Speaker A:
Hello and welcome to Live Like the World Is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. This is your weekly edition of This Week in the Apocalypse. Feels sort of weird to say this week, this weekly, weekly, this week. I don’t know, we’ll figure that out someday. We’re professional podcasters over here. We know how to do.
Speaker B:
I’m your—
Speaker A:
one of your hosts for today, Brooke Jackson, joined by our wonderful and brilliant friend and fellow co-host Miriam. Hey, Miriam.
Speaker B:
Hello.
Speaker A:
And we’re going to talk about a very special news topic that Miriam is super interested in and took a deep dive on. But before we do that, we’re also going to cover some headlines. But before we do that, actually going to toss to a jingle from another one of podcasts on the Channel Zero network of anarchist podcasts, of which we are a very proud member. So let’s stick that jingle in here.
Speaker B:
Jingle, jingle, jingle.
Speaker C:
Tangled Wilderness is a podcast of anarchic literature from Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, a collectively run radical anarchist media publisher. We’re looking for content that doesn’t know where it fits in, for people don’t know where they fit in. Every month we publish a zine, get a professional voice actor to narrate it, and then interview the author. There’s even a word of the month. We have short stories about belonging, portals, and preparedness, songbooks from Yiddish partisan movements, comic books about being queer, games about finding your friends and fungus, and essays about everything from the surprisingly radical history of gathering dandelions, the Haymarket Martyrs, The Spanish Civil War, martyr culture in Rojava, and the wacky turns that cults can take when their leaders die. Read along at tangledwilderness.org and listen wherever you get podcasts. And so if you feel like a stranger in this tangled wilderness, consider sending us your story. Maybe it will find a home.
Speaker A:
And we’re back. What a great jingle, as always.
Speaker B:
Always the best.
Speaker A:
We appreciate being on the Channel Zero Network. Let’s see, I guess we’re going to talk about the news today. We don’t have to do a whole long intro because they know, the people know you and the people know me.
Speaker B:
Yeah, they know what we’re here for.
Speaker A:
Okay, there’s a couple of headline things I wanted to go over before you teach me about whatever super cool topic. Super cool topic? Interesting and probably very upsetting topic.
Speaker B:
Yeah, that’s more the direction we’re going.
Speaker A:
Oh, man. I feel like every week we could make this week be a climate catastrophe podcast, so it’s hard not to, but that does seem like that’s a bit of the thing that’s happened in the last week, especially because since our last recording was the really bad flooding that happened in Nepal.
Speaker C:
Yeah.
Speaker A:
Hundreds have died and thousands are missing. Maybe even now they’ve got the body— the count is up to thousands have died. I haven’t actually looked at that specific number. since the weekend. So awful, awful stuff going on there, and especially difficult because the flooding that happened kind of created some lakes in places that aren’t normally lakes, places that usually will fill up in the monsoon season, which is what they’re at the beginning of, and help catch some of those intense downfalls, but in fact are currently now filled with water sort of pre-became lakes. So as monsoon season begins, And those torrential downpours hit, much higher potential of then those lakes overflowing and flooding and sort of re-flooding these areas that have already been hit.
Speaker B:
Yeah, every week the news is climate change, but this week it’s really bad from a humanitarian standpoint. People are really in trouble right now.
Speaker A:
Yeah, it’s like the week of flooding. And also, flooding in the Grand Canyon this week, that 2 or 3 campers at least have died and campsites have been swept away in the water and so forth. So a lot of flooding going on right now all of a sudden, but especially bad over in—
Speaker B:
All of a sudden, all of a sudden is strong.
Speaker A:
Sure. That’s, yeah, really good point. Really good point. Anyway, so those are some headlines from the climate nonsense that is our disaster. And now for the rest of the news.
