It Could Happen Here - Executive Disorder: Alberta Separatism, Ukraine's Starlink Predicament, Global Protests Continue

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police rode off as a suicide in a snowstorm.

Starting point is 00:00:15 Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing in disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an I-Heart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to IHeart True Crime Plus

Starting point is 00:00:36 subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for IHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character. The funniest podcast in the entire world. I like that. It's a good way to promote ourselves. We are two funny guys having fun enjoying ourselves. And we just know how to have fun, unlike anyone else. If you guys like fun conversations, hot takes. What else? Not too hot. Just kind of lukewarm.

Starting point is 00:01:05 Just to get your mind thinking a little bit. Listen out of character on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. It's all just a joke. What is the value of these women? I'm Bridget Armstrong. Back with Season 2 of the podcast, Curse of Miss America. We're talking to participants, whistleblowers. And people who say Miss America didn't live up to their promises.

Starting point is 00:01:27 He looks at me and goes, you don't love. look like you suffered an eating disorder. I never received scholarship money to pay for my student loans. Maybe this is the meta question for the podcast. What is Miss America at this point? Listen to the curse with Miss America on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself.

Starting point is 00:01:52 Get Worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptides, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closure, then I would humpherson. humbly recommend other podcasts. If you're interested in blackmail, love bomb and cloning yourself or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast?

Starting point is 00:02:21 Here's what you missed. There should not be a single law enforcement agency. It does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slap it. doing DEI on anything. It's raw. And I'm sitting here going, they are playing y'all for fools.

Starting point is 00:02:38 Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. Orzo Media. This is It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by James Stout, Mia Wong, and Rod. Robert Evans.

Starting point is 00:03:09 This episode, we are covering the week of October 14th to October 21st. Diva down. I am sad to report. Oh, yeah, God. The new White House press secretary, Katie Zagariah, was fired after just five days on the jar. RIP, you guys can't see it, but I'm pouring a 40 out for her right now. It is all over my floor. This is going to cause damage to the wood.

Starting point is 00:03:34 This is half a scaramucci. Is it half? I thought it was 70% of a skirmucci. Scareamuchi. Half a Scareamucci. Scaremucci was 10 days. She was five days. Okay, she was only for five. All right.

Starting point is 00:03:43 I thought I heard seven for some reason. Good to know. Maybe it's that Scaremucci did more press conferences. She only did one press conference. All right. Yeah, that's all it took. That's all it took. To give a sense, I was camping without signal for the entire duration of her career and didn't know who she was.

Starting point is 00:04:03 You missed an entire press secretary? Yes. Yeah, I am a journalist who covers this shit. And I completely missed her. Her firing came after poor reception to her first performance and reporting, scrutinizing her claims about being a lawyer, despite not passing the bar exam. Trump told her, quote,

Starting point is 00:04:25 honestly, if I were you, I'd reconsider. Is this for you, Katie? Because honestly, you don't need this, unquote. She sure doesn't. One of the funniest, one of the funniest Trump thinks. exchanges I've ever read. Yeah. Wow. Really coming in with empathy. Is this for you, Katie? You don't need this.

Starting point is 00:04:46 Trump channeling HR manager. It's incredible. Yeah, no. He's handling this very delicately by most accounts. Politico reported that Trump told the White House officials Katie had, quote, no talent and shouldn't be on TV. But the White House disputes this. And the White House says that she is, quote, transitioning to a new role. though Katie said on Twitter it was quote, an honor to work for Trump

Starting point is 00:05:11 in the past tense so who knows what she's going to be up to in the future. Sure. Incredible. But yeah, no, we have lost out on a lot of potential content in the future. So poor one out for all the all the podcasters out there who was relying on years of press conferences to mine content.

Starting point is 00:05:29 Yeah, Saturday Night Live's got to be really fucking scrambling after that. Oh my God, yeah, damn. Yeah, I mean, you know, sometimes a beautiful thing comes into your life and it's just there for a little while and all we can do is enjoy the time we had together with what's her name. Yeah, what's her name? I know a name, Matt.

Starting point is 00:05:46 Like I said, I was camping the whole time. Luckily for us, we have so many things to cover, so we'll be fine. Everyone else in danger. Us, deluge. Speaking of other things to cover, threatening letters containing a mysterious white powder have been sent to the offices

Starting point is 00:06:05 of over three dozen congressional representatives and election offices across at least 32 states. At least one of these letters sent to Democratic Congresswoman Hillary Shulton of Michigan made a quote, direct and specific reference to an impending civil war beginning after the election, according to the congresswoman. And interestingly, according to Shulton, the letter claimed to be from the Democratic Socialists of America. So I guess they're kind of moving beyond labor organizing an electoral reform towards a much more interesting tactics. This, of course, is not true.

Starting point is 00:06:46 The DSA did not send letters containing mysterious white powder. The implication being it could be anthrax. It has not been found to be anthrax or dangerous. Usually when letters are received containing white powder, that is the sort of like implicit threat. The return address on several of these envelopes mailed two various addresses across the country was for an old DSA office in New York City, an office that DSA hasn't used in over a decade. Nice. Congresswoman Schulton released a statement which reads in part, quote,

Starting point is 00:07:20 This is another instance where the DSA has excused or ignored extremism. DSA has allowed extremists in its movement, which not only allow, but justify vitalized. as a viable means to achieve political ends, unquote. Man, they sort of kicked out all my friends who were doing, who were being street medics. Like, come on. They don't got the juice for, I mean, it's not even the juice. Like, no one in the DSA is doing anthrax letters.

Starting point is 00:07:47 Come on. DSA told CBS, quote, needless to say, if we are not involved with these letters, and we are glad to learn no one was harmed, unquote. What are we doing here? Yeah. If a bunch of amateurs with no, like, chemical and biological weapons experience were attempting to distribute anthrax around the country, you would hear about it first when they infected themselves with anthrax. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:08:13 Like, that would be the story. Yeah. And, like, it's worth mentioning, like, yeah, like, this is a fairly common right-wing tactic. This is not a thing where even you're sort of, like, I don't know, you're like 1970s, like, Red Brigades guys who were, like, kidnapping people off the streets. Like, even they didn't do this. No, because it's really hard and dangerous. It's really hard and dangerous. It's very much giving, like, learned about terrorism in the 1990s,

Starting point is 00:08:39 hasn't paid much attention since and decided to do a hoax. Early 2000s, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, sure, early 2000s. Come on. I don't know, such a weird option to go with anthrax. I guess there are other white powder, so it's kind of an easy one to go with. I mean, yeah, they're just mailing a white powder. They're not mailing anthrax, right?

Starting point is 00:08:59 It's just flour or something. It's a low effort hoax, sure. Yeah. There's all sorts of white powders out there. There sure are. Powder trigger. The Germans have this fake cocaine that's not intoxicating that comes in this little glass thing.

Starting point is 00:09:15 If you just want to snort something, it's cute. Oh, wow. Snuff. No, it's not snuff. There's no drug in it at all. It's just basically like mint. Just like talcum powder. Yeah, it's just like something you can snort if you really need to snort.

Starting point is 00:09:27 If you just your nose needs that stimulates. Germany is quite the place. Yeah. Thank you, Germans. So I heard from someone in Northern California this week, and it's a pretty credible source, that ICE agents have been seen outside the Sutter County Veterans Hall in Yuba City, which is a polling place.

Starting point is 00:09:45 I didn't see any evidence that they were making detentions there or of people there, or whether they were just using that as a staging area, I don't know. But this is something I'm really hyper-focused on in the weeks coming up to this mid-term election. Secondly, DHS is leaving TPS recipients from Ukraine and Sudan in limbo. It's not renewing their TPS, but it's not cancelling it either. So TPS generally is already a status which has to be renewed on a very fixed and short timeline, right? So it doesn't give people much permanence to begin with. But at this point, they have even less permanence, right?

Starting point is 00:10:20 It makes it very hard for them to know what to do next. like we saw what happened to Haitian communities after the removal of that TPS, right? Part of me wonder is if this is just like a rate limiting thing for DHS. Like they're still going hard on the TPSs they've already cancelled and like maybe they want to sort of divide and conquer with their surges in different communities or if it's a pretty midterm thing because it is still somewhat unpopular to go after Ukraine. Next, I have CNN reporting that the Department of, Department of Defense is loaning an active denial system to CBP. This thing is often called a heat ray.

