Share Prices May Go Down, As Well As Really Down

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers, and welcome to issue 4334 of The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world, which since 2007 has been chronicling the descent of humanity into an everlasting chasm of...

Sorry, so let's lighten the mood a bit.

Audio newspaper for a world in which the lambs frolic happily in the springtime fields blissfully unaware of their impending role in the industrialized kebab industry no no i'll just give up uh welcome to the bugle i'm uh andy zoltzman here in london and uh we are going big on the west coast vibe this week this is the podcast equivalent of a beach boys nirvana crossover surf grunge festival reunion joining me uh all the way from uh the usa nato green and jackie cashian hello both of you hello hello andy hello buglers.

Hello Andy.

Hello buglers.

How's America doing?

How's America doing?

We have a cold it turns out and it might be cold.

Quite.

So we don't know.

There's trouble.

I always wanted our empire to go down with a whimper instead of a bang, but here we go.

Here we go folks.

I don't know.

Just sort of a descent would have been nice.

Andy, Andy, I just want to acknowledge the awesome and undeniable power of this podcast.

Yeah.

Because you probably saw the news in the last week that some pro-Palestine activists vandalized the Trump Golf Club in Turnbury, Scotland.

And longtime listeners of the Bugle will recall that I may or may not have suggested exactly that activity on a prior episode of the Bugle.

And so I think we can give this podcast credit for incepting

that idea into

the minds of the pro-Palestinian movement.

But we claim no liability because it's all bullshit.

And with that in mind,

no one gets the idea to catapult Elon Musk into the Bay of Pigs.

No one think of that.

He must have the technology to do that himself, to be honest.

I think that's the world's biggest hope at the moment is that Elon Musk will develop a piece of technology that will fire him into space eternally.

Not quite.

I want him to live for all eternity floating around in the endless vacuum of space.

I saw that movie.

I'm pro that movie.

He did say that he was going to do his next manned flight.

He said he was going to do the next manned SpaceX flight.

And I was like, it couldn't happen to a nicer guy, please.

As long as he's published space.

We are recording on the 14th of March, 2025, on this day in 44 BC.

Well, that was the last time Julius Caesar got through a whole day without being assassinated.

So well done, him.

Couldn't quite keep that streak going any further, but it was good while it lasted for Big Julius.

As always, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin.

This week, a palindromes section.

This is issue 4334 of the bugle.

So it seems a good time to delve into the eternal human fascination with palindrome.

So, why are we as a species more fascinated with palindromes than any other species in the history of the universe?

Well, I guess it could come down to the cycle of human life, starting helplessly and with no control of your bodily functions, then a phase when you're generally not burdened by too many responsibilities and often develop more extreme political views, then adulthoods, a prolonged scrabble around for purpose, sense, meaning, and money, and then, well, the journey backwards begins.

So, we have our special palindrome section, the longest, we look back at the longest palindrome ever, which according to a let's call it five-minute search on the internet, was 1.15 million words long.

There was a blog post about it in 2018 by a chap called Roland Meertens.

It's not a great read, the 1.15 million word long palindrome, it's fair to say.

Almost six million characters

making a kind of splat of unconnected and mostly obscure words and names.

But if you went in it 24-7, you could read it out loud at a bus stop in just 108 hours or so, including toilet breaks.

You should start at noon, obviously.

Also, we look back at some of the famous last words that have been palindromes.

Many celebrity British execution stars from back in the day who were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered,

chose for their last words to be a palindrome, that palindrome being

We also look at the future of the palindrome.

AI is now so advanced that it could create a palindromic right-wing video diatribe about how wokeness has destroyed the haberdasher industry and taken all the fun out of war crimes that would last for 15.7 billion years.

But would that take the childish excitement out of discovering that God's boobs dog is the same backwards as forwards?

Can we ask, should palindromes

palindromes be banned?

Are palindromes legacies of imperialism?

Or should they be compulsory?

And are we long overdue a rebalancing of language, which has been so heavily biased towards words that aren't the same in both directions?

Does a sausage count as a palindrome because you can eat it the same from both ends?

Would Napoleon have been more successful if he'd been called Napolopan?

And in an e-car race, how can you tell which bit of the race is the start and which is the end?

And can palindromes ever be as popular as tennis?

All those questions answered in our section that's going straight in the bin.

Well, that's a wrap, Andy.

