The Scathing Atheist - 500: Quincentenary Edition

Episode Date: September 15, 2022

In this week’s episode, the New York Times does an expose on Yeshiva education that the students probably couldn’t read, Christian teachers on Marsh’s side of the pond will find new ways to pretend to be persecuted, and we’ll talk about a cola that’s even worse than RC. --- To make a per episode donation at Patreon.com, click here: http://www.patreon.com/ScathingAtheist Come see us at QED: https://qedcon.org/ To buy our book, click there: https://www.amazon.com/Outbreak-Crisis-Religion-Ruined-Pandemic/dp/B08L2HSVS8/ To check out our sister show, The Skepticrat, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/the-skepticrat To check out our sister show’s hot friend, God Awful Movies, click here: https://audioboom.com/channel/god-awful-movies To check out our half-sister show, Citation Needed, click here: http://citationpod.com/ To check out our sister show’s sister show, D and D minus, click here: https://danddminus.libsyn.com/ To hear more from our intrepid audio engineer Morgan Clarke, click here: https://www.morganclarkemusic.com/ ------ Headlines: State funded Yeshivas under fire for failing to provide basic education: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/11/nyregion/hasidic-yeshivas-schools-new-york.html Judge: HIV drug mandate violates religious freedom of anti-gay Christians https://onlysky.media/hemant-mehta/judge-hiv-drug-mandate-violates-religious-freedom-of-anti-gay-christians/ Debunked: Teacher wasn't jailed over pronouns, but for breaking a court order by going to school https://www.thejournal.ie/enoch-burke-fact-check-jail-pronouns-5860219-Sep2022/  Catholic League: Relax! Priests’ victims are “adolescents, not children”! https://onlysky.media/hemant-mehta/catholic-league-relax-priests-victims-are-adolescents-not-children/ Greg Locke’s pastor buddies don’t know how masturbation works: https://onlysky.media/hemant-mehta/these-christian-preachers-have-no-idea-how-masturbation-works/ 'Humanist' headteacher claims forcing children at her 'diverse' primary school to have Christian assemblies 'breaches their human rights' because only a third follow the religion https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11134653/Headteacher-says-forcing-primary-school-children-Christian-assemblies-breaches-human-rights.html  Humanist headteacher fails in attempt to ditch Christian assemblies for LGBT course https://www.christian.org.uk/news/humanist-headteacher-fails-in-attempt-to-ditch-christian-assemblies-for-lgbt-course/  --- This Week in Misogyny: Women registering to vote at much higher rates than men: https://insights.targetsmart.com/not-just-kansas-women-motivated-to-vote-in-states-with-repro-rights-at-risk.html LIndsey Graham proposes national abortion ban: https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-senate-republican-lindsey-graham-unveils-abortion-bill-ahead-midterms-2022-09-13/ Sexually abusive chaplain sentences to seven years: https://onlysky.media/hemant-mehta/prison-chaplain-james-highhouse-sentenced-for-sexually-abusing-inmates/

Warning, this episode has 500 episodes worth of profanity momentum going in, so I doubt it's going to be fuckless. This week's episode of The Scathing Atheist is brought to you by Stamps.com, Honey, Allbirds, and by all the listeners who took time to review the show, attend our live records, support us on Patreon, or thank us through email, or otherwise encourage us to keep doing this thing for 500 fucking episodes. And now, The Scathing Atheist. This is Scotty Califf, and if my voice sounds familiar, you're into some really weird porn. If nearly a decade of doing the strangest porn available on audible.com has taught me anything, it's that we did, in fact, evolve from filthy monkey men and women. It's Thursday. It's September 15th.

And it's National Cheese Toast Day. Oh, well, I feel culinarily welcomed already. Oh, there you go. I have no illusions. I'm Eli Bosnick. I'm Michael Marshall, and from Queen Latifah's New Jersey, Liverpool, England, and Waycross, Georgia, this is The Scathing Atheist. On this week's episode, Jewish schools are run by a bunch of Hasidics. Dicks.

Christian teachers this side of the pond will find new ways to pretend to be persecuted. And we'll talk about a cola that's even worse than RC. But first, the diatribe. So at first my plan was just to do a light, fluffy, can you believe it's already been 500 episodes kind of diatribe. But the more I wrote, the more I realized that you can't really talk about that without acknowledging how much worse the country

that i'm diatribing into now is than the one that i was diatribing into back at the start i mean keep in mind it was 2013 right with this show started right when obama was being inaugurated into his second term and and as shitty as John McCain and Mitt Romney were, they're pretty damn moderate when you compare them with today's GOP leaders. The atheist community was thriving at that time. We weren't even a year removed from the first Reason rally, which drew such an unexpectedly huge crowd

it was being called the atheist Woodstock. Secularism seemed bulletproof in the courts. Hell, one of my first interviews was on the subject of how much longer the country would even need atheist specific media nearly a decade on that shit seems like a half-remembered dream i mean biden probably isn't any less progressive than obama but his opponent in the last election was a christophascist right and whoever the fucking republican nominee is in 2024 will probably be running on christian grievance and theocratic promises atheism continues to grow as a demographic but shrink as a movement

every week i see more people proudly proclaiming their exodus from the atheist community as though abandoning it to the shit lords is somehow a virtue and plenty of the major draws at the original reason rally turned out to be embarrassments in retrospect and gave those folks plenty of solid reasons to leave. The Supreme Court is fast approaching fucking Spanish Inquisition levels of Christian control, and the need for people speaking on behalf of rationalism hasn't been higher in living memory. Honestly, the landscape has gotten so much more dire while we've been doing the show that I have to at least consider the possibility that the show is the fucking problem. And in a sense, it is. Right. I mean, it's far too grandiose to pretend that our podcast moved the national needle in any meaningful way.

But the Christian backlash that you're seeing now was no doubt inspired by the visibility and successes of the atheist movement a decade ago. visibility and successes of the atheist movement a decade ago we were still a small minority mind you but nobody overestimates the size of an opposing minority with quite the gusto of american christians they consistently and comically overestimate what percent of the population is muslim gay atheist whatever i mean you know they're raised with a thought of a disappointed god watching a masturbate and demons hiding around every corner so i guess seeing enemies where there aren't any is just second nature to them but to some degree it was real and when they put their christian platitudes online atheists pointed out how illogical they were when they put their prayers in front of secular gatherings atheists complained when they demanded the same amount of of Christian privilege that they had just taken for granted for generations, atheists said no.

