Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo

Hello Buglers and welcome to issue 4238 of The Bugle, the audio newspaper commissioned by the fates themselves to chronicle the long slow decline of humanity into a pit of inescapable decrepit.

Sorry, people aren't Andy Comedy Shark, my mistake.

But I'm Andy's ultimate, it is the 31st of August 2022, as we record, but you're not going to hear this until next month.

So it might be a bit out of date by the time you September occupying buffoons listen to this.

We are back after our summer hiatus, in which the global apocalyptograph needle continued flickering annoyingly upwards.

War, famine, drought, floods, 100 more cricket tournaments, people babbling on incoherently to each other.

All the classic harbingers got busy harbinging through the last month or so.

And to try to bring a halt to all things apocalyptic.

Joining me today, fresh from the Edinburgh Festival, it's Alice Fraser.

And not fresh from the Edinburgh Festival in California, NATO Green.

Hello to both of you.

Welcome to the first post-hiatus bugle.

How was your Augusts?

Lovely.

I've been harbinge watching the end of the world.

It's been like a month since the last bugle and there's been quite a lot happening in the news.

There's been a lot going on and I would just, as we look forward to September I would like to respectfully ask everyone in the world to shut the f up

just for like a for like a week just to shut the f up for a week go to a Vipassana retreat do some silent meditation just

so we could catch a breather.

My dad runs some nice courses.

Yeah, but

the problem with your dad's courses, Alice, is he doesn't have space for seven and a half billion people on them.

And that's that is what is needed.

I mean, a week-long global silence, I think, might be the most

practical idea for the betterment of this planet that I've ever heard.

We are recording on Wednesday, the 31st of August, 2022.

Happy birthday to the former egomaniac horn dog Roman emperors Caligula and Commodus, renowned as two of the shittiest Roman emperors of all time.

So, my advice to you, ancient Romans, don't choose any emperors born on the 31st of August.

It doesn't seem to work out for you.

Perhaps they were unfortunate to be around in the first millennium rather than the early third.

I think they'd have fitted right in with us today.

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

This week, money-saving tips.

With the cost of living biting around the entire universe, and here in Britain, in the absence of any sensible government advice or indeed assistance, we give you bugle government advice on how to save money in the forthcoming months.

One, slay a walrus and wear its skin through the winter.

Two, rather than heating your house, heat yourself with a new thermotics radiator suit, which pumps hot water around your new metallic exoskeleton.

Three, barter with your local supermarket, take a trolley full of food to the checkout at a busy time, then offer to swap it for some magic beans and trust that due to the hassle of causing a scene when there's a long queue building up, they'll just let you get away with it.

Four, retrospectively average out all the food you've eaten in your life.

If you've eaten too much, redistribute the overeat to the future and then imagine eating a series of unnecessary but tempting desserts.

Nutrition is, after all, 99% psychological, so it will probably keep you feeling replete and full.

And finally, six, use the natural heat of the earth to cook your food rather than having to pay for your own gas or electricity.

Simply dig a pit several thousand miles deep in your garden or the nearest area of public parkland, winch your food down in the morning and return from work to a lovely lovely warm slow-cooked stew or soup that you can winch up the several thousand miles over many weeks when you get home with your bare hands.

That section in the bin, also in the bin, a free reaction to the news.

Are you bored of watching the news only to be let down by your nation, planet and or species?

Then simply use one of our free reactions to the news to save yourself from actually having to sit through the actual bulletin itself.

Choose from oh god no

When will we ever learn?

Idiots.

All of them.

Fing idiots.

We're doomed.

Doomed, I tell you.

Or the all-new, that story was not quirky and amusing enough to compensate for all that went before.

That section also in the bin.

Can I also suggest keeping warm in the winter tip, Andy?

Yes.

If you're feeling a little chilly around the edges and you can't afford heating, try pissing yourself.

It's temporary, but it isn't everything.

Yeah.

I mean, it's amazing, babies have cottoned onto this, as I'm sure you know only too well, Alice, from recent months.

Alice, why limit it to pissing yourself?

Why not piss your loved ones as well?

That's the socialist mentality I like about you, Nado.

It's time for the expropriation and redistribution of pissing on one another.

Yep,

I had totally internalized that neoliberal approach, only pissing on yourself.

