The World Drifts Into Anti-Semanticism

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello buglers and welcome to issue 4281 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a visual world, albeit an audio newspaper in which you can't trust what you hear for a visual world in which you really shouldn't believe what you see.

Don't shoot the messenger, or indeed don't shoot anyone, just as a general piece of my advice.

I'm Andy Zaltzmann, the undisputed champion of disputing things.

Oh no, I've just lost my title by saying that.

I'm here in London, or as the Romans called it...

That was the Romans before they founded London, after they invaded our God-given Britishly British land in 43 AD.

Thank you, Brussels.

Hashtag take back control.

And I'm joined today from San Francisco, a city which escaped Roman colonization by a mixture of luck, geography, non-existence at the time, and exorbitant property prices.

Joining me from there, NATO Green.

Welcome back, NATO.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, Buglers.

How have you been since you were last on a few happy weeks ago for this planet?

Miserable.

Alternate jags of uncontrollable sobbing and binge drinking.

I did discover something, Andy.

I was, you know,

politics is so stupid, and we end up having to write about the same things again and again.

And so, do you have this experience where you're like, did I write this joke already?

And so I went back, I was going, went back to listen to older bugles to see if I had done a joke already.

And I was switching between a few episodes.

Do you know how, like, DJs will cross-fade between records?

Yeah.

And I realized that if you start any Andy Zaltzman joke in the history of the bugle and at some point switch to any other Andy Zaltzman joke, it will still play.

So

Chris could remix the entire Bugle back catalog by just splicing Andy's setups and punchlines together in a free-for-all manner, and it would still sound like Andy.

Right.

Okay.

Well, I mean, it's good to know that I've got such incredible theatrical range.

Also, joining us on the Bugle for the first time.

So, bringing something fresh to this, what evidently is a a tired old format.

Someone I gigged with for the first time literally a millennium ago, or at least in a different millennium.

Warm welcome to the bugle to Alistair Barry.

Hello, Al.

How are you?

I'm very well, my friend.

How are you?

Very good.

Welcome to the show.

I feel slightly awkward that we've got one guest coming from the glamour of San Francisco, and I am speaking to you from the Holiday in Express Hull, which is attached to a large multi-story car park.

Levels of glamour that Alan Partridge would genuinely look down upon.

But I must say, I very much like what Nato said about your jokes, and I don't mean that in a bad way.

I've always been a very, very big fan of

your wordy introductions, especially when we used to do Political Animal and those very long, I've always thought you could actually do 20 minutes off stage just splicing your introductions together and actually not bother with the gig at all.

So I think we've spotted an opportunity.

Yeah, I mean, if only I'd done that during my brief and not particularly successful club stand-up career then I think my 20-minute set would have gone a lot better.

We are recording on the 17th of November 2023.

On this day in 1810 Sweden declared war on the United Kingdom thus beginning the Anglo-Swedish War, one of my all-time favourite wars.

It raged from November 1810 until July 1812 and when I say raged it raged like a bench in the park.

No fighting ever took place.

No one was killed in it And trade between the two countries continued largely unaffected.

Why can't all wars be like that?

But there were still surely English people making jokes about having five weapons left over at the end of the conflict.

I mean, sure, the films wouldn't be so exciting,

and maybe the poetry wouldn't reach such heights.

But other than that, that sounds like the ideal blueprint for a war.

This seems like a very Swedish thing.

Yeah.

That just so that they would

have a war and not show up.

Sweden seems to be really committed as a nation to not doing war effectively.

To non-commitment.

In Stockholm, there's a giant museum of the Vasa Museum.

Have you been there?

Of their greatest warship that they built to defeat their enemies and then immediately sunk.

Yeah.

I mean, it lasted, I think, about 20 minutes, didn't it?

Longer than your club did

no no NATO they went on far longer than 20 minutes out of these driveways

as always a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin this week Napoleon Bonaparte to mark the launch of the new Ridley Scott blockbuster Napoleon

featuring Joaquin Phoenix.

We ask some searching questions about Napoleon including did Napoleon actually exist?

Or like Maximum's Decimus Meridius in Gladiator,

also featuring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Scott,

did Ridley Scott just make him up?

