology to our show :)

A tourist from the UK carved his name into the Roman Colosseum in 2023 ~ approximately 2,000 years after it opened to visitors.  He claims he didn't know how old the Colosseum was but he sure is sorry that all of Italy and most of Europe wants to see his blood splashed against the Colosseum floor in exchange for carving "Ivan & Haley 4Evah" onto the walls.

It turns out that graffiti is nothing new and people largely had the same d*ck jokes 2,000 years ago as they do today.  So should this UK tourist be thrown to the lions or is his apology good enough to stop Italian justice from taking its vengeance out upon him?

Summer Vacation for Apologies Accepted!  We'll be back next week, but for now enjoy this encore episode because UFOs/UAPs are now back in the news!

We take our second deep dive into the topic of UFOs and government cover-ups! 

On March 13, 1997 a huge flying object was reported by thousands of people across Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Sonora, Mexico.  The air force scrambled fighter jets to investigate.  Local and national news stations covered the event, which became known as “The Phoenix Lights.”  It was arguably the most important UFO story of the 1990s.

Former Governor Fife Simington (yes that’s a real name) wants everyone to know that he also saw the Phoenix lights that night.  He just didn’t say anything at the time because he did not want to cause a panic.  To help diffuse tensions, he held a news conference where he brought out a guy dressed as an alien (typical gray and not a reptilian because don’t be ridiculous) and everyone laughed. 

Now, 20 years later, Fife is telling anyone who will listen that he is positive it was a UFO and for sure otherworldly.  He’s semi-sorta-kind-of sorry that some people had hurt feelings over the press conference and thought he was making fun of UFOs – but hey you guys it was funny and really I’m like one of the cool kids and I had to protect the city of Phoenix because that was my job and I’m talking about it now so where’s my hero-award?

Kevin Day was a radar operator for the Navy and working with the latest and greatest radar and tracking technology onboard the USS Princeton on November 10, 2004.  He was highly trained, highly qualified, and highly respected for his skills – so people took notice when he spotted something on the radar that wasn’t supposed to be there.  He reported it up the food chain because that was his job.  November 10 was an important day, four military pilots were conducting training exercises and the new radar equipment was tracking their flight.  It could just be malfunctioning equipment, but if something was up there that wasn’t supposed to be there, the pilots' lives were potentially at risk.  Kevin had no choice but to report the anomaly and the pilots were directed to try and get a look.  They got more than a look.  All four saw the object with their own eyes, and one of them filmed the object.  They all agreed, whatever it was, it was an unknown object flying and defying the laws of physics (damn you and your laws, physics!).

After reporting the incident, and after the US Government landed a black-hawk helicopter onto the air carrier and flew off with the film, Kevin’s career took a hit.  People made fun of him.  His military commander asked him WTF had he been smoking that day.  The incident followed him and kept him from getting promotions – he was “that UFO guy” and labeled a kook.

Then in 2017, 13 years later, the video was leaked online.  It took the US Government another 3 years to say out-loud that the video was authentic, but they finally did in April of 2020 – in the middle of a global pandemic when the entire world was on fire and everyone was praying that American democracy wasn’t going to collapse under the weight of a giant orange crybaby toddler – so no surprise that people were kind of paying attention to other things.

But Kevin noticed, and he’s here to say he deserves an apology for a decade of abuse and scorn for simply doing his job one day in November 2004…

Note: there are 3 unrelated military observations of UFOs and the link to all 3 videos is here: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/2165713/statement-by-the-department-of-defense-on-the-release-of-historical-navy-videos/

It's an encore episode in honor of lady scientists everywhere!

No surprise that the US Government conducted secret radiation tests on civilians in the 1940s and up through the 1970s.  It's almost not even worth mentioning that the radiation was injected secretly, without warning or consent, into innocent people to see what happens.

What happened was a formula that allowed scientist to backtrace from your internal bodily radiation levels to the point of exposure, the Langham Power-Function Model or Y 5 a X2b. Oh, and a bunch of people died, but not from radiation sickness! They were terminally ill to begin with.

Bill Clinton apologized for these secret radiation experiments in 1995, but we have to go all the way back to 1860 to understand what radiation is, what did its discovery mean to science, and how does all of this get from Madam Marie Curie to the passage of laws around informed consent?