And that scared the shit out of them. A lot of the problems that we're seeing now in our culture stem from their panicked response to exactly that fear. Now, at the same time, you know, the growth of our community has caused it to fracture here and there along the way. I mean, several of the problematic headliners at reason rally and the like didn't become problematic after the fact okay i mean some of them did of course but some of them were just always that bad and it took a critical mass of people in the community willing to expose that fact for there to be any real movement about it so as much as it may seem like the community took a turn for the worse, it's more accurate to say that it took a turn for the better

through how bad it already was into stark relief. And sure, many of those problematic speakers are still around and still drawing big crowds, but they're not getting invited to shit like the Reason Rally. They're only speaking on behalf of atheism to the extent that we allow our opponents to choose our spokespeople. But regardless of how we got here, whether as victims of our own success or just by stumbling into the inevitable trough that comes after the peak, here is where we are. And here is a damn scary place to

be. Here where public school teachers can coerce their students into prayer, where corporations have religious beliefs, where taxpayers can be forced to fund private religious schools. Where explicitly religious slogans adorn our public property. Where teaching on honest account of the historical privilege in this country is against the law. Where the right to reproductive care is contingent on biblical interpretation. All of those things happened after we posted episode one of this show. Hell, all of those things would have been unthinkable when we posted episode one of this show. You know, if I had opened my first diatribe warning of those possibilities, I'd have been dismissed as an alarmist.

And yet here we are. And who the hell knows where we're going? I mean, the demographic trends haven't changed. The rate at which America is secularizing has, if anything, increased. traffic trends haven't changed. The rate at which America is secularizing has, if anything, increased. Pew just released a study that said Christianity is likely to lose its majority status in this country in the next 50 years. But at the same time, and as a direct consequence, Christian leaders are seizing power at an unprecedented rate, desperately trying to lock in their dominance quick while they still have the numbers to do it. And even as their

control increases, they scream ever louder about how besieged they are. Their gain in power seems to correlate about one to one with their perceived loss of power. And that means that their solutions are getting ever more terrifying just at the same time that they're better able to implement those solutions. In other words, we've got our work cut out for us for the next 500 episodes. I mean, look, the world doesn't need this scathing atheist podcast. I won't flatter myself with any delusions of grandeur here, but the world absolutely needs scathing atheists. This podcast could disappear tomorrow without making any difference in the overall political trends and forces in the larger culture,

but the same can't be said for this community. Whatever impact this show has on the world doesn't come from my end of the speaker. It's not what's in the headphones, it's what's in between them. So thanks for being in between them. Thanks for sticking with us. Thanks for lending us your time and your ears and, in a lot of cases, your effort and your money to this cause and to this community. And thanks for letting me devote so much of my life to it.

I'd be yelling into an empty room about this shit with or without you, but my family worries way less about me this way. They're talking about you, Jesus. We interrupt this broadcast to bring you a special news bulletin. Joining me for headlines tonight are the Judy and Violet to my Dora Lee, Eli Bosnick, and Michael Marshall. Fell tonight, the Judy and Violet to my Dora Lee, Eli Bosnick and Michael Marshall. Phyllis, are you ready to get to work? You heard him, Marsh.

Let's hear your best Southern bell. Oh, okay. Well, I do declare I have always depended on the strangeness of kinders. Okay, all right. We obviously need to clarify which of us is Dora fucking Lee here. So while we do that, we're going to pause for a word from our first sponsor this week, Stamps.com. Lucinda's Dora Lee.

Obviously. So Heath's getting there a day early. Yeah, I think he's worried about jet lag. Okay, yeah. No, that's smart. Surprise! Damn it, Eli. What are you doing? I'm the holidays and I'm sneaking up on everybody,

which is why there's never been a better time to sign up for stamps.com. What's stamps.com? Well, stamps.com is your one-stop shop for all your shipping and mailing needs. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over a million businesses. You can get access to USPS and UPS services that you need to run your company right from your computer. Or even just do your holiday shipping. That's right. Oh, that sounds great.

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Oh, it's for carving holiday roasts. Don't believe him, Marsh. Oh, I definitely do not believe him. For the holidays. And now, back to the headlines in our lead story tonight in a lot of ways this show started in response to me learning what a shitty excuse for education kids in the hasidic jewish community were getting so i think it's appropriate that we open up the 500th headline segment with a story about exactly that so yeah the new york times just published a massive expose

outlining just how much public money is being shoveled into Hasidic schools so that they can fail to educate and occasionally physically abuse their students. And far from the zero dollar ideal that one might say the Constitution demands, the Times was able to uncover over a billion dollars in public funding just in the last four years. Okay, everyone, as your born Jewish friend, you all get one pass to hear about the secret Jewish cabal stealing a billion dollars for child sacrifice. But just one, everybody, just one. And just to be clear, that's non-transferable. You don't get to pause the podcast here and then go use your pass on a David Icke video. Right. Got to be now. Exactly. Thank you. Good clarification. So, yeah yeah so this story starts with this startling

fact normally uh kids in hasidic schools or yeshivas don't take standardized tests but in 2019 the central united talmudical academy decided to administer a state standardized test in reading and math to their 1000 plus students and every single one of them failed yeah so as the story points out, that's not because the schools themselves are failing, right? Because their goal is not to give kids a well-rounded education. It's to deprive them of one so that they're trapped

in the Hasidic community when they grow up. Right? So instead of learning literally any history or science in most schools, that's not an exaggeration, they spend the overwhelming majority of their time studying Talmudic law and scripture. Right. And to be clear, it's not like every household. They spent the overwhelming majority of their time studying Talmudic law and scripture. Right. And to be clear, it's not like every household needs its own rabbi in this community.

Right. So even within their own thing, they're doing a bad job. Right. Like Anna Tefka had Taylor's. And the thing is, you might wonder how it could take them so long to get through a book of Talmudic scripture that they're spending all the time on it. But bear in mind, none of these kids can read. So that really does slow down the learning. Yeah, they'll pause, yeah.

Now, to be fair, there's no one central authority that runs all the Hasidic schools. And the Times does point out that a few of them actually do provide real and good educations, but the majority don't even teach English. And in terms of math, let me just, I'm going to quote the article talking about 12-year-old Yeshiva students.