I mean, it's quite possible, isn't it?

He's got a bit of a track record for it.

Maximum's known as Maximums, of course, because of his remarkable consistency, throwing 180s when playing darts.

Also, we ask, if Napoleon had invaded Russia from the other end in 1812, would he have been any more successful?

And the answer, no.

Also, we ask, could the rumours be true that Nappy, as he was known by his mates, escaped from exile on Santelena before his alleged death in 1821 and is now making a living in Vegas as a Napoleon impersonator?

Plus, we ask who would win a battlecraft gymnastics mashup competition between Napoleon and Simone Biles?

And I personally would definitely tune in for that.

Also, we give you tips on how to make your own Napoleon at home.

We have advice from a leading historical figure modelling expert.

You can make a decent Bicorn hat out of some old underwear and a coat hanger, apparently.

Plus, we tell you how to divert electricity from your home circuit to bring your model Napoleon to life.

You will, of course, need the billpayers' permission to do this.

And you also need a live chicken and five gallons of vinegar.

Don't ask.

Just do it.

That section in the bin.

The fact you managed to get through a whole bit on Napoleon without mentioning Wellington once means you have to be hounded out of Britain never to return.

I think it's absolute disgrace.

Played by Rupert Everett in the film, apparently.

It's really an interesting portrayal, having essentially someone who's

quite well known for his sort of slightly flamboyant and often, I think he's played drag quite a lot.

I'm wondering, I'm looking forward to the film enormously, but I think it would add a certain historical level to really annoy those people who fetishise your Churchills and your Wellingtons if he did turn up at Waterloo wearing Wellington boots and a dress.

I always think that the reason they don't go to full historical accuracy in film is that then like 80% of the film would be taken up with characters saying,

you have horrible breath because no one has invented toothpaste yet.

Top story this week: San Francisco has been the center of the world.

Exciting times for you, NATO, as your home city has hosted the APEC Summit.

APEC, I think, is basically a global cartel that artificially fixes the price of Aardvox.

But the summit

in San Francisco this week, I mean, it's brought your city

to a standstill, hasn't it?

Have you enjoyed the grand jamboree?

So, the APEC Summit, the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, has brought 20,000 diplomats and businessmen to the San Francisco Convention Center to plot the further plunder of the world.

And

so

it has totally jacked up traffic.

Everyone from here is staying away from downtown unless you are going there either to

plot the aforementioned plunder of the world or protest people doing that.

One or the other.

There's no other activities happening in San Francisco right now.

The city has

we're excited to welcome the 20,000 delegates to the city

to enjoy the culture for which we're famous, to try some of our drugs

and the fentanyl that people we've been overdosing on at record numbers.

There was

like, you know, there's been all these news stories about

the decline of San Francisco.

It's a failed city, homelessness.

And they managed to make all the homeless people disappear and clean the city.

And

people ask two questions.

One is,

why didn't we do that last month?

If you could just do that.

And two is, where did you put the homeless people?

So

we think that they're being fed to the APEC delegates.

So because our mayor sort of has like a case of Munchausen by proxy towards the city, where she sort of goes in cycles of like trying to destroy the city so that she can take credit for saving it.

And, you know, we didn't want people to lose out.

There was a Czech camera crew that was robbed at gunpoint

while they were filming.

So that's exciting.

San Francisco, famous for our gays, we had a gay event called Gaypeck

so that the delegates could come and enjoy the fisting that we invented.

I don't know why they called it Gaypeck when Pacific Rim was sitting right there.

Family show.

Family show.

We have people chaining themselves to delegates, getting arrested, not getting arrested, wishing they could get arrested because it's cold and wet and they want to go home and their butts are getting cold.

So it's been an exciting week.

So, is that what they've been doing with the homeless people then?

Is that how it works?

Basically, they've managed to turn them into protesters because that way they can be corralled into some sort of prison cell and kept warm.

So, you've managed to kill two problems with one fell swoop.

That was sort of the genius of Occupy Wall Street, if you recall, is we're not homeless, we're protesters.

I like the fact that a a Czech

camera crew was robbed at gunpoint.

I have to say, I've never been to San Francisco, but I've been to America quite a lot.