Speaker B:
So my topic that I have been looking at this week is the measles outbreak currently going on in Pennsylvania and the relationship between the current administration and vaccines in general. And where that is at is that the Trump administration is openly at war with the concept of vaccination. And people are already dying as a result of that. So RFK Jr., who will be the villain— How did I know that was the next name out of your mouth? I was going to say, is this just RFK Jr.
Speaker A:
or is this— okay, all right.
Speaker B:
Yeah, that bastard. The TL;DR on this is fuck RFK Jr.
Speaker A:
Amen.
Speaker B:
A well-known anti-vax wingnut. He has many other nonsense health beliefs actually, but we don’t have time to talk about all of them today. We would be here all day. So we’re focused on the fact that he is an anti-vax wingnut and also that he is, unfortunately, Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Speaker A:
Wow.
Speaker B:
And earlier this year, he used that position to make a series of changes to the recommended childhood vaccine schedule, ending recommendations that children be vaccinated for, among other things, flu, RSV, hepatitis A, hepatitis B. And this comes after he last year gutted the Advisory Committee on Immunizations, firing, I think, all 6 16, if I remember correctly, of the members.
Speaker A:
Replacing all of them.
Speaker B:
And then filling it with anti-vax activists.
Speaker A:
Right.
Speaker B:
While also bizarrely claiming not to be anti-vax. This is part of how he does this, is he’s constantly talking about how he’s actually very pro-vaccine while at the same time making unfounded claims about the harm done by vaccines. Now, these moves have been opposed by the American Public Health Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, among others, but wildly supported, actually, by the polio, measles, and human papillomaviruses. Again, among many, many others.
Speaker A:
The viruses themselves are in support of this anti-vax. Okay, great. Excellent. Yeah, the viruses themselves.
Speaker B:
Yeah, they love it. Now, in addition to spreading lies about vaccines and giving out bad advice, which we will talk more about later, RFK Also, I feel like I should say RFK Jr. I don’t know. Who gives a shit? I’m not trying to defend the Kennedy family. I just want to be specific about which guy we’re talking about. RFK Jr.
Speaker A:
We’ll just call him Junior from now on.
Speaker B:
Yeah. That’s a good point. It’s just too many letters. Get a real name, asshole. So Junior also canceled $500 million in federal funding for mRNA vaccine development.
Speaker A:
Jesus Christ.
Speaker B:
Now, during his confirmation hearings to be where he is, Junior lied about a trip he made to Samoa in 2019.
Speaker A:
Oh.
Speaker B:
Now, at the time, he was the leader of an anti-vax organization. And despite his claims to the contrary, he used that trip to Samoa to discourage vaccination, specifically saying in a letter to the prime minister that he thought 2 recent deaths in Samoa had been caused by the MMR vaccine. Months later, a measles outbreak there caused the deaths of 83 people, and it is widely believed that RFK Jr.’s work there helped push anti-vaccine activism and contributed directly to those deaths.
Speaker A:
Oh, shit.
Speaker B:
So this is sort of, uh, an interesting thing because this happened in 2019 before he was— he occupied the role that he had, uh, but he was already doing this work. He was already killing people with, uh, or getting people killed with lies about vaccines. So, and again, during his confirmation hearings, he lied about this, and the Department of Health and Human Services continues to maintain to this day that his visit was, quote, unrelated to vaccines.
Speaker A:
Oh, okay.
Speaker B:
But enough about politicians. Um, let’s, let’s talk about what’s actually happening on the ground because it sucks. So, so far this year, there have been 460 cases of measles reported in the state of Pennsylvania. And to contextualize that number—
Speaker A:
Please.
Speaker B:
In the entirety of 2018, there were 400 cases of measles in the entire United States.
Speaker A:
Whoa.
Speaker B:
So that’s a pretty big increase.
Speaker A:
Now—
Speaker C:
Yeah.
Speaker B:
2 people, both unvaccinated, at least one of whom was an infant, have died so far in the Pennsylvania outbreaks this year. And these are the first deaths due to measles in Pennsylvania in 35 years.
Speaker A:
Holy crap.
