World War Three!? Watch This Space!

Hello buglers, I am Andy Zoltzman and welcome to issue 4287 of the Bugle audio guide dog barking into the void to try desperately to ward off the unquenchable postman of reality.

It is the 15th of January 2024 as we record a day that will have already gone down in history by the time you unrecord, sorry, listen to this pod blast.

And once again, we are looking at a world that is not quite living up to its potential for, let me just check the official numbers, the one millionth week in a row.

And I think that basically coincides with the start of the beginning of human civilization as we know it.

I'm sure that's purely coincidence.

Joining me today to shut the eyes and drink the teas, I'm more than delighted, beyond ecstatic, borderline delirious, to welcome, firstly, from Up the Road in South London, Nish Kumar.

Hello Andy.

Hello Buglers.

Happy New Year.

How's 2024 treating you so far?

It's going pretty well.

It's going pretty well unless you think about anything.

Yeah, that's...

See, maybe as we've learned that now we're in the fifth year of the decade.

Just

ignorance is not bliss, but ignorance is tolerability.

And I think...

As long as you've managed to work out a way to mute the words news on all of your devices,

It's absolutely peachy.

Also from up the road in South London, then up the railway line, then along the underground, then into the airport, then onto an aeroplane, then an eight-hour flight, then

a shuffle through immigration controls and a taxi ride through San Francisco.

It's Nato Green!

Hello Andy, hello Nish, hello Buglers.

How are you?

Hello Nato.

Hey So

you know I've been thinking about the challenge of being a political comic during times of great horror and how difficult it is to write jokes about horror and it got me wondering what it would have been like if the bugle had been a going concern during World War II.

Would Andy have done a pun run of concentration camp names?

Yes, I think so.

Would Nish Kumar have called Goebbels a c?

Yes, I think he would have.

Would Tiff Stevenson had things to say about Hitler's fashion sense?

Yes, obviously.

I'll tell you, there would have been some pretty impressive background audio, given where Andy and I live in direct relation.

Some of the bombing campaigns.

We'd have had to do some bugles from an air raid shelter for sure.

Well, I mean, that sounds like some premium bonus subscriber content that we need to record at some point.

We'll spin off series.

Yeah.

Also, if we all want to have our careers simultaneously cancelled, that might be the most efficient way of doing it.

we are recording on the 15th of January.

Tomorrow, the 16th of January, is the 2050th anniversary of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus being granted the title Augustus by the Senate in Rome, thus kicking off the Roman Empire.

Yep, that's...

2050 years ago, this second, the paperwork was signed to launch the all-new continent conquering mega franchise.

And news reaching us as we speak that

Roman history from this moment in 27 BC up to and including the death of Emperor and Stoicism superstar Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD has just been bought by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund, meaning that, amongst other things, the works of celebri poet Ovid, the pioneering MMA arena, the Colosseum, and the Roman conquest of Britain have all been re-attributed as achievements of the House of Saud.

A few

extra questionable slangs for dissenting voices to add to their catalogue too.

So that's always nice.

On the 17th of January in 1920, so 104 years ago, alcohol prohibition began in the United States.

How's that going, NATO?

104 years on?

Is it looking...

I mean, you did show us your booze cabinet just before we started recording.

I was just going to say, we should probably flag for buglers that just before we started the official record, NATO showed us what he described as his midlife crisis.

and it was a

Dean Martin's liver

just spilled out onto some very, very fashionable-looking shelving.

Yeah, well, I mean, look, don't you need six or seven different kinds of Amaro around the house?

Yeah, I did come back from a holiday in Spain about 18 months ago with 12 different vermouths.

So I'm not really in a

position to judge, criticise, but only to admire NATO.

Noel Coward didn't have 12 different kinds of vermouths.

As always, a section of this podcast is going straight in the bin this week.

Well, it's been the annual Consumer Electronic Show, which we touch on every year, every January, the World Meet.

We reported last week on the Smart B-Day, which was exhibited at the CES this year.

It's an annual festival that mixes human ingenuity with human tendency to use that ingenuity to make ridiculous things that no one needs, which is not a modern thing.

It's always been the way.

Well done, Oof, that's amazing, but I didn't actually need a picture of a bison on the wall of a cave that you have to crawl 50 meters to get to because I already have 34 other pictures of bison there, you idiot.

It's always been the way.

It's just the way humans exist.

So we look at some of the other exciting products displayed at the CES 2024.

You might have read about AI pillows.

