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Falun Gong and Organ Harvesting
36 Plays6 years ago
In our continuing (and inadvertant) crusade to get ourselves banned or mired in controversy with countries and large organisations, we talk about claims the Chinese government harvests the organs of the members of Falun Gong. We also talk a little about Roger Stone, another case of Novichok poisoning in the U.K., and explain why we are not going ahead with the production of hardcore pornography.
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Transcript
Introduction and Personal Anecdotes
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the podcast's guide to the conspiracy.
00:00:07
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Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I'm your Southern Hemisphere correspondent, Josh Edison, in Auckland, New Zealand. And our Northern Hemisphere correspondent is, as always, Dr. M.R. Extenteth in Bucharest, Romania. Who has recently returned from Prague. I don't know why I said Prague in that way. It was lovely. It could be spooky. It was, as you know, it was actually quite fascinating. So I bumped into
David Farrier's Documentary Secrecy
00:00:50
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dark tourist starts July 20th promises to be very interesting and then David was very mysterious about his next documentary effort in that a little bit like me
00:00:59
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David Farrier.
00:01:06
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When it comes to new ideas, sometimes you just don't want to share them with people until you start working on them because the power kind of just disappears from the idea if you talk about it before you start committing to actually working on it. Yes, I know what you mean.
00:01:25
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Have you met him before? Are you known to him? Oh, yes. Yeah. He and I are known to each other. I will say that in the most salacious way possible, even though there's nothing salacious about it. Or is there? I honestly don't know.
00:01:43
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Well, introductions aside, shall we go on with the news so that then we can go on with the main topic and then just keep going on until the end of time?
Patreon's Adult Content Crackdown
00:01:52
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Indeed. We'll dig into the news and then we'll dig into each other's organs. Mmm. It sounds like fun. Breaking, breaking, conspiracy theories in the news. So.
00:02:07
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In news, that's less about conspiracies than it is about podcasters' guides to them. Patreon have recently been cracking down on accounts that feature adult content. This is especially disappointing for us, since it means we have to shelve our plans to include hardcore pornography in these broadcasts. Yes, despite the fact that multiple audience surveys have shown unequivocally that what our audience wants is solid helpings of unmitigated filth to accompany their thoughtful dissections of conspiratorial matters,
00:02:37
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It seems we have no choice but to pull our hands back up, shave off our trucker moustaches and send the Belgian national gendered on specific first division across team home. Our attention was that the pornographic content would have been produced by and starring ourselves, obviously. We're very sorry about this. Here at the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, our mission has always been to give our audience exactly what they want, to give it to them hard and in copious volume over and over
00:03:07
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And over again, oh look, two more firemen. Watch it. You're skirting the guidelines as it is. At any rate, to ensure that our sweet sweet Patreon moolah keeps rolling on in, we're going to have to keep this podcast above the waistline, at least for the foreseeable future.
00:03:25
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We know, we're as disappointed as you are.
Roger Stone's Political Maneuvers
00:03:29
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Moving on, perhaps we should say something about President Trump and the Russian thing? Well, it certainly is news, and there's a lot of it. But rather than talk about Trump, let's take a moment to talk about Roger Stone. Ah, yes, Roger Stone, the Kennedy supporter who turned to conservatism due to Barry Goldwater. Stone is a Republican fixer, which is polite speak for finds out the dirt on your opponents.
00:03:53
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And he's worked with Richard, Tricky Dickey Dixon, Nixon, Dixon, Nixon. Ronald, I'm a former unionist Reagan, possibly worked on the George, I have two middle initials, H.W. Bush's campaign, got ousted from Bob Dole's campaign for soliciting sex partners for him and his then wife. I should point out, we're not slut-shaming here. There's nothing wrong with multiple sex partners as long as everyone is a consenting adult. Yes, and eventually, the Trump campaign initially officially
00:04:23
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And now it seems unofficially. He also runs a personal website called the Stone Zone. Missed a trick by not calling it the Stoner. Or the Stoner's Zone. Whatever the miscalculation of his website's name, Stone is both a respected fixer in the conservative community and rather fond of conspiracy theories.