And I have to say, if I was robbed in America and it wasn't at gunpoint, I would feel short-changed.

I feel it's only fair that firearms are involved at some point.

You can't come back and go, got mugged, what did he have?

Just an attitude.

I was doing another story about the impact on the city, that there was a couple that was due to get married, found that their wedding venue was inside the summit security zone.

The last thing you want at a wedding is delegates at an international economic conference milling around.

It just devalues the entire concept of making long-term promises and sounding like you actually mean them.

I think that's a very insuspicious start to

a marriage.

It depends on what you registered for, Andy.

Because if your bridal registry included trade-related intellectual property rights,

you might have hit the jackpot.

Elon Musk pulled out of his planned gig at the summit.

The fictitious techrepreneur and cartoon Baddy had a schedule change, apparently, and had to spend the afternoon stroking his white cat and fostering anti-Semitism instead.

So

it's not been awkward.

But I do think this idea of solving the entire homeless problem

could be something that, I mean, this might be the big positive for the world to emerge from this summit.

And we just need more global summits everywhere, all the time, and we will solve all street homelessness.

It seems like that solution has been

staring us in the face for

house the world's homeless through protest and basically removing from the streets that way.

Yeah.

Well, because obviously over here, I don't know if, NATO, you followed this over here.

It turns out homelessness in Britain is a lifestyle choice,

according to our recently departed Home Secretary.

And I've always thought, you know, pitching a tent at the Glastonbury Festival is a lifestyle choice.

Pitching it on the high street, I've always felt slightly less of a lifestyle choice.

And I don't know if you've seen, you may have seen our very famous

homeless lifestyle magazine, The Big Issue, featuring, you know, center folds of men on, you know, various levels of heroin overdose and a special supplement for park ventures you can buy nearby.

The British one.

It turns out that, you know, I'm going to blow your minds.

Do you know how

they solved the homeless problem in San Francisco for the summit?

Are you ready?

Go on then.

They put them in homes.

And somehow that worked.

In terms of

the meeting between Biden and Xi, I mean,

a few slight moments of awkwardness, for example, when Biden

called President Xi a dictator,

which apparently he doesn't like very much.

In fact, Biden said he's a dictator in the sense that he's a guy who runs a country based on a form of government that is totally different from ours, which I mean, it's a bit of a

slightly restricted definition of dictator.

I love that Biden backpedaling on the dictator who's like, oh, it's just different.

You know, I don't mean dictator in a bad way.

Some of my best friends are dictators.

It's such a significant meeting

that the leaders of the United States and China met, that the world's largest superpower met with the United States.

Well, I did like there was one quote saying that they agreed, and this was a huge step forward, that they agreed to share military intelligence.

And I was kind of under the impression that they had actually been sharing military intelligence for many, many decades now.

It's just they didn't like to let each other know that that's what they were doing.

You've got Trump, who basically is there calling anyone who doesn't vote for him vermin.

I almost think that Biden saying that Xi might be a dictator is almost a term of endearment.

In other American news, there's been a highly entertaining squabble, NATO,

which made Bernie Sanders,

former presidential candidate, get as cross as I think I've ever seen him be.

And bearing in mind that his fundamental state of existence is being cross about the entire state of America and the planet.

That was quite impressive.

Just bring us up to date with

the squabble that provoked Bernie Sanders to get, I think, a repetitive gavel-banging injury.

As I may have said before, Bernie Sanders is an 82-year-old bald Jewish socialist grandpa who went to University of Chicago in 1962, which is also a description of my dad.

So

when people are like, oh, I really love Bernie Sanders, I'm like, I get it.

My dad is cool, too.

But so it was at a hearing of the, the, there's a Senate committee that Sanders is the chair of.

It's the Senate Health Education Labor Pensions Committee, aka the HELP Committee, because they mean well.

And the title of the hearing was Standing Up Against Corporate Greed, How Unions Are Improving the Lives of Working Families.

And the Republicans on the committee couldn't have that.

So Mark Wayne Mullen.

is a senator from Republican senator from Oklahoma

who challenged the president of the Teamsters union to a fight during the hearing, Sean O'Brien, Teamsters president.