Who I think played for Derbyshire in the 1930s.

You can now get

an intelligent smart pillow, smart cat flaps, which I assume stops the wrong cat getting in, which is good news if you live in an area with a lion infestation.

Also, we review some of the

products you might not have seen, the Solitudo Hermit Helmet, which is a special helmet that keeps you blocked off from all reality and news.

Just as Nish was calling for, this product has come.

Well, it's not quite on the market, it's just the first prototype.

It's just a cardboard box at the moment, but it works, it works pretty well.

Also, the Robotic Auto Queen.

This is very exciting, could sell huge in Britain still coming to terms with the loss of our beloved monarch 18 months ago.

So you can choose from the VT1, the EZ1, or the EZ2 models.

That's Victoria, Elizabeth I, or Elizabeth II for your robotic auto queen, or LTF, that's Latifa for the

international audience and it provides all your queenic needs in the queeness aftermath of the Queen's Queen which sadly ended in the month of Elizabeth Elizabeth as it's now called 2022.

We review the Invisibath the world's first invisible bath.

I'm not sure what the purpose is, but it's nice to have the option of taking a bath without having to look at an empty bath whenever you're not using your bath.

Smart stilts, they rise up and down to the height required for you to peep over whatever wall or fence you're trying to peep over.

The Sculpiotech Michelangelive Insta David, which links up with your internet browsing history to work out your favourite celeb, family member, sports star, or even politician, and every morning sculpts a life-size naked figure for you to enjoy in a purely artistic manner.

Of course, you simply fill the Michelangelive with powdered marble, set the timer, and wake up to your own personal David with optional added speedos if you don't particularly enjoy the look of plums before breakfast.

We've got the, and also

we review the speedy lunch smart sandwich.

This is a very exciting development in food tech.

The smart sandwich is filled with all manner of digestible and biodegradable food tech wizardry.

It links up wirelessly without wires to your smartphone so you can follow how much of your sandwich you've eaten already, how much you still have left to eat, both as a percentage and a PNMR rating, that's potential number of mouthfuls remaining, based on scanning of your mouth size and data from previous sandwich eatings, plus the estimated time required for you to finish your sandwich and how much work you could get done per mouthful by eating the sandwich at your desk using the optional accessory of an automated sandwich eating arm.

Plus an ETCD, your estimated time of completed digestion, so you can schedule in your UBBs, unavoidable bathroom breaks, for the exact moment you will need to take your bath in the bathroom, as Americans would say.

The Speedy Lunch Smart Sandwich also provides you with suggestions for bread type, filling, spread, garnish, and angle of cutting to maximize the nutritional value of your sandwich while minimizing the time lost from your working day.

And provides you with a 10-year sandwich planner with up to 3,653 different sandwich options to ensure that you never repeat eat the same sandwich twice in a decade.

As repetitious lunching has been shown to decrease office productivity by up to 0.042%.

At just $79 per sandwich plus $99 for at-desk drone delivery or a bargain $40,000 for a year supply, the

speedy lunch smart sandwich represents an affordable way for you to lunch smart in today's competitive marketplace.

Exciting times to be eating.

That That section in the bin.

Listen, ever since we mentioned the subject of NATO's extensive alcohol collection, I've thought of something that even as I say it, I know is going to come back to bite me in the ass.

Because whenever I engage the listenership directly of this show, it tends to end with my Wikipedia page being locked and only able to be edited by moderators.

I'm just putting it out there, Bugle cocktail menu.

What are your bugle cocktail ideas?

At the moment, all I've got is a Kumartini and a Zalts Manhattan, but

I'm sure people will be able to come up with some

really

probably, I imagine, quite disgusting cocktail ideas.

Right.

Well, this sounds like we are throwing this open to our listeners.

Do email us anyway.

As I say, I do so with full knowledge that it's going to come back and blow up in my face.

I did once throw things open to the bugle listenership, and it's ended up with, I would say, once a year, somebody asking me about when I'm planning to pitch nude with Nish to a television commissioner.

But

I'm throwing it open to the bugle listeners.

The thing with Nude with Nish is, I can't remember how long ago that was first suggested.

It must be, what, five or six years ago that Nude with Nish was first suggested?

Yeah, it must be, surely.

I mean, at that point, it would have been maybe top 10, 20% most ridiculous shows on the TV now.

I'm not not sure it's even in the top half anymore.

Anyway, send in your ideas.

Chris, what's the current email address?