Quote, most can add and subtract and some can multiply and divide but few can do much more end quote that's the seventh fucking grade okay needless to say students who graduate from these schools and then try to find jobs in the real world generally come up short which is no doubt why the hasidic community is always amongst the city's poorest. I mean, you say that's a seventh grade, Noah, but in fairness, most of those kids have no way of knowing they're in the seventh grade. You know, they think they're in like a one, but with a long hat grade. And look, obviously, it isn't exactly news that kids in Hasidic yeshivas aren't getting a proper secular education, but it is news that anyone at all in New York City is saying

anything about it. OK, I mean, the city and state politicians are still too scared to do anything about the report since we're talking about a community that largely votes as a block based on this single issue of how lenient a politician is going to be on yeshivas but it matters that the information is out there right like keep in mind as important as those votes are hasidic jews are about 1.2 percent of the city's population and half a percent of the state's. So, like,

it wouldn't take much outrage in the outside world to negate that voting bloc. Yeah. But, careful, Noah, last time we pissed them off, they gave the world COVID.

Okay. So, you know, balance it. All right. And in religious HIVdom news, you know, one of the lesser mentioned harms of religion is just how it manages to poison

and taint truly any concept, even the good ones. Take, for example, religious freedom, an idea that a mere century or two ago, one could see the upside of. And yet nowadays, when you hear the term, you just know it's going to mean some barely concealed, legally justified bigotry. Oh, yeah. Conservative Christians basically see religious freedom as this one weird trick that will hack your government.

Secularists hate it, which was already bad enough before the Supreme Court started agreeing with them. Yeah. Yeah. So sure enough, religious freedom struck out at the rights of other people once again last week as a Texas judge ruled that free coverage of prep drugs that prevent hiv infection as required by the affordable care act is unconstitutional because it violates the religious freedom of christian-owned companies yes right and

and to be clear he means their religious freedom of other people having HIV. Mm hmm. Yeah. So for those of you unfamiliar, PrEP drugs stand for pre-exposure prophylaxis and refers to drugs like Discovery and Truvada, which are almost 99 percent effective at preventing transmission of HIV. Which is amazing for a variety of folks and communities because you know getting aids is bad the problem was until last year when generic versions became available these drugs were super duper expensive but now we have generic versions they're way cheaper and they're required to be covered by the aca the problem is and this is practically the judge's fucking argument, Christians believe that AIDS is a punishment from God for gay men and therefore asking them to help out anybody not get AIDS violates their religious freedom.

That's actually the argument. Yes. Yes. They're claiming the right to condemn other people to AIDS and a judge who will still be a judge after this case agreed with them. How is your country at a place where laws don't apply to people we find icky is now the official position of the judiciary. So, well, to be fair, we've always been there, Marsh. That's where we even when we were still y'all, that's where we were.

OK, yeah, that's fair. No, that is fair. Right. Exactly. We just kept it. Yeah. Now, I want to be clear here. I think this judgment stands no chance

when it reaches higher courts. As everyone, including the American Medical Association, has pointed out, I don't engage in that risk behavior, therefore I shouldn't have to cover it would open up companies to deny shit like breast cancer screenings or tests for

cervical cancer or hell, devoutly vegetarian companies could say they no longer wanted to cover statins. So it hopefully will get knocked down, but it's 2022. And I know better than to hope for anything good out of our higher courts, you absolutely cannot rule out that why should I pay for chemotherapy when I don't currently have cancer won't be successful, which is a hell of a take from the people who consider themselves our moral superiors. Right? Sure is. Jesus. And in trans unsubstantiated news, religious conservatives in Ireland are up in arms after a teacher was sent to jail simply, simply for refusing to use gender neutral pronouns for one of their trans students. And because we're talking about it on

this show, you know that the teacher was an evangelical Christian. And because we're talking about it on this show, you know he's full of shit. More so than just your regular evangelical Christian, I mean. Yeah. Oh, won't someone think of the bigots. Wait, stop. Not that. Don't actually do any Google. Just think of them surface thinking. So according to the story that was enthusiastically reported by newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, Enoch Burke was imprisoned for his Christian beliefs, specifically his Christian belief that it's OK to use his position of authority as a teacher to be an arsehole to a specific trans kid in his class. Jesus.

Their story is it's gotten to where an adult can't even bully a child anymore and they have to exaggerate to get it. Yeah, they have to lie. They have to lie to make up their position. Yeah, exactly. Because I'm sure a lot of listeners are thinking, yeah, it seems pretty odd that Irish judges

would start throwing people into Irish prisons for being Christian, given that historically Ireland's pretty Christian. Pretty damn Christian. But you know, if you are thinking that, congratulations, you've approached this story with way more skepticism than anyone in the conservative press ever did. Yeah, well, Marsh, as soon as conservative pundits start being skeptical about what people tell them, you know, the whole dry vagina thing gets way less complimentary. I just, I don't think that they're ready for that. So here's what actually happened. Burke interrupted an event that was celebrating

the school's 260th anniversary in order to loudly complain about having to show a basic level of decency to a trans pupil during the day at school because he believes that being trans goes against the teachings of the Church of Ireland, which, yeah, okay, he is right about that. But in that case, it's not the trans kid who's the problem there. Right. No, it's sad how often their points should be our points, right? Yeah. And so Burke interrupted this special anniversary event, and he made such a commotion that several members of the congregation and the staff walked out in protest. But he wasn't even done there. He went up to the head of the school after the service and carried on airing his petty entitled grievances. And he was told, you know, now isn't

the time for your transphobic bullshit. We'll pick it up in private during work hours like grown adults would. But he continued to still follow around his boss, essentially shouting at her until other people had to step in and hold him back. This is what he was doing. Wow. Physically, other people had to step in and hold him back. This is what he was doing. Wow. Physically. Physically, he had to be restrained.

So all of that behavior towards his boss, no less, understandably earned him a suspension from the school because it obviously would in any world. That's what would get you suspended. Yes. But this fucker just refused to accept his suspension at all. And he turned up to work in order to carry on teaching. Like he thought he could just costanza this whole thing oh it's like you can't even have a psychotic break in a public ceremony and then show up pretending nothing happened like a sovereign citizen getting dragged out of his car

anymore yeah it doesn't quite have the same ring to it yeah so the school took out an injunction from the courts in order to stop him from turning up while suspended and disrupting classes and being around kids he wasn't no longer allowed to be around at that time. But then he ignored the injunction and turned up the school anyway. And that's why he was sent to prison for contempt of court. That's the story. Jesus Christ. And think about how sinister you have to be for a Christian school to call the police on you. Right.

A Christian school in Ireland, no less. You know, they probably have to run a gauntlet of a dozen physically abusive nuns just to get to the fore. Right? Yeah, if anything, the story here is about how much earlier this dude should have been in jail. Yes. This story is mostly just an argument about why we should just go ahead and jail teachers that refuse to use gender neutral pronouns before it comes to this.