Speaker B:
In addition to the deaths, there have also been 73 hospitalizations. Anyway, there is a reliable way to protect people from measles, and the government is currently actively trying to keep it away from people.
Speaker A:
Hmm.
Speaker B:
They, again, constantly claiming not to be anti-vax and constantly supporting not getting vaccinated and constantly fighting against vaccines. So, On a visit to Pennsylvania in 2021, so more recently than the Samoa trip that he is currently lying about, RFK Jr. praised Amish parents for not vaccinating their children and said that chicken soup is effective medicine for measles. And downplayed— he has also downplayed the danger of measles by pointing out that for the last decade, there have only been 3 deaths from measles in America. Yeah, but guess why?
Speaker A:
Yeah!
Speaker B:
Jesus. Failing to recognize that this is precisely because Americans have, up until very recently, largely been vaccinated against measles. It is very much the, well, I’m not getting wet, so I might as well get rid of this umbrella argument, except that getting rid of an umbrella rarely causes the deaths of children. Now, just to, like, get a little bit more into measles as a disease, It is not an incredibly deadly disease. What it is is an extremely contagious one.
Speaker A:
Yeah.
Speaker B:
So on average, death rates for measles are very low. It’s just 0.2% of people who get the measles die. And that sounds low. 0.2% sounds low. But another way to put that would be 1 in every 500. And if you think about how contagious it is and the fact that most of the people who get it are under— most of the people who die from it, rather, are under 5.
Speaker A:
Children, yeah.
Speaker B:
You realize that we’re starting— that what we’re saying is if measles runs through a town, basically 1 in every 500 toddlers die, which then doesn’t sound like a low number. It doesn’t sound all that not deadly.
Speaker A:
Right.
Speaker B:
And those are the numbers for a healthy population. In displaced and refugee populations and places where people are already dealing with malnutrition and other health issues, fatality rates can actually go as high as 30%.
Speaker A:
Oh, holy cow.
Speaker B:
And this is where measles as a problem intersects with climate change as a problem because places where people are already more vulnerable are going to be more subject to diseases like this. And when I say it is very contagious, an infected person can pass it on to up to 90% of the non-immune people they interact with.
Speaker C:
Wow.
Speaker B:
So it is going to spread very quickly in a non-immune population.
Speaker A:
Okay.
Speaker B:
And an immune population here, herd immunity for measles requires about 95% of people to be vaccinated. And right now, the US is not there in a lot of places. Only 10 states are at or above 95%. Nationwide, we’re averaging 92.5%, which doesn’t sound like a lot lower, but it’s lower in many places. And it is low enough below the threshold that measles can and will spread. spread. In addition to childhood deaths, it can also cause severe complications in pregnancy, putting people at increased risk of hospitalization and death, as well as increasing the risk of miscarriage and low birth weight. It can also lead to permanent disability. So this is not a— for many people, getting the measles has historically been, you’re sick for a while, you drink chicken soup, you feel better.
Speaker A:
Mm-hmm.
Speaker B:
Those are the majority of cases, but they are not all of them. And the fact that measles was not a big deal for a lot of people does not mean measles did not kill people. It just means all the people you heard stories about lying in bed for a week are the people who didn’t die.
Speaker C:
Yeah.
Speaker B:
Because the people who died aren’t telling you about it.
Speaker A:
Oh. I wonder why.
Speaker B:
Yeah. I’m mad about this.
Speaker A:
Yeah.
Speaker B:
This shit is really no joke. And while RFK has not yet taken specific action to, like, ban or prevent the MMRV vaccine, which is currently the recommended childhood vaccine preventing measles as well as mumps, rubella, and chickenpox. He claims to support that vaccine. He always qualifies that support in a way that increases people’s distrust in vaccines and hesitancy around vaccines for children. When he talks about the vaccine, he always sort of brings up false claims about its dangers as well.
Speaker C:
Oh.