But I mean, if we want real trickle-down economics, someone's going to have to piss from on high.

Yeah, piss your own boots, your own bootstraps.

But a lot of

communist regimes have pissed all over all of their people so it does kind of work out I guess.

Those sections in the bin

top story this week catching up with what the world's been up to over the last few weeks starting with America.

Now NATO there was a slightly alarming story

that an opinion poll has suggested that more than 40% of Americans think civil war within a decade is likely.

Now, I don't know what the poll said in the 1850s, but 40% seems like quite a lot of percent at the current time.

How do you view the status of civil war brinkmanship in your country?

Well, Andy, I felt that the poll was incomplete.

Here are the questions.

Do you expect political divisions to get worse?

Do you expect political violence to get worse?

Do you think a civil war is likely in the next decade?

The poll missed the most obvious next question, which is: if there is civil war in the next decade, are you happy about it?

Are you going to be the one to start said civil war?

Are you going to fight in it?

Do you plan to fight the war with bullets or with shit posting on social media?

Like, how much do we have to worry about you?

How many guns do you have?

It's going to be a very weird civil war because, yes, the country is divided, but

it's not in two equitable camps.

One side, the smaller side, has all of the guns, and the other side, the larger side, has the entire economy.

So

they can shoot us to death, but we can turn off their Wi-Fi.

So

we'll see how that goes.

Oh, you really want a civil war?

No brunch for you.

So South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said, who Lindsey Graham is so white that graham crackers are named after him.

Lindsey Graham said that riots in the street will happen if Trump is arrested, which obviously riots in the streets, that's where riots go, is in the streets.

I'm not that worried about it because if right-wing riots are anything like left-wing riots, they'll trash their own neighborhoods.

So go ahead.

No one during a riot has the presence of mind to take the bus out of their own neighborhood to do the rioting.

You know what I mean?

Like,

you know, you do the rioting and then it's like it's your own grocery shop and then you can't get peaches the next day.

See, I think that bespeaks a very nice confidence in the ability of your riot to really break down social services because you're not going to catch a bus if your riot is going to be so good that it breaks down the bus service, right?

That's right.

I've always had this fantasy about

starting a car share service where if you're going to riot and you want to get out of your own neighborhood,

you call a car to drive you to the nearest rich neighborhood so you could ride over there.

It'd be called uplift, of course.

Could have been like a kind of a riot-sharing scheme whereby...

Yeah, that's right.

So

you don't actually have to do the traveling yourself.

It'd be better for the environment if you could just exchange riots and still, you know,

it's like

carbon trading of riots.

I think I work.

As a woman, I prefer to internalize my riots into

sort of self-loathing.

I think it's amazing.

40%, 40% of Americans think there's going to be a civil war in the next decade, and the other 60% think that there's definitely not going to be a civil war, and they are furiously willing to defend that belief with their lives.

Can't end well, can it?

If we will keep emphatically indulging our brains in info dumps on micro-blogging platforms, all of whose growth incentives align with making you compulsively adversarial, we can't really blame anyone but ourselves for an increasingly emotionally overwrought public forum, I think.

Yeah, that's eloquently put.

I mean, NATO, essentially, we've got two virtual Americas running concurrently

in parallel.

Do you think it's just time to just declare them different countries in the same physical space, which is really just formalizing the current arrangement?

I think that's a China Melville novel.

Right.

So, which I enjoyed.

I may have said his name wrong.

But yeah, it feels that way anyway.

And,

you know, and so like one side is in the cities and another side is between the cities.

And so when I need to drive from a city to another city, if I have to stop and get out of the car, I like make sure to like hide that I'm a Jew and run to the bathroom.

You know what I mean?

One of the things that the extreme right wing has done is they come up with these like internet code words for things.

And so the internet code word in the like extreme white supremacist internet for the coming civil war is boogaloo.

And the logic of the derivation of that term is Civil War II electric boogaloo.

So that is to say that if you don't know, in 1984, there was a movie in the United States called Break Into Electric Boogaloo that told a heartwarming story about a group of young people of color in Los Angeles using breakdancing to defend a community center from gentrification and being bulldozed by a real estate developer.

And that is what the extreme right wing has taken as the inspiration for the coming civil war that they're planning.

So not only is it cultural appropriation of the name, but they're not even breakdancing for the Civil War.