Yeah, it's preventative at that point so now of course burke is in all the conservative press playing himself up as a martyr to the walk mob like he's fucking jordan or peterson and gullible right-wing morons are just lapping it up because if you hit the same people that they do it doesn't matter to them if you're provably full of shit. Alright, well, now I need to convince Eli not to turn to the dark side again, so we're going to pause for a quick word from our second sponsor this week, Honey. Today's episode is sponsored by Honey, the easy way to save when you're shopping on your iPhone or computer.

Okay, how about a sausage roll? Are you even hearing yourself right now? Oh, hey guys, what's up? Hey Marsh, we're just trying to get Noah ready for our trip to QED so I'm ordering some British foods for him to try while we're here since you guys don't have Hot Pockets.

Oh, okay, right. But isn't that a bit pricey? Tell me about it. I wish I had a coupon code for at least one of these websites. Oh, well, why don't you try Honey? We are trying, darling. Yes, Snookums, you can see us trying. No, no, no, no. Honey is the free shopping tool that scours the internet for promo codes and then applies the best one it finds to your cart.

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And Honey doesn't just work on desktop. It works on your iPhone too. Just activate it on Safari on your phone and save on the go. If you don't already have Honey, you could be straight up missing out.. By getting it, you'll be doing yourself a solid and supporting the show. I'd never recommend something I don't use. Get honey for free at joinhoney.com slash scathing. That's joinhoney.com slash scathing. Ooh, okay. Oh, what about mash?

That's just mashed potato, right? Like potato the vegetable. Nope. Yep, I hear it now. Have you considered that you might have scurvy? You might have scurvy. A man wrote the Bible. A horse would smug. If it's a legitimate race. It is a slut, right? Cooking can be fun. Hey, I'm proud of a man. This week in Misogyny. A funny thing has been happening ever since the Dobbs decision. It used to be nearly impossible

to get Republicans to shut up about abortion. You could ask them how the weather was and they'd say, it's always dreary when it's still legal to murder a defenseless pre-born baby. But now, all of a sudden, they're avoiding the subject. Hell, a bunch of Republican candidates in close races have gone about scrubbing any and all references to how anti-abortion they are from their websites. And I guess that could be for any number of reasons, but I'm willing to bet it has a little something to do with polls showing that Americans are, by and large, horrified by the

extreme abortion bans being proposed in some parts of the country. Probably also has to do with the fact that women are registering to vote in the midterms at more than twice the rate of men. And maybe the fact that even in blood red Kansas, women showed up to destroy a referendum that would have greatly restricted abortion access in the state. But regardless of the reason, after decades of running on the abortion issue, they're now running away from it. The party seems happy not to talk about it at all between now and the midterms. Except that is for that cartoon-naked mole rat of a senator, Lindsey Graham, who infuriated his colleagues this week by proposing a bill that would enact a national ban on abortion after 15

weeks. So after an entire summer of insisting that it should be decided by the states and therefore doesn't need to be a campaign issue through most of the country, they're now faced with the exact opposite. Now, a lot of people think Graham was actually trying to defuse the issue, if you can believe that. The reasoning here goes that people are mostly just scared of these ultra extreme abortion bills. Like in West Virginia, where the legislature just passed a bill that would ban all abortions at any point, excepting only medical emergencies, rape, and incest. So Graham proposed what he sees as a compromise bill that would be far more palatable to the majority of voters.

So when a candidate is confronted with the question of whether they support, say, Indiana's near-total abortion ban that's set to go into action next week, they can retreat to this 15 week ban and say, I support the legislation in the Senate. Of course, that's fucking nonsense, since the bill wouldn't protect abortion for the first 15 weeks. It wouldn't stop these other states from enacting more strident laws, so it would only really affect the more liberal states. states from enacting more strident laws, so it would only really affect the more liberal states. But since what would really happen and what politicians can run on are two different things, it might make some small amount of sense, I guess. And since what makes sense and what Lindsey Graham thinks makes sense are two different things, I can believe that's what he was thinking when he proposed it. But one way or the other, the Republican establishment is

pissed. And it looks like the end result is really just drawing another underline on what might just be the most important issue in this year's midterms. Oh, and before I let you go, I want to throw a cap on a story I've personally been following for a while now, though I don't think it's come up on the show yet. It's the story of James Theodore Highhouse, a former army chaplain that became a prison chaplain that became a rampant abuser of female inmates. He used his status as a so-called man of God to sexually coerce and abuse inmates he was supposedly ministering to, and used our culture's deference to his job to cover his tracks, reportedly telling one victim that if she reported him,

quote, no one will believe you because you're an inmate and I'm a chaplain, end quote. Now, I don't want to go into the details of the abuse, but to give you an idea how bad it was, the sentencing guidelines for his crime is two and a half years, but the judge gave him seven. Now, why the fuck sentencing guidelines for any type of sexual abuse are that low is a whole other story. But it's worth remembering that he may well have gotten away with it if that victim had believed his warning. And let's face it, some other victim of some other chaplain almost certainly did. Anyway, hate to leave you on such a depressing note, but let's

face it, the misogyny section probably shouldn't end on an upbeat. So with that, I'll wrap things up and hand you back over to Noah, Marsh, and Eli. Thank you, Lucinda. Next up in headlines in Read Between the Lines news. president of the Catholic League and man who looks like the least popular Dick Cheney impersonator on Cameo, Bill Donahue opened his mouth this week. And you know what that means? That's right. Apologizing for child rape. I was going to go with swarm of locusts flew out, but OK. Yeah. Close second. Close second. Yes. In an attempt to downplay the achievements of Pennsylvania's attorney general, Josh Shapiro, the AG responsible for the now infamous Pennsylvania report, who is now the Democratic candidate for governor.

Donahue wrote online that the Pennsylvania report wasn't a big deal not going to but even if we granted him the dubious distinction between children and adolescents there that most is still not great bill right like if somebody tells you most of the sex i've had didn't involve goats you're still gonna ask that person about all the goat fucking you know what for fuck's sake dude why don't you just hold up yearbook pictures and say ah tell me you wouldn't have fucked this kid, huh? Come on! Jesus Christ! Yeah.