Right, there's no need to go any further.

Let's just call it a day there.

That pleased me no end, quite honestly.

Much like that.

Top story this week: America news.

Well, the land of the free, the home of the brave, also turns out to be the home of the politically cowardly, the constitutionally deranged, and the socially hateful, and the land of the trapped in a spiral of self-immolation of their own making, and of the eternally vomiting elephant hovering over a picnic of enveloping fear.

That anthem might need a little bit of a tweak to take us through the latest from the overblown parody decaying superpower that is Trumpistian America.

NATO and Jackie,

take it away.

Where do you want to start, NATO?

In

the latest?

We've only got, what, 46 months left?

Oh,

God.

If we're lucky.

Yeah.

So,

I mean, a minute ago, you know, Jackie said that the empire ending with a whimper or a bang.

You know, on the one hand, the Trump-Musk regime is awful and causing a lot of real harm to the entire world.

On the other hand, they are the most pathetic, stupid bunch of cringing, simpering, illiterate, tedious losers the world has ever seen since the mayor in Jaws.

You thought Liz Truss was a loser.

Dream on, you tea-huffing nerds.

Not since the earliest Astralopithecus wandered out of the Old Duvoy Gorge 1.8 million years ago, discovered fire, and burned his own dick off immediately.

Has any humans been as stupid and lame as Musk and Trump are?

I guess we could start here.

Elon Musk,

the owner of renowned exploding car company Tesla,

both the world's richest man, lost $120 billion this year so far.

Who amongst us hasn't accidentally mislaid an amount equivalent to the GDP of the Dominican Republic?

So,

Tesla's market valuation has dropped 45%.

Musk, one man, such a despicable asshole, it's reshaping entire economies, and people are protesting Tesla dealerships all over the world, and in some places, torching them.

The French call setting the property of the rich on fire heroisme.

Trump calls it domestic.

domestic terrorism.

Some people say that when Trump bandies around words like domestic terrorism to talk about nonviolent nonviolent protests of a Tesla dealership, he's being tongue-in-cheek, and he is his tongue between Elon's cheeks.

So

coming to Tesla's defense, Trump turned the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom to announce he was buying a Tesla for himself and one for his 17-year-old granddaughter.

There's video for him getting into a Tesla for the first time, and he delivered some of the greatest political oratory in American history.

Not Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Country or Four Scored seven years ago.

No, Trump sat down in the Tesla and said, quote, everything's computer,

which tells you two things.

Trump doesn't know how to drive or use computers.

And in explaining the operation of a Tesla to him,

you can hear on the video Elon Musk saying, look, it's like driving a fast golf cart.

And when you're right, you're right.

Wow.

I don't.

And here's, I was raised to be a capitalist.

I mean, I literally very much, I come from a long line of salespeople and money laundering people.

So it's not like I shouldn't be more sympathetic to Elon Musk and Donald Trump, but I just, I'm cheering for the demise of Wall Street like nobody's business.

The head of the JP Morgan, Jamie.

Diamond, I think his name is, is he said that the

mortgage rates hate uncertainty.

And that's not a good thing

is when the economy is uncertain.

It's not a good thing because he's decided to put everything.

Like, I don't know if he just started going to Gamblers Anonymous or what, but it's literally, it's driven him to actually say things.

And

what we're doing now is we're just investing in tulip bulbs in the 1400s.

And we're just hoping that they will be worth whatever they're worth.

Well, look, I'm not an economist and I very much have the have the certificates to prove that.

And that makes me as qualified to talk about the U.S.

economy as pretty much everyone in Trump's cabinet.

And

look, I mean, when you look at...

Do you have any expertise in the economy of fifth-century Athens?

AD or BC.

Look, there was

look, absolutely, I mean, you know, it's a bit, obviously, a bit early to say.

We've got to remember, there was no absolute and unignorable grandmother load of historical evidence to suggest that Trump's economic strategy might not prove to be an economic panacea that make magic money trees sprout from the sidewalks across America.

And, you know, it's quite possible that all these tariffs will, you know, make little goblins emerge from under the soil of America and surreptitiously sneak up American people's bank accounts and treble the value of all their money.

We just don't know yet.

Yeah, we just don't know.

Maybe with the, you know, some concerning economic figures so far, he's just been unlucky so far.

