(More) Sh*t Happens

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello Buglers, I am Andy Zaltzman.

It is the 9th of October 2023 and welcome to issue 4276 of the Bugle audio newspaper for a thoroughly f ⁇ ing idiotic world.

I'm Andy Zaltzman and I will be honest with you, I generally prefer doing this show in weeks where wars are not breaking out and where massively complicated issues haven't just become horrifically, tragically brutal.

But there you go, that is the problem with doing podcasts in places like planet Earth and whilst being a fully paid up member of a species like the human race, these things happen.

So welcome to this week's Bugle.

I am in the shed of Destiny in London and I'm joined from Bologna by Alice Fraser and from San Francisco by NATO Green.

Welcome, both of you.

I do hope you're going to cheer me up over the next hour.

I hope so too, Andy.

I just want one day.

I would like to hear some news out of the Middle East that isn't some version of massive humanitarian disaster involving war crimes that's going to make everyone on your social media timeline finging horrendous.

I hate so many more people than I did yesterday, Andy, and none of them are in the Middle East.

We're all waiting for the new, like, the breakthrough on the cutting-edge, like, kebab innovations uh out of the middle east so that we can get the the the futuristic horizon of kebabs and falafels to enjoy well that's something to look forward to uh i guess um

uh we're also joined by a special guest this week the 16th century dutch king william the silent hello william

Still got it, Bill.

Still got it.

We are recording, as I said, on the 9th of October 2023, 2,000 years to the day since, ironically, in the Middle East, Jesus made a bench.

It was before he got really big.

1,000 years since Elon Musk's time travel machine landed in what is now California for the first time.

And 1,000 years exactly before Elon Musk's time travel machine lands back in California for the last time with all the secrets he's harvested from early third millennium planet Earth.

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

A recent poll in Britain awarded former Kent novelist Charles Dickens the Britain's greatest first line of a novel of all time awards for his classic It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times.

Charles Dickens, aka Chuck D, thus launched the human race headlong into an era where everything had to be either the best or the worst.

I blame him for most things.

The opening line, of course, came from his 1859 smash hit platinum-selling French Revolution Page Turner, A Tale of Two Cities, and saw off competition from, amongst others, Big Georgie Orwell's 1984, which was set famously in 1984 and began, it was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking 13 as Ian Botham ran into Bowl Somerset's first delivery of the first county championship match of the new season, on strike for Yorkshire, Jeffrey Boycott.

It also beat the classic 1970s children's book, Miffy Feels Squiffy, which began, Miffy dear, the nice vet said, I've run a diagnosis.

You'd best sit down because it's bad news.

You've got myxomatosis.

Also saw off

one of the most famous famous first lines in any

novel from anywhere.

Pull my finger, said Mr.

Darcy, giggling.

Sadly that remained the unpublished first draft.

And it also beat off this from a more recent novel.

My name's Liz and I was Prime Minister for like a month and a bit and this is my book about me and why I was right and why I was just unlucky that absolutely everything I did went catastrophically wrong because of all the lefties running the country whilst I was running the country.

That sadly missed out.

As did well, my personal pick for greatest first line of a novel of all time.

It was 4.30 a.m.

The sound of a dog barking rent the Philadelphia skies.

Mickey Stantanio opened a resentment-filled eye.

F ⁇ ing dog, he spat, stretching his arms and throwing his novelty-doggy alarm clock at the wall.

The dog barked again.

Balls, frouted Stantanio.

That was actually a real dog.

I'm going to have to buy another alarm clock again.

One of the great works of literature of all time.

Also, also in our book section, some new AI memoirs from great historical figures written with the help of the wondrous magic of artificial intelligence.

The books that these great figures would have written if they'd written them, including Henry VIII's Better Luck Next Time, The Gentleman's Guide to a Mid-Millennium Breakup, Julius Caesar's Ouchie, How Being Stabbed to Death by a Group of Conspirators Can Really Ruin Your Month of March, and this from Lucy, How to Look Good When You've Been Dead for 3.2 Million Years.

That's an absolute page turner from the former Ethiopia-based skeleton and star of the Australopithecus afarensis franchise.

That section is in the bin.

I mean, at least those are books rather than TikTok series,

Jesus' AI TikTok series.

Are any of your friends toxic?

Find out how.

Top story this week.

The Middle East still isn't fixed, it turns out.

It's very hard to know what to say about a story like this in a show like this.

As the ancient sayings go, we are where we are.

It is what it is.

And shit happens followed by more shit then happening in response to the first shit that happened, then more shit happening.

More shit happening in response to that.

