March 5, 2025 • 13 mins
On the Wednesday March 5, 2025 edition of The Armstrong & Getty One More Thing Podcast...
- Joe brings us a tasty story about miners!
Stupid Should Hurt: https://www.armstrongandgetty.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We'll all miss Jim, but he was delicious. It's one more.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Thing this was going. That's right, Wow, just the way
Joe Biden's great uncle died or something.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Like that, right right, one of the many crack potteries
in the last two years or so, Joe Biden's rule
that we can all remember fondly. So I've been sitting
on this story for a little while because partly it's
a little kind of aluted and long to present during
the radio show in which we're during which we're under
(00:40):
the cruel, cruel oppressions of the clock. But now we
have a little time, and I guess this is probably
under Jack, filed under one of your favorite themes, which
is people aren't nearly grateful enough to be Americans. Yeah,
so live in America, who've grown up those of us
who've grown up here or ended up here. If that's
the case.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
This morning, I won't say what, but I heard a
story about a dar four and they're in Africa this morning.
It's all like, jeez, you're so lucky you live here.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Yeah. I don't know. It's probably costing me part of
my soul, but I do read those accounts of the
various wars in Africa, and I mentioned them now and
again on the air, but the horrors of them are
I don't want to bring you down to describe them. Yeah,
but it is human beings who have lost their humanity completely. Yeah,
(01:30):
committing atrocities on grand scales. Anyway, on a cheerier note, whoops,
this isn't very cheery, but it's amazing. So there is
a huge problem in Africa, specifically South Africa, with illegal mining.
You have companies or groups of people either do their
(01:52):
digging themselves or find an old mine and decide we
think there's still some life in this bastard and we're
to mine it. But they have no right to be there,
they have no permits, they're not operating under any laws,
they're trespassing and the rest of it. Well, So there
was one of those in a place you've never heard
of in South Africa where the authorities found them and
(02:17):
busted them while there were a ton of guys down
under the surface. And I think initially the guys refused
to come up because they didn't want to get arrested,
and so the government said, yeah, we're going to starve
them out right, We're going to cut off any food
(02:37):
and water getting down there, and so the miners have
been holed up since the police cut off the employe
use of food and water in August. The story's written
in August, Yeah, this was story was written in mid January.
A legal application filed by a human rights group to
speed up the rescue included an affidavit for I'm a miner,
(03:00):
who also said that some had resorted to consuming human
flesh to stay alive. So the government finally initiated the
rescue operation after a human rights group launched a series
of legal challenges to the blockade. The government was physically
blockading anybody from rescuing these miners. They're like, no, we're
starving them out. You can't help them, you can't get them,
(03:21):
so before you pay it off, well one more factor
real quick. But officials refused to allow even after they said, okay,
they can be rescued, but nobody official is going to
go down in there because it's too dangerous.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Hmm, not sure. I have a problem with this. We're
not making you stay down there, come on out. No,
we're not coming out. Okay, well we'll wait.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Well, but then for some reason they couldn't get out
anymore because they didn't have the Some of the logistics
of this are a little confusing to me, but like
they didn't have the elevators down there or whatever, so
they couldn't come out if they wanted.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
But you can't eat somebody unless they're dead. Did they
start killing some of their compatriots and then eating them?
And how do you decide who goes? Or did they
starve and then you eat them?
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Yeah? I mean we I can.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
See donner party of one, Donner party of.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
One, jeez. Yeah. Yeah. So what happened was and the
way the narratives plays out in this whole long article,
I apologize for my fumbling with it. It skips back
and forth like journalism sometimes does. It's not laid out chronologically.
(04:38):
But so, with hundreds of miners trapped below the ground
with out food or water, two men from the local
town volunteered to venture where no police, government officials, or
professional rescuers were willing to go. So these guys made
their first descent wearing white hard hats, helmets, t shirts,
(04:59):
stepped out of a red cage dangling on a cable
from a crane on the surface forty two hundred feet
above them. Their lights illuminated a sea of emaciated faces.
Men crowded into a chamber were crying and pleading to
be saved from the pitch black of the abandoned gold mine.