Starting point is 00:11:02 The idea, of course, is that CBP might use it at the border for areas of high migrant traffic. They have experimented with this before, and what's interesting is that the Pentagon seemed to have refused to have their people run the system or develop training tactics and procedures to use with the system. This is in line with how the Pentagon has previously approached this. They had these for like almost two decades. And they took them to Afghanistan, but they never used them. And I'm guessing they never used them because some jag somewhere was like, yeah, that's giving war crimes. It's not a new technology, right?

Starting point is 00:11:37 They've never really been able to find a place where they felt, and for younger folks, they did some shit during the war on terror, which is generally considered to be a flagrant violation of international law. But they didn't do this. CBP has evaluated it before two in the L-Central. sector when Rodney Scott, who's now CBP Commissioner, was there. El Centro sector, of course, is ground zero for this shit, right? Greg Bovino, O's G patrol agent there. Obviously, this comes with massive human rights concerns, as well as international law

Starting point is 00:12:08 concerns. If you're using some kind of heat ray to attack people who are not in the United States, the obvious other issue here is that we have fires all the fucking time at the border and turning on a heat ray is probably a great way to have more of them. I guess an interesting development. And this is right before we recorded. One of his deputy chiefs of staff, Patrick Weaver, used to be an advisor to heck theft. He's bumped around a bunch of executive branch appointments.

Starting point is 00:12:33 He posted, quote, the border is now a military installation and a battle lab for testing new systems to include directed energy weapons. The border is locked down. And then he posted a picture of the story. I just want to point out that, like, again, it's not Department of Defense staff using this. It would be CBP, and CBP would have to develop a whole set of training tactics and procedures to do it before they used it. last time they did it they decided basically the juice wasn't worth to squeeze right and especially in the Alcenteau sector at that time people were coming through a lot of irrigation canals and the chances of somebody drowning large number of people drowning because you use this on them in a place

Starting point is 00:13:10 where they're already in danger obviously they decided not to use it so we'll keep an eye on that I guess this has also a very interesting like imperial boomerang effect of military technology then being used to the border and then as we've seen across the country that also increases the possibility of border patrol using this technology against American citizens. Yeah. Doing like crowd control, like in Portland in 2020, where they used a very specific LRAD that induced, you know, piercing headaches. The idea of this technology getting, you know, closer and closer to being used within

Starting point is 00:13:46 our national borders. I mean, as bad as it is that it exists, the bad as it is that CBP could use it at the border itself, which is this whole issue. Yeah. This also kind of shows the tendency of this sort of development to get closer and closer to the Imperial Corps. To the metropole, yeah. And I think that that's towards Evers Earth, right? Like Miller's book, Empire of Borders, I don't know when that came out, but like he talks about the U.S. Palestine border, the direct pathway, testing systems on Palestinian people to selling them to border patrol. And then, as you say, to them finding their way into the metropole, right?

Starting point is 00:14:17 Like, the whole country is experiencing now what we have experienced at the border, which is the state is either hostile or completely absent. And talking of that, like in Pensacola, right, where people are working to repair from storm damage, I saw that ice had come to arrest two roofers who were working to repair that storm damage, right? Like, what you expect from the federal government is FEMA. FEMA is pretty much on its knees right now, but ice has swallowed up all that funding, gobbled it up, and it's there. I think it resulted in like a, we're not coming down from the roof and eventually ice leaving. happened in several cases specifically with roofers, right?

Starting point is 00:14:54 Good for them. I'm glad they didn't get caught. Yeah, talking of weird DHS shit, the United States Coast Guard has released a bizarre promo video detailing their work in San Diego, which features, I think I would describe it as an emo cover of Pink Pony Club by Chapel Rhone. What? It's real weird, yeah. We can listen to it, but we don't have to. No. No, I'm good. I'm good.

Starting point is 00:15:15 Yeah. Continuing in their trend of, like, trolling intellectual property, right? finally the Hunter in Myanmar is continuing to flounder in its assault on Rakhine or Araka state. It's sort of continuing with its major tactical philosophy, which seems to be doing World War II shit in 2026. This time they've gone with an imposed amphibious assault. They're trying to stop the Arika armies offensive on Situay, and the way they've done that is like big landing crafts full of conscripts, which has resulted in massive casualty.

Starting point is 00:15:50 right? There's been a bunch of reporting over the last few months on how these big hunter offensive work and it seems to be like straight up human wave attacks at which the officers, at least the higher ranking officers, the officers who would plan such an operation are not present. And then any of the NCOs or officers who are present, like their role is not to think tactically and adapt. It's to enforce discipline and continue enforcing the plan even as everybody's dying. So yeah, it's a pretty brutal scene for conscripts in Myanmar right now. Early voting has begun in Texas, and this past week in the lead-up to the election, pamphlets have been mailed to households across Texas from a group identified as the, quote,

Starting point is 00:16:37 Texas Transgender Student Union. These pamphlets were addressed to students in the household and contained resources for LGBTQ youth and a guide on how trans teens can emancipate themselves. These mailers have sparked outrage among conservatives, and that appears to have been the point. This, quote, Texas transgender student union doesn't actually exist, or at least didn't exist until last month, when a group by that name registered as an LLC in Wyoming,

Starting point is 00:17:13 according to business records. I said LLC in Wyoming. Okay. Oh yeah. Great stuff happening here. This is not a real student advocacy group in Texas. Yeah. This is an op.

Starting point is 00:17:26 This pamphlet does include some resources from Tent. That's Transgender Education Network of Texas, which is a real advocacy group. But they were not involved in the making of this mailer, nor do they have emancipation resources. Tent has since faced a huge wave of harassment and threats, following. the mailing out of this pamphlet. The Texas Tribune traced the mailer ID of two pamphlets to a mail tracking company called Snailworks,

Starting point is 00:17:54 who, the National Republican Congressional Committee has paid almost $60,000 over the past two years for mailing services, according to a federal election commission search of campaign finance records. Stephen Manichelli is currently kind of running this lead down and trying to figure out exactly where this mailer has come from, He's been like live tweeting his investigation. We don't know tons yet, but if you want an update on it,

Starting point is 00:18:20 check out our correspondent Stephen Monticelli on social media. He'll probably have some more info about where exactly this letter came from and who might be behind it. Texas Smith County Republican precinct chair Sarah Fields posted a picture of one of these mailers that she received and wrote, People are getting pissed. Let this be a reminder to take your anger to the voting booth. though a later follow-up post noted the suspicious origin of these pamphlets.

Starting point is 00:18:48 Quote, I just checked my messages. No less than 100 parents had messaged me. Enraged over the mailers. Is this an op? If it is, it's not okay. It even gives tips on how to get emancipated, unquote. So it appears that this mailer was sent out specifically just to make people mad. Some Texans upset enough to go to the polls, trying to mobilize

Starting point is 00:19:11 anti-trans sentiment to get them to vote for the Republicans. Yeah, it's an extension of a theme, I guess. In some other, I guess, transgender-related news, earlier this month, the New York City Health Department announced a plan to spend $9 million to provide gender-affirming care to minors after two hospitals in the city, NYU Langone and Mount Sinai caved to pressure from the Trump administration and cut services to trans youth. This funding is set to go into effect early next year, likely partnering with Callan Lord, which is a local LGBTQ hospital system in the city.