Shit then following as sure as shit happening, follows shit happening until no one can remember what the first shit that happened was, who shat it and why.

And then to cap it all off, some more shit happens.

It's,

I don't know, it's quite often on the bugle.

I reach a point where I almost think I'm never going to feel optimistic again.

And this week has been one of those weeks, and I've really needed

the cleansing power of sport in my life as much as ever.

Andy, I am here to not help.

Okay, thank you, NATO.

Thanks for stepping into that breach.

How are you going to not help?

I'm so agitated, I'm going to take off my Leeds United scarf.

Oh, wow.

That puts everything in perspective.

So it's sort of a relief that we're having this conversation, the three of us are all Jews.

I mean, we're saddled with Chris, who's a known anti-Semite.

but

other than that,

you know, and it's like one of the things that's so hard about what happens in Israel and Palestine is as a Jew in America.

I don't know if this is your experience where you are, but I'm expected to have an opinion in a different kind of, like, I, and I just long to be free to hate Israel like I hate literally every other government.

I hate Israel, the Israeli government, I hate the Palestinian government, I hate the American government, I hate my mayor, I hate my governor, I hate the Australian government.

You name it.

If there's some sort of seal or crest involved, I'm against it.

And somehow that's like a controversial stance in America in 2023.

Alice, you're in Italy currently,

which I think makes you entirely neutral on everything other than Italian politics and food.

How has it been reported in Italian media?

Have you followed it at all?

I have absolutely not followed the Italian

media on this issue at all.

I have been trying to avoid it.

Basically, until I was told I was doing the bugle this week, I was trying absolutely to avoid the whole issue because I am so pregnant right now that my response to literally all of this news is just to start weeping and go, they're all just babies.

So that hasn't really led me to the most incisive political commentary on the whole matter.

I've been following a little bit what the various governments around the world have been saying, the statements that the governments have been making,

none of which are at all surprising if you know anything about

the alliances and

commercial arrangements that each nation has with the other.

I think some of my favourites were Brazil, who just made the most limp-wristed statement you could possibly imagine, just a wet paper towel of a statement urging parties to avoid escalating the situation and asking everyone to be nice, which is a very sweet way to present yourself as completely useless.

Qatar, along with Saudi Arabia and Iran,

blamed Israel, surprise.

The EU and the Czech Republic have come down on the side of Israel.

I think, this is the worst part of it, I have found myself really awkwardly agreeing with the Chinese government's statement,

which is always slightly uncomfortable, who called for a ceasefire and for establishing an independent state of Palestine,

implementing a two-state solution and avoiding an escalation of tensions and violence and ending the cycle of violence.

And I am always deeply uncomfortable when I find myself agreeing with China, given that they recently are called Australia America's dogs, and I had to agree with them on that as well.

So.

My favorite of the, like, I feel like it's like a competition in this moment, Alice, or like the political statement to express concern without taking a controversial stance in any way at all.

My prize goes to Michigan Governor Gretchen

Whitmer, who tweeted, I have been in touch with communities impacted by what's happening in the region.

It is abhorrent.

My heart is with all those impacted.

We need peace in this region.

I'm glad her heart is involved.

I'm sure that's a big comfort to

everyone.

Try to figure it out.

The context of

the

latest flare-up, as they say, is that there was a possibility of a normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

And a lot of people think that Hamas wanted to sort of provoke a crisis to stop the normalization, and it will probably work.

And so, I would say the word of the day, everyone, is BATNA.

If you take a business class on negotiations that includes the idea of BATNA, which is an acronym, it does not stand for Build a Tiny Naked Andy.

BATNA stands stands for best alternative to no agreement.

It is how parties each evaluate the cost of a no-deal scenario.

And it's based on a book called Getting to Yes, but we're in more of a getting to f you and drop dead forever situation.

And so now everybody gets their BATNA.

It's like a thought experiment.

Hamas and Israel get a BATNA.

Matt Goetz gets a BATNA.

Saudi gets a BATNA.

BATNA's all around.

Batna's for everybody.

You know, the failure to anticipate the attack was perceived by Israel as an intelligence failure.

And when, as we all know, as Jews, when Israel has an intelligence failure, Israel's mom is very disappointed, and Israel

might not get any popka.

Israel will never be a doctor now.

Israel's older brother didn't have an

intelligence failure.

It wasn't an intelligence failure.

Today, the Times of Israel reported that Egypt warned Israel repeatedly that something big was happening in Gaza.

It was explosive.

So it wasn't so much an intelligence failure as a listening failure because it's Jews, everyone was talking all at the same time and they couldn't hear.