Andy, it is hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com.

So do,

that's actually something I think we should get, we should try and get a little bit more of.

Don't forget, if you are a premium-level voluntary subscriber, you can email us in with questions for Ask Andy,

the monthly subscriber-only show in which I answer all your questions.

But do send in your suggested bugle cocktails and any other correspondence to that email address.

The Nate Old Fashioned.

There we go.

What makes an old-fashioned more depressed and semitic than it was already?

I think it's going to be very hard for me to not quickly describe you as going, NATO Green, oh, the depressed Semitic.

That was your wrestling name, wasn't it?

Top story this week.

World War III might be breaking out again.

I mean, this is

basically the state that we're currently in as a planet that World War III might or might have already broken out.

I'll tell you what I was thinking last Thursday.

uh Nish, NATO.

I was thinking we're over 10 days into the year and whilst Ukraine and Gaza are still ticking along in full boom, there hasn't yet been an outbreak of armed conflict involving major global powers that has the potential to escalate into something terrifyingly bigger.

So can't complain about the year I've been receiving as a consumer so far.

Then on Friday, it appears that Britain and America started bombing the Middle East, albeit a specific part of the Middle East

targeting the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Nish,

I know,

I assume in all the TV shows you've done, your various travel shows and things, you must have done a bit of a stint with the Houthis.

Like playing, I don't know, playing squash with Pouthi Rebels or whatever.

Definitely not, Andy.

If Nish had done a stint with the Houthis, they would have been cancelled already.

This is the thing.

The US and the UK has learned nothing.

You don't get rid of these groups by bobbing them.

You get rid of them by commissioning me to do a television program.

I've taken down whole networks, not even just individual programs.

Are you telling me that if you didn't commission Nish Hangs with the Houthis, the entire situation in Yemen would be resolved within six months?

Six months?

That's one of your longer rules.

It's it yeah, it's truly bad stuff.

I think the uh news that the US and the UK are conducting bombing campaigns in the Middle East is so familiar to me that I think it caused my virginity to return.

It's immediately put me back to 2002.

The background to this is that

well, the background to this is a big placard that says, oh shit, everything's been fucked for a hell of a long time.

But the more specific background to this is the Houthis are a group that emerged in the 90s and rose to prominence in 2014 after they rebelled against Yemen's government.

And there's been a civil war in Yemen that's been conducted with the Houthis, who have a kind of Iranian backing

and the military coalition led by Saudi Arabia.

And there is no sentence or situation that begins, middles, or ends well if it involves the phrase military coalition led by Saudi Arabia.

That is just an absolute recipe for disaster.

The Houthis are also known as Ansar Allah, which translates as supporters of God, which is immediately a red flag.

Any group with God in its name or we love God they're going to turn out to be definitely at best a spicy band of people.

And it is difficult to observe lots of the kind of religious conflicts as they happen.

You know, the

Yemeni civil war has a Sunni-Shia element to it.

The Sunnis being the Saudi Arabians, the Shias being the Houthis.

Obviously, what's happening in Gaza has a huge religious component to it between Jews and Muslims.

And it can feel surprising, particularly for someone like me who largely exists in a world of lapsed religious people.

You know, I come from a long traditional line of lapsed Hindus.

I'm currently doing a podcast with two of the most lapsed Jews in human history.

I even know lapsed atheists.

I know lapsed atheists.

These are people who, to be clear, don't believe in God.

They just really hate the stand-up comedy of Ricky Gervais and find

his tone around atheism so unbearable that they're beginning to will there to be an afterlife so that he can be consigned to hell.

But yes, now the US and the UK have decided

it didn't work the first time, so we're just going to do it again.

It really is.

It absolutely, really is the Superman film of ideas.

It just,

it worked at one point, but it hasn't worked for a hell of a long time.

And yet we still keep doing it.

So what sort of kicked off the

current flare-up was a number of attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.

Since November, the Houthis have attacked more than 20 merchant vessels in the Red Sea using missiles, drones,

helicopters, and boats.

The attacks have caused considerable chaos in the global trade because the Red Sea is one of the world's favourite shipping routes ever since the Suez giant water slide fell down in 1869 and was repurposed in its new flat state as a canal.

And the Red Sea is particularly crucial because these days, NATO, it requires a ship to go up and down it rather than just a Moses with a special stick to magic a special members-only crossing route.

So you can see why it's so strategically important.

The Houthis have said their attacks are in response to the Gaza situation, which let me just check whether it's been sorted out.