00:04:44
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He's written books on how Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the death of JFK. We've mentioned in previous episodes his theory that the Clintons run a murder racket, and quite interestingly, given his previous works for H.W. Bush, a book on how the Bush family is really a crime family. That book targets Jeb Bush in particular, and interestingly enough came out during the primaries, when Stone was fixing for Trump.
Mueller's Russian Probe and Its Impact
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And there's a conspiracy theory right there. But for our purposes, it's more interesting the fact that Stone has been associated with the Russian collusion angle on Trump, in part because it's Roger Stone, and also because he used to work with Paul Manafort, who we've talked about previously. He's someone with quite clear ties to Russian oligarchs.
00:05:28
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Anyway, Stone has been subpoenaed by Robert Mueller in the Russian probe, and Stone is filing to have the grand jury subpoena dismissed, arguing that the subpoena is an example of judicial overreach. Basically, Stone's argument is that Mueller has too much power, and thus needs a judicial slap on the wrist. Now, this argument was tried by Paul Manafort to no success,
00:05:55
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So it's likely it won't work again here. However, a judge has recently dismissed charges of Stone being involved in the collusion with Russia. Game over, man! Game over! Eh, not quite. You see, that charge was not part of the Mueller investigation. It was brought forward by two DNC donors, Roy Cochram and Eric Schoenberg, as well as a former DNC staffer, Scott Corner, after the WikiLeaks dump of the DNC and Clinton emails.
00:06:19
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That suit was filed in Washington DC, and the judge in question has said she has not ruled on the merits of the case, but rather the location. Yes, Washington DC is not, she argued, the proper venue for the plaintiff's suit. This is one of those curious aspects of US law. You have to have standing to be able to file a suit in a particular jurisdiction. And apparently there's just no standing in Washington DC.
00:06:45
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But really, we only bring you this news to emphasize that Stone has a website called The Stone Zone.
00:06:51
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And also because if Stone is forced to testify, you can bet, based on his previous books, that the testimony will be something quite special. And not just that. Stone is a regular fixture on the Alex Jones suite of channels, and his latest claim is that George Soros has infiltrated the White House, and was at one stage getting daily briefings on the goings on
Soros' Alleged Influence Through Stone
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there.
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Now, this is one of those things which is kind of true if you squint at it enough. There are a lot of people in the civil service in Washington DC who have at one time or another worked for an NGO that has received Soros Foundation money. Soros's various open government initiatives and the like produce people who then go on to have careers in government. And Stone seems to think that finding examples of people who worked with NGOs backed in part or entirely by the Soros Foundation
00:07:44
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Suffices to show that Soros is the one who's really in control. Indeed, whilst Stone can and will point towards specific examples of people he thinks works with Soros, including now ousted National Security Advisor General H.R. McMaster, his sources for the actual truth of the conspiracy tend to be nameless sources in the US or Israeli government.
00:08:11
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But given that Stone is rather fond of grandiose claims, he's not very good at backing them up. His book on the assassination of JFK by LBJ, for example, is considered to be sensationalised at the very least. And his hagiography of Nixon and the Watergate affair is considered by Watergate scholars to paint a picture designed to absolve Nixon of any complicity in the conspiracy. Let's just say he's not so much a scholar as he is a dirty trickster. Or as they say in polite circles,
00:08:40
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a fixer for the Republicans.
UK's Vote Leave and Be Leave Controversy
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Meanwhile, in the UK, it looks like the Vote Leave campaign, which campaigned in favour of Brexit, is going to be fined because it broke spending limits and failed to comply with some of the rules of the campaign. What is fascinating about this is that the UK's electoral commission has issued a draft report some 500 pages in length before laying charges.
00:09:05
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Crucially, the issue seems to be that Vote Leave managed to skirt campaign finance rules by donating some of its excess money to another campaign, believe that that's B and leave. Initially, Vote Lead said this hadn't happened. Then it said it had happened, but it wasn't a coordinated plan.