The Civil War would be great if there were break dancing, some denim vests, a cut glove.

If every battle were a dance battle.

I know.

You know, I remember the 80s where, like, you could, you know, people just walked around with squares of cardboard and a roll of linoleum in case you suddenly found yourself in an adversarial breakoff, needed to drop down and do the worm.

That's, you know, that's how I I spent the 80s, like all of us.

That'd be a good way of handling the Civil War.

And what bothers me most is they picked the name Boogaloo just because it's a catchy sequel title.

Break into Electric Boogaloo.

They couldn't go with Civil War II, Civil or War, or Too Civil II War, or Civil War II, The Civil War Who Shagged Me, or Civil War Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back.

And in this case, by by Empire, I mean the assistant manager of a garden supply store in eastern Washington who is way into QAnon.

No,

they had to do Boogaloo.

Not the squeakqual.

Couldn't they have come with that?

The squeakal is pretty good.

Look, I'm not big on making individuals culpable for broad social dynamic problems, so I'm going to blame all of this on our evolutionary monkey brain, which I've traced back to a Homo erectus called Kag, who was a real slut for drama.

He was the first flat earther.

That was before anyone had invented the globe, so he just refused to believe in hills.

So, the Trump story, which has been one of the big stories in America through the Bugle hiatus, and I'm not saying that this became a big story because we were not around to satirize it, but you can draw

your own conclusions.

Andy, are you saying that you are not one of the redacted informants

in the search warrant?

I'm neither, I'm not saying it, and I'm also not saying it.

You went on holidays and it was all downhill from there, or as Carg would say, it's all over there from here.

I mean, are we overreacting?

I mean, we've all nicked a few bits of stationery when we've left a job, you know, the odd bit of memorabilia to remind us of times gone by.

It's just generally, those bits of stationery don't have the words top secret written on them in cartoonishly big letters.

It's a fairly extraordinary chapter in the seemingly unending story of Trump.

Can you just bring us up to date with what's been going on?

Oh, boy.

So,

one day, a few weeks ago, there was a news notification with no warning, the FBI is searching Trump's house right now.

And everyone in America went, I'm sorry, what now?

And they seized

two dozen boxes of papers that Trump took to Mar-a-Lago when he moved out of the White House.

Now, moving day comes when it's time for Trump to move out of the White House on January 20th, 2021.

And it's a typical moving day.

He's shouting at Melania: make sure to pack the toothbrushes and the underwear and my charging cords and anything labeled top secret.

You know, it's weird that Trump was so fixated on all these documents because, as we all know, Trump can't read.

So

his official papers are just like drawings of dicks on Emmanuel Macron's face

and receipts for hamburgers.

And Republicans freaked out.

So

the FBI called it a search, and Republicans called it a raid to make it sound more dramatic.

And it was the kind of raid where you call ahead of time to make an appointment.

And the FBI coordinated with the on-site Secret Service, and the Secret Service said, go ahead and parallel park behind the 11 golden golf carts with don't tread on me stickers on the back.

The documents that they got were so secret that the FBI agents who collected them didn't have the security clearance to look at the documents that they took.

But they are cleared, I guess, for the guy who gives Trump colonics.

So it's a weird security level that they have.

You wouldn't be entirely surprised if they'd found a couple of nukes hidden away in his garden shed, either as little things he'd helped himself to on the way out.

I mean, I guess, you know, that's a positive, isn't it?

That he doesn't yet have his own nuclear deterrent that we're aware of.

So he's resisted calls to return the boxes, describing them as mine, according to three advisors who haven't given their names to the New York Times.

I don't know what would give him that idea that a guy could just see something and sort of be in its presence and say it's mine, but I've definitely lost jokes like that.

I've definitely said jokes in company and seen them on stage later and was like, you just, you were just next to that joke.

That isn't yours.

It happens with cricket stats as well, don't we?

But I guess the concern, NATO, is that, you know, where does this leave ordinary Americans like yourself?

That if the FBI can just suddenly, unreasonably demand the return of highly sensitive official documents of considerable national security implications from Donald Trump, then it can demand anything from anyone.

I mean, just you wait.

Next will be your family, holiday photos, your embarrassing teenage diaries, your secret stash of erotic poems about long-dead historical figures,

your handwritten logbook detailing every single cup of tea you've ever drunk.