Like sporadically, Bugle mentioned wingsuit pioneer Franz Reichelt in 1912 was unlucky when his exploratory effort to fly off the Eiffel Tower in a wingsuit did not go quite according to how he'd hoped, albeit that it did go exactly according to how physics predicted.

Anyway, Franz didn't live to see it himself, but he was proved right when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon just 57 years later.

So the point is, you've got to give it time and do everything differently and things might work better.

I just, or here's what I wish, shall I say, is that, is that the Diet Coke was being specifically created just in France so that they could just retaliate from these 200%

tariff increase to somehow cut off Donald Trump's supply of Diet Coke.

It's the only thing he drinks, you know.

And so it would be the only thing that might get through his brain.

There are some real risks in these tariffs, you know, because, you know, Europe is retaliating.

And we have to remember that Ozempec is from Denmark.

And so that could really hit the Trump voter base where it hurts to cut off their supply in Ozempic.

And of course, the Trump voters are like, screw them.

We're going to have a good American-made version of Brozempic.

I'm very thin, but I have an inexplicably greasy butthole.

I mean, we see why Melania got rid of the Kennedy Rose Garden now, so that she could turn it into essentially a car dealership.

And I don't even know

if

Trump's driver's license is current and if he could get a real ID, if they could find his, I mean, if he could find his birth certificate, which I believe he was born during the filming of Coming to America in Queens.

And

I just...

And there was, and they, and they live streamed it on X.

And so it was viewed by over 1 million bots.

That's all.

And that's they're hugely influential bots as well.

I mean you mentioned the Tesla Tesla struggles.

The Tesla sales have been slumping in Europe in particular, down 76%

in Germany year on year, as consumers have decided, not unreasonably, that they don't want to drive something from a company owned by someone who does things that look so very, very, very much like Nazi salutes.

I say that in that way to cover our backs legally.

So in terms of tariffs, I think that's like a 20,000% emotional tariff that people are not prepared to pay.

The Tesla share price overall has dropped 40% since the start of the year.

And I mean, when you've twanged past the money market's margin of maximum moral elasticity, you have really, really gone rogue.

Now, again, we've got to look at the you know the economic plan behind this.

Obviously, turning the White House into a showroom for high-end luxury cars costing around about $100,000 each is going to bring the price of eggs plummeting downwards.

That goes without saying, which probably explains why actually no one has been saying it.

You can't get better proof than that.

Trump has said he'll write a check for

his Teslas.

Now, without wishing to tell Elon Musk how to live his life, you might want to check Donald Trump's credit score before you agree to that check.

I think he doesn't know where his checkbook is.

It might go, boy, boy.

He said, so

Trump threatened a 200% tariff on European alcohol products and said this will be great for wine and champagne made in the U.S.

Let me restate that.

This will be great for champagne made in the U.S.

No, it's only champagne if it's from the champagne region of France.

Otherwise, it's just a sparkling opioid crisis.

And

if they, if Trump's tariffs, you know, like it's interesting,

as the Trump policies has unfolded, a lot of people have had their like,

you know, around and find out moment of, you know, where it really comes home to roost for them.

And if Trump's policies make it harder for me to maintain my steady supply of Spanish vermouth and Italian Amaro, I will be very cross indeed.

So

I might do my own January 6th just to make sure I have ready access to Chinar and Furnet.

So

the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, we're focused on the real economy, by which they mean the real economy where Americans follow the tradition of our founding fathers, like George Washington, and are forced to give their teeth to their bettors to pay for rent.

Well played.

As we record here on Friday morning, by the time this episode of The Bugle comes out, we may or may not be in a different world where things will or will not have happened.

So

Friday night at midnight.

So everything we're about to say could be obsolete by tomorrow.

Friday night at midnight is the deadline for the Senate to pass a funding bill to continue funding the U.S.

government.

The Republicans control the House and the Senate.

The bill passed the House with no Democratic votes.

The Republicans can't pass it through the Senate without eight Democratic votes.

The funding bill will allow Musk and Trump to continue dismantling the federal government.

Shutting down the government would also be bad.

Senate Democrats faced with an impossible choice, either help the Republicans destroy the government slowly or make them do it quickly.

And after days of tense closed-door meetings, they emerge to announce that Senate Democrats are united around a clean short-term funding bill through April, which is interesting because it is not an option they had.

So it's like how I am united around a vote for me to be thinner and less bald and hairy.

It would be nice, except that I didn't do the work ahead of time to make that possible.

