Sea Sore

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome.

Am I still allowed to say welcome, or is that off-brand for UK PLC these days?

I'm not sure, actually.

I do quite a bit of BBC work, so I've got to make sure I have a balance for and against the government.

So let's go with welcome and f off.

That should cover things to the bugle.

I am Andy Zoltzmann this is issue 4256 of the bugle to be precise.

Yes, 256 episodes since we relaunched.

Meaning fanfare please Chris.

Bigger fanfare please Chris.

Meaning that you can now have a straight eight round knockout to decide your favourite post-relaunch bugle episode.

A competition that, assuming you did one match every two hours, to allow for each episode averaging about 40 minutes to play in full with a half-time orange, some post-match analysis, and a look ahead to the next contest.

Going by about four matches a day, tapering down to two a day from the quarter-final stage onwards with a break, a day's break in between the round of 16 and the quarterfinals, and the quarterfinals and the semifinals, and two days between the semifinals and the finals.

And of course, no third-place playoff.

That's precisely 10 weeks.

10 weeks of your life that you could do that competition in.

Ironically, this beginning to this week's episode probably means it's already looking a good bet to be knocked out in the first round.

Unless our two guests this week can pull this episode out of the fire.

Let's find out.

Joining me to try to rescue this episode

from

a car in a basement in Australia.

Which may need some explanation.

It's Alice Fraser.

Hello, Alice.

Hello, Andy.

There is no competition.

Everybody's favourite episode is my debut on the bugle.

Of course.

Where I launched the pun, I think it was the one where I said Arbeit Macht Freis

about Sean Spices

fast food endeavour.

I am in a basement in a car in Newcastle, in Australia, because I did my fringe festival show here, and

oh, it was terrible.

But also,

my baby and my dad are up in the hotel room looking after each other.

And this is the only place that I can podcast.

Also, cars have great acoustics, and it's just a fun place to hang out.

And I don't think I'm the only person who's hanging out in a car to avoid their children.

I go for a walk sometimes in my suburb in Sydney, and it's just like every fifth car is a guy sitting behind his steering wheel on an iPad, just illuminated in the dark,

sadly avoiding his life.

Yeah, I think most professional motor racing drivers are just avoiding their children, to be honest.

When you say they're avoiding their children, you don't mean like physically on the track.

Because

that is a new sport I would 100% tune into.

Well, the voice you just heard there joining us for the first time this year, it's Neil Delamere.

Hello, Neil.

You're not in a basement or in a car by the oxygen.

No, I am celebrating St.

Patrick's Day.

I didn't realise it was St.

Patrick's Day until I woke up and felt extra Irish.

I just felt both oppressed historically and lyrical.

It's an unusual feeling, but I'm prepared to go for today.

I have to say it.

Well, as a British person, for those two emotions,

I will say

sorry, and you're welcome.

I'm stuck

on the race car drivers who are trying to escape from their children.

Is that what they mean by I'm following in the footsteps of my father?

Are they just being tracked?

It's quite possible.

It's quite possible.

I mean, there are a lot of children of racing racing drivers themselves become racing drivers.

Mick Schumacher.

Yeah.

I don't know if that's, you know, more than it in other professions.

You know, whether the children of assassins themselves become assassins.

I'm not s I I don't know.

We'll have to we'll have to look at the stats.

Uh Chris, you are also for this St Patrick's Day special wearing a glorious Irish green football shirt.

You were telling us the vintage beforehand,

1980.

It's the 88, 90, because back then you didn't change a football shirt every six months.

So

Ireland kept this shirt for about three years.

And it actually had a sponsor on it

because they didn't have any money.

I don't know.

Yeah, happy St.

Patrick's Day, Andy.

And I love the fact that the only two professions you could think of were race car, driver, and assassin.

What are those

that got away?

I've ended up with two professions, comedian and cricket statistician.

And, you know, they were very much the losing semi-finalists behind Racing Driver and Assassin.

What a UCAS form that actually was when you were filling in that.

Listen,

I just don't know if I get the points to be a ninja.

If it's not a ninja, it's definitely who opened the batting for Australia in nineteen eleven.

Both race car drivers and assassins spend a surprising amount of time just spinning their wheels.

And

do you find that being on the BBC as you are so often and the BBC's obsession with balance,

I'm conscious of this as somebody who writes for some of the things that you do for the BBC, does that leak into statistics as well?