Speaker B:
While claiming to support it. And he generally highlights the idea that there are these serious risks associated with it, which are just not really supported by actual science or data. And a lot of the pushback in general to the MMRV vaccine dates back to fraudulent claims made by disgraced former doctor Andrew Wakefield linking the vaccine to autism in an effort to use lies and ableism to promote his own version of the same vaccines.
Speaker A:
Oh.
Speaker B:
It’s bullshit and grifting all the way down.
Speaker A:
Right. Okay.
Speaker B:
And the vaccine, when administered in 2 doses, offers 97% protection against measles.
Speaker C:
Wow.
Speaker B:
So we have a thing that works, and we just have these assholes who are like, hey, don’t do it, but also won’t admit that they’re like, hey, don’t do it. It’s deeply frustrating.
Speaker A:
Right. Yeah. It’s hard to call bullshit or call them out. on them saying that when they’re not exactly saying that, and it’s sort of a read between the lines of saying that.
Speaker B:
Yeah. And what they have actually done and continue to do is cause the numbers of people getting vaccinated to go down. And that’s the thing that actually matters.
Speaker A:
Yeah.
Speaker B:
It’s not just measles vaccination rates that are down in the US. The DTaP vaccine, which prevents diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis, is declining at a similar rate. Tetanus is a bacteria found in soil, dust, and saliva. It has a 10% mortality rate.
Speaker A:
Wow. There is just— 1 in 10 people.
Speaker B:
Yeah. It is a really dangerous disease, tetanus. There is just no goddamn reason for anyone to have to get this disease. If you’re not sure if you should get a tetanus shot, they’re usually good for about 5 or 10 years, and you’re supposed to get a booster within a couple days of receiving a wound. I forget how recently, how, like, what the time limit is, but it’s after getting a wound. And there’s no particular danger that I’ve heard of to getting a shot too soon after a previous one. So my understanding is if you don’t remember when you last got one, go ahead and get one. And if you’re not sure if you would like to get tetanus, Google the word tetanus and the name Charles Bell to find a 200-year-old painting of a patient undergoing the muscle spasms associated with tetanus. Which can get so bad that people break their own bones or are unable to breathe. It sucks. Don’t get tetanus. I say that as though everyone can control whether they get tetanus. We have a really good thing for preventing tetanus. It’s the tetanus shot. Fewer people are getting it. I hate everything. Diphtheria, another of the diseases that the DTaP prevents.
Speaker A:
Nobody’s ever had that. Nobody’s ever heard of it. You’re making that up. That’s a made-up disease. That’s along with that other one. Like tetanus, we’ve all heard of, but diphtheria and whatever the other thing was, It’s just— it’s made up.
Speaker B:
I’m just making up vaccines because I am a shill for Big Vax.
Speaker A:
No, you’re making up diseases because no one’s ever had this diphtherum.
Speaker B:
That’s correct. Nobody has ever gotten a disease that spreads easily from person to person. This one’s not a virus. This one’s a bacteria.
Speaker A:
Okay.
Speaker B:
With a 10% mortality rate going up to 20% for children under 5 and adults over 40. And the name comes from the ancient Greek word for leather or wood if I hadn’t just made it up. the ancient Greek word for leather, because with this one, a pseudo-membrane of dead cells in your throat forms a leathery patch that blocks your airway. And a fun fact about diphtheria is this is the disease that struck the town of Nome, Alaska in 1925, necessitating the famous Nome Serum Run when sled dogs and their humans made absolutely heroic effort to deliver diphtheria antitoxin to a town cut off by snow and experiencing a pre-vaccine diphtheria outbreak. Multiple dogs died on that journey. So if you’re not going to get vaccinated for yourself and your fellow humans, please at least think of the sled dogs.
Speaker A:
Yeah.
Speaker B:
We’re doing a little better on polio, but again, the numbers are trending down. Fucking polio.