So now it's just daydreaming.

So

Senate Democrats spent days trying to figure out how to pass the Republican budget while acting to their voters like they were fighting it.

They want to look like they're doing something while doing nothing.

It's the sort of everyone look busy approach to governance.

Democratic Senate

minority leader is New York's Chuck Schumer, a Septinogenarian Jew.

And he recognizes the polling suggests that Trump is historically unpopular.

His economic policies are unpopular.

The polling shows that if the federal government is shut down, voters will blame Republicans and not Democrats.

And with that winning hand, he decided to fold

because it's a lot of hassle.

And who needs the aggravation?

I have a busy schedule of prostate exams and yelling at soup.

So

Schumer's favorite Democratic Party slogan is: we will never stop fighting for you, which is a nice way of of saying we will never win.

I can't figure out if he is literally just like a member of the Bene Gesserit, where he's just like, I have a bigger picture in mind, so I'm just going to let the horrible things happen, or if he's more like just

Boromir, where he's like, no, my heart's in the wrong place, but I'm going to take the ring because I think it'll help.

I mean, I don't know where he's coming from.

All I know is I just, I need Lady Jessica to come in and talk.

Is Amy Schumer available to talk to Mr.

Schumer, to Senator Schumer, to somehow stop the Benny Jesserate from completely screwing us over?

I don't know why he's bowling.

Make him put his hand in the box.

Put his hand in the box!

He's afraid of the box.

He's afraid of the box.

And I have to say that AOC seems to be some version of either, I'm trying to, in my analogy of all things Lord of the Rings and science fiction, I have to say that I can't figure figure out if she's Gandalf or if she's Gimli.

But all I know is that the only people who seem to actually be standing up to any of these guys are the women representatives.

There are no male representatives who have said anything.

I mean, Bernie, a little bit, but Bernie, I don't know what Bernie is.

Is he old major from Animal Farm?

I don't know what his thing is.

He's about to fall over in a heap.

But I have to say, between like AOC and Warren and Pelosi, who are older than God themselves, and it's because, of course, women are just a couple of holes in a haircut to these people, and they just want to either watch us die as they pull things out of us or watch us die as they put things into us.

I can't figure it out, but I do, I would like to quote

Representative Jasmine Crockett and just tell them all to f ⁇ off.

For a long time, people have been suggesting that it's time for the patriarchy to take

a step backwards and allow other people to run the world.

And the Democrats are just doing that.

The men from the Democratic Party are being very forward-looking and stepping inside saying,

Now it's your turn.

Right.

Exactly.

We're not going to support you at all, as per usual.

But, you know, but if you end up getting all of the power, is there some way while you're in the kitchen, you could get me a sandwich?

Okay.

Nancy Pelosi put out a statement this morning that addressed to Schumer that just said, listen to the women.

So

as a union negotiator, I'm fascinated by sort of theories of negotiation.

So Chuck Schumer's approach is that the Republicans passed a budget that gives them whatever they want.

And Chuck Schumer thinks that denying them the votes to do whatever they want gives them whatever they want.

So we have no choice but to give them whatever they want anyway.

And then the,

and if the Democrats don't provide the necessary votes, the Republicans can't do whatever they want and they have to negotiate, which the Republicans don't want to do.

And since they don't want to do that, we should stand strong and give them whatever they want.

And

in evidence of, so Schumer announced that he was going to vote to give the Republicans whatever we wanted in defiance of AOC and Pelosi and

all of the women.

And

Trump immediately posted to Truth Social praising Schumer for doing the right thing this morning after checking in with his mom, Vladimir Putin.

So, and it's created a lot of chaos in the economy.

And

Trump's approach to negotiation, on the other hand, rattles markets because the markets see Trump's behavior as erratic.

And as a negotiator, I don't see it as erratic at all.

He just approaches all negotiation as a New York City real estate deal.

Like,

I want that building.

You.

Okay, I'll buy the building next door and make it build bigger building and block your view.

And that approach doesn't work in the fully interconnected, interdependent world of global commerce and diplomacy.

Like in real estate, the worst thing that happens is you don't buy the building and then everyone goes about their day and buys other buildings.

No matter how stupid you are, you just end up buying a different building, but that doesn't translate to like there is no other France.

Like,

I'm just gonna go get a different France.

I don't need your France.

Like, there's not that doesn't that doesn't work.