00:09:24
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But the Electoral Commission says they have sufficient evidence to show that this was indeed collusion between the two campaigns. Well, between two allegedly different campaigns. Part of the claim against Vote Leave is that Be Leave was really just a subsidiary of Vote Leave itself. And sticking with the UK, an unusual and presumably developing story,
00:09:50
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Two people are in a critical condition after being exposed to an unknown substance near where the screepiles were poisoned in Wiltshire. And as of recording this episode, the Metropolitan Police are confirming that the couple were poisoned with Novichok nerve agent. The operating assumption is that this is some residue or leftover material from that earlier incident.
00:10:15
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As the Met has noted, there's nothing in the history of the coupled who suggests the pair were targeted. Unlike the Screeples, which the UK alleges had been under surveillance by the Russians since about 2013.
New Novichok Poisoning Incident
00:10:28
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Expect to hear more on the new Novichok poisoning case if news develops. Indeed. And I think we're done. Time to talk about organ harvesting. Fair enough, roll the theme.
00:10:44
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What? No, no, not that one. The plans are off from the old theme. The old theme. And we're back. Ow! My liver! You're getting ahead of it. We've got to build up to this thing. My kidneys! Yes. Today... All of my arteries. All of them? Yep, all of them. They're all gone. Oh, gosh. That's going to make a horrible mess on your carpets, man. You want to do something about that fairly quickly.
Falun Gong and Chinese Organ Harvesting Allegations
00:11:11
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Anyway, so shout outs to long time listener Jim who suggested via the medium of Facebook the other week that one thing we haven't talked about is the conspiracy theories around Falun Gong and whether or not the practitioners of it are being imprisoned and having the organs harvested by the Chinese government and in general, Chinese organ harvesting
00:11:37
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overall because it is quite an interesting topic. It is, and I've got a bit of personal history on this, so I for a long time have been quite sceptical about the organ harvesting claims being made by Fei Long Gong, and in part it's due to
00:11:56
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A terrible event back in October of 2007, so people who can drag their minds back that far and also come from Aotora, New Zealand, will recall that October 2007 is when the October raids occurred. So the raids on Tuhoe and Tuhoe activists and Maori sovereignty activists, which led to charges under the terrorism suppression
00:12:22
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Act in Aotaro, New Zealand, those charges which were eventually laid to one side. And I went to a public meeting where a bunch of lawyers were talking about the defence of the suspected terrorists, and at the very end when there was Christian time, someone stood up and went, you know, this is
00:12:43
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This is really quite quite terrible, but we have to also remember that the poor people of Fei Long Gong in China are having their organs harvested and we need to be able to show solidarity to these people as well. And that was a case of an activist
00:12:59
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not really reading the mood of the room. We were there to hear about the charges against the accused and what the defense would be to show they weren't terrorists and this person stood up and went but also and then brought Fei Long Gong into it and so from that point onwards up until about a few years ago
00:13:22
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Whenever people mentioned Fei Long Gong and organ harvesting, I kind of rolled my eyes because whilst I recognise that Fei Long Gong members have issues in China, I kind of thought the organ harvesting thing was a kind of propaganda thing they were doing to get sympathy. But as we will see in this episode,
00:13:44
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previous me may well have been wrong about that and previous me was wrong about well didn't hold those claims seriously because of what happened in october 2007 which is just one of those things that makes you rethink your assumptions and also your prejudices yes i mean my my personal collection too far long gone is a little more tenuous but um
00:14:11
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I actually drive past the Chinese embassy pretty much every day. And I used to work in a building just down the road from it. And so quite often as you drive past the air, even down here in Altaro in New Zealand, on quite a regular basis, you'll see Falun Gong protesters outside doing their meditation exercises in front of a big banner that talks about live organ harvesting.