Speaker A:
Yeah. No one should get polio anymore. It shouldn’t be a thing.
Speaker B:
Did you ever know anybody with polio who had survived polio?
Speaker A:
No, thankfully. But I’d like have heard plenty of the stories about what it does to you and what the long-term effects are.
Speaker B:
Yeah.
Speaker A:
Thankfully, yeah, none of my grandparents or great-aunts and uncles had that, had to suffer through that. But jeez.
Speaker B:
Yeah. And it’s more recent than people realize though.
Speaker A:
Yeah.
Speaker B:
I did have a great-aunt who had had it in her youth and she died in my lifetime when I was already an adult. And she was permanently disabled by this disease that she had that we don’t have anymore and we don’t need to have, but people are not getting vaccinated. And so we may see polio more like we used to. It used to be a thing like every year there was—
Speaker A:
It was like a season, polio season?
Speaker C:
Yeah.
Speaker A:
Oh, wow.
Speaker B:
Okay. It was considered— I don’t actually— it seemed to have spread a lot in the summer. It was connected— I remember it was connected to swimming pools. I’m not sure if that was like a belief people had or if that was actually how it was spreading. But definitely in the summer, people were, yeah, every year worried about polio. And that’s the thing people in America have not, in most places, had to think about for a while. And I’m mad, by the way.
Speaker A:
Yeah. I mean, just for additional context, I know that polio causes sort of long-term disabilities, but can you remind us, the audience, of anything more specific on what that looks like?
Speaker B:
Yeah, so for a lot of people, polio caused paralysis, and that could be limited to a limb. It could also affect people’s ability to breathe.
Speaker A:
Okay.
Speaker B:
So that was where polio patients ended up in iron lungs, which are a way of helping somebody breathe if they are not— if they’re not able to use their muscles to breathe.
Speaker A:
Okay.
Speaker B:
So, you know, pretty bad.
Speaker A:
Yeah.
Speaker B:
I don’t— yeah, I don’t know. Pretty bad.
Speaker A:
I feel like with some of these diseases, a lot of time the discourse just falls simply down to like, well, what’s the, you know, what’s the death rate on it? Like, oh, there’s only a 1% chance of death, like whatever. And we maybe don’t talk as much about these other things that can happen and have long-term disabilities or effects from getting it. It’s not just, is it going to kill you or not? It’s bigger than that.
Speaker B:
I mean, to be clear, the fatality rate for polio was also not zero. And it’s one of the rare diseases where I believe it was less dangerous for children than for adults. I mean, I shouldn’t speak of it in the past tense because it does still exist, but fatality rate is 2 to 5% for children and up to 15 to 30% for adults.
Speaker A:
Wow. That’s not small.
Speaker B:
Yeah.
Speaker A:
That is a very not small mortality rate.
Speaker B:
Yeah. And as you said, had life-changing effects for people who survived it as well, in many cases. There were also a lot of asymptomatic cases, which is, again, it’s easy to discount if you choose to ignore all the people affected by it. I don’t know, that shouldn’t be easy, but apparently it is. So just to get back to some of these bigger trends that we’re talking about, globally vaccination has still not returned to pre-COVID levels.
Speaker A:
Hmm.
Speaker B:
With places already vulnerable due to colonial exploitation, conflict, and climate change harder hit than places not as vulnerable. And the US is an outlier here because it’s not so much vaccine access that’s the problem as what’s sort of euphemistically called vaccine hesitancy. And this is where I get really frustrated. And there’s this school of thought that you kind of, that you have to like indulge vaccine hesitancy to avoid alienating them. And I’m not saying just like be mean to people all the time, but I do get frustrated with the idea that we have to like take seriously ideas that are actually lies.
Speaker A:
Yeah, I hear that.
Speaker B:
And there is an issue of health literacy and people feeling dismissed when they bring up their concerns with their or their children’s doctors. But this isn’t happening just like because doctors don’t want to talk to their patients. It’s happening because the healthcare system is already overloaded and collapsing.