In an article titled, So Ironically I'm Amazed the Tensile Strength of the Internet Can Withstand It, What Josh Shapiro Did to the Priests Was Disgraceful, Donahue takes issue with the statement on Shapiro's website that he, quote, statement on Shapiro's website that he, quote, exposed the Catholic Church's decades-long cover-up of child sexual abuse, identifying over 300 predator priests and thousands of victims, and spurring investigation across the United States, end quote. And he says of that claim, quote, this is thrice false. One, not all the alleged offenders were priests. Two, most of the alleged victims were adolescents not children and three the report was not evidentiary it was investigative meaning that the accused priests were never given the opportunity to rebut the charges and real quote jeez yeah so donahue is

the one who is in fact fucking thrice false hoomps or whatever the fuck he says. OK, so one, the vast majority of offenders were priests and the rest were in connection with the churches. It wasn't like dentists who dragged their victims into churches to molest. Right. Exactly. Well, and also like our rapes weren't limited to X is never going to amount to a good defense, no matter its accuracy. Yeah. Number two. Yikes.

I don't know. Your response is she was 15. You're being dramatic. Yikes. I don't have I don't need to rebut that point. Yeah. Again, I can't get past that. Most most of the victims were adolescents.

Look, if you to go back in time to the 70s to fuck every single member of the Jackson 5, no one cares that you had sex with Jermaine, Tito, or Jackie, even though that would be most of them. That wouldn't be the story there. And of course, as to excuse number three about how the priests never got to rebut the charges, that's because

most of the priests the Catholic Church gave up were dead. Had Bill Donahue's church not spent decades stonewalling law enforcement, maybe they actually could have been punished. Again, that's a point against you, Bill Donahue. Well, and also, given the

bang-up job you're doing, Phil, I don't know that giving priests a chance to rebut the charges would have helped. I stand by what he said she's 15 why are you all staring at me i don't understand so yeah all these fucking horrible excuses aside the good news is shapiro is currently up by six points in election polls and may be pushed even higher by voter turnout to send dr oz back to his and my home state of new jersey and hey bill i have a feeling once shapiro is governor,

you might actually get some of that evidentiary justice you've been longing for. So good luck on that, buddy. Be careful what you wish for. And in lock and unload news tonight. Hey, hey. As we were recording last week, overly caffeinated hate preacher and Planned Parenthood's most valuable nonconsensual donor, Greg Locke, was hosting a national deliverance training conference. And I have to thank friend of the show, Hemant Mehta, for pointing this out over on Only Sky.

Among the things we learned during said conference is that at least two of the speakers he chose for the event don't know how jerking off works. Which honestly explains so much about their worldview, right? Because if I thought masturbation was like giving the tip of your dick a round of applause, I would also be accusing random women of witchcraft. Like, I get it, guys. It's all coming together. Wait, you don't do the round of applause? Thank you.

How do you show it that it's done a good job? You British people are so polite so okay so the first of these was a pastor named daniel adams who explained that masturbating opens up a portal to demons before adding this interesting factoid quote if you look at porn long enough or if you masturbate long enough the thing you're imagining becomes in the flesh end quote not the warning you thought it was bro and just but in case you're right becomes in the flesh, end quote. Not the warning you thought it was, bro. But in case you're right, I want to apologize in advance to Anna Kendrick with the caveat that it takes longer the older you get.

It's not my fault. Yeah, and in case it's true, I would like to provide that as an explanation for how much more often Marsh has been on our show. So it all makes sense I'm flattered I'm flattered alright so the other jack off in question was one Vlad Sechuk

who warned people against masturbation by telling attendees that the demons of pornography needed to be fed quote every single three weeks end quote which is an odd time interval for so fucking many reasons i mean i'm sure that's like you know that's how often his wife's quilting club and his kids little league practice coincide or something but either he's wrong or my pornography demons are serious

over a cheaper that's what i was like vlad's jerk off demons are sadly putting their tiny little jerk off tithes into the devil's plate while mine are that guy who gave scientology a billion dollars so they made him an alien or whatever the thing is if you did watch the video of vlad preaching about all this in his like super tense ultra frustrated manner knowing that he's an every three weeks kind of guy suddenly makes a lot more sense yeah and also explains how often he paints his garage so yeah so not exactly the most newsworthy thing that we've ever covered on this show but i think it's worth pointing out because if nothing else the fact that greg lock and his friends don't know how masturbation works explains an awful lot about him as as these guys have pointed out but it also suggests a remedy, though Andrew was super clear that I am not allowed to spell

out what that remedy would be. Moving on. And finally tonight, occasionally, when I guest on this show, I like to give you a glimpse of a different world. A world almost exactly like your own, but with small and disorienting tweaks. Fewer guns, fewer flags,

fewer calories. Hey, I'm going to be there in October, Marsh. I intend to fix that last difference in Cadbury eggs and English breakfasts alone. Also slightly less bad that Americans isn't the bride that you think it is, Marsh. Okay, that's fair. That's fair. But anyway, today I want to tell you about a teacher leading

pupils in a collective act of Christian worshiping class and how the authorities stepped in to continue forcing her to do that against her will. Okay, I'm picturing a smoke the whole pack situation. So, Jo Connor is the head teacher at Polna Infant School in Hampshire, and she argued that her school shouldn't have to engage in a daily Christian worship because two-thirds of her pupils weren't Christian, and according to their parents, more than half of them were atheists. And a full 100% of said infants were atheists, so if you think about it, it's even worse.

So, Edger, one can argue that kids aren't born atheists, but since they're not like, they don't require worship of vague animism or the creaky stare monster, I don't know that that matters in this instance. Right, exactly. But unfortunately, according to the Education Reform Act of 1988, every single school in the UK must take part in a daily act of worship that is, quote, of a broadly Christian character, reflecting the broad traditions of Christian belief without being distinctive of any particular Christian denomination, unquote. Really? Oh my God, that's the most Church of England declaration ever. You will be whatever kind of Christian you feel like being a kind of, or else. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, what if your kid's atheist or Muslim or Jewish or Hindu or Sikh or any of the flavor of non-Christian?

Tough shit. They've got to cross their legs, close their eyes with the rest of the class. Or if parents do feel strongly enough, they're able to withdraw their kid from that bit of school life, the compulsory worship aspect of school life, at which point the school then has to make a whole thing of singling that kid out in front of the whole class, or sometimes even the whole school, if it's a whole school assembly where the Christian worship's happening, to ensure that that kid doesn't get any Jesus on them. Which, you know, is something, as you can imagine, all the other kids are totally cool with and won't find it to be excellent material for playground bullying. Although that said, no, no, my dad is stupider than your dad is hardly the slam dunk line for a bully to take, admittedly. I'm sorry, Marsh, are the words in English,

no, no, instead of na,na? Because I literally find that more upsetting than the forced theocracy we just learned about. They have to do something with all those missing R's. They've got to put them somewhere. Yeah, it's fair. Yeah, they've got to go somewhere. So despite having in Jill's class a majority of kids who aren't brought up

to believe in the Christian God, and despite trying to invoke the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has explicitly and effectively called the UK's collective worship fucking stupid, Ms. Conner's attempt to exempt her school from indoctrination failed, unfortunately. Ironically, her application was rejected because her school was so well regarded by the school's regulator, Ofsted, so why should she rock the boat? Your school's too good, if anything, you shouldn't start changing things. I know you're paraphrasing

for comic effect, but I would love it if more UN declarations included an and also it's fucking dumb clause. Oh God, absolutely. Yeah, two words. Of course,

Christians have celebrated that rejection as a win with the Christian Institute falsely claiming that the school was actually looking to bin off God in order to teach a quote LGBT ethos.