Netanyahu wasn't interested in the reports about threats from Gaza because he was focused on the West Bank.

And we all know that men have trouble multitasking.

It wasn't just that they missed the plan, but that the paragliders, Hamas, attacked Israel using paragliders, the first ever invasion by extreme sports enthusiasts.

Watch out for the Hamas stockpile of strategic unicycles, tactical bungee jumpers, and the dreaded parkour battalion.

I think they're coming in.

I mean, to put everything in perspective, Russia has called for a ceasefire.

That's Russia,

which you might know better as Russia, the country that's not been big on ceasefires for much of its recent history.

The Ha RX newspaper in Israel strongly blamed Netanyahu's serial failings for these

intelligence glitches.

All in all, I mean, the Middle East has been a bit tricky, well, pretty much since,

well, the world was invented.

What was it?

In 4004 BC or whenever it was.

Things have been slightly

tricky there.

So anyway, best wishes to any buglers in the affected regions and best wishes to the human race to at some point in its life, learn to get along with itself.

I mean, for me, obviously, finding an angle on this that didn't make me weep uncontrollably and pregnantly was difficult, but I found my solace in looking at what influencers think about this.

The game I like to play with situations like this is who's going to do the best grift.

I think my two favourite takes on this online that I've seen so far are the exciting times for evangelical Christians who see this as one step closer to the rapture.

That one was fun.

It's always nice to see that someone's taking something positive out of this.

And a Russian conspiracy theory out of Russia that the Ukrainians are the ones who sent weapons into Gaza because, you know, they've all got all these spare weapons lying around.

If you're listening to this Buglers and you have any shred of optimism left, please do email it in to hellobuglers at thebuglepodcast.com and we will

share it around.

I'm sure the bugle audience will enjoy those jokes as much as the live comedy club audience that I inflicted them on last night

in a workout show

who were like,

We showed up for jokes about online dating.

Why are you talking about war crimes?

American news.

Well, let's lighten the mood, NATO, with the slow death of American democracy, the latest instalment.

I mean, here in Britain, our own interim prime minister, Rishi Sunak, told us that we have a political system that is broken, that is essentially rotten to its core and is gnawing away at itself from within.

But

compared with America, it remains in the rudest of health.

Because over

in your country, our former colonial partner, of course,

you are still struggling with...

I don't know how long this ongoing bout of political putrefaction has been going on now, but it's been particularly acute for the last, what, seven years in particular.

And it reached another landmark with the ousting of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy.

Now, he said a new record, McCarthy, for most times outed from job as Speaker of the House of Representatives.

One, the previous record of zero had been jointly held by all 54 previous speakers dating back to 1789 of all places.

So that, of course, was shortly after America straddled its camel of freedom and started galloping it down the bobsled track of independence.

It was never going to end well.

Come back to the mothership.

We're taking applications again.

So, can you just explain exactly why McCarthy was booted out and why reports have just reached us that the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial has been weeping marble tears?

Well, Andy, in America, it's the worst of times and the best of times.

It's the worst of times if you want a society.

It's the best of times if you are a chaos agent hell-bent on destabilizing destabilizing world governments, or you're the Joker who just wants to watch the world burn, or you crave the Schadenfreude of watching the modern Republican Party swallow itself.

Today's Republicans are like naked zombies, where when you see them, you realize you've never seen a zombie movie with a naked zombie, and you can't stop looking at the zombie's undead and rotting dick, even though you should be running away, and whoops, it ate your brains.

So the House

needed to pass a budget, and if they didn't pass it, the government would shut down and millions of federal workers would stop getting paid.

On the one hand, you had most Democrats and Republicans wanting a budget to be passed.

They disagreed about what would be in it.

Then, on the other hand, you had an extreme right-wing of the Republican Party that just wanted to shut down the government.

That was their demand, was to shut down the government.

They fundamentally don't believe in the government, and it's very weird and pathological to sort of devote your life to being involved with the government when you hate the government.

Like, I don't like camping, but you don't find me at REI shouting at people.

You know what I mean?

The sickest burn came from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said that the GOP ran around the house like a Roomba until they found a door the Democrats opened.

She's comparing Republicans to a robot that exists to clean dust and is bad at it.

So then

when McCarthy was voted out, the acting speaker is Patrick McHenry from North Carolina,

whose first and only act in office was as speaker was to evict my Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi from one of her offices.

That's their platform is f ⁇ ing with Nancy Pelosi,

which I get.

I once delivered her office a seven-foot foam spine.

They still don't like me.