Falun Gong's Historical Context
00:14:33
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Having spoken to people about Falun Gong in the past, they seem to have a fairly dim opinion of it as a
00:14:40
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quasi-religion, well, it's not a religion, it's quite determinedly not a religion, and we'll look at that in a little bit. But as a sort of meditative spiritual technique and what have you, I've heard people say it's really just a little bit, kind of a little bit of a load of bollocks and a little bit of the sort of, you know, ancient Chinese secrets that were invented in 1992. And yet at the same time, being a load of bollocks doesn't mean that it's not also unfairly persecuted by the Chinese government.
00:15:10
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And certainly, as I've said in other forums, if the US government started rounding up Scientologists and harvesting their organs, that would be a horrific human rights abuse. But it wouldn't mean Scientology isn't bollocks. Please don't sue us, Scientology, but you are bollocks. But maybe we should
00:15:29
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take a step back and actually have a look at the history of it and exactly what it is that we're talking about. Do you want to lead off or shall I take this bit? Josh, you're the biggest fan of the 90s here, so I think you should take the lead on all 90s related history. Well, that's entirely fair. So go put your flannel shit on, put on a bit of grunge and take us back to the 1990s.
00:15:52
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I'm always wearing a flannel shirt in my soul. That must really hurt. It's quite cozy on a cold winter night like this. So we can actually go all the way back to the 1950s if we wanted. Because Falun Gong comes out of the Qigong movement that kind of started up in China in the 1950s. Now Qigong is something that has genuinely been around for thousands of years. It's just sort of refers to the
00:16:20
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sort of meditative techniques that people used for physical and mental improvement. It's part of most Chinese martial arts, really. In fact, practicing martial arts can be thought of as a kind of qigong sometimes, especially when you're drilling the same movement over and over again, trying to perfect it as people do in Tai Chi and that sort of thing. So I've been around for a while, but then come the Cultural Revolution and Chairman now and communism and all that business, religion
00:16:50
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was very much on the outs in communist China. And any sort of Chinese religions were sort of labelled feudalist superstitions and were not at all in favour. And so in the 50s, these Qigong movements came up that were very much not religious movements. They were simply meditative sorts of techniques.
00:17:19
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that were all about health. They were about making you more physically healthy and more mentally and spiritually healthy. And sort of very much placed themselves in the tradition of Chinese medicine. So they made an effort to publicly very much divorce themselves from any sort of religious aspect. It was all about physical health and science to the extent that
00:17:45
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In the 1970s, certain Chinese scientists actually claimed to have confirmed the material existence of qi, which is the life energy that you're supposedly channeling while doing qi gong exercises, which I think is possibly a step too far. Certainly, you can treat qi as a sort of phlogiston kind of thing where there is a real phenomena and it's to do with blood circulation and hormones going throughout your body and
00:18:13
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your brain producing theta waves and all sorts of crap like that. And talk about qi is just kind of a shorthand for all these much more complex processes. But I think they were actually trying to say that no, it's a real mystical thing. But anyway, so this was this was sort of embraced by the Chinese government in 1985, the state run China Qigong Science Research Society was formed to sort of oversee and sort of register all these different schools of Qigong exercises.
00:18:40
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And then in the 1990s, a man by the name of Li Hongzhi came up with his system called Falongong, which was, I should say, as we'll see in a minute, a kind of a Qigong school of its own. It had all the usual physical meditative exercises. It had an amount of sort of
00:19:07
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I don't want to say pre-tuness because it was, again, taking pain to not be a religion. But there were, it was concerned with the moral well-being of its practitioners. There were things about emphasize being part of society, for instance, so not retreating like some sort of hermit to practice to do your meditation under a waterfall in front of the mountain. It was about living in wind society with everyone else. It also
00:19:34
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was quite a conservative morality. So it taught that promiscuity and homosexuality were bad things, which in fairly conservative China, I don't think was much of a problem. But as it moved into the West, there was a bit more friction. It got on the wrong side of the China Qigong Science Research Society. In the late 90s, there were disagreements about apparently
00:19:57
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All of these Tugong movements tend to charge a bit of money. There are sort of textbooks to buy and they'll charge for lessons and what have you. Apparently Falun Gong was undercutting a lot of the competition. It was selling its things quite cheaply, which the rest of the organization wasn't too fond of. And there were various sort of arguments and disagreements and eventually they left the society. One of the consequences of that was that they were no longer state sanctioned and didn't have a state sanctioned body to stick up for them in case they got into any other sort of trouble.