When you say a statistic, do you then have to say, but also maybe numbers aren't real?

Basically, you've got to be balanced in all things.

So the way I do it is I do one true statistic and then one false one.

And I just find that no one seems to notice.

He does negative numbers in the statistics just to keep everybody happy.

As long as all my statistics in any given day add up to naught, then that's fine.

That's all I'm seeking for when I'm on the BBC.

Yeah, but you don't like naught because not originally was invented by Arab mathematicians, so anything from outside.

You can't use that on the BBC these days, can you?

Oh, yeah.

What are you going to do now?

You need some sort of Anglo-Saxon concept.

That's what you need.

Yeah, well, I'll just build a henge and be done with it.

We are recording on St.

Patrick's Day to commemorate St.

Patrick's Day.

I'm recording in front of a green screen, albeit with a picture of London on it.

It's the 17th of March 2023.

On this day,

in the year 180, Commodus became sole emperor of the Roman Empire at the age of just 18 following the death of his father, Marcus Aurelius.

Now, contemporary accounts suggest that Marcus Aurelius was not even slightly murdered by his own son, but thanks to modern technology, we now know from watching films that Commodus did, in fact, himself murder his father,

before, of course, himself being later slain in the Colosseum by a vengeful gladiator.

And it's amazing how wrong the historians of ancient Rome could be.

Half the time, I think they just made shit up for a good story because they couldn't be asked to do the research.

On the 19th of March in 1932, so two days from now, as we record, possibly tomorrow, as you listen at Bugler,

I'm addressing you individually there.

I don't think our listenership has collapsed to just one listener.

I hope not, anyway.

On the 19th of March in 1932, the Sydney Harbour Bridge

was opened, which, if Alice was not in a basement in a car in Newcastle, Australia, rather than

in Sydney, where she normally

is of late,

you'd be able to just confirm that it is still

there.

But I guess we'll just have to rely on that assumption.

Prior to the Sydney Harbour Bridge opening, Alice, the only way to get across Sydney Harbour was by a combination of one or more of dolphin, miracle, teleportation, fruit-powered jet suits and catapult.

Yeah, so it's amazing the influence that bridge has had on Sydney as a city.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Or if you bite a wombad in the right place, it'll kick you across the harbour.

Yeah, but I mean, the bridge was just so much, so much better than that, than those options.

On the 20th of March,

I'm still in the cometist thing, to be perfectly honest with you.

He invented darts that year, of course.

You know that, don't you?

Yes, well, of course.

Yeah.

And the commode, which is a chair that you shit in.

Look, any chair you shit in is a commode if you look at it enough in the right way.

Technically, all chairs.

If you bite a wombat in the wrong place, all chairs are commodes.

On the 20th of March, so that will be Monday as we record,

it will be the 107th anniversary of Albert Einstein, little Freddie Physics himself, publishing his general theory of relativity, which of course stated that an elephant looks tiny if it's a mile away, but a mouse looks fing huge if I waggle it in your face.

That was 107 years ago on Monday.

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

This week we have a special questions in modern philosophy section provided to us by our in-house bugle philosopher, Professor V.

X.

Buckerstaff, in which we pose the following key questions in modern philosophy.

If furniture could talk, would sophers start a war?

Would the widespread use of the social media term hashtag free will itself disprove the existence of free will?

If an animal demands to be eaten but only by a vegan, do meat eaters have a moral obligation to roost on a potato until it hatches?

And if scientists discovered that the only way to save the human species was by cloning 100 million Cristiano Ronaldos and 100 million Judy Denches and letting them loose onto an otherwise unpopulated island for 100 years.

Which island should we use?

If you have answers to any of those questions, do email and yes, Alex.

I have an answer to the first one, which is if Sophis could talk, would they start a war?

It would depend how the terms were couched.

Oh, well, this episode is really recovering very, very promisingly.

I can see this being a quarter-finalist at this rate.

In what competition?

top story this week, the sea.

Love it or hate it.

Believe in it or think it's yet another conspiracy or scam by the elite.

The sea is here to stay.

And since we last recorded, the nations of the world have reached a truly historic agreement to try to protect the oceans of this planet.

This followed ten years of negotiations.

The UN High Seas Treaty has been agreed and it will come into force at some unspecified point in the relatively nearish future if it actually happens.

This is

a huge moment for the sea, a much underrated part of the world.

We focus so much on land.