And Sanders had to

repeatedly gavel

to call the hearing back to order.

I love the whole exchange because,

you know, I guess Sean O'Brien had tweeted at some point, you know, you're a punk anytime, anywhere.

And Mullen wanted to fight him and said, you know, stand your butt up right now.

And O'Brien said, I will.

And Sanders said, we're not fighting.

We're here to talk about working families.

And

so here's my favorite part:

Senator Sanders, in attempting to redirect the scuffle, said to Senator Mullen, this is a hearing.

Sean O'Brien is the witness.

Do you have a question for the witness?

And then Mark Mullen said, You said anytime, any place, this is a time and a place.

And Senator Sanders said, that's not a question.

So then

the dumbest thing about what Mullen did was he brought,

he brandished color printouts of

Sean O'Brien's tweets.

Like he had had the presence of mind to print out in color, that is like some very much like okay boomer energy, like not understanding how the technology works, that you had to print out color copies of tweets in order to make a point.

But here's the thing.

Mark Wayne Mullen is a former MMA fighter.

Not very successful one.

He had five matches, I believe,

but a former MMA fighter nevertheless.

Sean O'Brien

is a Teamster from Boston.

And

Alistair, I don't know if you know anything about Teamsters or Boston, but if you had to bet on a fight and your choice was a professional MMA fighter or literally any Teamster from Boston, you go with the Teamster from Boston.

You go with the Teamster from Boston.

Funnily, I was driving up here tonight to do this and I listened to a couple of politics podcasts in the car and

I listened to The Last Bugle.

And it struck me that actually the bugle was by far the most sensible one because everything else is so utterly batshit, crazy that it doesn't make any sense to do anything apart from comedy.

I read that exchange, you know, Bernie Sanders in the middle banging his gavel while you stand your butt up, you stand your butt up, and him, I think Bernie Sanders said the American public think little enough of us as it is.

He's got a point there.

So, so you're suggesting that these kind of exchanges are not high-level political discourse, Mullin?

I don't like thugs and bullies.

O'Brien, I don't like you, because you've just described yourself.

Zing.

And then they

went on to say,

O'Brien, do not point at me.

That's disrespectful.

Mullin, I don't care about respecting you at all.

O'Brien, I don't respect you at all.

I mean, this is.

We've mentioned Abraham Lincoln earlier on, and the great history of American rhetoric and the back and forth between

politicians and political figures.

I mean,

it's hard to see

where American political rhetoric can go from here.

If you think Demosthenes

famously cured his stutter by chewing pebbles, whereas, of course, American Republicans now famously sort out their squabbles by taking the pebbles out and just chucking them at each other across Bernie Sanders.

Yeah, I mean, I think you're probably not far off.

What I saw in a local zoo here in London, which I used to take my kids, when they're about the age that your kids are now, Alistair.

And I was taking my kids around and a monkey

shat on its hand, ate some and then threw it across the cage at another monkey.

And that monkey is now a senator for Arizona, which I think is important to remember.

NATO at a protest news now and well it wouldn't be an episode of the bugle featuring NATO green if NATO had not been or wasn't currently on a protest.

You did do one episode live from a picket line.

You have

taken part in what's been described as one of the largest acts of Jewish civil disobedience in Bay Area history.

Arguably bigger than when Moses turned up with

a large number of people saying, oh, I think we should have gone right rather than left.

But so what exactly is this huge act of Jewish disobedience?

So, hello, Alistair.

Good to meet you.

I stay in the streets

with the people.

I forgot that.

The destruction of Gaza has come at great human cost, but none greater than the fact that I lost 3% of my followers on social media

due to my controversial and provocative stance of being unequivocally against killing children.

So that is a line too far.

As a Jew, it has been sobering in recent months to discover that I am, in fact, anti-Semitic.

I have been informed that I am an anti-Semite because for using words apartheid, occupation, genocide, war crime, fascist context, anti-Zionism, colonialism, ceasefire, and morality.

I've also been called anti-Semitic for not simultaneously in every utterance about anything, also saying Israel has a right to exist and defend itself.

I condemn Hamas in the events of 10-7, hostages, Yemen, Uyghur, Armenia, Kurds, Darfur, Kony 2012, and Sudan.