00:20:27
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and trouble they started to get into. In April of 1999, a newspaper article critical of Falun Gong was written by a scientist with apparently quite close ties to the Chinese government. So this was sort of seen as the government stomping on Falun Gong a bit. They protested a little bit and then protested in larger numbers. And the large protest was eventually broken up by riot police.
00:20:53
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And all this led to on the 20th of July, 1999, apparently security forces went, had quite the purge, went through and abducted and detained thousands of Falun Gong practitioners that they identified as leaders within the movement. And two days later, the People's Republic of China Ministry of Civil Affairs outlawed the Falun Dafa Research Society, the body behind it, as an illegal organization, quote,
00:21:19
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engaged in illegal activities, advocating superstition and spreading fallacies, hoodwinking people, inciting and creating disturbances and jeopardizing social stability.
00:21:28
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So at that point Falun Gong became outlawed by the Chinese government. So yeah, what's interesting about this is of course, people outside of China became quite fascinated in what's going on here. I mean, there are lots of these Qi Gong movements in China. And yes, this one in particular was no longer state sanctioned, but it wasn't as if they seemed to be doing anything at odds with the Chinese state at that particular point in time.
00:21:57
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Their only sin seemed to be that they weren't party affiliated. And so foreign observers tried to explain why the communist government in China. So people went, so why have they done this?
00:22:13
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And they talked about maybe there's a fear of another Taiping rebellion. So there's been this period of time in Chinese history where these quasi-religious movements have actually turned into violent insurrection. So maybe the party was concerned that without there being state control over this group,
00:22:39
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this group might rapidly move towards an insurrectionist movement. Then, of course, it was the fact that once they became independent from the state and lost their state sanction, there was probably an assumption that in communist China, Falun Gong would just disappear.
00:23:01
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That would have been the polite thing to do, but no, Fei Longong continued to operate without state sanction. And that was concerning to the Communist Party, who want to have their fingers in every pie.
00:23:16
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And there was also a worry that maybe Falun Gong was becoming slightly more spiritual and thus getting slightly closer to being a religious movement, which of course put it at odds with aspects of the so-called official, and I'm putting air quotes here for listeners, Marxist ideology that the Communist Party of China is meant to engage in. Now, yes, you mentioned the Taiping Rebellion.
00:23:45
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Longer-term listeners will remember that's something we've talked about on this very podcast some time ago. That was a civil war that incidentally happened around the same time as the American Civil War, and yet was a hell of a lot bigger. I believe, I don't have our notes in front of me, but from memory, it was the biggest civil war ever and one of the biggest armed conflicts ever. And that was, yes, it was a sort of religious movement
00:24:11
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fusion of Western Christianity and Chinese religion that turned into, yes, this massive bloody insurrection. So I could sort of understand a reluctance in that. Yeah, things apparently just continued to snowball. And since the late 90s, it's been claimed that hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners have been imprisoned without trial.
Organ Harvesting Investigations
00:24:35
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And while imprisoned have been
00:24:37
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are subject to forced labor have been abused and tortured in an effort to convert them away from Falun Gong up until the point where people have made the claims that Falun Gong practitioners, among others, have been killed and had their organs harvested to supply the organ transplant trade in China, which is where we get to the particularly conspiratorial things. So yeah, organ transplants in China, legit or not,
00:25:07
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No, that doesn't really work. So it's kind of well known that if you need a new organ, say a liver, a set of kidneys, and there's a waiting list in your Western nation,
00:25:26
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Then you can go to China and for some of money and a very short waiting time you can get the replacement organ of your desire.
