"Try to be the pond."

There’s a thread running through a few of the topics we cover this week: how fomenting unreality can turn into real harms suffered by real people in the real world. Like how Russian propaganda led directly to Putin’s war against Ukraine; like how deregulation of media in the US has allowed a mythological “patriotism” for conservative Americans to fester, which has increasingly manifested as real-world violence; and like how Republicans' inventing an imaginary and extraordinary need for retirement funding nearly killed the Post Office. We also cover a couple of nifty new words for our vocab repertoire, and an elementary school lesson about ponds and fish that every adult needs to hear.