Apparently, my controversial anti-killing of children views are secretly a dog whistle that I am knowingly doing to Nazis to invite them to kill me and my family.

I am inciting violence against myself because I didn't realize that Jew haters the world over are in their lairs waiting for the signal from an obscure left-wing Jewish community in San Francisco to launch their attacks.

So it's been very weird on my social media.

Some people are legitimately upset about

the war, and some people have lost the plot.

Like, did you know, Andy, that Hamas kills and beheads people?

I'm against killing.

I'm not more against beheading.

Do you know what I mean?

Like,

I'm not like, oh, they just bombed everybody to death.

At least they weren't beheaded.

So this past Monday night, I was one of 650 Jews who occupied the Oakland Federal Building to demand a ceasefire

for many hours.

And it was a very Jewish action.

Isn't an anti-Semitic trope if it's just our personalities?

Like the protesters, there was a lot of anxiety.

Like there was a lot of discussion about how to center ourselves and calm ourselves while people were chanting.

There was

everybody, you know, there was a lot of like, did you bring snacks?

Of course, Jews planned to bring enough food to the protest.

We're going to be there for a while.

Do you have a snack?

Do you want someone to get you a snack?

Do you want us to bring you a snack?

Do you have a layer?

Are you going to be cold?

Do you have your allergy medication?

It was very

stereotypical.

But I'm optimistic that the Palestinian peace movement is ultimately going to be successful because it's the only movement that has a signature scarf.

And I think you can't underestimate the power of effective accessories.

But the thing that you don't realize about protesting and civil disobedience is that it's fing boring.

One thing you should know is that it's not difficult to overwhelm the police.

If, like, there are about 40 Homeland Security police and 600 protesters, and in other protests,

like, police overreact with violence, and then they say after the fact that they feared for their lives.

Not this time.

I can say definitively that when police are confronted by 600 Jews singing Lo Ya Sagoy and dancing the Horah, they're not afraid of anything.

Unless there's so many snacks, they're slightly afraid their cholesterol might be in serious danger.

Yeah, they were afraid of picking up some contact diabetes.

The calls for a ceasefire have, well, caused massive fractures in the Labour Party here.

I mean, Labour

must be getting jittery at this point with a general election due in a year or so's time.

And it does seem completely unlosable.

And they are having to try and find ways to make things more difficult for themselves in the traditional Labour Party manner.

Eight shadow junior ministers have resigned after refusing to back the party line on not calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

Kierstama wants a humanitarian pause

before then

unleashing the forces of unhumanitarianism again.

And so eight shadow junior ministers have resigned because they want us a ceasefire.

So it's essentially, I mean, it's

to a large extent, as we talked about on the Beagle before,

semantic arguments about what ceasefire and what pause means.

And it does seem a bit disappointing.

Are you going to say it?

That you're anti-semantic?

In, well, let's talk a bit more about UK politics now.

Alistair, it's been a tumultuous week, not just for the opposition, but for the government.

Home Secretary soella bravman mentioned earlier on

was sacked by uh interim prime minister rishi sunak she then uh issued a scathing resignation letter or departure letter accusing rishi sunak of uh betrayal um

Bravman, much fated by the right wing of the Tory party for being consistently even more wrong than all the other cabinet ministers and doing so more provocatively and divisively.

And

she reacted to being fired with all the restraint, diplomacy, and sensitivity we've come to expect from her time in cabinet, chundering out a furious letter that said in several hundred words what she clearly meant to say to Sunak in four letters, one vowel, and three consonants.

It's,

I mean, the bizarre thing about Suella Bravman being fired is not so much her being fired now,

because she's been fired

previously and then reappointed within a week last time.

I think she's,

I've lost, slightly lost count of the number of times

she's been fine.

But the fact that she is

in politics at all, I mean, something's gone wrong, has it not, Alison?

Something's gone horribly wrong.

I mean, I particularly like the fact that the Conservatives are meant to be the party of law and order.

And she was kicked out, stroked resigned, stroked, sacked by the least successful Prime Minister in British history.

And six days later, she was back in one of the great offices of state.

And you do think, I thought the punishment should fit the crime.