I have gotten reports.

So she was evicted, and now she's homeless, like 8,000 of her fellow San Franciscans,

and the San Francisco Police Department will throw her in jail to sober up.

So some people want to draft Trump to be Speaker of the House instead, which I actually support.

I think that's a good rehabilitation plan because Trump is a criminal and facing trial.

And sometimes people with a criminal background have trouble getting gainful employment, and productive employment is an important part of recidivism and reintegrating people into society.

And so, I did a Google search for companies that will hire ex-offenders, and the list includes McDonald's, Starbucks, Amazon, Walmart, Pizza Hut, Congress, the Supreme Court, the Navy, the Marines, the CIA, the FBI, the Suicide Squad, and IKEA.

Trump could be assembling a chair or being the chair.

But bear in mind that the Speaker of the House doesn't actually have to be a member of the House.

So you're up, Andy.

You're right.

I'm happy to do it.

I'm absolutely delighted.

I mean, it was a bit of an irony, was there not, in McCarthy being witch-hunted out of his gig.

Was there not?

I mean, that must have appealed to American history fans.

It does feel like a neat answer to the question posed in the original McCarthy trials: have you no shame?

And the answer being a resounding, no, f off, we don't have any shame.

Basically,

I mean, I know he brought it on himself, but I feel such sympathetic cringe for the pain of Senator McCarthy, who basically took 15 rounds to get himself voted in, only was allowed to be voted in after he agreed to rules that would make it easier to get him out,

and then lasted barely nine months.

It's like

you're getting someone to marry you, but they've changed the vows to be instead of until death, do us part.

It's like until death or a strong breeze do us part.

And then nine months later, your wife shows up.

with a ceiling fan and you know it's all over for you.

He claimed that he'd tried to be the adult in the room, which in modern US politics is a lethally risky position to take.

To try to give off adult vibes.

It's a bit like being the cow in an understocked McDonald's.

It's probably not going to end well for you.

And also, bearing in mind McCarthy's previous actions in American politics, him claiming to be the adult in the room is somewhat akin to a marlin claiming to be the land-based mammal in an aquarium full of sharks.

It's not a particularly impressive claim.

Britain news now and well we are in the middle of party conference season, the most irritating time of the year in this country last week was the Conservative Party conference this week is the Labour Party conference as I said Rishi Sunak said that our politics is broken in in his speech at the Conservative Party conference in which his general thrust

was to try and present himself as an opposition politician despite being the Prime Minister because he can't sell himself as Prime Minister because of the 13 years of rancidly incompetent chaos that he and his party have given to the country.

So

it was a very strange conference.

In his speech, he basically laid out what I think he thinks he wants people to think he thinks.

And I think he thinks he said what he thinks the Conservative Party faithful think they want to think they're hearing.

But it's quite hard to tell with the Tories these days.

Now, obviously,

it's not really fair to criticise a party conference speech for being an acidly acidly dressed salad of quarter-baked sloganets, confected enemies, and uncosted vaguenesses.

That is what party conference speeches are for.

And at least he did set out a bold new set of promises to be either completely ignored or openly broken.

There was just one problem with the speech, and this was highlighted by Matthew Parris, who writes for The Times and was himself a Conservative MP previously.

And he said there was one small problem with Sunak's speech.

He wrote, it was all bullshit.

So there we are.

That's, you know, he's come up with various ideas, but someone from essentially, although he's not, I don't know if he's even still a member of the Conservative Party, but a well, former Tory MP said it was all bullshit.

Now, we know how well bullshit works in politics.

Maybe this could be the turning point for the Sunak regime.

He said he'd shown he was prepared to take difficult decisions by cancelling the part of the HS2 railway that goes as far as Manchester, but that it would have been a difficult decision to stick with it as well.

It was a difficult decision either way, because it has been f ⁇ ing incompetently done from day one, as we've discussed at various points on this podcast.

It did make me think, though, watching Sunak's speech to the Conservative members, that these speeches are entirely pointless, and we'd all be a lot better off if leaders had to give speeches at each other's conferences rather than at their own.

And also, if they had to tell at least a certain number of facts before they could treat themselves to an outright lie.

I mean, it might make the speeches very long to get all the lies in that they want to get in, but at least we'd have something to cling to.

I don't know if

it was, again, Alice, in Italy, whether the Tory Conference was,

Italy's got slight political issues of its own, as it generally has.

But

yeah,

it's a horrible time of year here, to be honest.

It is a horrible time of the year.

I mean, the Labour Conference will have to wheel out something extraordinarily special to manage the levels of self-congratulatory self-contradiction pulled out by the Tory conference last week.