00:25:41
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And so there's been questions as to how is China so efficient when it comes to organ transplant, when the West is not. Now the Chinese government's official line is A, their population is gigantic, so the pool of possible donors is much larger than that in the West.
00:26:04
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And also the Chinese government has been willing to admit that they do take organs from executed prisoners, because China still has capital punishment for certain crimes. And once a prisoner is dead,
00:26:23
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their bodies of no use to the state anymore, and so their organs can be distributed to the many for the well-being and health of the population in general.
00:26:37
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The issue is, people think that the numbers just don't add up. Or do they, Joshua? Well, indeed. Yes, apparently, there are very, very low rates of people signing up to be organ donors in China. It's not a popular thing for various sort of cultural reasons. So in the 80s, they passed this law.
00:26:59
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saying that it was legal to harvest organs from executed prisoners, provided the prisoners had consented or that no one claimed the body. In 2001, a Chinese military doctor apparently testified before the US Congress that he had taken part in organ extraction operations from executed and prisoners, some of whom were not yet dead, which is getting into considerably dodgier territory. And then as you say, the numbers don't quite add up.
00:27:28
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going by the number of executions that China will admit to, the number of legal executions of convicted prisoners, and the number of organs that are apparently available, there's a mismatch there. And in particular, when we're talking about organ transplants, you can't just stick organs on ice. An organ has to be removed from a living body, transported as quickly as possible to the donor, to the the
00:27:57
Speaker
and transported into them as quickly as possible, which means that in order for there to be organs available as readily as they are, people have to be dying either a lot,
00:28:11
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or basically dying to order. And of course, people are dying a lot in China. As I said previously, China has a gigantic population. So just by population statistics, people are dying all the time. But as you point out, people aren't signing up to be organ donors. And whilst China does imprison and execute a lot of prisoners, as we say, the numbers don't add up.
00:28:41
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But then there's the addition, which suggests that maybe there are slightly more executions going on than China's willing to admit, which then suggests, or raises the question, I don't know why I keep saying the word suggest here, which raises the question, who are they executing
00:29:04
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And why? And that's where Fei Long Gong comes back in. Because Fei Long Gong claims not only are they suffering political persecution, but when they are imprisoned, they're also being killed off to satisfy this demand for organ transplants. Now, obviously, the official position out of China is that none of this is true. That this doesn't happen,
00:29:30
Speaker
They supply organs from executed prisoners, primarily end of story. But obviously, these claims are not something that one can ignore. And so people outside of China have listened and conducted various investigations of their own. There has not, to my knowledge, been any
00:29:50
Speaker
actual hardcore concrete proof that this is what's happening. But there has been quite a bit of anecdotal evidence of interviewing people who claim to have good knowledge of what's going on and then saying that's what's happening. In particular, in 2006, some investigators carried out a sort of a sting operation in which they placed calls to hospitals and police detention centers in China claiming to be organ or looking for organ transplants.
00:30:20
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and said, how quickly can you get these organs, specific organs that we need? How are you able to supply them? And supposedly these phone calls, they did actually record people saying, oh, yes, we can get these organs. We've got a bunch of these Falun Gong people locked up, and we can harvest organs from them whenever you need them. So there is evidence it's just never been
00:30:45
Speaker
enough evidence, I guess, to get China to fess up. I mean, there have been documentaries, so there are two notable documentaries from the last decade, Hard to Believe and Human Harvest, in which documentarians from the West go to China
00:31:02
Speaker
and basically interview people and in some cases entrap people to get them to make the claim that some of the organs that are being used for these transplants come from Feilong Gong practitioners. And as you say there's never been any formal complaint to the Chinese government.
00:31:22
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about this particular process. But of course that gets us into the murky world of international politics and the fact that certain Western powers don't really like to rock the boat when it comes to human rights abuses.