I'll just check the webpage.

Nope, still

that webpage hasn't been updated for 4,000 years.

I'll just refresh it.

Still no.

So it's a bit of a mess.

In November, the Houthis seized the Galaxy Leader, which is not quite as exciting or sci-fi as it sounds, sadly.

The Galaxy Leader being a ship, a 21-year-old ship of Polish origin, Japanese-owned, Bahamas-registered, classic 21st-century child of the world.

They've been using it as a tourist attraction.

There's still 25 hostages on board, which is not exactly your dream day out as a kid, is it?

Would you like to go to the playground?

No.

How about roller skating?

No.

Would you like to go to the petting zoo?

No.

Well, you suggest where you want to go for the day out, darling.

I'd like to go to a hijacked cargo ship with 25 hostages on, please, mum.

I'll tell you what, the Houthis really need to take more of a leaf out of the British government's book.

Because what they're doing at the moment is they've stolen something and

they're allowing people from their country to come and view it.

What they should be doing is stealing something and then allowing people from the country it was stolen from to have a look at it.

That's basically the entire purpose and existence of the British Museum.

Hey, people from other countries, come and look at your own shit in our country.

Politically, it's caused sort of an uproar in the United States because,

I mean, you know, Biden did just did it.

He just, you know, started bombing Yemen.

The thing that I, in reading up on it, that I realized that

they keep being described as the Houthi rebels, but they control the capital.

And normally, if you control the capital, you're the government.

So I don't know why they keep calling them rebels.

But anyway,

Biden just did it, and people were like, you bypassed Congress.

And Biden's response was sort of like,

what do you mean I can't just bomb the Middle East?

This is what we do.

So, and

what Biden's policy in the Middle East is like, it's sort of a masterstroke of like simultaneously being complicit in mass death in Gaza and starting a potentially escalating war with global powers and

causing himself to lose an election in the United States in 2024 by alienating key constituencies

and bring in Trump 2.0.

It's difficult difficult to like

overstate how breathtakingly bad political calculation this is for the Biden administration because I guess he thinks it's just the 80s and it doesn't matter.

It's like, and that he like definitely didn't learn anything from 9-11.

It reminds me that the container ships are no joke.

Like container ships, I was, at the beginning of the Iraq war, there was a protest at the port of Oakland.

Like the first day of the Iraq war, we blocked blocked streets in San Francisco and they arrested us, and it was a nice day.

And then a month in, there was a ship going from the port of Oakland to deliver weapons to Iraq, and we went to

protest the ship, and the Oakland police opened fire on us.

And

it's a good reminder that if you start with global commerce, they will destroy you.

If you want to do a hunger strike or wave a flag or

put orange powder on a snooker table or glue yourself to a painting, have at it.

But

once you start

mucking about with container ships, then it's on like Donkey Kong.

Well, I mean, this just shows that how important these supply lines are.

And until we get a global network of special vacuum tunnels drilled through the Earth's core to transport goods from anywhere to anywhere else, this kind of thing is going to be problematic.

So really, you know, we've had that technology, I think, for at least, I don't know, let's say 5,000 years.

We could easily have done it.

The Yemeni civil war that you mentioned won the much coveted award of World's Worst Humanitarian Crisis from the UN in March of last year.

It's a 10-year conflict that has left over 20 million people in need of humanitarian assistance.

But there has been some hope for a deepstorming of the situation with various negotiations in progress and a tentative, fragile peace deal between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia, although that could be thrown into jeopardy if the Houthis take over Sunderland Football Club, bitter local rivals of the Saudi-owned Newcastle United.

So

we'll just keep you up to date with that.

For those of you unfamiliar, a few quick Houthi facts in our Houthi fact box.

The Houthi are based in western Yemen and are made up of an estimated 20,000 individual Houthises who align themselves politically with Iran.

The kingdom of Houthatania was long thought to be fictitious, but in the 1980s it was discovered by explorers searching for evidence that Indiana Jones was real.

The Houthi rebels take their name from Jean-Ferry Rebel and his son François Rebel, the 18th century French composers.

And finally, how many Houthi rebels does it take to change a light bulb?

One.

Same as with most other people.

Those are your Houthi facts.

I really feel, Nato, that you're not giving Joe Biden enough credit here because he did win an election on the basis that he was going to unite a fractured and divided nation.

And he has united them in that everyone thinks this is a bad idea.