Starting point is 00:19:48 And as of the day of recording this, Wednesday, October 21st, the Supreme Court, at least temporarily, blocked the Trump administration from denying gender affirming care to trans prisoners. This was just a two-sentence, unsigned order, which leaves in place a previous court order from a U.S. District judge in D.C., which originally blocked the Bureau of Prisons new policy going to effect, which would have taken away trans prisoners' gender-affirming care, including their health care. The second sentence of this two-sentence order from the Supreme Court reads, quote, Justice Thomas and Justice Alito would grant the application for stay, meaning that these two justices would have let the new anti-trans policy from the Bureau of Prisons

Starting point is 00:20:35 go into effect. So the fact that those two are singled out is interesting. You could interpret this possibly as like a 7-2 ruling, but there's really no legal justification given. It's just two sentences. It's the shortest, like, shadow docket ruling I've seen. We'll see what happens going forward. Yeah, I glad we got a good one. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:56 We got another small thing that literally broke while we were doing this. Great. So San Diego City Council Committee voted on Wednesday to rescind the ALPR use policy. That doesn't take ALPRs, like, completely out in San Diego. It means that any future contract would have to go through the whole process again,

Starting point is 00:21:17 including this like a privacy review board. That is automated license plate readers? Readers, yeah, flock cameras in the colloquial, but in this case and other analogs, right? A lot of places have said, oh yeah, we're counselling flock and then gone to Axon or another provider. Switch to Axon. Yeah, that's the move.

Starting point is 00:21:32 Yeah. Bravely, Mayor Togloria has immediately stepped him to put himself between the flock cameras and the people of San Diego like the hero he is. Todd Gloria has cloned himself and is personally standing in front on every license plate reader.

Starting point is 00:21:49 Most useful thing he's ever done. Todd Gloria is watching. Would that work? Are clones people? Could we just do that with the flock cameras? They're just twins. Somebody get to work on that.

Starting point is 00:22:00 A flock of Todd's. Give everyone, instead of a digital twin, everybody just has a clone twin that stands in front of the flock cameras. Just constantly flipping them off. Yeah, Todd said automated license plate readers are helping San Diego police solve serious crimes, cover stolen of vehicles and property and locate missing people. Taking this proven tool away from our officers will be a serious mistake and a step backwards for public safety.

Starting point is 00:22:21 Shut the fuck up, Todd Gloria. A number of people in San Diego have been wrongly arrested and detained because of flock cameras. People will remember that San Diego police had the vehicle description and number plate for the people who shot up the Islamic Center of San Diego. the mosque, right? Four hours. And they did fuck all. Not one of the cops engaged those people, right? The only person who stepped up, who kept that community safe were people who were already at that mosque, two of whom died in the act of stopping the shooter, killing more people. Surveillance is not safety. That is not the same thing. And it is particularly pathetic for our mayor, right, who was

Starting point is 00:23:03 shouted down at a press conference that night at the ICSD to attempt to lie about this. when he has failed our city so badly. Fuck this guy. There is very little nice I have to say about Todd Gloria. Let's move on, I guess, to other contract shit. ICE has issued a no-bid extension to the contract that I'm pretty sure it's omentum services has to keep running East Montana. I know what the company is called.

Starting point is 00:23:29 I'm guessing that's how they pronounce it. It could be an omenum, but I don't really care. In the justification, they say, quote, Omentum owns and controls key facility infrastructure and operational assets. Camp East Montana. These assets include temporary housing unit security systems, generators, food service equipment, and other infrastructure necessary to operate this facility. Because of this ownership and operational control, Amentum uniquely possesses the ability to continue services

Starting point is 00:23:54 without a break in performance. No other vendor can assume responsibility for the facility and provide the required services without substantial transition time, duplicity cost, operational disruption and unacceptable risk to detainee welfare and mission continuity. They then go on to mention the Office of the Inspector General report on the horrific conditions there, including three deaths and the destruction of evidence in one of those cases. They say, quote, recent oversight by the ICE Office of Detention Oversight yielded a preliminary report identifying more findings, these circumstances created and contributed to a need for immediate contractual action to protect any detainees and staff and ensure performance under ICE standards. So they are renewing and extending this contract, right, for this agency. which is remarkably bad among ICE contractors, among immigration detention, right?

Starting point is 00:24:45 This contract is vast. It has a base period of seven months, followed by a 12-months option and then two six-months options. The payout for these, and then there's quite a lot of redactions in this. A redacted item on the budget combined with all these extensions would together be $2.8 billion. Jesus. Yeah, this is for a tent camp, right, on a military base. So, like, these people are not having to build buildings, no, they have to maintain their tank camp, right? But they also don't own the land.

Starting point is 00:25:17 Like, they're doing this as a contractor on a military base. That's crazy. I mean, you're left to wonder how much of this whole thing is, like, state subsidies for, like, allies for the Republican Party or, like, it's just, it seems right. I mean, that's a lot of stuff right now. Yeah, beyond the morality of, like, what's going on, it seems like a wildly inefficient use of funds. Well, what's particularly remarkable, I don't think Omentum had ever, we've reported on this before, but I'm pretty sure at the time we reported that this isn't what they do or they hadn't done this before. This is going to be the biggest contract by orders of magnitude they've ever had.

Starting point is 00:25:51 Also, the monthly rate escalates from 68 million a month to 97 million a month. Whoa. Yeah, I mean, maybe Trump's just going to go after it a bit more with inflation. You know, maybe he's going to invade some more places that make oil and everything's going to get more expensive. maybe that's what they're predicting. But like, it could also be that they plan to scale up this facility, right? Yeah. Yeah, it is remarkable.

Starting point is 00:26:16 Like, this one hasn't had as much reporting, I don't think, as some of the geo-group and core civic facilities, because it's harder to, right? Because it's harder to people to protest outside. Often we find out about things by, like, either migrants shouting them out over the walls or, like, writing notes and tossing them out. So we haven't heard as much about this,

Starting point is 00:26:36 but the conditions we have heard in that report were horrific. And nonetheless, these guys are about to net massive bounty. Talking of bounties, is it time for us to make some money with an advertising break? I'm afraid of us. Yes. Nice. Video presents the soundtrack to your October.

Starting point is 00:27:15 From spooky podcasts and chilling playlists to non-stop Halloween radio and more. We have all the thrills and chills you're craving this season. Press play. I'm Melissa Jeltson, and in my new podcast, what happened to her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled as suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

Starting point is 00:27:51 The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her.

Starting point is 00:28:13 No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing in disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hamza.

Starting point is 00:28:36 And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know. There's a lot of them to listen to these days. How are you going to get to us? Well, there's a specific reason why you should listen to us. We are the best podcast in the entire world.

Starting point is 00:28:48 I swear. I know, bold. But why don't we list some of the things we might talk about on a regular episode? So sometimes we'll talk about. I don't know, the Uber driver we just had. And how nice they were, or if we tipped them or not, come and find out. Sometimes we'll talk about that weird news story from last week. It's the one you're thinking about, trust me.

Starting point is 00:29:07 Or maybe we'll talk about music and what's happening in the underground or drama and music or TV shows or the Met Gala and what the actors wore. What we're saying is we're not afraid to talk about everything under the sun. And if you want to see what that's like, come join us. It's a place where everyone can hang out, anyone. Wherever you're from, whatever you're like, you're welcome. Listen to out of character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 00:29:36 For more than a century, Miss America sold the country of fantasy. Well, all you ready, ladies? Okay, here we go. But over the past decade, the crown's been slipping. They said, goodbye to swimsuits. Now, hello to lawsuits. I'm Bridget Armstrong. Last season, we took you inside the world of America's next top model.

Starting point is 00:29:57 Now I'm back with season two of this podcast, Curse of Miss America, investigating the rise, fall, and uncertain future of one of America's most iconic institutions. The Miss America pageant. I never received scholarship money to pay for my student loans. He looks and he goes, you don't look like you suffered an eating disorder. It's great, but looks too ethnic. It's a story. the Miss America organization really doesn't want us to tell.

Starting point is 00:30:28 An exploitation of our Miss Americas is treated by the Miss America organization as an attack on Miss America itself. Listen to The Curse with Miss America on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. Get Worse with Kyle Brew is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. But if you're interested in blackmail, love bombing, cloning yourself,

Starting point is 00:31:10 or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Take a listen to some of the incredible advice we've given so far. Fake a back injury. Get the spray tan, up your alcohol consumption. Only women should be allowed to have guns. Kill them. Kill them. Kill them for the gun.

Starting point is 00:31:28 Listen, it's already over. I'm all about lying if it's something that really happened. The next time a bear is running at you, you just calmly stop what you're doing, you look the bear in the eye, and you say this isn't you. Do not preserve relationships. You don't need them. You only need one thing, and that's the Get Worse podcast. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.