But actually the sea, well it's what, a good 70% of this planet.

Are you both fans of the sea as a as a continent?

Do you think it's had its time and maybe we yeah, we're just mollycoddling it now by throwing treaties in its direction to try and butter it up?

Well we we I we need the sea because I'd like to keep my surname.

Right.

Off close.

Otherwise, I'm just called Neil if there is no C.

So that's how that works.

I'm a big fan of this UN treaty

that has come into force now, or will come into force.

But the real question here, I think, Andy and Alice, is can the fish be trusted to keep their side of the deal?

I think that's the real key here.

Like, they are notoriously tricky to deal with.

Some podcasts which have you believe that there's no such thing as one.

So I just don't think it's the right time to appease them.

But apparently, apparently, all the main parties came to the table: the UN, Captain Birdseye, Poseidon, all the big hitters, and they hammered out a deal.

Some of the coral-like animals apparently were the last to hold out.

They wanted a full-scale war with the UN.

But the UN then reached out to the traditional foe, the true crabs, following the old law of the sea: my an enemy's enemy is my friend.

Sorry, can we just

let that line have a little bit of space now?

Just say that that and move straight on.

I mean, I thought you'd like that.

You were right.

If you like that one, I have a cracking octopus point of view with us.

A cracking one, eh?

It took 10 years of negotiations to get this treaty signed, which involved disagreements on fishing rights, shipping lanes, deep sea mining, the rights of underwater volcanoes to erupt whenever they wanted, and the amount of salt that is allowed in the sea.

They finally settled on a slightly vague sounding pledge that it should be the same saltiness as a pan of water you're cooking pasta in.

So we'll see if that works out.

I mean, Alice, it's hugely tricky negotiation when there are so many different parties involved, as Neil was pointing out.

Obviously, us humans with our evolutionary nostalgia for when we were aquatic microorganisms living simple lives in the utopian ideal of the ocean without social media and everyone shouting at each other.

The plankton with their unlikely, if practical, lobbying alliance with whale hunters.

The whales themselves always complain about submarines trying to seduce their partners.

I mean all these warring factions, and yet somehow they have hacked out a deal.

Yeah, and the massive delay, of course, at the launch party where the king of the ocean wanted his daughters to do a performance and opened the seashell and his favourite daughter wasn't there,

which really put a halt on proceedings.

I always think that scene in The Little Mermaid where they open the seashell and there's no Ariel there,

whoever wrote that scene doesn't understand show business at all.

There is an understudy, there is a manatee in a red wig waiting backstage for her chance to shine, and she would have been there.

I just

feel like my reaction to this story is very shaped by my childhood.

It took them 10 years to negotiate an agreement to protect the world's ocean, something that Captain Planet could have solved in one episode.

The fishing industry obviously are very interested party in any treaties to do with the sea.

I mean, they must spend a lot of time as an industry just wishing people to hurry up with food printing technology because, frankly, it's f ⁇ ing cold and wet out there.

And the fishes themselves as well, the problem that they have in any negotiation is they often forget what they were trying to negotiate.

So

it is a really hard thing.

You can understand why it took

quite so long.

It's designated as much as 30% of the seas as protected areas.

I guess the concern with that is that all the fish and other sea creatures will now move to that 30% of the ocean that is protected, and property prices in the remaining 70% could collapse, causing an economic crash that ironically could bankrupt the entire ocean-based world.

So, you know, there are clearly stumbling blocks ahead.

Any particular highlights?

Real estate problems in the deep ocean will be solved by rising sea levels as

real estate problems on earth will be created.

Not enough people talk about the gentrification of coral reefs, though.

I think, and that's a good point that you raised there, Andy.

Increasingly white coral reefs.

One man bleached is another man's property prices.

And obviously, as Jane Austen herself once wrote, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a species in possession of a good planet must be in want of an economic system that strives to exploit that planet for all it's worth until there's nothing left but a post-apocalyptic wasteland of barren destruction and the faint echo of some scientists saying we did warn you and i i guess she really was ahead of her time wasn't she she was very much ahead of her time.

So, yeah, there are these

preserving the oceans.

It's one of those classic woke things, the idea that we should have a planet that continues to function in the future more than six months away.

That this treaty is trying to address.

Yeah, did you know her real name was actually Jane Austen, short for Jane Austen, Texas, revitalized by Joe Rogan's Comedy Club?

I didn't know that.