Speaker A:
Yeah.
Speaker B:
And depending on healthcare workers who are already struggling to keep up and overwhelmed with their patient load, taking the time to counteract the disinformation that is being pushed from the highest levels of government does not feel like a winning strategy. And asking a pediatrician who’s already being— like, who’s already running several hours behind to stop and take the time to discuss science with somebody who is coming into the conversation with hundreds of hours’ worth of lies to debunk while the waiting room fills up with sick kids, like, does not seem like that’s how this is going to change.
Speaker A:
Right.
Speaker B:
And also, doctors can be condescending and shitty. Like, that’s not— I’m not denying that. I’m not arguing with that. And that is especially to people the doctors perceive as lacking in education.
Speaker A:
Right.
Speaker B:
So I don’t think it’s untrue that people who feel like they have genuine concerns and just need to have stuff explained better or just need to have their questions answered get dismissed by their doctors. I think that probably does happen. But boy, it would be happening a lot less if the healthcare system wasn’t collapsing and if people weren’t just pushing lies.
Speaker A:
Yeah.
Speaker B:
And one thing that will not help is Trump’s recent executive order giving new government recommendations to space out childhood vaccines more.
Speaker C:
No.
Speaker B:
And that’s a suggestion they make because it’s in this, we’re not anti-vax, we just have concerns zone, because it sounds like a reasonable compromise.
Speaker A:
Right.
Speaker B:
Right? Oh, just don’t do too many at once. You’re still going to get all the vaccines. But obviously, If you space it out to multiple doctors’ appointments so that kids have to come in more times to get the same number of shots, they’re not going to— more kids will not get all their shots.
Speaker A:
Right. Yeah.
Speaker B:
And requiring more doctor visits per kid is also not going to help with the fact that the system is overloaded and doctors don’t have time to do the work that needs to be done. It makes it much less likely. that a doctor is going to have time for a conversation, let alone a detailed debunking of every lie RFK Jr. has ever pushed.
Speaker A:
Right. Yes.
Speaker B:
I do want to end on good news. I have good news.
Speaker A:
Yay.
Speaker B:
Actual good news. I’m not just like, I’m not doing the sarcastic like, oh, good news. No. So first, mildly good news. Globally, the US is a bit of an outlier. Like I said, we’re trending down in vaccination. The world in general is slowly trending up. with the WHO describing the trend as inching forward, which isn’t great, but it beats the shit out of plummeting backwards.
Speaker A:
Right. Yeah.
Speaker B:
And on the unambiguously good news front, there is a new tetanus-diphtheria vaccine currently in promising human trials. Why do we need a new tetanus-diphtheria vaccine? I thought you said the other one worked. Yes, this one also works and has been formulated So that it can go a year without refrigeration.
Speaker A:
Oh, wow.
Speaker B:
It has been shown to work after being stored at room temperature for a year and then reconstituted and used.
Speaker A:
Oh my gosh.
Speaker B:
And this is huge for access in places with less electricity and access to refrigeration. It’s a life-saving improvement of a vaccine already in use because it will drastically increase the number of people in remote areas who are able to get vaccinated. And also kind of cool, the way that scientists developed this was by using a sugar called trehalose, which I may or may not be pronouncing right.
Speaker A:
Okay.
Speaker B:
But it’s the sugar that allows the resurrection plant to seemingly dry out and then come back to life when placed in water.
Speaker A:
I haven’t heard of those.
Speaker B:
You ever seen one of those?
Speaker A:
No.
Speaker B:
I feel like every new age store I walk into ever has had a resurrection plant in a bowl.
Speaker A:
Right? They might not have made it to the West Coast yet. We just got air plants.