Starting point is 00:32:01 So first, kind of a quick story. I mean, this is actually a huge story. It might wind up being one of the biggest ones we've covered in the last few months, but at the moment there's just not a ton out in terms of like knowing what the consequences are going to be. But there was a massive vulnerability revealed in PHP this week. PHP, which stands for personal homepage, is a scripting language used to develop websites, like most of the websites in one way or another. I think like 70% of the Internet these days relies on PHP in some way, you know,

Starting point is 00:32:30 aspects of the website or whatever. like I still use it. WordPress uses it heavily, so do platforms like Drupal and Magneto. It wouldn't be too far off to view PHP as a foundation level of the modern internet. Late Tuesday, a massive vulnerability was discovered in PHP by AI systems. Two vulnerabilities actually were found, and without getting technical, these could provide bad actors with a way to run whatever code they want on an affected server

Starting point is 00:32:53 without even logging in. One thing a bad actor could do with this is create a backdoor or edit the content of a website to embed malicious code. this is a tremendously like broad reaching and severe vulnerability. Yeah. Now, when stuff like this gets found, the ideal thing to do is to inform, you know, the people who maintain phb or whatever or whatever thing a vulnerability has been found in so they can patch it before it becomes known to everybody that there's this massive vulnerability.

Starting point is 00:33:20 But that's not what happened. The vulnerability was leaked hours before the patch came out. The patch was set for Wednesday. And on Tuesday, like late afternoon, early evening, everyone knew that there was a vulnerability. And so every major website on the planet scrambled taking themselves down or disabling pHP related parts of the website and applying emergency fixes. Like the Netherlands, like a bunch of government websites went down. Fourchan was down.

Starting point is 00:33:41 A bunch of like very large and influential websites were down, including a lot of government sites. You've probably noticed this to some extent. I want to quote now from an article by Malwarebyte Labs. The longer term concern is forgotten infrastructure. Abandoned websites, unsupported applications, and connected devices with pHP-based management interfaces. vulnerable installations may remain exposed

Starting point is 00:34:02 if nobody maintains them where a vendor no longer supplies updates. So it's way too early to know what the long-term impacts of all these vulnerabilities and of like the hacks that are going to be carried out as a result of these vulnerabilities will be,

Starting point is 00:34:15 but this is a big story. You should expect to hear a lot more in the near future. This is an example of how, you know, one of the things these AI tools have done is that hacking has always involved a lot of automated stuff

Starting point is 00:34:26 like running scripts and whatnot to search for vulnerabilities. and AI has allowed us to supercharge the speed at which vulnerabilities are found and exploited. And so shit like this is going to become much more common. This is all part of like the decreasing reliability with which we will all be able to access and utilize the internet safely. And yeah, it's just kind of worth keeping an eye on this, even though it's not clear what the fallout entirely is going to be at this point. Scary. But everybody you know in digital security says this is a very big deal.

Starting point is 00:34:56 Yeah, it's real bad. heads on a swivel family. So moving outside of the internet and over to a place that has no internet, let's talk about Canada. Garrison, is that accurate? Does Canada not have the internet? I don't know, man.

Starting point is 00:35:11 You don't know. Okay, that's good. Good to know. That's our Canadian correspondent, Garrison Davis. Thanks. Yeah. I'll be up there to report in person in a few months. Yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:20 If you can text me, we'll know there's internet. Well, actually, that's not the internet. That's good point. Those of you who pay attention to the most important goings-on of our neighbors to the north, and I mean Canadians, not Yankees, for our southern listeners, know that the province of Alberta just held a referendum on whether or not to hold a binding referendum

Starting point is 00:35:35 on separating from Canada. And the separatists failed, just like in Star Wars. Also like in Star Wars, the roots of the Alberta secession movement have a lot to do with complex issues of trade, particularly the oil and gas trade. In 1969, only about 5% of Albertans expressed interest in discussing separation from Canada during a provincial poll.

Starting point is 00:35:56 But then came the 1970s, and the 1973 oil crisis, which was sparked by the Yom Kipper War, and then OPEC getting big mad. OPEC got really mad a couple of times in the 70s, and there were a bunch of fuel shocks. If you grew up in the time most of the people this podcast did, and you went to like an elementary or a middle school or any kind of public school that had no windows,

Starting point is 00:36:15 that's because it was probably built around this period. And they were like desperate to find ways to reduce heating and cooling costs. Amazing. And another impact that those fuel shocks had was that it caused a lot of, North America to go like, well, I guess we have to exploit our own oil reserves much more because we cannot rely on the stuff we had been relying on. This helps spur massive and rapid growth in the North American oil sector, obviously across the United States, but in Canada as well, this was a big deal in Canada because Alberta happens to be one of the most oil rich places on planet Earth.

Starting point is 00:36:46 The province alone has the fourth highest proven reserves of oil on planet Earth, according to a 2025 report by a consulting firm McDaniel and Associates. And we actually didn't, like this is actually a change in terms of what we knew about Alberta's oil reserves. They keep going up as we like figure out how to get better at, you know, it's a mix of hydraulic fracking and like better science and whatnot, but they're getting better at finding out and exploiting like how much oil there is in Alberta. About two million more barrels of oil were recently discovered in Alberta thanks to a mix of hydraulic fracturing and new technology for drilling wells. For a write-up by the Bow report, oil sands production has grown substantially in the past decade,

Starting point is 00:37:24 up 70% from 2 million to 3.4 million barrels per day. The growth of several projects has increased confidence in the commercial viability of developing additional lands. Now, this is significant for a couple of reasons, but one thing that has grown over the past few decades alongside Alberta's proven oil reserves is secessionist or separatist sentiment. There are different opinions among those people

Starting point is 00:37:45 about what should be done when and if Alberta separates, but a decent chunk of them do support joining the United States. And I don't think it takes a lot of imagining to wonder why some people in the charge of the United States government right now might support that. To continue with that Bo Report analysis. Since the Shale Revolution in 2008, there's been a massive growth from North America, and the rest of the world hasn't grown oil production. We're now seeing that the tight plays in the U.S. aren't infinite and are showing signs of plateauing.

Starting point is 00:38:13 Specifically, when we look at the United States' largest oil play, the Permian, it has essentially been flat at 5.5 million barrels per day since December of 2023. Flat production from the Permian is contrary to the previous decade, where we saw tight oil production grow by half a million barrels per day per year. Oil demand has gone up by about a million barrels a day per year for the last several decades, and at this point we do expect that to continue, at least in the very near term. Given the growing demand for oil and stagnation in supply growth, since the shale revolution, it's expected that Alberta's oil sands reserves will become increasingly critical. As global oil demand continues to rise, and with limited growth and production from other sources, oil sands reserves will be relied. upon more heavily. So Alberta is one of the places in North America that we keep finding more oil. And as we start to plateau in the United States, people in the U.S. government, particularly

Starting point is 00:39:03 the Trump administration, are looking at Alberta as a potential crucial resource for the future. So while there's a lot of wackiness around the Alberta secession movement, as there is with any secession movement in the U.S. or in Canada, there's also major geopolitical implications behind the mere discussion of Albertan independence. And the prize of Alberta and the prize of Alberta an oil was considered well worth some scheming by people in the Trump administration. The movement had gotten supercharged first during a conflict in the early 1980s between then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the Albertan Premier Peter Laude, who disagreed about how fair Canada's revenue-sharing energy policy was. Trudeau argued that the federal government needed

Starting point is 00:39:40 to control Canada's natural resources and sought to impose further taxes and oil and gas revenues. Laude threatened to cut production in response to new taxes. 49% of respondents in a 1981 poll by the Canada West Foundation agreed that Western Canadians benefited so little from membership in the Canadian state that independence made sense. And in the decades since, the issue has remained bubbling in the background, like crude. It was ignited in the modern era in 2015 when Pierre Trudeau's son, Justin, became the prime minister. And to make a long story short, over the last several years, things have really come to a head. Separatist parties who had attracted like 1 or 2% of the vote previously were supercharged by