He has managed to be criticised for this bombing campaign by Ayanna Presley and Matt Gaetz.

Those are two people who are not just politically polarized.

They're barely the same species.

Ayanna Presley is a human being, and Matt Gates, I believe, is some sort of sewer-dwelling reptile.

Yeah, he definitely, I mean, he did unite the left and the right also in supporting the Israeli military.

Because

if you look at Congress, the right-wing position in Congress and the Senate is that they just support the massacre in Gaza because they don't believe that Palestinians exist.

And the liberals in Congress support the massacre in Gaza in a sort of like, it's tragic that Israel has no choice but to massacre 20,000 civilians in the name of self-defense.

It's too bad that Hamas keeps making them do that.

Yeah, and it's nice to see the liberals line up in support of the famous international liberal Benjamin Netanyahu.

A man whose only crime is crime.

Lest we forget.

I mean, and lest we forget,

I've said it before and I'll say it again: went to high school in Philadelphia.

And

if you're looking for someone to be both racist and belligerent, a Philadelphia high school student

is going to be your top choice.

Well, someone else has been weighing into the issue with words of wisdom, and that is the British Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps.

And

there's been many collections of words on the bugle over the last 16 and a half years that shouldn't have existed.

And Defence Secretary Grant Shaps has to be right up there, but he is Defence Secretary amidst the current political chaos that the Conservative Party have enveloped themselves and the nation with.

But he said Britain should prepare for further wars involving China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran erupting in the next five years.

He said, we've come full circle, moving from a post-war to a pre-war world.

Well, for a start, that's half a circle.

Not a very semicircular half a circle either.

It's more like a squiggly line that looks like a drunkard has tried to paint an extended middle finger on a moving bus.

But anyway,

you can sort of understand what he's trying to say.

He carried on, said, an age of idealism is being replaced by a period of hard-headed realism.

So this age of idealism, I'm sorry if you missed it, I think it lasted for about 48 seconds during the fireworks displays on Millennium Night.

And hard-headed realism.

I mean, that's not...

really been massively prominent in certainly Grant Chaps' Conservative Party over the past 13 years that they've been

in power.

Mop-headed Wittery, that's generally been their MO for as long as anyone can remember, but I'm not sure hard-headed realism is what you think of when you think of Grant Chaps.

And we should remember, this is, we have to take it with a bit of a picture of Schultz.

This is, as I said, Grant Schaps talking, a politician best known for being inexplicably in office and also for pretending to be people that he isn't.

So

strange times.

Strange times.

The one sort of one of the key positives for Rishi Sudak, and I'm using key there incorrectly, I meant to say one of the only positives for Rishi Sudak at the moment.

Who this morning has received some polling data that, when you plot out in a graph, spells out go f yourselves.

One of the few positives here is that he has had a bit of an opportunity to sort of, you know, look like a bit of an internationalist and actually repair his reputation with the White House.

The relationship with the White House and Downey Street have been

pretty sort of

frayed of late.

But Grant Schnapps even managed to

this in no way positive for anyone other than one specific guy in Britain situation.

Because

when he was asked before the attack on the Houthis happened whether it was going to happen, he used this phrase, watch this space.

Watch this space?

That is not...

an answer to a question.

If the question is,

are you going to bomb people in the Middle East?

That's the answer to the question, when is your mixtape dropping?

Moving on now to Britain news and exciting times here in the UK.

We no longer need a legal system at all because it turns out that TV drama does the job far more efficiently.

A national scandal dating back 25 years, which has been sort of in and out of the public eye to various degrees over that time, has been jabbed forcefully into the public eye socket by a hit TV drama series, Mr.

Bates vs.

the Post Office, examining how hundreds of postmasters working for the post office faced prison, financial ruin, career devastation, public abuse, all because of a dicky computer program allied to massive institutional failings in the post office.

Now, Nisha, I mean, this has been,

it's not sort of right to say that it's been completely ignored over the years because a lot of people have done some great work trying to sort of push it forward, but it did take this hit TV drama on ITV for people to properly give a shit about it and for politicians to start

talking about it as a mainstream issue and one of the great miscarriages of justice in our country's impressive history of

miscarrying justice.

Yeah, it's faulty computer software.

It resulted in, basically, it made it look like the people running the post offices were stealing money when, in fact, they weren't.

And it had huge and significant real-world consequences.

230, around 230 post office workers were imprisoned on false charges of theft and fraud.

Thousands of others

were implicated.

It's been, the scandal has been directly linked to, I think, four suicides as well.