Speaker B:
Oh! Well, yeah, anyway, it’s this plant, it does this cool thing, and people are now using the sugar in the plants that enable that to help this vaccine dry out and be reconstituted a year later after being stored at room temperature, which is cool! And that’s great, and I’m glad people are still doing cool work despite all of their funding being taken away in many places. this work did not happen in the US. Can’t wait for this to save lives until RFK Jr. decides trehalose turns kids polyamorous or some shit.
Speaker A:
Oh God.
Speaker B:
Yep, that’s it.
Speaker A:
Yay science. Yay people doing science though and continuing the work. I think that’s absolutely fantastic. That’s what we need. And it’s too bad that the US isn’t, but you know what? Someone is. And Yeah. Not everyone’s quit.
Speaker B:
We’re straight up the bad guys. I mean, there’s— yeah. Which doesn’t make any other nation the good guys, but I think it should not be surprising that a lot of the good work is not happening right here at the moment.
Speaker A:
Mm-hmm. Wow. Okay. That was some great research and information for all of us. Thank you for putting together that news story and sharing and teaching me. I learned some new things even though I’m pretty heavily pro-vaccine already. I’ll admit my bias there. I didn’t need to be like convinced or anything, but—
Speaker B:
We’re anti-neutrality here for journalism.
Speaker A:
Yeah, we’re pro-truth, which, yeah, sometimes means being anti-neutral because— Yeah, often. More and more in this world, it does seem like. Yeah.
Speaker B:
Yeah. And anti-RFK Jr. Or Junior, did we decide to call him?
Speaker A:
I mean, at least for the purposes of repeatedly talking about his name.
Speaker B:
So yeah, that’s the good part of the news.
Speaker A:
Okay. Glad that there’s some good news at the end. And really genuinely, yay science and the rest of the world doing science, even though our so-called country is falling apart and falling down on the job. We are also very grateful to all of you who are listening to this podcast, Live Like the World Is Dying, which is brought to you by the publishing collective Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. We put out 3 different podcasts and also have a number of books and some fancy zines that we publish, and increasingly more fancy zines. There are a few new ones set to come out this fall and winter that we’re really excited about, including some new stories by our beloved Margaret Killjoy. We are supported in large part by our Patreon members. We are very grateful to you Patreon members for your ongoing support and the growth of support of this podcast and the whole work of the collective, which has allowed us to do more and more things and continue to put good out in the world and to keep— to make things affordable as much as possible as well. That is all because of our great Patreon support. And those Patreon supporters who come in at the $20 a month or more tier get to have a special shout-out at the end of every podcast episode because we are so super extra grateful. So we want to say thanks to all of these lovely people, causes, ideas, and organizations, which are: Please Fight Anti-Fatness, Arizona Sunsets, Bunny Bionics, Bike Smut Film and Performance, Patrick Harnett Marshall, All Wiener Dogs Everywhere, Joseph the first 2 chapters of The Eden Project by James Hollis, Kiwanis Socialists, the Athens People’s Assembly of Athens, Georgia, Mr. Kraft, your Canadian friend, Mark, Tiny Nonsense, Sarah, A Future for Abby, the Canadian Socialist Rifle Association, Hyunhee, Max, Lancaster County Chooses Love, Karen, Astoria Food Pantry, Enchanted Rats of Turtle Island, Feral and WV, Blinkcat, the Massachusetts chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association, Shulva, Jenny and Phoebe the cats, Jason, Aiden, and Yuki the dog, Alexander Gopal, Sunshine, Opticuna, Portland’s Hedron Hackerspace, Julia, Appalachian Liberation Library, Lord Harken, Baby A-Cab and her 3 great pups, Ephemeral, Princess Miranda, Janice and Odelle, Boldfield, Allie, Papa Runa, Milicia, Theo, SJ, Paige, Pocono Pink Pistols, Nicole and Tick for the dog, David, Towser’s Love of Bumblebees, Carson, Dana, Chelsea, Amber, Marjorie, We Will Outlive Them, Kirk, Micaiah, Chris, the incredible Rennerai, Micah, and Hoss the dog. Thank you so much.