Rishi Sunak, as you said, he's emphasised how difficult decisions are to make in politics right now, longing for a time gone past where I assume in the past decisions were easy to make in politics.

He managed to roundly condemn politics, politics as usual, and all the problems caused by whichever party has been in power for the last 13 years, while promising both change and continuity, swearing to protect the bottom line of families' wallets, also cutting infrastructure that would do exactly that and saying he likes the environment, but will also be walking back net zero commitments to a fun and sustainably unsustainable bare minimum.

It's that great thing that people do when they treat environmental commitments as a fun exercise in massaging numbers like you're tricking test scores to get into Oxbridge rather than, you know, saving the f ⁇ ing planet.

There were some really extraordinary things, including this bizarre new policy on smoking, where he's going to ban 14-year-olds from being able to buy cigarettes.

And that age is going to go up

every year.

So that when those 14-year-olds are, say, 94, they still won't be allowed to buy cigarettes.

But 95-year-olds will be allowed to buy cigarettes.

It is one of the weirdest, most pointless policies.

that has ever been concocted from the hive mind of British political wonks.

I can't wait for a delinquent 37-year-old to be hitting up a 42-year-old in a car park, asking them to buy him a pack of smokes.

This is a policy that was, I think, suggested by Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and copied wholesale by Rishi Sunak to protect the young of the nation.

But it feels like it doesn't feel like a very Tory policy.

I feel like

the party that's very much about putting children up chimneys should be

more invested in personal freedom than this.

It also seems like

the party that's worried about the solvency of the NHS would want more people to die of lung cancer.

Exactly.

I mean, these people are heroes.

They save

smoking saves the economy so much money in terms of pensions we don't have to pay.

Yeah, these people are heroes.

They should be getting the knighthoods.

I think my favourite Tory backlash to the Rishi Sunag proposed smoking ban was, I think, Toby Young, who said, smoking has a fine 500 year tradition

and that's why we should preserve it.

Well it used to be compulsory in some schools.

I know in the 19th century a lot of

private schools

I think you had a pint of beer and a pipe of tobacco every week to

keep you strong.

Sunak also said, we've had 30 years of a political system which incentivizes the easy decision, not the right one.

So 30 years was a curious time span because as I said, he's tried to basically savage the record of his own government to make himself look like a candidate of change.

Then, that goes back to 2010, then Labour were 1997.

But 30 years is 1993.

So, what was the moment that changed our political system into one that basically gave up making difficult decisions?

Well, obviously, what happened in 1993 was Australian cricketer Shane Warne delivered what is now known as the ball of the century, one of the greatest single deliveries in the entire history of the great sport of cricket, a ball that that swerved and dipped through the Manchester air, bounced and turned and hit Mike Gattings off-stump.

And it dealt such a devastating blow, not just to the England cricket team, but to the entirety of the United Kingdom and nation, that our political system simply gave up.

It was either that or the release of the hit single Boom Shake the Room by DJ Jazzy, Jeff and the Fresh Prince, or perhaps even I'd do anything for love, but I won't do that by meatloaf, an an anthem to political complacency, if ever there was one.

I mean, it could be that time that my grandmother said, hyper-colour t-shirts can't be safe, and maybe

they were skin and

washing machine safe, but not safe for the future of the British governing system.

It's quite possible.

The big problem the Conservatives have, as I said, is a sort of believability problem given all the mistakes they've inflicted on the British people.

I mean, would you trust an interior decorator who you'd paid to spruce up your recently divorced vegan Auntie Ethel's new room and who would smeared the words, I don't blame him for leaving you in panda blood on the wall, would you let that same decorator loose on your kids' room?

Well, no, not unless he offered you a really cut price deal and some frankly extraordinary tax breaks.

So that may well be coming ahead of the next election.

Aside from Sunak, there was another,

well, frankly, ludicrous speech by the Home Secretary and hardline nonsensicalist Suella Braverman.

The previous week, she'd announced that multiculturalism has failed, without going on to say, mind you, come to think of it, monoculturism wasn't really panning out too well for us either as a species.

Bit of a ropey century last time out for monoculturalism.

She once again applied her trademark sledgehammer of willfully provocative oversimplification to the nation's and the world's problems.

Amongst other things at the conference, in a typically bilious vocal chunderment, she took aim at what she called luxury beliefs,

railing against what seemed to be a computer-generated fictional tranche of society,

talking about people who have the luxury of promoting seductive but irresponsible ideas, safe in the knowledge that their privilege will insulate them from any collateral damage.