Their lights had burned out weeks or months earlier, and
(05:21):
they ended up making more than thirty trips underground over
the next three days, and says the one guy, can't
explain the smell down there. They told us they were
eating human flesh and cockroaches. They had lost hope. And
one of the touchy parts of this was everybody was
so crazy and panic stricken, and they could only bring
(05:44):
up thirteen men at a time in a cage designed
to hold six people stuffed together. Okay, so it was
completely crammed with these poor, barely hanging on human beings
trying to assure the others we are coming back.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Oh, could you imagine seeing that thing going up and.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Not knowing Yeah, the lifeboats on the Titanic. Yeah, wait
a second.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Right, Well, that was one of the reasons that these
two guys, who are heroes, unquestionably and some of the
authorities agreed to send them down because they were locals
and could talk to these guys and relate to these guys.
They weren't quote unquote the authorities. So oh, by the way,
it's worth mentioning that even in normal times, gunfights have
(06:29):
been reported among competing minors thousands of feet underground. These
are just crazy ass lawless digs that people. They have
no better options than to do this, so they do
go down to survive, okay, right. In fact, this one guy,
one of the rescuers, He last emerged from a stint
(06:51):
underground in October at a different abandoned gold mine. He'd
lived in tunnels below the surface for three months at
a time where underground commerce was functioning. A regularly purchase food, drinks,
and headlamps from vendors who bring their wares into the mines.
But you never go out for months at a time
lest you get arrested.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
God what no outside, no sunlight? What that must do
to your mind?
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Right?
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Oh yeah, And so then and you're reduced to eating
cockroaches and dead people. You got to f feel around
and find them and communicate with each other.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
And then Jim starts looking delicious.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Oh jeez, there's no way to go back to normal
after that at all.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
No, No, no, not even close. So it was difficult
to decide whom to bring up first. Charles said, that's
one of the key guys here. Each trip up and
down took forty five minutes. They tried to prioritize the
weakest second deceased for fear the decomposition would worsen. They
brought bread, potato chips and water with them to ease
the last agonizing hours underground for the people who had
(07:54):
to wait. For about five months. These workers were trapped
underground as police tried to smoke them out. In the
words of the minister in the government, a long time.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
To be in the pitch dark eating gym.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
The operation was part of the police's closed the whole
plan to combat illegal mining, which has reached crisis levels
in South Africa, a staggering forty two percent unemployment rate
in South Africa under the brave leadership of the parties
that took over after all the white people were kicked
out of government. Not that it's a race thing, it's
(08:29):
a corruption thing. But it's led to high levels of
chronic poverty. So people do this sort of thing. Between
August and January, more than fifteen hundred miners emerged voluntarily
from this shaft. Others died attempting to climb out of
the mine, while some became too weak to try after
hunkering down for months to avoid arrest, and the people
(08:49):
pulled out of the mine were charged with trespassing and
other crimes.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Well thanks, yeah. Do you think you could get hungry
enough to eat Michael?
Speaker 1 (08:58):
For instance? If I'm starving to death, do we have
to make it a specific person? Well, yes, is the answer. Yes, absolutely, Really,
I'm surprised by that. I'm a carnivore and I'm a realist.
I assume it's ay. If I don't eat him, I
will be dead. I would prefer to live, So that's
what I do. Can you cook him first with what
(09:20):
you're stick down a miron shaft? I don't know, make
a fire? You're unclear on the concept, dear, so the
government official. And this is another aspect of how foreign
this is to Americans. Literally, this government official they quote
about why they starved him to death like that. He
(09:40):
compared the calls for humanitarian assistance for the miners to
asking the police to send food and water to a
robber hold up inside a bank. Sending sustenance to the
miners would be aiding in a betting crime and criminality.
If they let them die and starve and eat each.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Other, I agree if they can get out, but if
they actually if they if they can't get out, well
then it's a different thing.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Yeah. See, that's the part of the narrative that confuses
me because at the point where they're starving to death
and eating Jim, you'd think they'd think, you know, it's
like just a misdemeanor charge. I'm gonna go up and
get busted right.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
And go to subway right.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
So yeah, that that part is not clear to me.
But between the way the government approached it and that,
the employment rate and so misery eye.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
So you get hungry enough, So where do you start?
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Do you suppose five?
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Ribs? You know I love ribs, whether it's babyback, you know, Michael.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Put some on those, you know.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Yeah, but you know the thigh has got a nice
it's in the butt as well, I mean, the the
gluty's maximus. You're looking for muscle tissue somewhat marbled with fat.
It's like taking a good steak, Jack. I don't look,
we're starving to death in this scenario, and you all are.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Like, oh oh, Ikey, you gotta get practical, I promise you.