Starting point is 00:40:18 COVID-19 restrictions. And then the fact that Trump's been launching a trade war and talking about making Canada the 51st state, that's also helped kind of clamp down on some of the separatist sentiment. It's a big part of what Prime Minister Carney has used to sort of like argue that Canadians need to stand together in this time. And he's right that the separatist movement is being like deliberately pushed by a whole bunch of people in the United States. Now, obviously the most direct reason why this referendum came about is because in May,

Starting point is 00:40:45 Albertan Premier Danielle Smith announced that the independence question would come to a vote. She supported a unified Canada but was willing to have a referendum vote because over 300,000 Albertans had signed a petition asking for a referendum. The petition's signatures had been gathered after a mass town hall campaign by pro-separation citizens. It was blocked by a court for reasons to do with indigenous rights initially, but was allowed to go through. Voters in this referendum had a number of choices to make, not just as to whether or not to do a binding referendum. Although first they did have to choose, do we remain with Canada or do we start the process of holding a Biding separation referendum? But, per the BBC, quote, there are nine other questions that have been put

Starting point is 00:41:23 to voters, though they have been overshadowed by the one on independence. They deal with two main topics, immigration and constitutional matters. For the most part, all of them seek to ask Albertans about options to gain autonomy from Ottawa. Voters were also asked, for example, if they wanted more control on immigration and whether people should have to provide proof of citizenship to vote. U.S. interests repeatedly attempted to influence the election in a number of ways. A write-up in McLean's documents how U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent held an interview with Jack Posobic where he said, I think we should let them come down into the U.S. Alberta is a natural partner for the U.S., rumor that they may have a referendum on whether

Starting point is 00:41:57 they want to stay in the U.S. or not. This was taken very seriously by Canadians as a statement of U.S. support for intervention in Canadian politics, consistent with the 2025 National Security Strategy, a regime released, which revealed what's known as the Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The Don Roe Doctrine? Yeah. This, per the White House, put Canada in the U.S. sphere of influence. As McLeans wrote, quote,

Starting point is 00:42:21 The document was read with dread in Ottawa. The strategy has, of course, played out in rhetoric and policy. The administration wants a say on Canada's trade agreements. It wants specialized access to resources, and it has zero regard for notions of sovereignty, except, it seems, when it comes to Alberta. Now, the most direct U.S. influence in this whole process so far has been online. tons of MAGA-affiliated accounts pushed Albertan secession.

Starting point is 00:42:42 Benny Johnson suggested taking Alberta militarily, Stephen Crowder supported Alberta statehood, all sorts of stupid shit. McGill's study found pro-independence accounts on social media outperformed anti-independence accounts by an eight-to-one ratio, which is pretty clear evidence of interference by social media companies, I would say. Right before the referendum, public interest Alberta called for an inquiry into foreign interference in Alberta's secession. referendum after it was found that Albertan separatist leaders held a meeting with U.S. Republican political strategists in the province about how to push the referendum. This is all very fucked up, and Canadians should be pissed at us. The good news is that, for now, things did not go MAGA's

Starting point is 00:43:25 way, did not go the Trump administration's way. Albertans voted overwhelmingly to stay part of Canada. Nearly two million people cast their ballots, and so far about 75% of them look to have supported remaining Canadian. I think we'll be continuing to cover. aspects of this in the future, but that's what you need to know right now. Nice. Anything to add, Gere? Yeah, I'm glad that Alberta voted to not have a vote on whether to leave Canada. Yeah. Unfortunately, though, some of the more confusingly worded referendum questions on stuff like immigration or not as unanimous, the early count on a bunch of those immigration questions leans yes in favor of pursuing more restrictions. But the more

Starting point is 00:44:08 Margins on those are pretty small, and votes from cities like Edmonton and Calgary are still coming in and could theoretically switch those over, but they'd have to go up a couple percent. Some of the other questions on like changes to the Constitution have already flipped from yes to know as we've been getting in more results from the cities. But these other questions are pretty close. We don't have full results quite yet. So although U.S. interference did not produce the result on separation that Maga may have wanted, the type of immigration rhetoric that spreads on social media is not unique to the United States or really any kind of quote-unquote Western country right now.

Starting point is 00:44:54 There's pretty ugly stuff everywhere. But yeah, in terms of the separation referendum that all lines up with what I've been reading in the old CBC and what I've been talking with my family about. because, yeah, they've been voting. They're voting. I don't know, Canada, I'm going to give you the same advice I give every country these days. Invest in long-range missile defenses.

Starting point is 00:45:18 Well, I don't know. Sorry. I don't know if that's the best use of Canadian state money. It might be. There are some countries who really do like this. But no, I mean, Alberta really is the heart of the kind of conservative conservative movement in Canada right now.

Starting point is 00:45:38 This is where like, you know, like the trucker convoy was organized all of those. All those many years ago. It is one of three provinces I've heard described as Canada's Texas. That's the only one that's accurate. People could say like maybe like

Starting point is 00:45:54 Manitoba or Saskatchewan, they're lying. Those are obviously like Midwest states. Nova Scotia's got a little bit of Texas in it, but only a little. Interesting. No, it's definitely Alberta. I mean, my family lives surrounded by oil derricks. It is, it's quite incredible.

Starting point is 00:46:09 Should we stick to non-U.S. countries and pivot to Mia Wong? So speaking of places where people are pissed off at the Trump administration, we are moving to our dispatches from a world in revolt, and we're moving first to Albania, which has seen staggeringly large protests over the last roughly a week. It's very difficult to get good numbers on how big the Albanian protests are. I will say just off the top as a indication of how successful they've been. They lit the Supreme Court on fire.

Starting point is 00:46:48 They lit part of the Albanian Central Bank on fire. So the protests that have rocked Albania over the last week are a massive escalation of ongoing protests over a basically city-sized seaside real estate development tied to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, whose firm affinity partners. Okay, so this is where it gets murky because they've been granted special investment status by the government. They also talked about this development project. Like, there's like a video of, I think on Instagram of them talking about it and how they

Starting point is 00:47:22 like discovered this place when they went on vacation. It's kind of unclear exactly the extent to which they were involved in it. I don't know. No one seems to exactly know how closely tied there in. I've seen some reports, like the rumor is that they're just straight- selling it to Kushner's like firm, right? This development is going to be built on a wildlife reserve that is home to a whole bunch of animals like sea turtles and importantly a bunch of flamingos, which has led to this, you know, these protests, the original version of these protests being

Starting point is 00:47:50 dubbed the Flamingo Revolution. Nice. But the protest kicked into a higher gear in the last week. As I mentioned before, the protesters have been extremely successful in combating security forces. Again, they lit the Supreme Court on fire. They have spread rapidly across the country. Albania's nominally socialist party president has blamed conservatives and also Iran for fomenting the protests. But this rings somewhat hollow given that a very prominent young member of his own party who he had handpicked or run at like age 25 also joined the protest during the original phase of it. And the intensification of these protests and their expansion from being sort of solely about this real estate development to being about the things that all

Starting point is 00:48:38 the rest of the uprisings are about, which is to say unemployment, you know, terrible education, like bad economic prospects are very directly linked to the other uprisings in France, Spain, India, and other places. People, yeah, people are directly inspired when, you know, when you read interviews of them in the streets, they're directly inspired by what, I don't know if I like the name, the Gen Z revolt, but that's kind of what it's being called. Yeah, and there is this massive, like, generational, like, conflict element of these protests.

Starting point is 00:49:09 Yeah. Yeah, although, again, like, it's worth noting that, like, a lot of the people involved in this are a lot older than that. Like, I think, I think part of what's happening is, like, it's like the students who are the first people to take the street, and then everyone else goes with them. And that tends to be the case, like, generally, right? Like, it's generally young people who are just a bit less risk of a,

Starting point is 00:49:31 and who tend to do those things. They have less stake in ways continuing exactly how they are. Yeah, and more to gain, right? Like, they have the rest of their lives to deal with this shit. Yeah. Yep. And, you know, I think this is actually very encouraging that you're seeing very, very deliberate sort of tying

Starting point is 00:49:49 of these protests to the protests going on in other countries in a way that wasn't really true of like the 2018, 2019, 2020 wave of protests. And it harkens back to the sort of internationalism of 2011, where you would have things like protesters who were occupying Tucker Square would be like ordering pizzas for striking teachers in Wisconsin

Starting point is 00:50:08 like that kind of this is closer not fully there but closer to that kind of era of solidarity between these movements and a lot of that is because you know the people taking the streets are seeing the same economic conditions everywhere and are seeing people

Starting point is 00:50:23 like go fight to break and that helps to break the passivity of you know the passivity of the and get people into the streets. Speaking of getting people into the streets, we're going to turn from Albania to France, where the question in France for the last few weeks had been fairly simple.