We are, I mean, the BBC, which you mentioned earlier on, its founding ethos was Inform, Educate, and Entertain.

And I think

we're three for three percent.

Emily Bronte's real name was Emily Brontosaurus.

A lot of people don't know that.

They were a very big family.

It's an unfortunate nickname.

They had to shorten.

In other sea news, scientists have warned of a, quotes, alarming rise in microplastic pollution in the seas.

They've claimed that there's now 2.3 million tons of microplastics a tenfold increase in just 15 years now the question arises is this because we're putting way more microplastics into the ocean or is it because the creatures that live in the ocean have been trained to be more discerning eaters and are no longer eating as much plastic as they were.

This is a good news story, people.

This is evolution in action.

This is scientific overreach.

Like scientists telling us that this is an alarming rise in ocean pollution.

It's only alarming if you personally don't want to piss micro beats, like

a machine gun of

horrifying texture.

Or it's only alarming if you don't want a baby whose brain is full of tiny bubbles or you don't want to be so full of plastic that you function as a human ballpit.

I just

feel like you can always spin this as a positive.

Plastic doesn't age.

Maybe this is the anti-aging solution we're all looking for.

I don't know.

I think it's a bad thing, guys.

Yeah.

Scientists have found microplastics in human bloodstreams, in human waste, and recently in our lungs.

We are evolving into a kinder surprise.

We have plastic inside our bodies, and it's really put me off using my.

What is the point if it's already there in assembling your own fake phallus?

There are 2.3 million tons of microplastics in the ocean.

If you buy the action figure of a teenage mutant ninja turtle, it will have less plastic than an actual turtle.

And that is what our generation has done.

When St.

Peter asks us at the Pearlie Gates, what have you done?

And the boomers go, oh, well, we defeated communism.

And the Gen Z people go, we started a school strike to effect change.

He's going to look at us and say, what did you do?

And we'll say, we laminated Flipper from the inside out

but i mean we do need to keep this in perspective i mean 2.3 million tons of micro plastic potentially endangering pretty much everything that lives in the sea might sound a lot but there are a third of a billion cubic miles of water in the sea and that weighs way more than 2.3 million tons so there's still way more water than plastic in fact uh i i would say more than 90 of the sea is still water rather than plastic so this is just just a classic example of the media getting a hold of something.

Yeah, I mean, if Cleopatra looked at it that way, like, there's way more milk in this bath than ASP.

Yes.

Get perspective, isn't it?

Yeah, this should be safe.

Ow, what was that?

Or maybe I feel bad because I'm lactose intolerant.

I was so pleased when I found out that microplastics were caused by synthetic fibre breakdown because it justifies my decision to never wear anything but the corpse of a dead tauntorn.

I've got two questions there.

Okay.

What is that?

It's a Star Wars reference.

I'm your nerd fantasy girl.

It's my brand that I'm just starting to brand myself as.

When an Australian pivoting Australian person just says the name of a creature, you just assume it's some weird shit that you've never seen before.

I'm 100% thought it was an animal from Victoria or from Western Australia or a mate of hers who owns a youth and he's called Ton Ton.

Yes, Chris has shown us a picture.

Right, there we go.

I'd assumed it was, you know, something that had a pouch under its arm for keeping other people's children

out of its eyeball, like most other Australian animals do.

A final piece of sea news now.

Well, controversy in the sea world because of a plan to build the world's first octopus farm.

And scientists and octopus fans have

up in multiple limbs

over welfare issues and the ethics of farming octopods, famously intelligent creatures.

I mean,

amongst the various words you don't often hear on public transport these days,

I'll tell you what, this world needs, an octopus farm.

It's got to be pretty high up there.

I mean, it's not something that you generally think about as a, I mean, how, does a combine harvester work underwater?

I don't know how this would work.

But the great mistake the octopus community has made over the years,

the many millions of years of evolution that it's had the opportunity

to change it, to take control of itself, is remaining extremely delicious when boiled and sprinkled with paprika.

And that is why this issue has arisen.

As an octopus fan, myself, or a cephalopodophile, as I think we're called,

I'm really against this idea of farming octopuses.

I think if you can't find the octopus on your own and challenge it to a duel like a gentleman,

you don't deserve to eat an octopus.

They seem like the smartest thing that people still eat.

They're like right on that borderline of like

ethically

questionable.