Really? Yeah, because once again, which they weren't. They weren't at all. That's not true. Because once again, Christians can't accept that they're in a place of cultural supremacy without inventing imaginary persecutions, even when, like in this case, they fucking win. Right? Honestly, though, a school mandated a minute of gayness would do a lot for British schools

let's keep these minds open people come on let's give it a shot and on that reminder of just how unenlightened a country can be and still be more enlightened than ours we're going to close the headlines for the night Eli Marsh thanks as always and or sometimes as the case may be cricket and when we come back

the third ad will be over I went with the game I thought over i went with the game hi i'm no illusions and i'm michael marshall and i'm eli bosnick and the three of us share a secret struggle a dark passenger passenger. A deep and terrible burden. We've all tried to walk at the same relative speed as Marsha's wife, Nicola. That's right. Through what I assume is some sort of time travel starting at her weight, my wife walks just over 400 times the speed of a natural woman. Imagine running to save your child from a fire while on cocaine.

That's the speed at which Nicola casually walks. It's more of a teleportation than anything. And while we found that she can be slowed down by things like rigging her electric scooter to explode or having her contract a childhood communicable disease, eventually she's going to recover and then we're all left right back in her dust again. But there's no better way to do it than in the Wool Dasher Mizzle from Allbirds. Seriously? Sorry, man. They're back in season.

You gotta be kidding. I had food on the stove. Sorry. Who's this? It's a long story. The Wool Dasher Mizzle, Allbirds' weather-repellent performance running shoes, is the first shoe of its kind.

It's sustainably made from natural materials with a low environmental impact on the planet. It's true. Allbirds sent us a pair to try when they became a sponsor, and they're the only pair of shoes I own that don't make me look like I'm on some kind of prison work release. That's why I, Eli Bosnick, heartily endorse them. Hey, Diane, it's wool.

Do you mind hopping over to my tree and turn it off the stove? Those fucking shoes are back. This fall, keep your feet cozy and dry with the Allbirds Wool Dasher Missiles. Discover your perfect pair at allbirds.com today. That's A-L-L-B-I-R-D-S dot com. Thank you. Yeah. No, I'll

be back in a couple of hours. Okay, so who's Diane then? She's a talking rabbit that lives next door. You know what? I'm sorry I asked. She's a nice lady. Huh. During the Trump presidency, the entirety of the news apparatus was a constant reminder of how religious thinking primes adherence for other forms of bullshit. And while we're all thrilled that that reminder is gone, we still need to be reminded, which is why Marsh is back with another installment of Who's Woo? So tell us, Marsh,

which fraud are we going to be talking about today? Oh, yeah, just rub those American libel laws in me. I'm distancing myself from that introduction already. I am still in the UK. But we're going to be talking about Joseph McCullough. Oh, all right. Right. Let's hear it. So Joseph Mercola was born July 8th, 1954 in Chicago, and he graduated from the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine again in 1982. By 1997, he was in the alternative medicine world, setting up Mercola.com, the now notorious Mercola.com, where he'd share his tips on how to use alternative medicine on hard to treat patients. Well, easy-to-treat patients with hard-to-treat conditions, anyway. Yeah, the original tagline was, when nothing's working, maybe nothing will work. Well, he soon realized that there was easier ways to mislead patients than seeing them in person, such as, for example, selling them overpriced and ineffective supplements. And his outlandish claims for these supplements quickly caught the attention of regulators.

In 2005, the FDA told him to stop claiming that his Living Fuel RX offered, quote, an exceptional countermeasure against diabetes. Oh, Jesus. Or that his Tropical Traditions Virgin Coconut Oil could treat Crohn's disease, or that his Chlorella product could fight cancer. Spoiler alert, he didn't stop. Right. And keep in mind that all he had to do was phrase it more occasionally. Right. That's all the FDA was asking him to do or indeed has the legal authority to ask him to do. Yeah. And I'll just say, as someone who has to say, no, I will not say that less illegally quite a bit.

That requires some real cojones, okay? So, you know. So given that he didn't stop and he didn't finesse his wording to say could help with or anything like that, in 2006, the FDA wrote to him again, once more about his coconut oil and his chlorella, both of which he renamed the products

to evade the first warning, both of which he was now claiming would prevent cancer. And then around this time, he published at least two books, two of which made the New York Times bestseller list, including The Great Bird Flu Hawks in October 2006. And that explained that avian flu, which was quite big at the time, was just a scare story concocted by the media, by Big Pharma, and by the government in order to gain money and power. And it was a book that helped McCullough gain money and power. It was also an argument he would find useful later and he'd come back to it. He's just on stage. You guys aren't ready for large-scale plague denial yet, but your kids are going to love this.

So by 2009, McCullough had quit his in-person practice in order to focus exclusively on his supplement empire and it was really working by 2010 he was making 7 million dollars a year Jesus

and by 2017 in an affidavit a signed affidavit he said that his net worth was in excess of 100 million dollars like he may genuinely

be one of the most successful and lucrative snake oil salesmen on the entirety of the internet well I mean the Pope does have a Twitter account, but sure, I see your point. Last week when I was grocery shopping, I put rice cakes back because they were too fancy. Have you considered lying for a living, Eli? I think about it every day.