It has been a horrific and completely, it seems, sort of unnecessary miscarriage of justice that's just the result of, as you say, Andy, a faulty computer system and then massive institutional failure.

And there's been so much journalism about this.

People have written books, people have made podcast series.

But here's the thing.

Toby Jones is a very good actor.

And it turns out that was all we needed the entire time was just whack Toby Jones in a drama.

And

I'm going on stand-up tour later this year.

I'm thinking of having myself played by Toby Jones just to guarantee that people give a shit about the goddamn show.

I might just wheel him out at the end to heighten the emotional significance of everything that I'm saying.

Yeah, so the

it was a dramatization of one of the cases.

The real man is a guy called Alan Bates, who sort of

spearheaded the legal battle against the post office and the false accusations around 3,500 people.

And it's what it has done is it's meant that there are actually going to be consequences for this thing.

I mean, so far, the only consequences have been the former post office chief executive, Paula Vanelles, who to return her CBE.

So arguably we would like more consequences than acronyms being removed from people's names.

I sort of feel like my concern here is that she goes, listen, I've given back my CBE, so I think we can all agree.

Nil-nil.

Yeah.

Case close.

Let's just

draw a line underneath it.

What is CBE?

Oh, so that is a citizen of the British Empire,

which is one of the honours that were.

Now, the British honour system is one of the many, many

arcane, anachronisticismical anachronisms with which we like to delude ourselves that we're still the greatest known nation in the entire universe.

And they sort of vary.

You put empire in the name.

Yes, exactly.

So the the empire,

I mean, just to bring you up to speed, doesn't entirely exist anymore.

But but

but for whatever reason, I'm not judging, I'm not saying it's right or wrong that it ended.

It just, you know, some things, you know, there's a time to end everything.

But we still keep it in the

name of the honours that are given out by the government, OBEs, CBEs, MBEs.

I mean, is it, you may ask, time for us to let to let go, but I would say to the rest of the world, just let us in Britain work through our post-empire national irrelevant syndrome issues at our own pace because our PENIS is huge and we can't stop thinking about it.

I would like to invite the audience of the bugle to write in with suggestions of what the E for empire can be replaced with

in future honours bestowed by the crowd.

I mean, I think in many ways what Paula Vanels has done is completely inappropriate.

Like, because I think there could not be any more apt situation for someone to have an honour that has the word empire in it if what you've presided over is systemic cruelty, institutional incompetence, and the exploitation of poor people.

That is the British Empire through and through.

And if we're going to keep empire in, let's start rewarding people for appropriately Empire-reminiscent crimes.

Like,

if you get in trouble at work for destroying official documentation that proves malfeasance, you should immediately get an order of the British Empire.

That's what this damn thing was about.

Ikmar Ben-Gavia should definitely be in line for some sort of honor from the British Empire.

Well, I mean, what is one of the most baffling things about it?

There are,

I think, something like 1,150 post offices in the UK.

And you'd think if you ended up prosecuting hundreds and hundreds, even thousands of people who ran them or worked in them, you might think, this does seem like an awful lot more prosecutions than we usually do.

Should we just make doubly sure there isn't some common factor that's causing it to look like all these people are stealing all this money?

It is absolutely baffling.

And it showed how much we just blindly rely on technology and also the power of institutions that a lot of people are basically coerced into pleading guilty in order to avoid more severe punishments.

People were paying back the money they were accused of stealing out of their own pockets just to make

these threats of prosecution go away.

It is a dark, dark stain on this country's recent history.

The computer company responsible for the faulty software was Fujitsu.

The software was caused Horizon.

That's caused these decades of suffering and injustice.

However, times have moved on.

The computer company which has followed Fujitsu and now provides the successor software to the original Horizon is called Fujitsu.

And that new improved software is called Horizon.

So that's just the way we do things in this country.

So the government has now said it will overturn all the convictions of the sub-postmasters affected, which sets a dangerous legal precedent of the government getting involved in the legal process.

It comes at a risk of some wrongful exonerations, which probably doesn't...

It might be just a rare case of two wrongs making a bit of a belated right.

Ideally, this would be settled through proper legal channels, but the government is obviously fully aware that it's been running the legal system for the last 13 and a half years, and it is

clogged up with years' worth of unheard and delayed cases.

Maybe someone could invent a computer system that comes up with speedy verdicts on who is or isn't guilty.

American news now, and well, there was only USA.

USA.