I mean, where will this end, I ask you?

See, I'm not worried about that, Andy, because I have cleverly hidden all of my family secrets and photos and documents in public posts on Facebook.

In other American news, a big bit of legislation from the Biden administration, the Inflation Reduction Act, has been passed, which is quite hard for us to understand here in Britain because our current government's attitude to inflation seems to be scream if you want to go faster.

It's a 700.

The Inflation Reduction Act is what I call it when I respond to a flirty text with a discussion of how reversible vasectomy should be a default state.

Fabulous stuff.

Think about that.

Tell me it doesn't reduce your inflation.

Yeah.

I mean, that does presuppose that people listen to the bugle while tumescent, which, yes,

now that I turn my mind to it.

But I did assume that, Andy.

You did assume that.

That is well below 25% of our audience.

So it's a $750 billion

bill covering healthcare tax and climate.

Biden described it as one of the most significant laws in our history.

Not the most significant, probably.

I think that's probably fair to say.

It's been hailed around the world as a sign that America is finally taking climate seriously.

I think it's 370 billion, roughly, of funding into energy security and climate change.

America hasn't so much dragged its feet on climate change as put its feet in a raging coal fire while saying these are the best and warmest slippers I've ever had.

Ow.

So, how important is this bill, both for America as a nation, the Biden administration, and the future of the planet as an inhabitable ball?

It's been an interesting moment because

the so-called Inflation Reduction Act is most doned for

some tax increases on corporations to fund the most significant investments in climate change in a generation and also

a number of important efforts around health care and expanding health care and access to prescription drugs.

So not things that are intuitively about

inflation.

At the same time,

we wanted more.

It's incredibly significant climate action, perhaps not significant enough given that everything is on fire

or underwater.

And at the same time, or around the same time as the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden announced student debt forgiveness.

And so I'm sort of confused right now because I'm both happy that they did the things that they did and also disappointed that they didn't go far enough when the need is so great.

I'm both happy and disappointed at the same time.

I'm dishappy.

I'm appointed.

What is the word?

So,

and

what's most shocking is that

as soon as the Inflation Reduction Act was announced,

the midterms are upon us, and the projection was that the Democrats were going to lose in a bloodbath.

And as soon as they announced the deal, their polling improved, and Biden's polling improved.

The Inflation Reduction Act, incredibly popular.

student debt relief, incredibly popular.

It turns out that doing things that are helpful is politically popular.

And I don't think any of us realized that before.

I think most of the Democratic Party believed that making bad things less bad was the path to victory and not doing things that were affirmatively good.

And so this could mark a major turning point in American politics.

Yeah, I mean, Biden, I feel like it could be a major turning point, but Biden said that we are in a season of substance, which I think is a deeply hopeless way to frame

changing things for the better.

A season of substance, three months longer of doing good things, and then we're out.

Back to the winter of discontent.

I mean, in terms of the environmental side, it does seem to be an effort to kind of persuade American business and industry that there will be as much money to be made from saving the environment as there has been from destroying it, which seems to be kind of speaking speaking the language they understand.

So, this

may be the kind of breakthrough we've been waiting for.

On student loan forgiveness, it prompted a rather extraordinary comment from any guests, a Republican politician, Lauren Bobert from Colorado.

Have I pronounced that right?

Yes, you have, Colorado.

They get offended if you call it Colorado.

And they're heavily armed, and so we'll respond in kind.

Okay, well, we'll go with Colorado and Boba.

Anyway, who said she said that Biden is robbing hard-working Americans to pay for Karen's daughter's degree in lesbian dance theory?

Now,

this was a curious thing for a serving politician to say.

Can you actually do a degree in lesbian dance theory?

And if so, I have some questions for you, Naito.

Is lesbian dance theory a theory about lesbian dancing?

Is it a specifically lesbian theory about dance in general?

Can a dance or indeed a theory be intrinsically lesbian?

And can a non-lesbian espouse a theory or dance defined as lesbian?

Are two lesbians theoretically dancing together actually doing a lesbian dance?

Or if two non-lesbian non-dancers do a lesbian dance, do they become lesbian or do they become dancers or do they become lesbian dancers theoretically?

These are all important questions.

If two lesbians dance in a forest, is one of them a witch?