I'm plenty of marbled.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yes, it's probably gonna be rare.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
If I'm cooking it. This is one time where I
want it well done. I want it cooked all the
way through. No pink police, And Mike is working on
his glutes as he says, so is it legitimately?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Is it?
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Like?
Speaker 2 (11:24):
You know, if you're at the grocery store and you're
not hungry, you just buy the stuff you need. But
if you're hungry at the grocery store. I tell my
kids this all the time. If you're hungry at the
grocery store, everything looks delicious. So if you're even hungrier,
do you get to the point where it's just not
even really a battle to eat a human? You're just
so hungry It smells, looks, taste, tastes great.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
You think, I'm not sure I'd go that far, But
I'm with you eighty percent of the way. Yeah, you
wouldn't think, you know, this is kind of gross. He'd
be like a snarling beast, like a hungry wolf.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
You're right, yeah, shop being at the grocery store hungry
is just the disaster.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Michael.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
If we're eating your glutes. I need some cho lula
and some sauce, and they got to be cooked.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Yeah, a little sweet baby raised or something like that.
What isla, I don't know what that is. You don't
know chi lula? What not? That one raised? Right?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, my Martian illegal goal. I'll stand up for you.
Mil I've never heard that word in my life. What what?
What the hell is that?
Speaker 3 (12:29):
There is something seriously wrong with you too? If you
don't know what the chilu is.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
No idea, that's probably racist. I guess it's something they
put on your ass to make it taste better. Michael, Yeah,
it's it's ass sauce.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
No, it's a delicious, mildly hot hot sauce that comes
in a couple of different varieties. And I've never even
heard the word, and Americans are familiar with it. If
this was the Battle of the Bulge, I'd shoot both
of you as German spies because you don't know this
great country.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
We don't have it at eye hoop.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
I can tell you that, you know, I probably wouldn't
be as tasty these days. I have my blood sugar
down and so I'm probably not real sweet.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
I've gotta think my taste is pretty dull.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Point, if I have to eat pre dieting, yeah, well,
to paraphrase Luis c K, I am literally starving.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
I don't care. Well, I guess that's it.
We'll all miss Jim, but he was delicious. It's one more.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Thing this was going. That's right, Wow, just the way
Joe Biden's great uncle died or something.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Like that, right right, one of the many crack potteries
in the last two years or so, Joe Biden's rule
that we can all remember fondly. So I've been sitting
on this story for a little while because partly it's
a little kind of aluted and long to present during
the radio show in which we're during which we're under
(00:40):
the cruel, cruel oppressions of the clock. But now we
have a little time, and I guess this is probably
under Jack, filed under one of your favorite themes, which
is people aren't nearly grateful enough to be Americans. Yeah,
so live in America, who've grown up those of us
who've grown up here or ended up here. If that's
the case.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
This morning, I won't say what, but I heard a
story about a dar four and they're in Africa this morning.
It's all like, jeez, you're so lucky you live here.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
Yeah. I don't know. It's probably costing me part of
my soul, but I do read those accounts of the
various wars in Africa, and I mentioned them now and
again on the air, but the horrors of them are
I don't want to bring you down to describe them. Yeah,
but it is human beings who have lost their humanity completely. Yeah,
(01:30):
committing atrocities on grand scales. Anyway, on a cheerier note, whoops,
this isn't very cheery, but it's amazing. So there is
a huge problem in Africa, specifically South Africa, with illegal mining.
You have companies or groups of people either do their
(01:52):
digging themselves or find an old mine and decide we
think there's still some life in this bastard and we're
to mine it. But they have no right to be there,
they have no permits, they're not operating under any laws,
they're trespassing and the rest of it. Well, So there
was one of those in a place you've never heard
of in South Africa where the authorities found them and
(02:17):
busted them while there were a ton of guys down
under the surface. And I think initially the guys refused
to come up because they didn't want to get arrested,
and so the government said, yeah, we're going to starve
them out right, We're going to cut off any food
(02:37):
and water getting down there, and so the miners have
been holed up since the police cut off the employe
use of food and water in August. The story's written
in August, Yeah, this was story was written in mid January.