At which point, the nation's Brexit irony alarms fucking exploded simultaneously.

The highlight of the conference was

Swella Bradman treading on someone's guide dog.

Now,

whether she did it intentionally or not, let's just assume that she definitely did.

If she did, it would have been the most humane and kind-hearted thing that she did at the conference, or indeed that she's done

since taking office.

She ground her home secretarian foot into the defenceless pooch's dog flesh.

It's canine fur, little match for her poison-tipped Wellington boots.

And if I'm exaggerating and using inflammatory language, she fucking started it.

But it was a truly extraordinary moment.

I mean, generally, just the speech that she gave at the Tory Party conference was so cartoonishly villainous that the only reason she has not been etched into ink as a Disney villain is because you wouldn't trust her with one of those animal henchmen because she'd probably step on its tail.

Another curious moment was Sunak being introduced to the stage by his wife, which is something we've not seen in British politics before.

And it did make me think, and I'm yeah, she's the only person less electoral here.

Exactly.

But it did make me think, I think we should, if this is going to happen, we should be allowed to vote for who the Prime Minister's spouse is.

I thought this when Johnson was in charge, and I think that even more now.

If it's going to be a public position with a public role, we should be able to vote on who the Prime Minister is married to and sleeping with.

That is not much to ask in a democratic society.

I mean, I'm deeply disappointed in the UK that they didn't force David Attenborough to marry the Queen.

Well, you and me both.

Wow,

there was a brief period where that could have been on the table.

It could have been on the table.

I mean, Paddington himself was moving in to.

It would have made at most two people unhappy, and those two people would have been David Attenborough and the Queen.

Andy, as an American, would you explain this detail of British politics?

Because I read a bunch of stuff about the leveling up agenda.

And in my world, leveling up refers to advancing to to the next level on a video game.

Yes.

So why does Manchester care about Super Mario Bros?

Well, so levelling up was something that's been talked about by the Conservative Party for a long time.

And essentially what it means is to vaguely give the impression that they give even a micro percentage of a flying f about areas of the country that they have degraded and run into the ground for decades.

So

it's about equalizing some of the inequalities in

British society and politics.

And the HS2 line was a key part of that.

And they worked out that in order to reduce urban deprivation in parts of northern England or in Scotland or Wales, the best thing to do was to make it 12 minutes quicker to get from London to Birmingham on the train.

It's, I mean, there's not a lot has happened yet.

There's been a lot of talk and no action,

which might be good because generally when the Conservatives talk, you don't want to see that put into action.

But their failures to really do anything to level up the country in terms of this inequality between London and the rest of the country, essentially, or north and south, might cost them dearly at the next election.

Although we'll have to go on a long list of things that ought to cost the Conservatives dearly at the next election.

He did say, though, that he...

he thought it was time for politics to plan more for the long term.

And I mean, I've been calling for this for a long time on this podcast and it's good to see that Sunak is is aiming for the long term and we saw this for you know with his environmental policies pulling out of various environmental commitments Britain had to make sure that the planet is uninhabitable for millions and millions of years.

You don't get much more long term than that.

And also that makes sense of the bizarre smoking policy because bearing in mind the environment that we're going to bequeath to our kids, they're going to need all the f ⁇ ing lung capacity they can manage.

So, you know, there is some joined-up thinking, at least, if nothing else.

And also, it shows that he can learn.

You know, he himself, when he was chancellor of the exchequer during COVID, came up with the eat out to help out scheme, which is possibly the most short-term policy in political history.

Basically saying, go and have dinner, fingers crossed.

If you see a virus, ask it nicely not to infect you.

So, at least maybe he's a lesson to us all that we can learn from our mistakes.

A great line of merch for people that want to get more head.

Just a really

family, beautifully ill-thought-through statement.

Just also on this note, did you know a flying,

as a turn of phrase, was invented way further back than you think it was?

Because it's not about banging on an airline, it's about horseback banging.

Oh, right.

This and other pieces of research brought to you by the work I've been doing on the Jansilagard reader, available on unbound.com.

Good plug.

Good plug.

This is why Edward Muybridge invented the camera or whatever.

So, and am I understanding that

there's been doctors' strikes in England and there's been an NHS staffing shortage.

And if I follow the stories correctly,

the Tories want to solve the problem by relying on international workers to staff the NHS while simultaneously stopping immigration.

And Labor wants to make NHS workers do compulsory overtime.

Is that what we're dealing with?

That's essentially, I think, a pretty accurate summary.

I think also they are demanding iller patients to work on because they feel that the level of illness at the moment is not challenging enough.

