The End of the World with Michael and Stu

This week we are devoting a full episode to news, recapping the first week of Donald Trump's second term as president. We discuss the myriad executive orders the president has issued, ranging from his pardons, to his crackdown at the border, to his taking the United States out of the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement. What are the long term implications of these moves, and is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Is there a tunnel? Are we just now in a cave at the center of the earth? In order to find out, you must listen.

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This week we are discussing Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road. A bleak but simultaneously uplifting depiction of a journey through a world in which nature has been totally destroyed, the story offers glimmers of hope in spite of its incredibly grim setting. Themes of childhood, memory, dreaming, and perseverance even in the face of seemingly inevitable death mark this book, which is considered by many to be among the finest novels of the twenty-first century.
We also open up the conversation with some thoughts on recent presidential cabinet appointments, which are, as you might imagine...going just great!
This episode contains spoilers for The Road.

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This week we are tackling one of Stu's all-time favorite comics, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen. We go through the main characters and discuss the apocalyptic ramifications of this extremely well-wrought tale of a society on the edge of destruction. We also tease out the implications of costumed vigilantism suggested by Moore's text, considering how it is these figures which have such a large place in popular culture have no purchase at all in reality. Would a Watchmen-esque scheme to unite the world work in our current reality, or have things like Covid-19 and climate change proven the folly of this premise in our extremely jaded, partisan, too-online world?

We also cover the rise in flu cases across the country and how recent actions by the CDC are not helping with this issue at all.

This episode contains spoilers for the graphic novel Watchmen.

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This week we are diving into the weird world of Robert Francis Kennedy, Jr., the newly confirmed Secretary of Health and Human Services in the second Trump administration. We go over his history of environmental activism and chart how this morphed into a profoundly conspiracist worldview that, with him now in control of the levers of power in the American health sector, has the potential to do enormous harm to the well-being of the citizens of this country and indeed the citizens of the world. We honestly had too much material for this episode, and even having gone a bit longer than we normally do, we still left out much that could have been discussed, but we focus in on his vaccine skepticism, his opposition to drinking water fluoridation, as well as his specific criticisms of Dr. Fauci and the governmental response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The sources for our research can be found below. We also discuss some of the wackier incidents involving...animals.

We open the episode discussing the recent protests outside Tesla dealerships as well as the efforts to crush free speech being carried out by the Trump administration.

We didn't mention it in the episode, but next week we will be diving into the crisis of the late Roman Republic.

The New York Times on RFK Jr.'s history of vaccine skepticism

Think Global Health on the origins of RFK Jr.'s anti-vaccine activism

Claremont Review of Books review of RFK Jr.'s book on Anthony Fauci

CBS News on RFK Jr.'s anti-fluoridation stance

Protect Our Care on why RFK Jr. is the worst imaginable HHS Secretary

The Cut on RFK Jr. initiating yet another examination of autism and vaccines

Stat News on RFK Jr.'s nieces attempts to discuss covid with him

NPR on the infamous Central Park Bear incident

The AP on the time RFK Jr. drove home with a severed whale head on his roof

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This week we are discussing avian flu and the possibility that it might be the next pandemic ahead of us, just over the horizon. We get into the history of influenza outbreaks originating in domesticated animals, such as, most famously, the so-called "Spanish flu" of 1918 in order to calibrate how potentially worrying such an outbreak could be should it arise, particularly in the post-COVID political context in which we now live.
We also discuss the recent assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson (we mistakenly call him Brian Johnson in the episode, apologies), the sudden fall of the Assad regime in Syria, as well as a worrying new disease which has recently emerged in Congo.
Reuters story on the Congo mystery illness:
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/who-sends-experts-help-congo-diagnose-mystery-disease-2024-12-06/
ABC News story on early human cases of avian flu:
https://www.abc15.com/news/state/arizona-sees-first-case-of-human-bird-flu-in-pinal-county-health-officials-report#google_vignette
LA Times story on another early human case:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-12-07/possible-h5n1-case-in-marin-co-child-source-of-infection-unknown
Scientific American story about the dangers of this influenza strain:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bird-flu-virus-is-one-mutation-away-from-adapting-to-human-cells/
NPR story on raw milk and bird flu:
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/06/nx-s1-5220272/testing-usda-bird-flu-raw-milk-california

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