S1E60 - This Month in the Apocalypse: Feb. 2023

Episode Summary

Brooke, Casandra, and Margaret talk about the war in Ukraine and how Russia is not doing great, the train derailment in East Palestine, anti trans bills, Adderall shortages and meth, the return of Big Chicken, long covid as potential auto immune disease, further bans on abortion drugs, drought, floods, earthquakes and the US's top priority: shooting million dollar missiles at balloons.

Host Info

Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Casandra is just great and can be found at Strangers doing awesome layouts, and 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.

Next Episode

A special episode will come out next week on March 17th on Surviving the Justice System.

Transcript

This Month in the Apocalypse: Feb. 2023

Brooke 00:15 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. This is the February-March installment of our segment, This Month in the Apocalypse and I'm calling it the February-March episode because we're recording in February and we're talking about February but you're going to be listening to it in March, most likely. I'm Brooke Jackson, and with me today, as usual are the quick thinking Casandra and the fast acting Margaret Killjoy.

Casandra 00:38 I don't know if that's accurate.

Margaret 00:42 Or at least fast talking sometimes, especially when I'm hyper. And today I'm hyper

Casandra 00:46 half of what I'm going to talk about today is brain fog and how it impacts me.

Brooke 00:51 Nice. Well, before we get into today's episode, we'd like to share a little something something from another one of the swiftly streaming podcasts on the Channel Zero network of anarchist podcasts.

Casandra 01:17 And we're back. Cas, Margaret, how are you feeling today?

Casandra 01:51 I just had my first sip of tea.

Margaret 01:55 I have been doom scrolling so hard that I didn't sleep last night because of all the anti trans legislation. So I didn't sleep enough and then I ate a protein cookie and pretended like it was food. So I'm great.

Casandra 02:07 And you don't do caffeine at all. Not even tea.

Margaret 02:09 No, yeah, a bunch of sugar and protein in a cookie form is my equivalent of like making me immediately hyper.

Casandra 02:18 Alright.

Margaret 02:19 Because I don't fuck with caffeine. I'm straight edge, except for alcohol.

Brooke 02:24 Well good, you should take all that energy and tell us some things.

Margaret 02:29 Oh, okay, right. I'm first. Okay, February has been a big month for the apocalypse. The Apocalypse is coming in hard with a bunch of mostly really bad shit. I think that the biggest story, or whatever, the earthquake that happened in Turkey and Syria was really fucking bad. Everyone probably already knows this. As of when I'm recording it, the death toll stands at about 50,000 people in Turkey and Syria. Those numbers are still expected to go up. And a lot of it has to do with poverty and with buildings that are not built to withstand earthquakes. This is happening in a poor region. And that is absolutely affecting everything. I don't have as much information about that to relay, but I just feel like it's like the single most...like now I'm going to talk about the fucking balloons and I hate the fucking balloons. And I want people to know that like the earthquake is more important. But on February 14th, I think, I don't remember, I wrote on February 14, but you think I'd remember that was Valentine's Day. A surveillance balloon, there's a Chinese balloon and the US shot it down. It was a really actually big balloon and it probably included some surveillance equipment. China was like, "It's civilian." The US is like, "No, it was military." I'm not stressed about it because I expect the US government is surveilling me and I don't really give a shit if some other country...whatever, I don't fucking care. It may have been capturing cell transmissions and shit over the US. But then, of course, this sets off this like massive paranoia, where everyone's like, "Balloons are trying to get us. Those Chinese balloons." And the US like scrambled....

Brooke 04:20 I always knew it was going to be balloons. I've always said it, the balloons are coming for us.

Casandra 04:22 Doomsday mechanism.

Margaret 04:26 I mean...

Brooke 04:27 it's the balloons. Clearly.

Margaret 04:30 They are creepy. Actually. This is funny, my my dad is phobic of hot air balloons. I'm sorry to reveal this about you, dad. And because he was always like, "No, they're just there. They're on the horizon. They're creepy." Like he's not afraid of being in that. He's afraid of them like on the horizon.

Casandra 04:46 One of my most traumatizing childhood moments was this hot air balloon show was like going over the neighborhood and I was spinning in circles staring upward watching them as one does and forgot that my mom had a whole like row of rose bushes. And then spent the whole afternoon having like rose thorns picked out of my ass. So, that's all to say that I don't think your dad's insane.

Margaret 05:10 Yeah, so the US government scrambled a bunch of fighter jets to shoot down a whole bunch of other balloons, all of which, like the government is like, "We do not believe that they are surveillance balloons, but we don't know." And the reason that they're saying we don't know is because, well one they obliterated tiny balloons with missiles. So there's like, not a lot left. There's like like half a million dollar missiles being shot at these fucking things, one of which missed. They missed a fucking balloon over Lake Huron, and then it like, fell into the lake. And they're like, "No one was harmed." And I'm like, great, I feel so fucking good that the government is shooting missiles at the US. That makes sense. And so probably those balloons are like amateur weather balloons, like people like do this, where you're like, I'm gonna get a balloon and like, put a bunch of equipment on it and send it up into the sky. And it's cool, right? And because you can like see the stuff. And so fortunately, the US government is there to protect us against amateur weather and radio fans.

Brooke 06:11 You know, you know, our friends over that other podcast have been saying we should nuke the Great Lakes. So I think this was just a trial run to...

Margaret 06:20 Fuck, Robert Evans is like actually the one that got them to shoot missiles.

Casandra 06:24 Cancel Robert Evans.

Margaret 06:25 Yep. All right. Yeah. Or he's a prophet.