They're not just a handsy fish is what I'm saying they have long memories and they do art and they have communities and they have opinions and like little personalities and I don't want to get on the wrong side of an octopus because I don't even know what side that would be they're round

handsy fish might be my favorite term I've ever heard on this podcast

I think I speak for all the longtime listeners of this show when I say I'm disappointed.

You squandered the opportunity, Andy, to call this a Cephala podcast.

I'm absolutely disgusted by that sorry this company is planning to fight to farm a million octopuses or octopi I don't know for food

but they're solitary and they're used to the dark and they're going to be putting tanks with other animals under lights and 10 to 15% of them will die That is not a farm.

That is squid game part two.

It's not right.

The plan state that the company has achieved a level.

This is I love this phrase, this quote, has achieved a level of domestication in the species and that

they do not show important signs of cannibalism or competition for food not they don't show any signs of cannibalism just not the important signs of cannibalisms like they do each

you know they do eat each other but just not so much that the other one will die maybe three or four tentacles but then they're absolutely stuffed after that tentacles are the breadsticks of the sea and and one of the things that they're suggesting they're going to do which is horrendous is they're going to kill them using icy water right so the icy water will dispatch the octopuses in a way, it doesn't seem to work on Wim Hoff, but it does work on octopuses.

And there was a cognitive neuroscientist in lots of the papers, and he was saying this is a very cruel thing to do.

A more humane way would be to kill them the way fishermen do, which is clubbing them over the head.

Now, if the less cruel way is bludgeoning, bludgeoning them to death, that is not great.

If the CEO of your company's gone, I don't really want to do the hypothermia thing, it's cruel.

Has anybody got any ideas?

Blunt force force trauma to the head.

Oh,

you big softy, Colin.

You big

softy Google.

This just needs not to happen.

I mean, also, when you think about it, yeah, this farm, a million octopuses, a million hyper-intelligent creatures with a deep-seated, long-standing blood feud against humanity.

That, again, is scene one in a science fiction film that ends with the destruction of humanity.

It is way too big a risk.

Way, way too big a risk.

And you mentioned neil that this is yeah it's more like squid game the way i look at it is you've got you know these uncommunicative creatures who tend to live fairly solitary lifestyles in the dark but are now being forced into communal tanks with light shining on them and then given extremely cold baths basically We are talking about the same method used to develop teenagers and British private schools through the 19th and 20th centuries.

Only the end goal is slightly different.

You wanted to create a tasty dinner rather than the ruling class.

So, you know, it's just,

you know, I guess learned behavior.

I think

handsy fish

swap, swap, swap, swap.

That would be amazing.

Just trying to...

Barce Johnson changing his colour to blend him with a rock.

I guarantee you the handshakes would get less damp.

He's trying to avoid child support again.

The intelligence of octopuses, I mean, you might think, our octopus is actually all that.

You know, how clever can an octopus be?

The last time they put an octopus on the TV Quiz Show Mastermind, it just answered eights to every question and then waddled off.

But there have been reports of octopuses managing to escape from aquariums.

In fact, there was one pair of octopuses in an American aquarium that tricked their way out by octa-splatting a security guard, stealing their uniform, causing a distraction in the penguin enclosure by reporting a polar bear sight and then bursting out using one of the aquarium minibuses and going on a four-week alcohol-fueled crime spree across six states that ended in a police ambush and a lethal gunflight outside a Spanish tapas bar in Louisiana.

So these are creatures that we need to fear, respect and occasionally eat.

Otherwise, we are doomed.

I saw a

I was in Greece and I saw a bit of splashing out at the sea and a guy slowly is coming out of the sea and he's having a bit of a wrestle and he, I'm sure I remember correctly, he had a trident in one hand.

And as he got closer, you could tell he was still dueling with a live octopus.

And it was a rocky beach and there's a family that has three small children, two adults, only other people on the beach.

And he finally gets himself into a position where he gets the octopus by one leg and in front of us, repeatedly beat the octopus to death on a rock.

in front of us.

And then when it was limp, he reached in, bit the ink sac out of it, spat it out, nodded at us, and carried on like we were supposed to continue a day just as normal.

What a stag party that was.

So, compared to the ice, I'm not so sure.

I really hope that Daniel Craig was going, I like your vision for when I walk out to sea, but I've got a better idea for that.

How about James Bond beats a squid to death and then bites its ink sac out in front of everybody?