Marsh, no, don't. So selling ineffective pills to worried patients, obviously that requires access to quite a large number of worried patients. And so his website quickly became one of the main go-to places for health bullshit. At one point, he was getting like 2 million unique visitors per month on par with the National Institute for Health. So a huge web presence. And his site claimed, for example, that HIV doesn't cause aids there's no relationship instead that exposes you to steroids and the drugs used to treat aids are possibly the real causes of aids the treatment caused the disease yeah even his followers have to recognize the fallacy in that orgasm caused me to masturbate as an argument, no? Well, if the treatment didn't cause the disease,

how come all the people who took the treatment had the disease? Now, I can't think about it. All these people on AIDS medication have got AIDS. Coincidence? He also, on his website, compared vaccination campaigns to the Holocaust. He claimed that measles can be very easily prevented with vitamin C and that the flu can be very easily prevented with vitamin D supplements, a bit like the ones that he sold on his website. Funnily enough. Weird. Do you ever wonder if anyone ever falls for this, but it's just like,

oh, okay, I guess I'll just eat some extra oranges then before they can get sold some bullshit. It's like, oh, no, no, I can't turn it off. It has to be pills. But to be clear, by this point, he wasn't actually saying, buy my own branded vitamin C supplements, they'll stop you getting measles. No, he wasn't saying that. Instead, he just put up articles explaining what miracles vitamin C supplements can perform. And then he'd sell those exact supplements with his name all over them elsewhere on the site. Right.

Or as the FDA puts it, choosing the straight and narrow. A legal business model. Exactly, exactly. But either way, if you Googled McCullough vitamin C, which was the name of the product, the actual name written on the side of the bottle, what you'd get were all of his articles saying that vitamin C was a wonder product on McCullough.com. So you get all that stuff immediately there. And also, if you sign up for his newsletter, which I did in order to write this story, he sends you his latest article on vitamin C. And in that same email, there'll be an ad for money off his vitamin C product. So he's very clearly putting the two back together when it comes to contacting consumers directly.

Yeah, I feel like the next thing you're going to get is like a vial of poison and a bogo for the antidote. So by this point, McCullough had hired a team of writers and translators to pump out articles filled with scary sounding rants about medical fraud and bribes and backhanders and shady deals made by shadowy figures. And every single one of those articles were acting as an eye-catching delivery mechanism for essentially his supplement advertising. Yeah, no, it's the I'm rubber, you're glue school of journalism, right? Very much that, very much that. And at one point, his website housed something like 15,000 articles on a range of alternative medicine topics and talking points,

forming regular points of reference for the anti-vaccine movement, who love him. Chiropractors refer to him all the time. The anti-flu ride movement, you can't move in the anti-vaccine movement, who love him. Chiropractors refer to him all the time. The anti-flu ride movement, you can't move in the anti-flu ride movement without people pointing you back at Joseph McCullough. And pretty much every other alternative health movement you could possibly think of, he's the reference point. I know this probably isn't how it works, but when you said that he has a team of writers,

I'm picturing like a shared office with an unfluoridated water cooler and cake in the break room on birthdays. He even very publicly donated money to an anti-fluoride campaign, though his donations likely amount to a fraction of the profits that he made selling items like water filtration systems that he said could remove fluoride from your water supply. So that donation that came with his name all over the website of the anti-fluoride campaign, that at that point isn't really a donation. It's more the marketing cost of being able to hyper-target your customer base. Right.

But even if it was a donation, it would be to something wrong and dangerous. Yes. So even if he wasn't full of shit, he'd still be full of shit. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then along came COVID-19. Well, and quick, lest the audience get as excited as I did when I read that in the notes, this is not the story about how he died of COVID. No. Yet, Mr. Pessimist, yet.

Are we legally allowed to cross our fingers? Oh, yeah, absolutely. We can. You guys maybe can and I possibly can't. Right, yeah. You do that. You do that. It's fine. Yeah, you're You do that. You do that. It's fine. Yeah, you're allowed to hope all sorts of stuff.

So by the time COVID-19 came along, Mercola had already run the whole pandemic playbook with that avian flu book. And so he just picked up the same rhetoric and just ran with it for COVID. So he relentlessly attacked the messaging from health experts all around the world. He alleged big pharma cover-ups, deep-steer plots.

And meanwhile, he was skimming through the catalogue of products that he sold in order to decide which ones he felt like claiming would cure COVID-19. And at last count, that was something like 23 of his products, including vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, selenium, melatonin, licorice, molecular hydrogen, prebiotics, probiotics, and sporobiotics, licorice molecular hydrogen prebiotics probiotics and sporobiotics saunas ozone therapy elderberry extract spirulina beta glucan lipoic acid and sulforaphane yeah pretty sure licorice made the cut when he accidentally chucked a box of good and plenty into his to be sold for go he just ran with it i just love that he didn't have to add any new products he's like actually as it turns out these 23 i've been selling the cure all along who'd have thought yeah no mike and ike are the scientists I just love that he didn't have to add any new products. He's like, actually, as it turns out, these 23...

I've been selling the cure all along. Who'd have thought? Yeah. No, Mike and Ike are the scientists who worked on it. Listen. So by July 2021, he'd published more than 600 articles making bullshit and dangerous claims about COVID-19 and the vaccine, which actually led to the New York Times crowning him

the most influential spreader of coronavirus misinformation on the entirety of the internet. I mean, Donald Trump did have a Twitter account, but I get it. I didn't see it. He was also named by the Center for Countering Digital Hit as one of the disinformation dozen,

which are the 12 most influential and prolific anti-vaxxers in the world, responsible for the majority of anti-vaccine rhetoric. Yeah, that's cool. That list is like if we knew everyone on America's most wanted list, like where they were, but all the cops were bug-eyed white guys who believed that arresting people was against freedom. So we just let them do their thing. Yeah. Yeah. McCullough published a book which outlined all of his COVID beliefs, which he irritatingly called, quote, the truth about COVID-19,

colon, exposing the great reset, lockdowns, vaccine passports, and the new normal, another colon, why we must unite in a global movement for health and freedom, unquote. Okay, I know the title of my last book was a little wordy, but at least my subtitle didn't have its own subtitle.

Yeah, that's fair. According to a review of the book by friend of the show Jonathan Jarry for the Office of Science and Society little wordy, but at least my subtitle didn't have its own subtitle. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. According to a review of the book by friend of the show, Jonathan Jarry for the Office of Science and Society at McGill University, the book spans the full range of COVID-19 misinformation, from claims that it was deliberately engineered in a lab to claims that the pandemic is designed as a distraction from a globalist plot in order to steal most of the world's financial resources. Hey, that's impressive. You fit two literally oppositional claims into the same book. That's some Ikean levels of bullshit mastery there. Yeah, absolutely. These days, however, if you enter McCullough's website, you wouldn't find 15,000 articles because his entire archive of

bullshit is now behind a paywall, essentially in an attempt to evade scrutiny from skeptics and regulators. Wow. In fact, the free articles that he publishes every day are now set to auto-delete within 48 hours. And when the bullshit, paranoiac, and highly dangerous medical advice you're giving comes with the same self-deletion policy as the briefing tape on Mission Impossible, you know you well and truly deserve an official listing in who's woo all right well marsh thanks once more for reminding us that humanity is doomed and we're going to deserve it when our ignoble end finally comes and in case you forget marsh will be back soon with another who's woo and it's time for the part of the show that comes next listener feedback this is the part of the

show that sneaks up behind you and yells boo our first message comes from well a lot of people actually like an incredibly touching and wonderful amount of people who said happy 500th episode all over the place on facebook on twitter via email uh we got some questions around our 500th episode but first things first no illusions 500 episodes how do you feel about that you're given the original goal was have an excuse to buy a nicer microphone and hang out with heath more? I'd say it exceeded my expectations. Yeah, I was going to say you stole my answer because mine was to hang out with you and Heath more often, and I ended up nailing it, right?