Well, that's, I think, from the old degree that went from the late 17th century.

But I mean, these are all important questions that actually touch on issues of identity, society, history, language, meaning, creative expression, and pedantry.

And I think that's a pretty strong basis for a degree.

So, is that degree available, or is this just someone talking bullshit again?

Look, I mean, if you've ever gone dancing with lesbians, you know that any number of lesbians dancing is involving theory.

There is theory to be involved.

What's interesting about, I mean,

Lauren Boebert said Karen's daughter.

And

according to white women in America, Karen has become the N-word of white women

to refer to white women who

partake of the long and proud tradition of weaponizing white femininity in the service of white supremacy and the carceral state.

And so

that's, I mean,

Karen's daughter majoring in lesbian dance theory is kind of what Karen gets for calling the police on the black guy on the block all the time.

So it's appropriate come up.

I'm not familiar with majoring in lesbian dance theory.

I think it was an interesting strategy.

I mean, the Republicans lost their minds over this thing.

And their strategy was not to say that student debt relief was too expensive.

Their strategy was to attack the debtors as bad people, that people who having, but this is socialism, people took out loans and people who pay them back,

and we're letting people off the hook for believing in the lie of opportunity in America.

Don't learn.

That was sort of their message.

Ted Cruz, who is a C student at Princeton, is mad about Barista's reading Foucault,

to which I say, fuok that.

Foucault wrote, the more complex an abstract knowledge becomes, the greater the risk of madness.

And

looking at today's Republican Party, I think we can all agree that Foucault was wrong.

Plenty of madness, complexity, nowhere in sight.

So that's what they're upset about.

Not the cost of the program, but just the idea of people learning stuff that they don't value.

Like, no, you shouldn't explore ideas and be challenged in college.

College is only for sexual assault, blackout drinking, and putting the word obfuscate in a sentence for no good reason, as our Lord Brett Kavanaugh taught us.

Yeah, the problem with putting the word obfuscate in a sentence for no good reason is that it obfuscates the meaning of the sentence.

I have to admit, I didn't pay a huge amount of attention to this lesbian dance theory kerfuffle, except to make the note that the kerfuffle is one of the best and most lesbian dance theories

with both a sapphic dignity and a deep vulvic symbolism.

But the thing that struck me the most about it was there's a real failure of Republicans to make something sound uncool.

You know what I mean?

Like when they say things like, you can't excuse student debt that people won't sign up to do jobs they hate and you're like, cool.

Like,

I don't understand why lesbian dance theory sounds like the most fun degree you could possibly do.

Well, also, I mean, you know,

when it comes to degrees, it's not about what you learn, they're about how you learn or what you learn about learning.

So, I mean, I would argue it's better to do a lesbian lesbian dance theory degree properly than a nuclear physics degree shitly.

And it's you know, a lesbian dance theory degree to me will be way better than, for example, a PPE degree, Politics, Philosophy, and Economics in Oxford, which the evidence suggests really leaves you with no career options apart from failing to get a proper job and ending up having to do some kind of waste-of-time work experience as a cabinet minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, or PM.

So, you know, let's not denigrate these marginal, albeit fictional, degrees

politics.

This week, multiple of my friends have moved their 18-year-old children into college.

And so I had the opportunity to give those 18-year-olds some advice.

And my advice was

the world is ending and you have no future, so have fun with it.

So

one thing I will say about the debt relief is the Democrats

had to means test it.

It's $10,000 of debt relief if you make less than $125,000 a year.

Mainstream Democrats in the Biden administration hold a deep belief that anything good requires an excessive and useless amount of admin.

Healthcare, means tested.

Debt relief, means tested.

Child tax credits, means test it.

These motherfuckers would means test blowjobs if they could figure out how to make sure every blowjob came with a drop-down menu, six forms, and an accountant.

There is one

foolproof.

They're worried that they're giving debt relief to people who don't need it because they could afford college.

And they don't want to give debt relief to rich people.

And there is a foolproof way to know that the person with student debt isn't rich, which is the debt itself.

Rich people don't have college debt.

They just pay for school.

They don't take on debt just for fun to act like they're like down somehow.

There's no cultural appropriate, like, they don't have like small vats of debt around the house to show off like they collected artifacts from, you know, a visit to a Malawi tribe somewhere.

