S1E109 - This Month in the Apocalypse: March, 2024

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Brooke, Margaret, and Inmn talk about the environment, how a Boeing whistle blower died suspiciously, Abbot's newest attempt to make Texas a mini fief, and remember the lives of 3 teens. They also talk about hope and some nice things that happened for a change.

Host Info

Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery. Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: This Month in the Apocalypse: March 2024

**Margaret ** 00:15 Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff your podcast. . . I did the wrong. . . Did I do the wrong one? Should we keep it?

**Brooke ** 00:23 [All laughing] I love you so much.

**Margaret ** 00:26 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, the other podcast that I'm one of the three hosts of. I'm Margaret killjoy, and with me is

**Brooke ** 00:37 Brooke. Hi.

**Inmn ** 00:38 And Inmn, who can't tell if this was a bit or not,

**Margaret ** 00:41 Let's pretend it was a bit. [Sarcastically] I have functional memory. I'm not on podcast recording number five for the week. I don't know what you're talking about. And this is Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. And welcome back. We've been on a break because we were all a little burned out and we wanted to catch up because we didn't want to. . . We thought through our options, we could either have gone off a weekly schedule, but we're like, "Well, we like having a weekly schedule." So we took a break. And I don't remember whether we told you about that break, but it's over. Don't worry. It'll never. . . It'll totally happen again. And whatever, you like watching TV shows that have season breaks, you can. . . I'm sure you all figured it out. Anyway, it's This Month in the Apocalypse, only this time, we're going to be a little bit messy because it's been a little bit. So it's like this month and a half in the apocalypse. So you get an extra. It's like 1.5 as much apocalypse as usual. Y'all are so lucky. But first, this podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcast and here's a jingle from another show on the network.

**Brooke ** 01:14 Okay, so it just occurred to me that if we're doing half of March, we're at some point going to have to do half of March. So we're either going to have to have half a month in Apocalypse or do half of March and April, and then there'll be another month and a half. So maybe we should call this 45 Days in the Apocalypse? I'm just saying.

**Margaret ** 02:52 I'll just continue to messily not exactly keep track of "Oh, that happened on this date instead of this state, so it can't come in." But I'm open to it. I can be convinced. So I want to talk about some stuff. One of the things I want to talk about is how I would never say Boeing assassinated a man. But I would say that everyone who pays attention to the following news story comes to the inevitable conclusion that the private company Boeing, which manufactures an awful lot of the planes in this country, has been having a lot of problems lately. A lot of people think they assassinated a man. There was a man named John Barnett. He was a Boeing whistleblower and he was found dead on March 10th. And the news can't say, quote, "he was assassinated." So instead, they're dancing around it, doing things like putting "self-inflicted," in quotes, when they talk about the gunshot wounds that this man had to his head. I honestly. . . like this one, it's like, it's like one of those things where it didn't surprise me, but it still surprised me. I don't know how to describe this. It's a very common feeling these days were something absolutely horrible happens, where you're like, "Oh, of course that happened." But you're still a little bit like, "I can't believe that happened." John Barnett was a quality control manager at a Boeing plant in South Carolina. He worked on the 787 Dreamliners. And he had been pretty upset about a lot of the quality control that was going on. There's been a lot of conversation recently about Boeing and its lack of quality control, because their planes are literally falling apart in the air. And of course, there were two crashes a couple years ago that killed hundreds of people, that had to do with some faulty technology that caused the planes to go into nosedives that the pilots couldn't correct.

**Brooke ** 04:52 And John Oliver just did a longer piece on Boeing too. So that brought it out in conversations.

**Margaret ** 04:57 Yeah, well, and then the main thing that brought it up I think is that in the US it actually happens to US people. So people noticed. An airplane had the plug in the side of the plane blow out. And it was before it had gotten up to cruising altitude and it would have gone a lot worse if it had happened a little bit later. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured and the plane was able to land. And from there, it's just been this cascading thing. I really recommend John Oliver's The Last Week Tonight about Boeing and what's been going on with the planes. Anyway, John Barnett, quality control manager, and he was in Charleston to give a deposition against Boeing because he was suing them for retaliation because of his whistleblowing, and then they were like, "Hey, how come he didn't show up in court?" And so they went to his hotel and they found him dead in his pickup truck, having a quote unquote, "self-inflicted" gunshot wound. He was 62 years old. And rest in peace. And I have yet to meet anyone who has heard this news and not been like, "Yep, Boeing killed a man."

**Brooke ** 06:15 Sure seems like it.

**Inmn ** 06:16 That's what reasonable people would come to the conclusion of because it's what's happened in the past.

**Margaret ** 06:27 And, you know, I mean, there's also. . . Sure there's technically a version of the world where he was like, "I'm just so sad about. . ." No, he was. . .whatever. Anyway, Okay, so then I'm gonna talk about environmental news.

**Brooke ** 06:42 Do that.

**Margaret ** 06:44 Don't worry, it's worse.

**Inmn ** 06:46 Oh, no.

**Margaret ** 06:48 So let's see. This was the warmest February in Earth's history. This is the ninth month in a row that we have been in the warmest of this following month on record. The time we beat this time, for February warmest, was 2016 was the previous warmest month of February in history. And charts are literally being recalibrated to show the excessive heat. If you look at a lot of these charts, the lines from this year don't even touch previous years, you know? Next, there's the warmest winter on record in the United States. This month, the average global sea surface temperatur