I thought that was one of your sort of shits.

but no no let her back in six days later I mean she is astonishing at having achieved I don't know if Nato you're aware of the previous incumbent of the role Pretty Patel

who I was under the impression was the most evil woman on the planet and Suella literally was like hold my latto

and has

it's but it's of a piece with with what we were saying about the cage fighting Americans that we're now purely in the realms of fantasy and Suella Braverman I mean the lifestyle choices thing there's she is she's a populist who seems also to have massively overestimated her own popularity.

Um,

ungenuist is the term I think that should be unpopulist, I think, because I don't, and she's, you know, there's that kind of widget, she's just saying what people are thinking.

And you think, God, if this is really what people are thinking, I don't want to live on this planet anymore, it's absolutely abhorrent.

Well, and she said in this resignation letter,

she said, I may not have always found the right words.

That is a little bit of self-knowledge,

but I've always striven to give voice to the quiet majority that supported us in 2019.

Well,

a couple of things to pick up there in the two-word term quiet majority.

The kind of people that Suella Braverman speaks for are the least quiet people in the country.

They generally scream, often from within a weekly newspaper column.

And also, it's not a majority.

I mean, in that 2019 election, 14 million people voted for Boris Johnson's Conservatives, which is a lot of votes by historic standards in a British election, but not a majority.

It was 43% of people who voted, 30% of people who could have voted, and around about 20% of all people in the country.

So, I mean, that's classic Bravman for me to use two words and for them both to be fundamentally wrong.

Absolutely wrong that the quiet majority is in fact the hysterical minority.

It is literally, you have to think the opposite.

I mean, the whole thing about this Rwanda scheme is is that they were told that it was against all it's not just, oh, you can't do this, it's against all our international obligations.

And now they've got this idea that they're going to rewrite a treaty that's going to change it.

They knew, they knew years ago that this wasn't going to work.

It wasn't Bravoman's policy, it wasn't Sunak's policy, yet they nailed their colours to this particularly unpleasant mast.

In order to sh and this is the thing that really gets you, in order to shift 200 migrants,

this is not a serious policy on any level, apart from it within the pages of the Daily Mail, you know, hysterical minority area.

But what I did notice, I don't know if you saw it today, Andy, in the Telegraph,

that Suella Braverman has introduced a five-point plan to get the Rwanda deal over the line.

And you do think if only she'd recently been occupying one of the great offices of state, that would have given her the power to achieve that.

Upon such threads, Alison.

Can I ask a question?

Yep.

So I'm trying to brush up on what's happening here.

And am I understanding correctly that

what has been called the Rwanda scheme was a plan to deport migrants away from the UK to a location most known for genocide.

And they're surprised that that was determined to have humanitarian problems.

Yes.

Did I miss something?

No, no.

Well, I mean, there's a couple of things to address.

That's pretty much it.

Yeah, you could have added a couple of things to it.

Basically, these are are people that we say we don't have

room and space and capacity for, and we're sending them to a country that is more densely populated and considerably less well-off than the United Kingdom.

So you can throw that in.

The Supreme Court rejected the policy this week

as unlawful,

which is a kind of, you know, legal term.

They could have gone with unhinged, unenforceable, unjustifiable, unaffordable and unfathomable, the five U's of modern Conservative Party policymaking.

What's most frustrating, as you say,

is that the time, money and effort splarged on this policy could, if I've done my calculations right, have paid for and produced any number of alternative solutions to the global migration crisis.

Now, as I've said before, we in Britain have to take the global migration crisis particularly seriously because of all global refugees and other asylums, approximately 99.94% end up here in Britain, if you only count the ones who end up here in Britain.

So, I mean, it does affect us disproportionately to all other countries.

So but the amount of money they've spent on this Rwanda policy, they could have built spring-loaded rebound cliffs to replace the white cliffs of Dover to then just twang people back in the direction from whence they came.

They could have spent it on a giant space hologram of Siwella Bravman saying the words, are you sure you want to move here?

We could have built a moat to go with our current moat or we could have installed giant space magnets that detect people with an insufficient level of inherent potential Britishness,

slurp them up, and plonk them somewhere in foreign ania or the rest of the world, as it's also known.