You know what I mean?

They just, they don't have the debt.

So it seems like the most useless form of means testing.

But moving back across to the correct side of the Atlantic, UK news now.

And well, Boris Johnson, the soon-to-be former Prime Minister and possibly soon-to-be future Prime Minister,

if the papers are to be believed, that he's essentially already on the comeback trail.

Anyway, he's said that Britain is absolutely not broken after a summer of chaos.

Now, when Johnson says Britain is absolutely not broken, by the rules of Johnsonian truthickness and languagery, this means the whole place is done for, nothing works, and everyone's fed off.

It's been a summer of kind of

a strange summer politically in which essentially we've had no government at all.

Boris Johnson's just kind of been on holiday and not turning up up to work.

The government has given up trying to do anything to help people through the difficult

economic times, and we've just been waiting for

the result of the interminable Conservative Party leadership election, more of which later.

But the state of the country...

This is a list.

Amongst the things that are not working in Britain at the moment, for various reasons, ranging from industrial action, decades of underinvestment, and the government's philosophical belief in political incompetence.

These things are not working.

The court system, the transport network, democracy, the police, the postal service, telecoms, the health service, money, life, England's opening batsmen are moat, business, leisure, the climate, trade, diplomacy, the government, everything else, and Stonehenge, which is still next to us, 364 days a year.

Stonehenge is right once a year.

Once a year is not enough, Alice.

A broken rock is right once a year.

Also.

Warships, a new £3 billion aircraft carrier broke down because someone forgot to oil its propeller shaft, apparently, which was the first thing I'd do on receiving a new warship.

I mean, that's warship owning 101, as far as I'm concerned.

That and checking the honker works.

So, essentially,

it's just

this kind of sinking into this kind of pit of acceptance that everything's a bit f ⁇ ed at the moment.

And amidst this, our new Prime Minister now looks set to be Liz Truss, who is winning

the two-horse race against Rishi Sunak, voted on by the Conservative Party membership.

So they're basically trying to appeal to a fraction of a percent of the electorate, and then the challenge after that will be to try and

appeal to a broader section of the electorate, which is about 2%, that actually decides elections.

So, you know, who knows?

It might work.

Truss has been using her trademark cocktail of dog whistle nothingness, and it's really hit home with the Conservative Party membership.

Sunak has been desperately reacting to every question by saying he thinks what he thinks the voters want him to think he thinks, and it's not really been working for him.

So

we're due to

be bequeathed Liz Truss as our Prime Minister

next week.

But she has not been really, I think, she's not been fronting up to the challenge.

She's quite well clear and therefore has been avoiding interviews, including a flagship interview with the BBC Radio on their

breakfast news show.

Now, obviously with a new leader of a country,

you want their policies, opinions, and track record to be scrutinised forensically by a top-quality political interviewer, or at least to have something that inevitably descends into an unedifying sandbite laden bicker.

You at least want that.

But Truss has been very cleverly avoiding scrutiny, because as the old saying goes, scrutiny can go f itself.

And she pre-flounced out of her scheduled interview with BBC Radio a few days in advance.

It's quite hard.

I mean, Alice, you've been here over the summer and probably playing a bit more because I've been away a lot and then busy with in my alternative universe of comforting cricket numbers.

I mean, what have you made of the

curious, arcane political tradition by which we, you know, our Prime Minister regenerates into someone simultaneously different and the same?

Well, it's sort of astonishing to me watching her.

Alexis, her appeal seems to be a sort of a constant and committed, wild-eyed Thatcher cosplay, or maybe like a evil post-menopausal Barbie situation.

Her OnlyFans is just, I can imagine the Iron Lady dominatrixing a hot working-class dude with a smudge of coal on his abs to represent being in a northern mining town that's been

but like it's it's just a sort of an astonishing performance that she's putting on of like deliberate incompetence.

Is this what so this is the thing?

I've been at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and sometimes I see some comedy that other people seem to enjoy and go is this what people like

And then I feel like the whole world is gaslighting me.

And I sort of feel like that with Liz Truss.

Of like, you know, I, between the two of them, sure, it's a vanity of small differences in the differences, mainly how vain each of them are.

But it seems to me, like, just as an outside viewer, that, like, Rishi Sunak could use a calculator if you asked him to in a windstorm and Liz Truss couldn't.