Starting point is 00:50:42 The question was, will the rest of French society join the French students in the streets, or would they let the student movement be crushed alone? And this weekend, to its credit, French society issued a fairly resounding answer. Yes, we are going to go into the streets. And the result of that was, over the weekend, France saw

Starting point is 00:51:01 the largest protest the country has seen since at minimum the peak of the Gillesjean like yellow vest uprising, possibly larger, and it's been defined by a level of militancy that even in a nation defined by the riot

Starting point is 00:51:17 is almost more characteristic of a small revolution than a large protest. The Gillesjeune, like, they've set up a whole website to convene people to protest and they have another one coming up on the 24th. with. Yeah, yeah. And that's part of what's been happening here is that, you know, the student protest survived long enough for the dates that the yellow vests had set up. And what this has

Starting point is 00:51:39 caused is a huge swath of both the French left and the French working class out there. You're seeing everyone from like proles in like, like, you know, French territories and reunion in Guadalupe where like in Guadalupe, people seem to be like shooting at police stations and stuff to, you know, you have the remains of the yellow vests. And in something that is genuinely sort of remarkable French society, you're seeing both the white and non-white French working classes go out at the same time,

Starting point is 00:52:06 which is something that very, very rarely happens. Usually when one segment goes out, the other one doesn't. So if you look at the riots in 2023, that against, like, police killings, were probably the most, like, militant, like, street movement you've seen in France in ages, but it was just the non-white workers going out.

Starting point is 00:52:24 And this time, it's been both, partially because the student movement, was born in a bunch of working class suburbs of Paris, but then spread to the rest of Paris and the rest of the country, you've been seeing a sort of alliance here in a way that you haven't in a long time. And the consequence of this is that when enough of the French working class goes out together, you can start doing the thing that they're doing right now, which is burning down city halls.

Starting point is 00:52:50 And, you know, you can see this. When you read accounts from people on the ground, It doesn't read like an account of, you know, even a pretty militant French protest. Like it reads like something out of like 1848. You're reading things like, quote, thousands of people are in the Elise district, setting up barricades. These are the largest mobilizations we've seen this decade. It's probably, it's hard to get good numbers of like the peak of the Gilles-Lijon. The government is estimating 500,000.

Starting point is 00:53:19 The unions estimate 800,000, which I think is much closer. I've seen estimates up into the millions. this was also a massive shock to the government. The government had been projecting that about 100,000 people would come out. They were projecting the movement was about to die. And then suddenly, you know, eight to 10 times as many people as the government thought was going to be out, came out. And this is also surprising to some extent in that this uprising differs a lot from the last half decade of anti-austerity protests and general strikes. There have been a lot of general strikes in the last, like half a decade.

Starting point is 00:53:51 but the call for this didn't come out from the unions. You know, it came out from a whole bunch of decentralized networks, including the sort of yellow vesting, including the student movement networks. And because of that, it was able to put into the streets almost an order of magnitude more people than anyone else has been able to call out. And it puts the French state in a somewhat difficult position because there isn't really a force that can just rein the protests in in a way that you had with the French general, with the general strides where you can negotiate with the unions.

Starting point is 00:54:19 There's just an unbelievable number of extremely angry people. people in the streets, and we're going to see how the protest continues to escalate this weekend. I'm going to move to a couple of kind of small ones. So in Tunisia, we had Tunisia's largest union calling a pretty large anti-government protest, which is pretty notable because, so Tunisia's been under the rule of, like, effectively a dictator who came in promising to sort of, like, end the rampant corruption and unemployment of the sort of post-revolutionary in Tunisia. That hasn't happened. But Tate has been, like, incredibly effective at repressing protests and repressing opposition.

Starting point is 00:55:00 And this is the largest group, like, group of people anyone's been able to put in the streets in basically since he came to power. So we're going to be monitoring what's happening there. It's also worth mentioning what's going on in Italy, where there have been some small protests in the north. I say small. Very effective, but small protests in the north that like managed to sack a whole bunch of Milan shopping district, which pissed off the government enormously. So there's a troop deployment going on in Milan. But I think more interestingly are the protests happening in the South at the same time where there's a set of roadblocks that are being maintained as part of a trucker's protest over sort of rising diesel. Diesel prices

Starting point is 00:55:39 are skyrocketing. There just isn't diesel to buy as well, which means that a bunch of the trucking sector that fuels a sort of export economy of the agricultural parts of southern Italy are collapsing because the truckers who are independent contractors can't afford diesel. And that's been crushing their industry. And so we're starting to see blockades of the roads leading up to ports. And that's something that I think can escalate because there just has not really been a government solution to these problems. Finally, I want to talk about Indonesia, where on Tuesday of the 19th, yesterday as we were recording this. But protests sort of begun in earnest

Starting point is 00:56:18 against the country's increasingly been battled right-wing president Prabowo Subiento, who is a former general and a former minister of defense and who came in on a very sort of like right-wing military fascist platform. Subiento has come under fire, and I use that term quite literally here,

Starting point is 00:56:36 for his failure to even vaguely contain a massive series of wildfires in Sumatra and Borneo that have been going on since July. So this is not a situation where people are mad at the government for not being able to control the weather. These fires have been going on for four months and they have covered not just Indonesia, but a broad swath of the entire region, like in these clouds of toxic smoke. And I mean, like, these clouds of toxic smoke are reaching Vietnam, right? And this has been going on for four months now and the government has not been able to put them out. People are extremely pissed. I'm going to quote here from Arab News, quote, the Ministry of Health, is just in Indonesia. The Ministry of Health has recorded at least 277,000 cases of acute respiratory infection related to the fires so far, of which 60,000 are children under five.

Starting point is 00:57:26 So this has pushed people into the streets in the last couple of days. Again, this is a set of protests that begun with students, like, hearkening to the student protests across the world. The government has said it will deploy 9,000 police officers that crush the protests. It's unclear exactly how this is going to go because we're in effectively day two of them as we're recording. Yeah, and we will keep you informed as that situation unfolds. Let's go on one more ad break and then return for two more important stories. Hello?

Starting point is 00:58:05 Radio presents the soundtrack to your October. From spooky podcasts and chilling playlists to non-stop Halloween radio and more. We have all the thrills and chills you're craving this season. I'm Melissa Jeltson, and in my new podcast, what happened to her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled as suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead.

Starting point is 00:58:59 Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

Starting point is 00:59:19 She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing the disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character.

Starting point is 00:59:41 It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around. But why should you listen to ours? Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world. And we talk about pretty much everything under the sun. For example, music we're listening to, underground music, trending music, drama in music world. Yes, sometimes we even talk about just everyday mundane situations in our lives, like the cool Uber driver we just had. Or the food we just say, that is surprisingly delicious.

Starting point is 01:00:08 Or we'll talk about the Med Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters. And so does yours. And this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen out of character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more than a century, Miss America sold the country of fantasy.

Starting point is 01:00:35 Well, are you ready, ladies? Okay, here we go. But over the past decade, the crown's been slipping. They said goodbye to swimsuits. Now, hello to lawsuits. I'm Bridget Armstrong. Last season, we took you inside the world of America's next top model. Now I'm back with Season 2 of this podcast, Curse of Miss America.

Starting point is 01:00:55 investigating the rise, fall, and uncertain future of one of America's most iconic institutions. The Miss America pageant. I never received scholarship money to pay for my student loans. He looks and he goes, you don't look like you suffered an eating disorder. It's great, but looks too ethnic. It's a story the Miss America organization really doesn't want us to tell. An exploitation of our Miss America's is treated by the Miss America organization. as an attack on Miss America itself.

Starting point is 01:01:36 Listen to the curse of Miss America on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. Get Worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. But if you're interested in blackmail love bombing, cloning yourself or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Take a listen to some of the incredible advice we've given so far.