So,

so now we're now all going to die.

That was good while it lasted.

Um,

now, obviously, amidst economic troubles, uh, the the the best card to play uh for the Republicans is to attack the cause of all these economic troubles, which of course is trans people.

And that's, you know, that's a well-known economic fact that trans people

cause every single major economic downturn.

More people have measles than there are trans people in

sports.

And well, this, I mean, they're taking it right to the top.

A House hearing ended abruptly this week

after uh the um

the host of the the foreign affairs subcommittee on europe keith self uh of uh the republican um

from texas um misgendered sarah mcbride um uh repeatedly and then basically waltzed out of the uh out of the meeting now obviously as discussed the economic theory is sound.

History, again, is laden with examples of gratuitous performative vice signaling transphobia leading to a precipitous fall in the cost of, for example, everyday groceries and fuel, and for resulting in factories and office buildings springing up overnight, offering stable, fulfilling careers to people from across all social spectrums.

So you can say, from an economic point of view, it makes sense.

But just from a human point of view,

it's just another,

I don't know, you know, how

to how to how to dis it's the level of pointlessness of the

sorry

I'm trying to work out how to express this.

The

I don't know, the level of kind of distracting pointlessness of attacking trans people, given all the failures that are being unfolded, even by Trumpian standards, is impressive.

Like I said, there's about eight people that they're mad at.

I would love for them to name how many trans people they actually know in their lives and how they've actually affected their lives, except for

the fact that everyone's been polite to each other prior to this weird

just grade school bullying that goes on amongst these gentlemen that make me literally, I think she, Sarah McBride said,

I don't understand, you know, I obviously take up a lot of real estate in these people's brains.

And it is just another piece of distraction.

One of the things I liked about the protests at the Tesla places is that

it's it's it is exactly

it's us taking the initiative to distract them.

Because

the protests at the Tesla things don't actually change a lot, but it makes them so mad that they have to address it.

And that's what things like, you know, affecting basic human rights do for the rest of us.

For the rest of humanity, we have to, when they say mean things about children or anybody's sexuality or their right to be alive, we were like, well, we have to address that.

And they're like, you're affecting sales of Tesla.

We have to address that.

And I was like, there has to be more things that we can do that can distract them from, I don't know, cutting down every tree of the national forests.

But I don't know

what those are, but maybe Nato does.

So in this hearing, the chair,

Republican congressman, introduced her, introduced Sarah McBride as Mr.

McBride.

She, being prepared and clever, responded immediately, thank you, Madam Chair.

Yes.

And then

there's an altercation between Congressman Self and Congressman Keating about whether you should address people by their name

when you're talking to them.

And

the Republican adjourned the hearing.

And I think

if you're concerned about what people are called,

you should shut the f up if your name is Mr.

Self.

So

the, it sounds like a character from Big Mouth.

And it led to, if you followed the news stories, you saw like this, you know,

the wording, the hearing was canceled due to self.

It was a self-caused contract.

And the committee hearing specifically was about exploring international cooperation to promote arms control in Europe, which is pretty gay.

So,

and it's become like the thing, the fixation on transgender people

is so weird to me because there's been this conventional wisdom that's been repeated again and again and again.

The Democrats lost because of prioritizing trans issues too much.

And that the Democrats' commitment to trans issues alienated the median voter and left them open to Trump.

And this would be an interesting observation if it were true in any way at all.

But so

I started, I was like, did I miss something?

So I started looking for some stats, as you do.

There were zero trans people at the Democratic Convention.

Zero trans speakers.

Trans people were mentioned twice by speakers from the stage.

Joe Biden, as president, appointed two trans people to positions.

There was a small handful of legislation sponsored by Democrats in Congress that had anything at all to do with trans people.

On the other hand,

Republicans introduced 1,500 anti-trans people pieces of legislation around the country and then blamed Democrats for being obsessed with trans rights.

It sounds like projection to me.

It sounds like

trans people cannot make themselves.

I was talking, last week, I was with a trans friend of mine and I said, how does it feel to you to be such the focus of this like national obsession and scapegoating?

And they said, she said to me, don't we have bigger problems?

Isn't there anything else anyone could be doing useful?

Like, they can't make themselves small enough for Republicans to want to stop fucking with them.

It's like, I don't, you know, I don't know, man.

I just think trans people should get to just live their lives.

Why are you ramming trannies down our throats?