Hmm, that could be the rebrand Casino Royale really needs.

It's octopus-y, surely.

I think, if I remember from my Hal and Roger adventure book series

as a child,

scientifically accurate as it was,

I think that's it

biting out its brain.

Right.

That's worse.

I don't eat octopus.

Right.

I have eaten octopus, but I've never killed an octopus with my bare bare hands whilst wielding a trident and confusing a family.

Confusing is an understatement.

Two out of three isn't that then?

It was a spear.

It didn't have three heads, Andy.

Britain news now, and well, this is also related to the sea.

Since our last bugle about 10 days ago, we're shifting to Friday recordings for the next few weeks,

the UK government government has um

well incurred some uh criticism from uh various people who on the more humanitarian end of the uh the political seesaw over their launch of a new scheme to uh

clamp down on small boats crossing the channel um packed with

what i didn't i think in former terms times would have been referred to as human beings but i think that's a term that is now the government is trying to remove from legal parlance They've launched another three-word slogan, stop the boats.

I don't know, I mean, three-word slogans are increasingly popular in

politics.

My own personal favourite three-word slogan is use three words

or hyphenate unnecessarily whenever possible.

In fact, one all the time.

It's

a huge story sort of last week.

And it was made huger by the input of one of England's greatest ever footballers, Gary Lineke, who is a BBC

football presenter now and has a huge social media following.

And he tweeted to the effect that the language used by the government was reminiscent of some of the language used in 1930s Germany.

Now, of course, when you make a comment like that, it will be reported as Lineke says the Tories are all Hitler, which was not quite what he said, but it led to it was

the Lineker thing became a bigger story than the fact that the government was

launching or developing a policy that

was,

I think,

well, off the cliff in terms of a lack of humanity.

It's kind of interesting what it showed about where Britain is as a nation politically and just the nature of public debate these days.

Gary Lineker, Neil, of course, famously scored England's goal against Ireland in the 1990 World Cup in a one-all draw in the group stage.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that.

Then Kevin Sheedie equalised Jay.

For the forces of good, I think the rest of the world said on the day.

Alice?

I mean, stop the boats is an Australian slogan.

It's nice to know that you shipped your convicts to us and we ship our barbarism back to you.

I think that's that's how it's farm the farming economics of it work.

But

I saw Rishi Sunak tweeted a number of things, which he left up.

I'm generally not a big fan of commenting on things that people have tweeted until they've had time to think better and take them down, but he's left it up for many days in a row now, saying that people who come on small boats to the UK illegally or claim

come to the UK illegally will not benefit.

And this was the real kicker for me, was it will not benefit from the UK's modern slavery protections,

which I think is a great news for anybody who

wanted to have slaves in the UK but didn't want to bring them in legally

that sounds about right there there are some people in parliament that just love an old three-word slogan in immigration don't they stop the boats get Brexit done or bite well you know the you know the rest of that one

Every little helps and always Coca-Cola.

I don't know all the rules.

The paranoia from the certain newspapers on this is just unbearable.

They're here.

They're off the coast.

They're in small boats.

They're coming.

They're not the fing Vikings.

Relax for Christ's sake.

This is

yet another unenforceable, cruel law change to throw red meat to a certain base.

And there's this huge paranoia about small boats.

And like it's like it's gonna get worse because this isn't gonna work.

So they'll be like, oh, uh we're we hate all small boats, we know small boats, we're gonna make small boats illegal.

Lilos, they're banned as well.

Ships in bottles, that's how borrowers illegally get into the country.

Doors, doors are banned.

Kit Wynns had clearly floated for some time on one after the Titanic went down.

And as a precautionary measure, Stephen Redgrave and Matthew Pinsc will be executed, just in case.

To be fair to the government, though, Neil, they called it the illegal migration bill.

And it turns out that it is illegal in international law.

So, I mean, this is a rare example of the government being honest about what it's doing.

It is saying its own bill.

Unless I've missed, I don't know where the pause is supposed to be, if they're supposed to be a pause.

But anyway, they've called it the illegal migration bill.

And essentially, they're trying to deal with this kind of vast global humanitarian tragedy and

the evils of people trafficking by being not particularly tough on the crime, but tough on the victims of crime.

Twisting one of their old...

their old slogans.

Yeah, I mean, you've got to admire the ambition there.

The government already knows this immigration bill will break international law.

They've intimated as much.

The Northern Ireland Protocol Bill would break international law.