There's only one bugle co-host that we could really have got to talk about this story.

I mean, any story that involves the phrase secret underground tunnel is bound to get our full attention as a species.

It's probably just some evolutionary relic of how we all come into the world.

But when this phrase secret underground tunnel,

the story also includes phrases such as illegal excavation work, brawl between police and Hasidic Jewish worshipers, alleged messiah, synagogue versus cement truck, and just fill the thing back up back up with concrete, mate.

Then this is one of the great news stories of all time.

NATO, you are our Jewish people digging tunnels under synagogues, correspondent.

I mean, this is absolutely sensational, isn't it?

It's quite incredible, Andy.

So, I mean, obviously, there's been a lot of talk and hullabaloo about Hamas having tunnels under Gaza and like it's some big thing.

But watch out, here comes Chabad.

Last week there was a brawl between Hasidic Jews in Chabad and New York police.

A secret underground tunnel had been discovered.

The police wanted to close it because it was illegal and unpermitted.

And so the Jews went to fight them.

Now, I should say: if you haven't spent time in Brooklyn and don't know about the Lubavitcher Chasids,

it's so Jewish there that when I go, I am not Jewish.

Like

there,

and so it's the home, it's Chabad World Headquarters, and

there's like a synagogue, and there's some other buildings, and some people had burrowed 60 feet of tunnels

underneath the buildings.

The police came, and they, and so, and a group of young men were blockading the tunnels to prevent them from being sealed, and they fought the police.

And once again, as is so often the case when police are confronted by Jewish protesters, the police did not fear for their lives.

The

Chabad was once led by Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who died in 1994, the so-called Lubavitcher Rebbe.

And some of the young men in Chabad believe both that he is the Messiah and still alive at the same time.

Neat trick if you're the Messiah, um, because the Messiah is supposed to go away and come back,

you know what I mean?

Like, the

like, is he which is it, guys?

Is he just is he gonna go away and come back at the end times, or is he just like chilling in Brooklyn eating at a halal cart?

Um, if he is the Messiah, just from an artistic point of view, he was he was quite an old man, wasn't he, when when he allegedly died.

And you know, Jesus was a hot young dude.

And I mean, it's going to be a challenge for artists to make that look quite as exciting as rip Jesus with an absolutely sensational six-pack, isn't it?

Yeah.

Bugle listeners, if anyone wants to send some nice oil portraiture of

a loincloth-wearing Rabbi Menachem Sneerson,

please email it to nishkumar at thebugle.com.

So the

but so they're they they the his his devotees were the the young men it was most it was all the men who were arrested were between 19 and 22 and they were all

They were a part of a breakaway group or a division within the Chabad movement that believed that Menachem Shneerson wanted them to expand

which I under I get that that part makes sense to me but specifically wanted them to expand by burrowing underground where they already were, which is the part where they lose me.

Like, if the Messiah wants you to expand,

you're and your answer is, let's build a wine cellar.

Like, it's just, it's like,

let's build a wine cellar in a dungeon and call it a day.

Like, it's a weird form of messianic expansion.

So, I think it's, it's an interpretation of what the Messiah wanted that was both literal and wrong.

So,

but and then their tunnels,

they dug 60 feet of tunnels that threaten the structural integrity of the buildings above them,

which just goes to show that these Hasidic Jews, they're no Hamas.

If they wanted some good tunnels, they needed to get Hamas in there.

They make some tunnels.

And if you're wondering, yes, there is a whole series of videos on TikTok of how Hamas builds tunnels.

So, but I don't know what's these,

like, it's such a weird thing of like religions, religions in their tunnels, man.

Hamas, tunnels.

Khasids, tunnels, Druids, tunnels.

12th century Finchaled monks near Durham, England, tunnels.

If you're a religious fanatic, you're like, I want to do one thing is commune with the Lord and also burrow underground.

I want to get closer to the Lord and earthworms at the same time.

It's like a very weird manifestation of faith.

Why are they trying to dig closer to hell?

Yeah, right.

It's just how hard it is to get a building permit in New York.

But

the attorney for five of the men who were arrested said to his clients may have suffered from a little naivety,

but had no intention of harming the building structure.

I mean, does that count as naivety, digging a tunnel under a building without thinking what happens if this ruins the building above it.

I think that's a little more than naivety, is it?

I have to say,

if you don't realize that digging a tunnel directly underneath a building might affect its structure, that goes beyond naivety.