I just don't think it affects you.

And they're so supple and pretty, and I want one to take me shopping at Zara.

I feel like what the Republicans are really saying at this point.

That

comment you made, Jackie, about Sarah McBride saying that

she seems to be occupying a large amount of real estate in their brains.

I think that is giving them way too much credit for the amount of real estate that they have in their brains.

I think there's a lot of real estate available in their brains.

I mean, it's undeveloped property, is what we're looking at here.

It's almost completely deserted.

It's in its fallow period

right it's very much of the winter of our discontent

also in america podcast news now and exciting news um uh

in california uh gavin newsom the suspiciously slickly haired governor of california has a podcast newsom inspired by the likes of fellow californian nato green has jumped on board the podcast train hoping that it will call at all stations to white house central in 2029 the podcast hit the headlines because one of his first guests

was the misery-mongering Nazi salute fan and sulphurous devil gas made flesh, Steve Bannon, the dirk diggler of disinformative delusionism himself.

This, NATO, seems like a curious choice

for

Newsom as a Democrat to get Bannon on so early in the history of his pod.

I mean, we've not had Steve Bannon on the bugle and we've been going in 18 years.

The temptation's been there, but we've managed to reject it up to this point.

So

what was the thinking?

Well,

regular listeners to the bugle will know that I am like, I'm a longtime Newsome hater.

He is from San Francisco.

He entered San Francisco politics 22 years ago, and I have hated Gavin Newsom since day one.

I'm an old school, I have the mixtape.

Do you know what I'm saying?

not know this about him.

Okay.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yes, he seems like Will Arnett doing a character of a politician.

Yes, he's a spoiled rich boy.

Yes, his first ex-wife was also Donald Trump Jr.'s ex-girlfriend.

Was he a good mayor of San Francisco?

Only if your idea of a good mayor is having Coke-fueled parties with Samba dancers while fucking your best friend's wife, who's also your secretary.

Does he have good ideas?

Actually, no.

Is he good at building a legislative coalition?

Not that so either.

He is handsome to a certain type of person.

Because he's from San Francisco, I've been in the same room with him several times.

And he is that kind of person with a certain kind of charisma where, at some point, after being in the room with him, any breathing human will inevitably ask the question, am I ovulating?

And

he has gender-affirming hair, is what I would say.

So,

but he's been in the mix as a possible presidential Democratic contender because

being that kind of creep,

he decided to launch his elevate his profile by giving the people what they want.

Another white guy with a podcast.

Did I say giving the people what they want?

No, that would have been expansion of rent protections, construction of new affordable housing, LA fire recovery, cost of containment on our utility bills, safe and efficient public transit.

But a sixth choice, a solid sixth choice after all those other things is more podcasting.

One thing about podcasting is it's a conversation.

And say what you will about politicians, they're not known as good conversationalists.

They're narcissists.

Gavin Newsom hasn't had to truly listen to someone since before he was in politics and he owned a wine bar and a guest wanted to have a long chat about the terroir on a tempranillo.

The show description is as follows.

I'm Gavin Newsom and it's time to have a conversation.

It's time to have honest discussions with people that agree and disagree with us.

It's time to answer the hard questions and be open to criticism and debate without demeaning or dehumanizing one another.

I will be doing just that on my new podcast, inviting people on who I deeply disagree with to talk about the most pressing issues of the day and inviting listeners from around the country to join the conversation.

This is Gavin Newsom.

Now, Gavin Newsom talks about himself more than Prince in the song, My Name is Prince.

Third person.

Too much third person, Gavin.

Too much third person.

And he, and, you know, he says he wants to have people on who agree and disagree, but he's only inviting on three in a row right-wing assholes.

Yeah.

Charlie Kirk, Michael Savage, Steve Bannon.

Like, have on someone who disagrees with you.

Invite Ilhan Omar to

flay him alive.

That would be good podcasting.

Oh, my gosh.

She would.

Yeah.

Newsome chinwagged with Bannon jovially enough during the show, standing up to Bannon's repeated truth-twisting and outright bullshit with the fierce immovability of a snowman standing up to a molten rhinoceros.

I mean, we have to accept that, you know,

when people start doing a podcast, they adjust their views to what their perceived audience wants to hit.

I'll let you all in on a secret here of Buglers.

Before I started doing the bugle, I didn't even like sport.