A legal application filed by a human rights group to
speed up the rescue included an affidavit for I'm a miner,
(03:00):
who also said that some had resorted to consuming human
flesh to stay alive. So the government finally initiated the
rescue operation after a human rights group launched a series
of legal challenges to the blockade. The government was physically
blockading anybody from rescuing these miners. They're like, no, we're
starving them out. You can't help them, you can't get them,
(03:21):
so before you pay it off, well one more factor
real quick. But officials refused to allow even after they said, okay,
they can be rescued, but nobody official is going to
go down in there because it's too dangerous.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Hmm, not sure. I have a problem with this. We're
not making you stay down there, come on out. No,
we're not coming out. Okay, well we'll wait.
Speaker 1 (03:47):
Well, but then for some reason they couldn't get out
anymore because they didn't have the Some of the logistics
of this are a little confusing to me, but like
they didn't have the elevators down there or whatever, so
they couldn't come out if they wanted.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
But you can't eat somebody unless they're dead. Did they
start killing some of their compatriots and then eating them?
And how do you decide who goes? Or did they
starve and then you eat them?
Speaker 1 (04:12):
Yeah? I mean we I can.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
See donner party of one, Donner party of.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
One, jeez. Yeah. Yeah. So what happened was and the
way the narratives plays out in this whole long article,
I apologize for my fumbling with it. It skips back
and forth like journalism sometimes does. It's not laid out chronologically.
(04:38):
But so, with hundreds of miners trapped below the ground
with out food or water, two men from the local
town volunteered to venture where no police, government officials, or
professional rescuers were willing to go. So these guys made
their first descent wearing white hard hats, helmets, t shirts,
(04:59):
stepped out of a red cage dangling on a cable
from a crane on the surface forty two hundred feet
above them. Their lights illuminated a sea of emaciated faces.
Men crowded into a chamber were crying and pleading to
be saved from the pitch black of the abandoned gold mine.
Their lights had burned out weeks or months earlier, and
(05:21):
they ended up making more than thirty trips underground over
the next three days, and says the one guy, can't
explain the smell down there. They told us they were
eating human flesh and cockroaches. They had lost hope. And
one of the touchy parts of this was everybody was
so crazy and panic stricken, and they could only bring
(05:44):
up thirteen men at a time in a cage designed
to hold six people stuffed together. Okay, so it was
completely crammed with these poor, barely hanging on human beings
trying to assure the others we are coming back.
Speaker 3 (06:01):
Oh, could you imagine seeing that thing going up and.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
Not knowing Yeah, the lifeboats on the Titanic. Yeah, wait
a second.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Right, Well, that was one of the reasons that these
two guys, who are heroes, unquestionably and some of the
authorities agreed to send them down because they were locals
and could talk to these guys and relate to these guys.
They weren't quote unquote the authorities. So oh, by the way,
it's worth mentioning that even in normal times, gunfights have
(06:29):
been reported among competing minors thousands of feet underground. These
are just crazy ass lawless digs that people. They have
no better options than to do this, so they do
go down to survive, okay, right. In fact, this one guy,
one of the rescuers, He last emerged from a stint
(06:51):
underground in October at a different abandoned gold mine. He'd
lived in tunnels below the surface for three months at
a time where underground commerce was functioning. A regularly purchase food, drinks,
and headlamps from vendors who bring their wares into the mines.
But you never go out for months at a time
lest you get arrested.
Speaker 3 (07:12):
God what no outside, no sunlight? What that must do
to your mind?
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Right?
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Oh yeah, And so then and you're reduced to eating
cockroaches and dead people. You got to f feel around
and find them and communicate with each other.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
And then Jim starts looking delicious.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Oh jeez, there's no way to go back to normal
after that at all.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
No, No, no, not even close. So it was difficult
to decide whom to bring up first. Charles said, that's
one of the key guys here. Each trip up and
down took forty five minutes. They tried to prioritize the
weakest second deceased for fear the decomposition would worsen. They
brought bread, potato chips and water with them to ease
the last agonizing hours underground for the people who had
(07:54):
to wait. For about five months. These workers were trapped
underground as police tried to smoke them out. In the
words of the minister in the government, a long time.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
To be in the pitch dark eating gym.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
The operation was part of the police's closed the whole
plan to combat illegal mining, which has reached crisis levels
in South Africa, a staggering forty two percent unemployment rate
in South Africa under the brave leadership of the parties
that took over after all the white people were kicked
out of government. Not that it's a race thing, it's
(08:29):
a corruption thing. But it's led to high levels of
chronic poverty. So people do this sort of thing. Between
August and January, more than fifteen hundred miners emerged voluntarily
from this shaft. Others died attempting to climb out of
the mine, while some became too weak to try after
hunkering down for months to avoid arrest, and the people
(08:49):
pulled out of the mine were charged with trespassing and
other crimes.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
Well thanks, yeah. Do you think you could get hungry
enough to eat Michael?