That is like me getting 16% on a geography exam in year seven at school and saying, listen, in the end, I was quite naive to think I could guess what ordnance survey symbols meant.

It's like these

they live to study the texts.

They study the Torah.

They have a deep connection to our classic texts.

And as a Jew, I have to say the texts are perfect.

The Torah, the Talmud are perfect and inspired by God, but dodgy on the details of what constitutes an effective loadbaric wall.

Obviously, this is a hugely entertaining story.

Also, obviously, because it's a hugely entertaining story that involves jewish people it's provoked a deluge of anti-semitic comments because well it's the 21st century the internet exists and humans have a statistical tendency to act like

uh so

there we are this it's it's a story in many ways that sums up where we are as a species we can't even enjoy a funny story about some weird people digging tunnels without people being anti-semitic.

We don't deserve funny stories about tunnels as a species.

species.

Just quickly before we go, NATO,

well, the 2024 presidential election begins in earnest in the next few days with the Iowa primary.

Can you give us a little

dose of optimism

to start the year?

That's going to be a no, fam.

All right.

Always with the no.

No for me.

Just time to plug the Bugle live tour in March

across the UK details on the internet, specifically at thebuglepodcast.com.

Do help keep this show free, flourishing, and independent by joining the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme.

Give a one or four occurring contribution.

Go to thebuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Also, as Chris told me to do last week, I'm going to tell you to follow the show, which apparently is Youth Talk for Subscribe.

Nish, anything to plug?

Yes, I actually have a...

You can buy my stand-up special from my website, nishkamar.co.uk.

It should be of some, I guess it will be of some interest to Buglers specifically, because it's a stand-up show largely dealing in the aftermath of the Lord's Taverners bread roll incident, which was actually covered for the first time on the bugle.

I think the bugle, I think after it happened, it happened.

It was in the news.

And then we did the bugle, I think, a couple of days later.

And Andy attended the recording dressed fully in his Lord's Taverners cricket uniform.

I feel guilty about that now, to be honest.

After he did the same gig in what actually turned out to be something of an incident-free performance,

sadly, I did not have such an incident-free performance.

And the show is called Your Power, Your Control, and it's available from nishkamar.co.uk.

And it deals in the uh specifics of that incident and the kind of aftermath and uh the subsequent meeting i had with the police to discuss death threats and uh you know a lot of uh a lot of fun uh some fun stuff in there so yes if you're a bugle fan that remembers that incident um or or if you're the bugle fan who uh turned up to uh one of the performances i did of the show and threw a bread roll at me before i would say quickly coming to regret that decision

uh it would uh yeah i'd suggest uh buying it.

And also, the great thing is that it's £9.99, which, thanks to the actions of the Conservative government in the last decade, is worth a lot less in other currencies than it once was.

You can hear Nish's performance in said episode of The Bugle in top stories later this week.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

When Nish does his bloody voiceover.

Yeah,

the unspoken issue at the heart of a lot of this plugging is: I need to get back to Andy about dates for the live shows, and I need to record the intro for Christmas.

Even though I would, and amazingly, I would say that this is one of the most competent plugs we've ever done on the bug.

Yeah, pretty good.

I think I might write a stand-up show about how well my Lord's Tavernus Christmas lunch.

Tremendous charity.

NATO, what have you got to plug?

Well, as usual, Mr.

Nino Green on Instagram, a couple albums out.

January 27th and 28th, I'm doing some political shows for SF Sketch Fest.

27th is a stand-up show, and 28th is

the live podcast of the Habituation Room.

Some political chat.

February 3rd, I'll be in Portland, Oregon at the Siren Theater.

And then February 10th, 17th, the 24th, I'm doing a run of shows at the Berkeley Rep Theater with W.

Kamal Bell getting the band back together.

That's it.

This is the best plugs we've ever done.

Everybody knew all of the things that they needed to know.

Everyone had the websites.

We didn't also.

When people say that the plugs are bad, I'm like, Chris edits them.

Yeah, like, as bad as they sound, he's cut out various episodes I've done of this.

People going, oh, hang on, let me just see quickly Google myself.

Just to so you think the plugs are bad, but you're listening to an edited version of them.

As they say, Nish, you can't polish a turd,

but you can't, you can get it to prep where what its website URL is.

Right, that's it.

Thank you for listening, Buglers.

Thanks as always to Nish and Nato.

Thanks to Chris for putting it all together.

We will be back next week with Riyalina and Josh Gondrelman.

Until then, 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.