00:31:40
Speaker
So as we're seeing with America's reproachment with Saudi Arabia, America's new reproachment with North Korea, and the US's rather contentious relationship with
00:31:57
Speaker
mainland China, often to get the economic benefits of trade, governments are willing to look the other way at suspected or known human rights abuses, which can make Western powers quite
00:32:15
Speaker
explicit in helping cover up what appear to be terrible things happening in nation states, who sometimes also have the temerity to complain about human rights abuses elsewhere. So I mean, these investigations which have been conducted, they generally tend to end up saying, yeah, it probably is happening. And yet aren't able to come up with, you know, anything, I don't know what would be conclusive enough where you'd have to
00:32:44
Speaker
I mean, you'd actually have to get someone killed, essentially, you'd have to you'd have to provide proof that a person of someone's execution and then their organs being chopped out of them, which is perhaps a little extreme. So we're in the situation to bring things back to conspiracy theories when we have a conspiracy theory that these human rights abuses are happening and that they are being covered up by the Chinese government.
00:33:10
Speaker
And it looks like these theories are fairly well warranted. They've not been proved conclusively true, but there is at least enough evidence about them that we can't dismiss them out of hand. Yes, it's one of those cases where, given available explanations for the phenomena, the phenomena being both
00:33:32
Speaker
resolving the question, are Feilongong practitioners been harvested for their organs? And also, why is it that China is so efficient at organ transplants?
Personal Reflections on Organ Harvesting Theories
00:33:43
Speaker
It seems that a likely contender here is that China is indeed taking the organs from Feilongong practitioners and presumably other dissidents as well. Other political prisoners, yeah.
00:33:57
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which then means you can go, yeah, this seems like it's in the pool of likely explanations. And the fact that China itself claims otherwise means they're covering up this process, which gives us our conspiracy theory. Indeed. So there you have it. So now we've in recent episodes, we've had a go at Scientologists, at Putin's Russia,
00:34:23
Speaker
in our communist China. So quite frankly, I'll be a little bit disappointed if we don't end up in a bathtub full of ice with both our kidneys missing sometime fairly soon, really. Which does make me get a little bit concerned about what my flight path back to Auckland would be at the end of this month. Yes. So I guess we've come to the end of an episode.
00:34:46
Speaker
Do you have any plans for the next week? You better not be planning to age another year. I might be planning to age another year next week. You and your aging, it needs to stop. It'll be the death of you. Look, you only turned 14 once. That's all I'm saying. That is a true fact about every human being, yes. Oh well. So perhaps next week we can all
00:35:12
Speaker
join together, all of us and all of you sitting around in front of your podcasting engines, I assume, shovelling coal into them to keep the words coming, and maybe sing a rousing round of Happy Birthday, but not yet, because it hasn't happened yet.
00:35:29
Speaker
No. And of course, because I live in a different time zone now, there's a case. Do I celebrate my birthday in New Zealand time or Romanian time? And I've gone for New Zealand time because it turns out that the 8th of July, of course, starts on Saturday evening here. So it's the perfect time to start. I can celebrate the time back home at a convenient evening time in Romania. Well, fabulous. I'll leave you in that case.
00:35:59
Speaker
to plan your whatever birthday hijinks you get up to in between now and next episode. And to you and the rest of our listeners, I expect I should say,
00:36:08
Speaker
Goodbye. And I will say, la riva de re. Works for me. You've been listening to the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. It is written, researched and performed by Josh Addison, aka monkeyfluids, and MRXtenteth, aka Conspiracism on Twitter. This podcast is available where all good podcasts can be found, as well as iTunes, Podbean and Stitcher.
00:36:37
Speaker
It can also be watched on YouTube. Just search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, or, if you happen to be technophobic, consult the auguries. You can support the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy via our Patreon page, as listed in the podcast description, or just by searching for us on Patreon.
00:37:00
Speaker
You can also support us via the Podbean patronage system, if that is more your style. You do you. If you want to get in contact with us, why not email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com, or find us on Facebook. And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.