I haven't heard of puns, and I mostly performed in iamec pentameter using a politically questionable luxembourgian accent but you do what you have to do to get an audience and if newsom has to talk to steve bannon that is just the way of the industry

i love that you think it's an industry

In, well, other news, J.D.

Vance was booed at a classical music concert.

Now, when you're riling up classical music fans you know you are hitting your kpis as a frontline

and um this was at the kennedy center in washington dc uh where donald trump sacked the chairman of the kennedy center board along with 13 of its trustees uh earlier uh this year and appointed himself as the new chair now whatever you think of donald trump i don't think he absolutely screams lifelong commitment to the art of classical music.

I think whatever side of the political spectrum you're on, you can probably agree to that.

And obviously, we shouldn't brand Trump as a fascist or a despot or a dictator just because he does things that a despotic dictatorial fascist might definitely do.

And controlling the arts and suppressing dissenting voices in the creative realm,

it might equally be a well-meaning effort to put cheaper and

more nutritious salads on the plates of hard-working Americans.

Again, we can't rule it out.

But you can understand people booing J.D.

Vance at a classical music concert.

I don't know the reasons, you know, everyone has different reasons for going to see classical music,

but I don't know what was on the running order, but I imagine your enjoyment of, for example, the heart-rending genius of Franz Schubert or Wolfgang, the Wolfman, Mozart, might be a little disrupted by looking up and seeing human metaphor for the self-indulgent failures of consumer capitalist democracy.

That's just got to put you off your classical, certainly not on your show pan list.

There's no hiding from it.

You probably wanted to go back to

where he came from.

You'd been a right Beethoven night, maybe even until lunch the next day.

And it was tough to get a handle on.

You might want to protest by throwing a shoe, but you'd know that wouldn't help.

If anything, you'd enjoy the intention.

He'd ravel in it.

That's what I'm assuming, anyway.

Iverdi loves that kind of thing.

So hopefully you'd come to your

sense in time.

Maybe protest instead by wrapping women's underwear around your limbs and throwing waving your bra bra arms at him.

Anyway, you'd probably have to calm down with a cup of Indian tea, clear your throat, and then whiz down a mountain on a couple of long thing planks.

Tchaikovsky.

and I'm done.

That

was exciting.

He has to get back to his true love of putting children in cages.

20th century composers, everybody.

Canada News now and Canada has a new Prime Minister, Mark Carney, the former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, was sworn in hours ago as we we record.

And unusually for a Canadian leader,

he's had to say that Canada

will not stand back and be taken over by America.

I'm not sure any incoming Canadian Prime Minister has had to say that out loud.

It was always just sort of assumed.

What a strange intray Mark Carney faces.

Will Canada become the 51st state of the USA or will the USA become the 11th province of Canada?

Will there be a daily USAV Canada ice hockey match just to keep the world entertained?

Will Canada swap hockey legend Wayne Gretzky for the promise that there will be no US land invasion of Baffin Island for at least the next month and a half?

So much remains up in the air.

In his acceptance speech

after being chosen to be the new Prime Minister, Mark Carney said, The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country.

If they succeed, they will destroy our way of life.

The subtext being, oh shit, I'm going to have to spend my entire working life dealing with a plutonium enriched fit.

And we should also, he should also have added, and I think this was a real mistake by Carney, hashtag not all Americans.

Because I'm sure, you know, you two, Jackie, NATO, you must be amongst the, I assume, more than a thousand Americans who don't actually want to take Canada over.

If we did, where would we flee to?

So, you know,

it's a big deal for Mark Carney to take over as Prime Minister and Liberal Party leader from Justin Trudeau.

It'd be a bold pivot for the Liberal Party to be led by a prime minister who has not done blackface multiple times.

So

big move for them.

Trump said of Canada, to be honest with you, Canada only works as a state.

We don't need anything they have.

Trump's basically saying it's stupid and sucks and I want it.

He started a trade war with Canada in the hopes it will wreck the Canadian economy.

Sort of a imperialist, you break it, you bought it, foreign policy.

And then

he said, as a state, it would be one of the great states.

This would be the most incredible country visually, visually.

If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it.

Yeah, maps.

That's like the whole thing.

They're all, they're all, it's chalk a block of artificial lines on the maps there.

I have, I have stood on the on the, at least I've never been to the U.S.-Canada border.