Like,

what's the next law that they'll aim for?

I think gravity could go next, Andy.

I think it's a confected Brussels diktat that the noble UK can finally take on now that Brexit has been done.

This time next year, you could be floating on the ceiling, Andy, like a ginger Lionel Ritchie, just as Henry VIII would have wanted.

You did not win the war to be pulled down to earth by some Euromagnetic force controlled by an unelected planet.

And then, if gravity goes, what about for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction?

Yeah, but maybe there shouldn't.

Maybe physics is the invention of lefty lawyers who don't want hard-working people to build perpetual motion machines.

Did you ever think of that?

No, you didn't.

Well, I mean, lefty lawyers are one of the groups that were blamed for preventing the government putting through this illegal legislation.

And Swella Braverman, the Home Secretary,

and part of the problem is their previous

strategy or policy of trying to catapult people to Rwanda has not.

They've managed to get, I think, a total of zero people on the planes to Rwanda

under the ancient clause of the Magna Carta, out of sight, out of mind.

I think that was legal under British law, if nothing else.

But Swella Bravman said there are 100 million people in the world who could qualify for protection under asylum laws.

Fortunately, but just by pure luck, 99.93 million of them last year couldn't read a map or were just plain lazy, so didn't bother coming.

But what if they did all come at once, which they won't?

But what if they do?

And that's the question that Braverman is trying to address.

Warming to her numerically idiotic theme, Bravman, who holds holds one of the four great offices of state in the UK, brackets, what the f have we become, added, there are likely billions more eager to come here if possible.

Billions, billions of people, billions of people want to cut.

If we do not stop handfuls of people coming here on small boats, there will be billions.

We have currently in the UK heading towards 70 million people.

We've

if billions do turn up, we're going to have to abandon our national addiction to underfunding in infrastructure.

It's going to get, you know, the traffic's going to be beat.

But why stop there?

Why, what?

I mean, why did she not just say trillions?

If she really wanted to get the attention of the, what, I mean, there could be trillions of people alive and dead.

I mean, trillions of humans, zombies, ghosts.

I mean, this to me shows the scale of the challenge that the government is at least doing something

to try to mitigate.

Just quickly on the Lineke thing, he was briefly suspended from the BBC and they had to do a football highlights programme with no humans,

no presenters, no commentators, which was a slightly weird moment in British

sportscasting history.

The problem for Lineke

was that really what he should have said was rather than comparing the language to what was used in 1930s Germany.

He should have said it was the kind of language that would be used in a fictional drama series set in a hypothetical early to mid-20th century European country that is veering inexorably towards fascism.

That would have made it fine.

That would have made it as long as it was only

pretend.

One final story before we fully run out of time.

Alice, a banking crisis has is enveloping the world once more.

The Silicon Valley Bank

in America has collapsed.

There's been various attempts to shore up other struggling banks on both sides of the Atlantic Credit Suisse are borrowing $54 billion to keep their financial dinghy afloat.

First Republic in America has been given $30 billion.

That's for a bank that I've never heard of and as far as most people are aware might well be fictional.

What is happening, Alice?

And

why is it happening so soon after the last f ⁇ ing idiotic financial collapse just 15 years ago?

I mean, it's happening so soon after the last idiotic fiscal collapse because Americans cannot be convinced to regulate their industry.

They have a very peculiar idea about how everything works, and it doesn't involve anyone

being held back from ravening capitalism.

The particular way this bank collapsed is very telling about the weird sort of feudal system in Silicon Valley.

The richest people heard about the possibility of a collapse first, they they got their money out, and then they told the people below them,

who then did exactly the same thing and so on and so forth, so that only the people who could least afford to lose all their money were left holding the bag without any money in it at the end.

And I think the most sort of bizarre thing about this is watching libertarian tech lords spending years trying to convince people that the banking industry needs less government in order to be able to pivot lively into disruption or whatever, and then they turn around immediately and ask for bailouts.

It's just watching the gods of dramatic irony shoot themselves in the foot with Chekhov's gun.

Don't get me wrong.

I think people who put their money in a bank should be protected by the government, and some of them have been to a certain extent.

I genuinely think that there should be regulation, probably because I'm too much of a wuss to believe in the inherent moral virtue of letting people rip each other's throats out with their teeth in a state of nature until we have a king again.