Or we could have just

hired more sharks,

bigger ones, like the ones we used to have to defend our shores until we joined the EU.

And they made us replace the sharks with baguettes, which got very soggy very quickly.

So, I mean,

so much time and effort and money has been wasted on this obviously unneeded.

It's the wrong solution to a,

you know,

clearly a massive, intractable global crisis.

And we, we, oh, it drives me mad the narrowness of the way that our politics approaches it.

It's happening all over Foreignania, and that is a word that I am going to be taking from this podcast and enjoying tremendously to basically signify anything outside the coast of Britain is foreignania, although I think Wales and Scotland should probably be included, and certainly parts of Cornwall.

But

I think that you're absolutely right.

It's so patent.

Again, we come back to the absolute post-post-truth.

It's so patently ridiculous.

I mean, they could have genuinely, I mean, the jokes that you provide there, Andy, absolutely lovely, but they genuinely could have provided a luxury hotel built for each asylum seeker they're planning to send for the money they've spent.

140 million, and they haven't sent a single asylum seeker.

And I do think it's quite like

the rationale behind the Rwanda scheme is apparently that the idea of being deported to Rwanda would be would be enough to make people too scared to travel to Britain.

So it was a deterrent.

And yet at the same time, they were keen to insist that Rwanda was a simply delightful place to be deported to and frankly the holiday destination of choice for anyone with any taste.

And those two things cannot sit in the same mind, especially as NATO says.

If you say to 99% of the world Rwanda first word association Rwanda was the first thing genocide so it's not really somewhere that you want to go to either by choice or deportation as a result of Bravman being sacked there was a cabinet reshuffle and I never thought I'd say these words but David Cameron is back in f ⁇ ing cabinet and

I think f ⁇ ing cabinet is now how it is officially known after what's happened in in recent years Now, it's been described as one of the great political comebacks.

Now,

I really want to pick up on this use of the term comeback.

Now, a comeback is someone who's worked their way back from retirement or obscurity.

They've earned their place back through achievement or rehoned their skills to enable another shot at success.

In David Cameron's case, what he did to earn his comeback was sit around doing absolutely f ⁇ ing call apart from some shonky lobbying, some corporate freeloading, and just sitting back and watching the chaos he bequeathed to the nation unfold.

And now he is, this is not a comeback.

I read that he was in a shed, Andy.

Yes.

Very much like me.

I mean, basically, I mean,

since he jumped into the first lifeboat after ramming RMS Brexit, Annic snout first into that iceberg.

But he's basically, I mean, he hasn't been very invisible in public life.

And this is the weird thing about it.

I can't understand understand

Rishi Sunat's logic thinking, oh, I'll tell you what we need to get those wavering voters back, is David f ⁇ ing Cameron.

I mean, what voter is going to think, oh, Cameron's back, that changes everything.

The thing with Cameron is he left office massively unpopular with people who were against Brexit and massively unpopular with people who were in favour of Brexit.

And also, he's not an MP because he, as I said, flounced out of politics, both wrongly, because he had a duty to sort out his own mess and rightly because we needed to be rid of him

kind of Schrödinger's resignation and he flounced out after the Brexit referendum so to get him in cabinet he had to be made an instant lord

and thus given an eternal seat in parliament and if you want alongside the likes of former Boris Johnson special advisor Charlotte Owen aged 30 who's now in parliament for life for having rendered the nation the formidable service of a couple of years saying yes boss to an egomaniac and for our special competition this week buglers you you need to explain why that is a just, sensible, and democratic system without using the words absolute travesty, putrid parody of a political system, or I thought we fought three world wars to save our democracy, too hot, one cold.

Do send your answers in on the nearest available pigeon.

Sports and the non-existence of God news now, and

two things I'm really into, to be honest.

The American football legend Megan Arapino, who's retiring, is facing, has been criticised after getting injured in her final match.

She had to leave the field after six minutes after injuring her Achilles and said afterwards that this was proof that God does not exist.

Now,

this is, I mean, this is a

fascinating story because, I mean, it gets to the very heart of what it is to be alive.

A, because sport is the greatest thing humans have ever invented.