Now I get to hang out with you. You guys legally have to hang out with me three to four days a week, depending on the week. Yeah, now I'm sick and tired of you guys. You've got to travel all over the world with me. It's a whole thing uh got some peripheral follow-up questions here emily asked uh what would you tell yourself if you could go back to episode one great question i and i this is the obvious answer

but i tell myself not to punch down right like there's some cringe worthy shit in our archives but it's not just that that stuff is offensive. That's enough. But it's also that it's embarrassingly lazy. Right. Like the main thing that I learned doing this show over the last nine plus years is that when the funny is easy, it's not going to be very funny. The harder you have to work on it, the better a job you're generally doing. So like taking the easy joke is pretty much never the right answer.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean i i can understand that being a thing for you i don't regret any of my jokes i've told on this show can't really relate i don't really understand what you're talking about but it's fine i'm sure it's a thing for you probably heath has to deal with it as well but no in all seriousness one thing that i would definitely do is i would keep in mind just how wonderful a community we live in. One of the biggest mistakes I think I made early on is getting sucked into community drama that was four people deep.

And not understanding that what I was actually doing by bringing that to our show was upsetting a bunch of people who were just enjoying our comedy podcast by being like, hey, just so you know, Steve over in aisle four thinks that Missoula, Texas is the best barbecue on the block. And it's just like I was bringing drama into our world where there didn't need to be any. And very often I was giving a microphone to voices that needed less microphones. So if only someone had warned me no illusions.

I love the fact that if you could go back to episode one, you would tell yourself the thing I was telling you in episode one. So that's very vindicating. Basically, the lesson we learned is we should listen to no illusions over these 500 episodes all right so uh eli i've got one for you here uh bryce wants to know what was the most memorable

interaction you ever had with a listener oh okay is this bryce blaga laga because me downing a plate of brownies before asking him if they had drugs in them uh it's up there i'm gonna say it is upstairs i believe this was a different bryce but'd imagine so. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, here on episode 500, let's let's set the record straight. I ate those brownies without asking. I have I have shorthanded that story to Bryce block a lock a drug to me. And I realize now in retrospect, it doesn't shine well on poor Bryce. So, yeah, you know, don't eat plates that people hand you just immediately without asking questions. OK, but serious answer like look i know for the vast majority of the people listening to this right now we are just a funny podcast that you listen to and i am super duper grateful

to be funny for a living right that is literally what i have always wanted to be since i was three years old and i am uh but i've also heard from folks that like, we are what got them through chemo, that we got them through crisis, through mourning. And if I'm being honest, I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I'd get to be that for people. So yeah, I mean, if you're one of the people

who has told me over the years that we were what got you through times that were tough just know that it means more to me than you could ever possibly know yeah right it's real hard to answer with anything other than that when we've had so many listeners like tell us that we play an important role in them coping with their depression or their suicidal tendencies or whatever uh obviously those are right at the top but also like we have a listener who was a bit of a shut-in when she first started listening to the show and interacting

with us and now she's traveled all across the country and to another country and is about to travel to a third country just to come and see our live shows and and you know helping her find the the courage to do all that that still makes me smile till it hurts yeah and she rules by the way so like it's also a gift to those countries exactly yeah uh and finally a lot of people of course asked why heath was unable to join us for such a momentous episode but actually heath managed to show up just uh long enough to answer that question for himself uh so heath why aren't you here oh he's ripped his dick off jerking off his mom or whatever oh i i thought we were uh not admitting that. Okay, all right. Well, there you have it.

All right. Well, that's good. All right. Tell Andrew to cancel the press release. Yep. All right, Heath. Take us home. And that's all the feedback you get. If you want more, keep sending your questions and comments to at PIATpod on Twitter. Before we lock up for the night, I want to remind you that there's still time to come see us in England at QED. Thank you. We have a brand new episode of our sister show's hot friend, God Off With Movies, debuting at 7 Eastern on Tuesday, and an even newer episode of our half-sister show, Citation Needed, debuting at noon Eastern on Wednesday. Obviously, this show would feel frameless if I neglected to thank Eli Bosney for being so cool,

Michael Marshall for being so hot, and Heath for being so awesome that even when he isn't here, you can still feel his presence. I also want to thank Lucinda Lusions for earning the sin syllable in her name. I also want to thank Scotty Califf for providing this week's Farnsworth quote. I don't want to link to her work on the show notes for this episode for fear of getting dinged on iTunes, but if you're intrigued, look her up on Audible. Oh, and hey, congrats on nine months smoke-free, Scotty. Hell of an accomplishment. But most of all, of course, I want to thank this

week's best bipeds, Stephen, James, Doug, Mark, Joel, Vanya, Molotov, SirArcane, Hiro, Quartermaster, Jacob, Thorne, listen to brand new science fiction, Sarah, Laura, and Tess. Stephen, James, Doug, Mark, and Joel, whose condoms have to be built at sea. Vanya, Sir Arcane, Hiro, and Jacob, whose IQs are so high their brains have

express elevators. And new sci-fi, Sarah, Laura, and Tess, who are so badass, champagne bubbles know better than to tickle their nose. Together, these 13 people, titles, and imperatives made us feel lucky as all hell this week by giving us money. Not everybody has the sweet katana skills it takes to give us money, but if your swordsmanship is up

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on Twitter. Legal services for this podcast are provided by the Law Offices of B. Andrew Torres, Tim Robertson handles our social media and our audio engineer is Martin Clark, who also wrote all the music that was used in this episode, which was used with permission. If you have questions, comments, or death threats, you can find all the contact info on the contact page at scathingatheist.com. I fucking love the Waldasher missile.

I love the Waldasher missile. As do I. The preceding podcast was a production of Puzzle and a Thunderstorm LLC copyright 2022 all rights reserved.