So,

that's something as well.

And the government are bringing in three brand new hours for doctors every day, going to be between 8.45 and a quarter to 9, so they can get

27.7 rather than 24-7

workload.

So

there is some progress in this.

My personal contribution to the overloading of the NHS is to fly back to Australia to have my baby and then

return to the UK, who I adore and enjoy and do not trust for one fucking second with my uterus Oz.

On the subject of strikes, NATO, you've got a strike update for us?

As regular listeners to the Bugle will know, I am a semi-functional hybrid of comedian and union negotiator, currently in contract negotiations with the San Francisco Public School District.

Our teachers union is voting to authorize a strike this week.

I should note that when I type, when I prepare for the bugle and I type on Google Docs, whenever I'm working on the bugle, it wants to auto-correct my authorize with a Z to my authorize with an S.

So, but our union voted to authorize the strike last week.

Our group includes the low-wage workers in the schools, the custodian secretaries, and cafeteria workers.

They haven't seen a raise in four years.

Many of them are on the brink of homelessness.

They work two and three jobs.

And in fact, many of them work for free.

The school district is so inept that they can't even run payroll

reliably.

So some schools'

parents have taken up a collection so that their custodian doesn't get evicted.

Under these conditions, not surprisingly, the strike vote was 99.5% in favor of striking.

That's 99.5%.

To put that in perspective, that is a better score than the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatoes Critics Consensus gave the cinematic masterpiece Paddington 2,

which got a lousy 99%.

99.5% is like a Stalin level of consensus.

But we did it with robust democratic debate among workers instead of gulags and show trials.

And one of the ways that we knew that our members were ready to strike is

occasionally during contract negotiations, we will employ a tactic called open bargaining, where we invite, we just open up bargaining to all of our members to come and observe.

And so, we had about 50 members show up, and I asked them if they wanted to introduce themselves to the management negotiating team.

And unprompted, they send one after another, hello, my name is whatever that person's name was.

I work hard for the students, and I'd like to strike.

Just set it to management.

So

possibly in the next month, there will be several thousand workers in the San Francisco public schools on strike to fill all of the vacancies that have resulted from the not paying the workers.

Natural world news now.

Well, the human world hasn't been covering itself in glory recently.

So let's look at the natural world.

And, well, bad news for birds.

Over a thousand birds were skyscrapered to death in Chicago last week in a single day of avian mayhem by a single building.

In the latest flare-off of bird versus architecture hostilities,

they counted over a thousand birds killed by the crafty McCormick Place Convention Centre.

These birds were interrupted on their way to their winter holidays.

The convention centre splatted the hell out of them, striking a blow for all the buildings that have been shat on by birds over the years by building, by hang on, by

butting to death a selection of warbles, thrushes, woodcocks, and other songbirds until they quite literally fell out of the sky like dead birds.

It's,

I mean, I guess whether you think this is a good news story or a bad news story depends on whether you prefer skyscrapers or birds.

Whose Whose side are you on, NATO?

I'm on the side of the guy who got a job collecting dead bird carcasses all around downtown Chicago because they I support that guy's right to a pension.

And

the birds didn't all die in one place.

Some of them, like, they ended up being just strewn all over downtown Chicago.

So

the

and I spent probably 20 minutes trying to think about is there a way that i can pivot this topic into a joke about the tv series the bear about chicago's legendary italian beef sandwiches um and i could not

that's that's very sad

but i do think you've put your finger on the uh the real tragedy here nato which is that we're living in an age where nobody's going to eat these birds like imagine even a hundred years ago what a delicious day this would have been for everyone involved.

And now it's just a tragic and senseless waste of birds and an indictment on our entire ecosystem and our failure to make it welcoming to the creatures with whom we share a planet.

It could have launched multiple nursery rhymes.

Such as?

Have you.

Are there all those nursery rhymes about pies filled with dead birds that have been hit by a building?

Yeah, I think they were all definitely killed by buildings.

Apparently, one billion...

Sing a song of dead birds.

Apparently, one billion birds around the world die every year from fatally beaking themselves into large stationary objects around the world, which does raise questions about Darwinism, as well as questions about the need for better signposting on bird migration routes to help these

flying idiots to avoid...

bloody great skyscrapers.

Let's also put it in perspective.

75 billion chickens get eaten eaten every year, so skyscraper splattings are not the bird community's biggest problem.

And I think they should be focusing on

chicken diets instead.

Maybe we need retractable.

It doesn't so much raise questions about Darwinism as it gives us answers in the context of Darwinism that we are now selecting for birds who have sudden moments of self-doubt mid-air.