And B, because ever since that famous day in, what was it, 4004 BC, when Adam found himself unexpectedly existing and said, who am I?

What year is it?

And how did I get here?

And an opportunistic bearded guy in a cloud said, hey, bud, I just made you.

And do mind those dangly bits.

I probably should have popped my knee inside for both logistical and aesthetic reasons.

Ever since then, people have been searching for proof of the existence or non-existence of God and or gods.

Thus far, The most conclusive proof offered in favor of God's existence is the number of athletes who thank God when they win minus the number of athletes who blame God when they lose, suggesting that God A exists, B likes sport and C really hates losing.

The main proof that God does not exist on the other hand includes pretty much everything that's ever happened in history, dementia, wasps and the results of the 1954 and 1974 Football World Cup finals.

And indeed football may now have provided that clinching evidence that could see bishops, imams and rabbis and other priests from all the different religions just quitting their posts in droves because in the final match of a phenomenal career Rapino was forced off by an Achilles injury as I said in the first few minutes not quite such a serious Achilles injury as Achilles himself suffered in the famous Troy versus Greece United match back in the mythical day but serious enough for Rapino one of the most influential sports people of her time to cite the injury as the final nail in the pumpkin of theistic belief um Piers Morgan whose career many prominent theologians have claimed also is incontrovertible evidence that we live in a godless universe, claimed that her injury was, in fact, proof that God does exist, and accused Rapino of brace yourselves, irony fans, being arrogant, self-promoting prima donna.

So, we're still waiting for verdicts from the world's religious leaders on whether Rapino's injury is or isn't proof of God's existence, or indeed of God's misogyny and homophobia, of which, to be fair, there's a weighty body of historical evidence,

or merely God's opposition to unnatural hair colours.

What did you guys make of it?

I don't know where you stand on whether or not God exists, but I mean, if he was

to,

you know, sort of prove his existence or otherwise,

I mean, he could be in deep cover and trying to make people think he doesn't exist by injuring Megan Rapino.

I mean, is this the way that he'd do it?

You have to say, in this situation, it does seem that she was joking.

And there has been a phenomenal sense of humour failure from everyone.

Who would have thought Piers Morgan would grab the wrong end of the stick just to make some sort of controversy?

And she did.

She snapped her Achilles.

And of course, this being the world of absolute literal response where tone is missing from any reportage, she has in fact denied the existence of a theistic universe.

And I'm not quite sure what she did.

I think she was just a bit pissed out of it.

Well, you say that, Alistair, but this is 2023.

It's one of our fundamental human rights, enshrined in the 21st century social media convention that has replaced all other previous form kind of guidelines for how humans should behave, that we can take everything that some people say completely literally whilst excusing everything that other people say on the grounds that they didn't really mean it, depending on whether or not we agree with them.

So that's

the world we live in.

And that is proof that God exists.

That brings us to the end of this week's bugle.

Thank you very much for listening.

It's plugs time.

Alastair, you've got a show coming up in London.

I have.

I'm on tour at the moment with my show Woke in Progress, entitled Woke in Progress, specifically to annoy my mother, to be honest.

But

I've been on tour for a little while, it goes on into December.

But the big date coming up is November the 28th at the comedy store.

And sales are looking good, but it's quite a big venue.

And so I still have plenty of tickets left to sell.

Tickets for the 28th of November at the comedy store at www.alastabarry.com.

Naito, plug away.

Well, buglers, if you're in San Francisco and this comes out on Saturday, Saturday night, I'm at the San Francisco Punchline.

In January, I will be, I have a few shows for SF Sketchfest, a political stand-up show, and a live podcast of the Bituation Room.

And then in February, I'll be on tour in Portland, Oregon, with an away date.

Check me out there.

Very important dates to alert you to, Buglers.

We are on tour next year in March, various places around

the United Kingdom.

Chris, have you got the list of...

I haven't got the list in front of me.com forward slash live and see for their finger selves.

All right, there.

We'll just leave it at that.

Also, if you want to help keep this show free, flourishing, and independent, do join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme.

Details on the Bugle website.

And if you join as a premium-level voluntary subscriber, you will get exclusive subscriber only access to the new monthly ask Andy show when I answer all or some of your questions

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.