But I feel like the core problem here is that so many loud thought leaders continuously present Silicon Valley success, tech success, as a function of a ruthless Darwinian survival of the fittest, meritocratic Thunderdome style situation, when it mostly actually seems to be like a half-hype game gold rush for angel VC money dumps, like some fed cargo cunt where they're all just begging the big man to drop money on them, or that scene in Toy Story 2 where the little cute green alien sort of pre-minion prototypes are waiting for the claw machine to choose one of them to raise up into musk land.

Businesses in Silicon Valley do not succeed because their business serves customers or meets a need.

They succeed when some ridiculous gambler slash money duke in barefoot shoes who thinks he's better than wearing a suit to a business meeting, he has venture capital and he decides to give them a spin on the money wheel because they did

I don't know, a funky futuristic PowerPoint presentation and they both listen to the same podcasts.

It's junk money being played with by impulse-driven narcissists who have a God complex, and they all know it's not real, which means that the moment someone tells them everyone else might find out it's not real, they start climbing each other to safety like ants in a flood.

Well, thanks for that insightful summary.

I mean, the question I would ask: Does this show that the bugle has been going on too long?

Because, as the old saying goes, when a podcast spans two inanely avoidable global banking crises, either the podcast has been going on too long or the global economy has got even more forgetful and stupid than it already was

that brings us to the end of this week's bugle Neil it's been lovely having you having you back on do you have any forthcoming shows or other works you'd like to yes I do a podcast I do a podcast called why would you tell me that and producer Chris says it's one of his favorite podcasts and we talk about things that you should know but maybe you don't like the woman who invented monopoly and for the exact opposite reason that you might think and she got no credit for it.

We interviewed

this season, we interviewed the guy who's actually a rock star who did the voice for the IRA when

it wasn't allowed to be on UK TV.

So check that out wherever you get your podcast.

It's called Why Would You Tell Me That?

Alice?

I'm doing my show Twist

at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, and then I'll be doing it in London and Tokyo on the 18th of May.

And

wait, London will be after Tokyo and then Edinburgh.

Find me online at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser.

I run writers' meetings every week if you want to write with me there.

And I desperately undercharge for them because I don't know how to value my own labour.

And don't forget also to listen to The Gargle, the Bugles glossy magazine sister publication hosted by Alice

with a

cast of.

It's not your favourite podcast, though, is it, Chris?

Warner's favourites.

Thank you, Neil.

F you, Chris.

I also love Catharsis and Top Stories.

Thank you for listening, Buglers.

We will now play you out with some more contributors to the Bugle Wall of Fame.

To join the Bugle voluntary subscription scheme to give a one-off or occurring contribution to keep the show free, flourishing, and independent, go tobuglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Jonathan Monroe invented the instruction manual, prior to which people just prayed to their local deity to make something work, or just shouted at the device until it snapped into action.

Alex Hoffman discovered that the site of the renowned Battle of Waterloo in 1815 was not, as many had thought, a large London station just south of the River Thames, but some land in modern-day Belgium.

The station didn't actually exist until after the battle, noted Alex, so I think it's just coincidence.

On which topic, J.C.

Van Ocker discovered that Napoleon wore a tricorn hat as a means of triangulating exactly where he was in relation to things like trees, lunch and the enemy.

Alan Hill inadvertently invented the game of darts whilst casually throwing carrots at a pizza during a particularly dull work dinner.

And Andrew Corliss changed the rules of chess to remove the once popular option of sweeping all the pizzas off the board and claiming a drawn game.

Simon Witham discovered the etymology of the coifurial term mullet, which emerged in 18th century philosophy when philosophers would mull over things for weeks, if not months, on end, leading to them growing long hair at the back, counterpointed by shorter, dead hair atop the brain, where the heat of thought had killed the roots of the hair.

Chris White was a revolutionary figure in the evolution of the sport of table tennis after suggesting that the participants should be allowed to play while standing on the floor rather than on the table should they so wish.

The tactic was and remains widely widely adopted.

Margaret Wharton conducted a reassessment of the works of the celebrated 17th century Dutch painter Rembrandt and calculated that he actually painted lots of self-portraits overturning the previous assumptions that everyone who lived in 17th century Holland looked exactly the same just a bit older or younger.

And finally, Mana Scharma discovered the missing note in the musical scale.

It was D, lying there hidden between C sharp and E flat.

Thank you to all our contributors to the Bugle Wall of Fame.

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.