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Starting point is 01:02:54 So talking of like a world in, world on fire. Yeah. Let's talk about Iran and Ukraine, right? So the UK MTO's report maritime trade office, I believe, indicated that the maritime reporting agency has struggled to, I'm just going to quote from it, struggling to accurately report true numbers of attacks

Starting point is 01:03:12 with majority of vessels refusing to report to UKMTO. And then in that bullet point, UKMTO is aware via other sources of incidents but constrained on reporting through lack of verification. Despite this, they recorded more than a dozen attacks last week. And they recorded that transit to Strait was 70% lower, straight-of-Hormuz, obviously, than pre-conflict levels.

Starting point is 01:03:35 While oil is moving through that east-west Saudi pipeline that bypasses straight-of-hormuz, it seems the move in Hormuz right now is to use smaller craft to offload to larger vessels. This, of course, is all happening at the same time that Ukraine has continued to use long-range drone attacks to batter Russian fuel infrastructure. launched a bunch of larger-scale operations over the weekend, and it appears that the world's most divorced man is not happy about this. That's Elon Musk, if you're not familiar. Elon Musk has been gating the speed at which Ukraine can remain connected to the internet

Starting point is 01:04:15 through his Star Shield system. He started doing this about the 14th of October, which was last Wednesday for you listening on Friday. This has serious impacts for Ukrainian drone offensives. according to posts by Ukrainian officials on Telegram, they weren't warned about this. They already can't use the Star Shield itself in Russian territory, but for other operations, it seems that they've been limited to connecting at speeds below 100 miles an hour 160 KPH. This 100 mile limit seems to be something that they've now arrived at, but when this was first

Starting point is 01:04:49 happening, people were experiencing connectivity issues even slower than that. So it's not uncommon for drones to be equipped with a terminal, right? Like a Star Shield or Starlink terminal to either function as a relay or in some cases like the actual drone that engages the Russians will have a terminal on it. They also use them on interceptor drones. I'm not entirely clear how. I can guess, but I'm not going to dig in public. Someone knows I'd love to hear Coolzone Tips at Proton.me.

Starting point is 01:05:19 If you're not familiar with Star Shield, Star Shield, Star Shield, Star Shield is a Gov-slash military version of Starlink. Sometimes it has access to faster speed, certain specific satellites. They're not entirely interchangeable, but Star Shield can use that Starlink network kind of plus, I guess. Ukraine has a couple of things. It has Star Shield, and then it has a registry of Ukraine Ministry of Defense Starlink terminals, which seems to be a separate thing, right? But like when it took a long time, but eventually Starlink turned off support for the Starlink terminals of Russians were using, right?

Starting point is 01:05:55 And it seems that they have this registry, which is oftentimes units in Ukraine will either fundraise to purchase or have donated to them a Starlink terminal. And then they can go to the Ministry of Defense and be like, hey, can you add this to your list? And then it's treated differently by the company as opposed to like, and I guess the deal there is to avoid Russians buying it. and they don't want to be supportive of Russia invading Ukraine, at least in that way. On X.com, the everything website, Elon Musk claimed that, quote, Star Shield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS. Starlink, of course, is a commercial service owned by Space X.

Starting point is 01:06:37 And this is, I'm continuing quote from Musk here. Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defense activities cannot be used for offensive military action as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company. On the 17th of October, Marco Rubio then went on to claim that Ukraine does not have Star Shield. On Star Shield, what's going on? Because Elon Musk said it's up to the president. Well, Star Shield or Starlink? Well, just both. Yeah, I know. It's confusing. So Starlink is a commercial product, okay? And so it's regulated and handled as a commercial product. Star Shield is a defense product,

Starting point is 01:07:12 the military product. And as I said, I mean, that is something that we have a military, United States military uses. It's not at this moment available to Ukraine. And that's under conversation. I mean, it's under discussion right now of how they would want to use it. No, but did the U.S. have anything to do with it not working in Ukraine at the moment? Zalinski said it was deliberate. Well, I don't know what Zalinski said. I'm not sure Zalinski knows what he's talking about, but it wasn't deliberate. We had nothing to do with it. I don't, I don't, the United States, nobody ordered that Starlink speed to be slowed down.

Starting point is 01:07:42 So, subsequently, the Wall Street Journal reported that, quote, a person familiar with the situation said Musk talked to multiple senior administration officials, including with Trump, before imposing the new speed cap, which Ukrainian officials said had allowed Russian missiles to evade their defensive. Tensions between the United States and Ukraine are really growing right now. Zelensky has claimed that Trump administration has cut intelligence support, which has resulted in failing to track missile strikes into Ukraine. Trump has claimed the U.S. still shares intelligence,

Starting point is 01:08:11 but he went on to say, We've given a lot to Ukraine. You know what? We've given a lot to Ukraine. They've given nothing to us. Remember that. We've given hundreds of billions of dollars. I gave the javelins to Ukraine when he knocked out.

Starting point is 01:08:27 That was me. Obama gave him pillows. You know the expression? Obama gave him sheets and pillows. Trump gave him the javelins. So don't tell me about Ukraine. We've given a lot to Ukraine. They've given us nothing.

Starting point is 01:08:40 So Trump being pretty combative there. This seems to obviously be ignoring the minerals deal. People will remember the very infamous Trump-Vant Zelensky meeting at the White House, right, which resulted in this minerals deal. Trump has also repeatedly tried to blame Zelensky for diesel prices. I want Zelensky to stop and I want Putin. Now, if you tell me that Zelensky is again shooting at refineries, all he's doing is making the world oil price higher.

Starting point is 01:09:10 is doing that. Well, I think that's a disgrace of it. There's plenty of other targets. They don't have to hit. There are a lot of targets that you can hit. But when you shoot at diesel refineries where you make diesel oil, and we need that, and the world needs that, then he's not doing a good service for the world. Failure of the convention in the English language to use one's voice going up to indicate a question, which is great. Because the far bigger issue is that Trump has started war with Iran, right? is the major issue. Not fuel. It's more.

Starting point is 01:09:42 Yeah. That's the actual reason is diesel shortage. I want to play this clip, though, because he really went in on Zelensky on Monday. I think it's time for somebody else to negotiate on behalf of Ukraine. Because what's happened? Very little land is moved.

Starting point is 01:09:57 But a million people, a tremendous number of people are dead. They're losing their male population. Ukraine could have had this thing settled a long time ago. If he would have listened to me and you remember the Oval Office, He would have had this settled a long time ago. Maybe it's time for Zelensky to get somebody else to negotiate. So it seems that like this is Trump's move going into the midterm, right?

Starting point is 01:10:25 It's that among other things that he's tried to do, to draw attention from what's happening to fuel prices because of his war in Iran, he's now trying to blame Zelensky. Just to wrap up on Starlink, Starlink is a reality of war. everywhere today. It's used in Myanmar and in Ukraine and all over the world. And this has the really unfortunate effect of making so many people directly reliant on Elon Musk specifically. It's a massive structural problem in conflict everywhere today. But Elon Musk, especially in cases where there's not Star Shield, right, where it's just Starlink, the commercial product,

Starting point is 01:11:03 Elon Musk has the ability to turn off the connection to the outside world of so many places and movements. I'd be naive if I said I expected this to be the last time we saw that. So yep, that's what I got on conflict today. For our last story, let's return to this show's namesake and discuss a new executive order. On Monday, First Lady Melania Trump made a rare public appearance with her husband to announce the creation of a new Women's Health Division within the NIH, the National Institutes of Health.

Starting point is 01:11:38 According to Health and Human Services, quote, the division will advance research into conditions that uniquely or disproportionately affect women, strengthen accountability in federally funded research, and accelerate the translation of scientific discoveries into prevention,

Starting point is 01:11:53 diagnosis, treatment, and clinical care. Trump created this new division via executive order, and this order also established a, quote, White House Women's Health Task Force, which, according to Trump, will, quote, mobilize the entire federal government to coordinate action focused on improving women's health.

Starting point is 01:12:14 Here is the president announcing who will run the Women's Health Task Force. And this task force will be led by Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, that's a big one. and he's been fantastic, I have to tell you. He's a little different. We understand that, don't we? Cheryl, do we understand he is a little different?