I have stood on the U.S.-Mexico border, walked right across.

and if no one told you otherwise, you would think that borders were social constructs invented by rulers to control people.

It's just an imaginary line there.

So,

and

Carney said,

My government will keep our tariffs on until the Americans show us respect.

I have bad news for the people of Canada.

Have you heard of Americans?

Respect isn't what we do.

We'll take a cruise ship up, we'll get drunk at your senior frogs.

You puke in the streets, slap your mom, buy a tchotchki, and go home.

But there's no respect at any point.

When he said that, we'll keep our tariffs on until American Shelter is back.

He's basically saying we will keep our tariffs on right up until the moment that the universe finally and mercifully ends.

That is essentially what that

means.

Governor of the Bank of Canada, he had to deal with the global financial crisis of 2008.

As governor of the Bank of England, he had to deal with Brexit.

And he may come back, come to look back on those times as blissful, stress-free, borderline holidays, given that now he has to deal with this.

Wow,

that is a hell of a draw for him that he gets to be the prime minister at this particular time.

Thoughts and prayers go out to him and his family.

Saudi Arabia buys Pokemon Go News now and, well, as rather revealed by the headlines, Saudi Arabia, or the public investment fund of Saudi Arabia, has bought Pokémon Go, or the company that owns Pokémon Go.

An interesting step for Saudi Arabia after attempting to buy the concept of golf, testing the always shattered moral compass of boxing promoters and turning football phone-ins from an honourable debate about whether Player X really had to score from there or at least make the keep and make a save into a fevered argument over the rights and wrongs of assassinating dissenting journalists.

But Pokémon Go, that's I mean, that's I'm not quite sure what the strategy is here

for Saudi Arabia.

It's one of the most popular augmented reality games in the world.

It's hard to know exactly how it's going to change Pokemon Go, whether it'll evolve to including game death penalties or not.

I guess we'll have to just

see what happens.

For those unfamiliar with it, it's an augmented reality mobile game that took the world by augmented storm back in 2016.

It involves hundreds of Pokemon species, none of which have been actually proven to exist, pokaming around in the virtual reality of actual reality.

It's viewed by many as what future historians may view as a landmark staging post in the end of all humanity as a functioning entity, if there are any historians in the future, which is currently looking quite unlikely, given that according to most

current projections, within 60 years, all human communication will just be 250 decibel screams lasting one to three nanoseconds each.

The game, when it was launched, did result in various incidents of public danger.

One player on Pokemon Go inadvertently scaled Celebrity Mountain K2 in an effort to ask Bulbasaur out on a date.

Another dived headlong into an erupting volcano whilst trying to feed a quas onto Magmar.

Another disrupted the World Snooker Championship final trying to put some underpants on a disturbingly priapic war tortle who had wandered into the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield.

And another ended up being sentenced to a 12-year stretch in prison after teaming up with Squirtle and and Jigglypuff in a botched bank job that resulted in a non-fatal shootout and an escaped bear.

So

that's the game that Saudi Arabia has added to its portfolio.

That was very fun for me.

Thank you.

Well, that brings us to the end of this week's America Special Bugle.

Good luck to all Canadians in preserving your independence until the next bugle in a week's time.

Do, if you've not already done so, come and see one of the remaining shows on my stand-up tour, the Zoltgeist Details at andysoltzman.co.uk.

Jackie, anything to plug?

Everything.

JackieCashin.com.

I'm on a never-ending tour.

My agent retired.

So as a parting gift, he gave me 32 weeks of work.

So go to jackiecaution.com and find out where I'm at.

And I have podcasts just like Gavin Newsom, but

the Dork Forest does not count as a dorkdom fascism.

So no Nazis.

Come on out and listen to some dork forest.

Thanks so much.

Mr.

Natal Green on Instagram, Natal Green on the other stuff.

I'm on a little bit of a tour.

You can see me outside of the Bay Area.

So I have two shows in San Francisco Saturday the 15th, but they're sold out.

Sorry.

But Sunday, March 30th, Brooklyn, New York, I'm at the Union Hall.

April 4th, Friday.

I'm at Comedy Studio in Cambridge, Mass.

April 19th in Chicago at the Den Theater, and back in the Bay at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley on April 22nd,

where Jackie will be soon as well, I think.

April 8th.

There you go.

Consider yourselves plugged, Buglers.

Until next week, goodbye.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast Mildly Informed which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.