We're selecting for those birds who have the presence of mind when they're planning their migration route on Google Maps to select avoid bridge tolls and skyscrapers?

Makes you think the penguins have probably got it worked out.

You can't be blown out of the sky by a skyscraper if you can't get off the ground.

Some suggestions have been made as to how to mitigate the number of birds being splattered by skyscrapers.

One is to make all skyscrapers fully retractable with motion sensors so that when they sense a flock of birds coming, they disappear underground.

Greased angled windows so that the birds simply slide off at high speed and help, in fact, if anything, helped on their migrations, or better managed and ticketed migration routes.

So, well, let's hope for better news for the birds in the future.

Well, some good news, although maybe not good news for mosquito fans, but a cheap malaria vaccine has been recommended by the World Health Organization, which could bring about a breakthrough in the battle against malaria.

Neither of you cheering that one.

That disappoints me, to be honest, but obviously you're both maddened malaria fans.

This follows decades of pressure from the woke lobby to cancel the famous disease.

The vaccine has been developed by scientists, sorry, Boffins at the University of Oxford, and has developed highly and has delivered highly promising results.

And we must say, well done to the scientists involved and well done to science as a whole for once in its stupid life concentrating on something a bit more useful than for example researching into whether scorpions have personalities and if so, whether they'd enjoy golf, on whether how many rotations pteropins can do if you flip them onto their backs and spin them on a ping pong table, and whether dinosaurs would have been allergic to angel delight, or how mummy frogs remember the names of all of their spawns, what makes mountains horny, and at what point a body becomes too boo-delicious.

I mean, there are so many variables in that one.

But well done, science, for doing something useful.

Extra, yeah, magnificent news for science, magnificent news for effective altruists.

The effective altruist community began by saying the best bang for your buck buck in terms of charitable donation was things like mosquito nets in malaria-ridden countries and then very quickly went off into thinking that we owe the future far more than we owe the present and there'll be more people in the future.

So what we really need to be doing is spending billions of dollars into think tanks on AI and space travel, the stuff that we were secretly always interested in anyway.

So good for them to have that taken off their plate with this malaria vaccine.

and extremely sad for everyone who argues that the reason that American healthcare prices are so overinflated because it funds the research that they do into life-saving drugs with this sad contraindication provided by the University of Oxford and the fact that the UK has more medical patterns per capita than the US does.

Hashtag SOS, not SOS.

Well, on that more positive news, I mean, this is a story of not just on apparently cats glow in the dark as well.

We'll have to come back to that on a

future people.

Well, that might be the best news for humanity that has emerged from this slightly depressing millennium so far.

Anyway, we'll leave it there for this week's bugle.

We'll be back next week, by which time I'm sure the entire world will have calmed down and learned to get along.

Fingers crossed on that one.

In the meantime, anything to plug, Alice?

Yes, go to unbound.com and write in Alice Fraser, because if you write in the Dancy Lagarde Reader, I guarantee you will spell Dancy Lagarde incorrectly.

So the Dancy Lagarde Reader is still available.

I have finished writing it, and so we're now just going through the process of getting it into your hands, however long that takes.

Also, I have a podcast called The Gargle, the sister podcast to this podcast, a sonic glossy magazine to the Bugles audio newspaper for a visual world.

Also, you can find me at patreon.com/slash AliceFraser.

We do a weekly writers' meeting which you can join for $1 a month, which I think is

sort of insultingly good value.

So,

patreon.com/slash AliceFraser is the place to to go for that.

NATO?

I've got dates, Andy.

Wednesday, October 18th, I'll be in Sacramento at the punchline.

Saturday, October 11th, I'll be in Kauai,

in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai.

And November 16th to 18th at the San Francisco Punchline with Dana Gould.

In January, I have shows coming up for Sketchfest, a political stand-up show, and a live podcast at Obituation Room.

And then February 3rd, I'll be in Portland, Oregon at the Siren Theatre.

We have some Bugle live dates that will be confirmed in the extremely near future, early next year in the UK.

Do keep your eyes on the internet for those.

We'll also have a stand-up tour at some point in the middle of next year.

Dates also, TBC.

But if you're contemplating buying anyone a Christmas present, what greater present could there be than a ticket to a live Bugle show and/or

my floundering return to stand-up after slightly too long off.

In the meantime, you can hear me on the news quiz.

We're five-eighths of the way through the current series, and to be honest, I'm

slightly trepidatious about what we're going to write for this week's show.

Anyway, thank you very much for listening, 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.