Starting point is 01:12:37 But that's what makes him good, I think. I'll let you know about it. That's what makes him good. I think. I'll let you know about it. Very reassuring, very reassuring stuff. Bringing endorsement for the dude in charge of the women's health program. Now, this task.

Starting point is 01:12:56 Force will also be co-chaired by Chief of Staff Susie Willis, and the Task Force will also include Pete Hegseth, among other cabinet members, though Hegseth is the first one mentioned in the order. So, real star-studded cast there in charge of women's health. Jesus. Great stuff. I'll read from the executive order, quote, My administration is committed to ensuring that American women are receiving the best scientifically

Starting point is 01:13:25 supported medical advice in the world, unquote. Now, the NIH already has an Office of Research on Women's Health and has since the 90s. So it's unclear how the work of this division will differ from the office, to quote the New York Times, quote, Alina Salganikoff, the co-chairwoman of the committee that produced the 2024 National Academy of Medicine report on, quote, ending unequal treatment, questioned how the new division would set research priorities and wondered whether it would end up focusing on the interests of the Make America Healthy Again movement, like non-hormonal approaches to contraception and fertility awareness, for example. Quote, If you have a fixed amount of money and you're going to invest in new research, what are the trade-offs?

Starting point is 01:14:14 What are you not funding in order to fund these new studies? Said Ms. Sliganikoff, who now directs the Women's Health Policy Program at the nonprofit health, research organization, KFF. Unquote. The questionable priorities of this division is not the only issue. Trump's new order does not secure or promise any research funding. And just last month, Trump cut $810 million from HHS. This was funding that was already pre-approved by Congress. During the wave of Doge cuts last year, HHS slashed funding for the Women's Health Initiative. a decades-long ongoing study focused on women's health, aging, menopause, and the effects of hormone therapy. After public pushback, funds for the initiative were reinstated, but the massive cuts to the NIH still have negatively impacted research into women's health.

Starting point is 01:15:10 Trump has cut or froze over $3 billion in previously approved research grants, 2.3 billion of which from the NIH, and Trump's 2026 budget proposal sought to slash the NIH budget by 41%, a cut of almost $20 billion. Since Trump took office, NIH has been rewarding grants much, much more slowly, with HHS, the Office of Management and Budget, or the White House, flagging certain awards as, quote, not acceptable, according to former NIH director Jennifer Toyer in an interview with NPR. Toyer explained how this interference from the White House has continued, even after Doge, quote, went away,

Starting point is 01:15:58 but the other systems had been put in place to do the same function, unquote. I think this is something that doesn't get reported on enough, even though Doge doesn't exist in name the same way it did in like the early months of the Trump administration. a lot of those same sorts of policies are being done by other institutions, other departments, other agencies, especially the Office of Management and Budget. Yeah. Yeah. They've learned this, right?

Starting point is 01:16:25 Like, it's the same with, like, we don't have Greg Bevino anymore, but we still have massive ICE detentions. Like, they've learned you can't do it quite as loud and proud. Yeah, they can shut down the most sort of obviously obstructive and disagreeable parts while still doing the same stuff just quieter. According to the Washington Post in fiscal year 2025, there was a 31% drop in the number of NIH-funded projects that included the word woman. An analysis by NPR found that between fiscal year 24 and 25, research areas that lost NIH funding included women's health, which was down almost $300 million. Jesus. Cervical cancer vaccine research, down $6 million. stem cell research on umbilical cord, blood, and the placenta, down 6 million, and, quote,

Starting point is 01:17:18 violence against women research, which was down 2 million. Not to mention the other sort of health disparity cuts in regards to minority populations. Last July, HHS imposed new conditions on Title X funding to align the program with conservative values. Title 10 is the only federal grant program dedicated specifically to family planning, providing birth control, STI testing, and related preventative health services. According to New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led a coalition of 22 other states ensuing to block the changes, to qualify for Title 10 funding under Trump, applicants would be required to align their programs, quote, with a sweeping set of political priorities as a condition of receiving or keeping federal funds. The priorities include eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion practices,

Starting point is 01:18:12 excluding and stigmatizing transgender people, discouraging the use of contraception in favor of natural family planning, and requiring clinics to counsel all patients toward marriage and parenthood, unquote. Jesus Christ. Insane stuff. Yeah. Yeah, this is like we've spoken on this show before about Romania, you know, and their natalist policies, like, I don't know,

Starting point is 01:18:36 That shit scares me a lot. Yeah. So the idea of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and friends, being put in charge of a new women's health initiative and task force, not very reassuring, to say the least. No. Trump's executive order also revokes a Biden memorandum and an executive order from 2024 to, quote, advance women's health research and innovation. The memo established the first ever White House initiative on women's health research,

Starting point is 01:19:06 and following Biden's executive order, the NIH dedicated 200 million to close the women's research gap. Biden then requested 12 billion from Congress, and ultimately, the administration invested about 1 billion into women's health research in just 10 months. So the sort of novel aspects of this announcement from Trump is just cribbing something Biden already tried to do

Starting point is 01:19:28 and actually provided funding for, while Trump's version has no funding, is in the wake of hundreds of millions, billions of dollars in cuts to funding for women's research and is in control of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. So not great to say the least. Yeah, really, really bad. It's, yeah, yeah. Other reporting from the Times has noted how this announcement is, you know, just weeks away from the midterms, and Trump is polling at like 30% among women. And this could be some sort of ploy to like get some more support for the administration going into the midterms.

Starting point is 01:20:07 I don't know if that's part of the intent, but the timing has been highlighted. Great stuff. It seems such a weird one to go for before the midterms because you're like giving a massive middle finger to half the population. Slightly more than half. But who am I? Previously, this has been a successful tactic for them. Yeah. Well, that doesn't, for us, I believe.

Starting point is 01:20:30 here and it could happen here. Sweet. Would you like to email us? You can do so. It's cool zone tips at proton. Dot me. Still, occasionally a marketing company email will sneak through

Starting point is 01:20:43 and earn a ban for its entire domain name. Oh, I did. I did actually specifically request marketing companies to send emails to that address last week when you were out, James. Fantastic.

Starting point is 01:20:53 So that might be my bad. Fantastic. I tried to stop. Great. Yeah, thank you. I look forward to hearing more about how your fucking book about investing is going to make you a great fucking guest on our podcast and that you haven't sent this to everyone else who has a podcast.

Starting point is 01:21:10 Great. Let's just clip out James saying, I look forward to hearing more and then throw that in every future episode along with a link to the email. Oh, God. Put a trans scroll on your couch. We reported the news. We reported the news. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

Starting point is 01:21:39 For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, pullsonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources where it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. I'm Melissa Jeltson, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police rode off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing in disguise.

Starting point is 01:22:19 Sometimes it's a police uniform. And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an I-Heart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to IHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for IHeart True Crime Plus, and subscribe today. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the host of Out of Character.

Starting point is 01:22:41 The best podcast in the world. It's really funny and a good time. Yeah, yeah. I think statistics just came back and we're one of the funniest two guys with mics. And that's pretty hard to beat right now, but it's true, actually. Why should people listen to us? Tell them. Well, we're trendy, we're funny. We're topical. You get all your news here. Not, you know, the facts, but maybe our takes on it and everything in between. So listen out of character on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Starting point is 01:23:09 It's all just a joke. What is the value of these women? I'm Bridget Armstrong. Back with Season 2 of the podcast. podcast, Curse of Miss America. We're talking to participants, whistleblowers, and people who say Miss America didn't live up to their promises. He looks at me and goes, you don't look like you suffered an eating disorder. I never received scholarship money to pay for my student loans. Maybe this is the meta question for the podcast. What is Miss America at this point?

Starting point is 01:23:34 Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. Get Worse with Kyle Pruh is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptides, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. If you're interested in blackmail, love bomb, and cloning yourself or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 01:24:14 Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait a moment, hold up. They change all of that? Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency.

Starting point is 01:24:29 It's raw. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. heat human.

It Could Happen Here - Executive Disorder: Alberta Separatism, Ukraine's Starlink Predicament, Global Protests Continue

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