Speaker 1 (08:58):
For instance? If I'm starving to death, do we have
to make it a specific person? Well, yes, is the answer. Yes, absolutely, Really,
I'm surprised by that. I'm a carnivore and I'm a realist.
I assume it's ay. If I don't eat him, I
will be dead. I would prefer to live, So that's
what I do. Can you cook him first with what
(09:20):
you're stick down a miron shaft? I don't know, make
a fire? You're unclear on the concept, dear, so the
government official. And this is another aspect of how foreign
this is to Americans. Literally, this government official they quote
about why they starved him to death like that. He
(09:40):
compared the calls for humanitarian assistance for the miners to
asking the police to send food and water to a
robber hold up inside a bank. Sending sustenance to the
miners would be aiding in a betting crime and criminality.
If they let them die and starve and eat each.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Other, I agree if they can get out, but if
they actually if they if they can't get out, well
then it's a different thing.
Speaker 1 (09:59):
Yeah. See, that's the part of the narrative that confuses
me because at the point where they're starving to death
and eating Jim, you'd think they'd think, you know, it's
like just a misdemeanor charge. I'm gonna go up and
get busted right.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
And go to subway right.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
So yeah, that that part is not clear to me.
But between the way the government approached it and that,
the employment rate and so misery eye.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
So you get hungry enough, So where do you start?
Speaker 1 (10:29):
Do you suppose five?
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (10:36):
Ribs? You know I love ribs, whether it's babyback, you know, Michael.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Put some on those, you know.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Yeah, but you know the thigh has got a nice
it's in the butt as well, I mean, the the
gluty's maximus. You're looking for muscle tissue somewhat marbled with fat.
It's like taking a good steak, Jack. I don't look,
we're starving to death in this scenario, and you all are.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
Like, oh oh, Ikey, you gotta get practical, I promise you.
I'm plenty of marbled.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
Yes, it's probably gonna be rare.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
If I'm cooking it. This is one time where I
want it well done. I want it cooked all the
way through. No pink police, And Mike is working on
his glutes as he says, so is it legitimately?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Is it?
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Like?
Speaker 2 (11:24):
You know, if you're at the grocery store and you're
not hungry, you just buy the stuff you need. But
if you're hungry at the grocery store. I tell my
kids this all the time. If you're hungry at the
grocery store, everything looks delicious. So if you're even hungrier,
do you get to the point where it's just not
even really a battle to eat a human? You're just
so hungry It smells, looks, taste, tastes great.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
You think, I'm not sure I'd go that far, But
I'm with you eighty percent of the way. Yeah, you
wouldn't think, you know, this is kind of gross. He'd
be like a snarling beast, like a hungry wolf.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
You're right, yeah, shop being at the grocery store hungry
is just the disaster.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Michael.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
If we're eating your glutes. I need some cho lula
and some sauce, and they got to be cooked.
Speaker 1 (12:10):
Yeah, a little sweet baby raised or something like that.
What isla, I don't know what that is. You don't
know chi lula? What not? That one raised? Right?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah, my Martian illegal goal. I'll stand up for you.
Mil I've never heard that word in my life. What what?
What the hell is that?
Speaker 3 (12:29):
There is something seriously wrong with you too? If you
don't know what the chilu is.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
No idea, that's probably racist. I guess it's something they
put on your ass to make it taste better. Michael, Yeah,
it's it's ass sauce.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
No, it's a delicious, mildly hot hot sauce that comes
in a couple of different varieties. And I've never even
heard the word, and Americans are familiar with it. If
this was the Battle of the Bulge, I'd shoot both
of you as German spies because you don't know this
great country.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
We don't have it at eye hoop.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
I can tell you that, you know, I probably wouldn't
be as tasty these days. I have my blood sugar
down and so I'm probably not real sweet.
Speaker 1 (13:09):
I've gotta think my taste is pretty dull.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Point, if I have to eat pre dieting, yeah, well,
to paraphrase Luis c K, I am literally starving.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
I don't care. Well, I guess that's it.
Hosts And Creators
Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong
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Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.