I'm sure you want somebody.

who's capable of operating basic machinery.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Maybe I want them to pick the wrong person, but it does seem like they are picking the wrong person.

But I don't know why I think Richard Zunek's the right person, except that he seems, again, like he could walk in a straight line if you asked him to at the head of a gun.

But it's not about being the right person, it's about being the less wrong person.

And it's not even about being popular at elections, it's about being

electably not totally unpopular.

And so, I mean, that's, I guess, the challenge.

I think that might even be too high a bar for trust to clear.

Nato, have you been following our political ruptions at all?

A little bit.

And, you know, look, Andy, be careful what you wish for.

For the last three years of the Boris Johnson regime, haven't you been saying

we'd be better off if this country was run by a bowl of soup and

if no one was actually in charge?

And

now your dreams have come true.

So,

you know, it's, I mean, in some ways, I think it's a, it's a, the idea of Liz Truss becoming prime minister does feel like a, you know, it's a, it's a, a, a breakthrough for, for women in that, you know, I mean,

say what you will about Thatcher, she was incon, she was competent.

And, you know, feckless, incompetent, opportunist, corrupt men are a dime a dozen.

But feckless, incompetent, corrupt women are a dime each.

And that's

harder to come by.

Right.

Yeah, I guess that's a positive.

That's a great step forward for equality.

Yep.

Right.

Well, that's a positive sign on it.

Well, she just sort of seems to be looking into the past all of the time, partly with the Thatcher cosplay and partly with trying to revive the Saxons versus the Normans thing by refusing to say if Macron is a friend or a foe.

Yes.

I mean, this is curious.

So, Macron,

the French, and crucially, you know, let's emphasise this.

he is not Napoleon.

Now, Napoleon was a bit it was a bit of an easier question to answer.

Is he friend or foe?

He laid his cards very violently on a series of tables over a couple of decades in the late 18th, early 19th centuries.

It was that question at the end of another uh interview um in which uh I think it was a barrage of simple kind of binary questions.

Now, obviously asking irrelevant childish questions with even more infantile binary answers is now one of the key pillars of democracy that we expect.

So So, I mean, we have a God-given right to expect an answer from our soon-to-be-God-given Prime Minister.

But, I mean, this is

a curious question not to want.

I mean, we're not still in the.

I don't think we're still in the Hundred Years' War.

I mean, it's possible.

I mean, there was, you know, the 14th, 15th century celebrity conflict that lasted over 100 years.

We're going to go over 100 years.

Why not make it a thousand?

So, I mean, it's possible that we're just getting back to basics.

We don't know.

In other world news now, Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, has died at the age of 91, two years younger than Ronald Reagan when he quit this mortal realm.

In another Cold War win for the West, go, team West.

It was quite a close-run thing in the end.

Interesting thing, the reaction to it around the world.

He was the most open, youthful, and progressive leader the Soviet Union ever had, which was not a wildly, hotly contested title, like most

acrobatic pope,

most jovial goth, or most charismatic barnacle.

He followed when he came to power in the mid-1980s, he followed a series of Soviet leaders who'd been one or more of nearly dead, effectively dead, and actually dead.

And

set about trying to open up the Soviet Union, he launched Peristroika.

Now, up until then, Perastroker had been what football managers said when they wanted two new centre-forwards, we needed para-strikers.

Damn it,

I'm getting the thumbs up from Ped, and we'll call it a draw to all.

That meant restructuring perestroika.

Previously in the Soviet Union, the general view had been that if something wasn't working, then you just kill millions of people and keep doing it the same way.

And it didn't always work entirely well.

Glasnost, as well, was another thing that Gorbachev brought in, a shortened hybrid word for looking back more fondly on music festivals, despite having not enjoyed them much at the time.

Hijacked by Gorbachev to mean openness.

And, you know, he's well liked and respected in the West, but all this reports suggest that not looked back on fondly in Russia, particularly not by Putin,

who seems to be setting about rolling back pretty much everything Gorbachev ever did.

What's the reaction been to his death in America, NATO?

Well, Andy, I hope you're happy because

now Britain isn't the only failed imperialist power whose bumbling retreat from its former client states leads to decades of violence.

It's not just you and Harold Wilson.

You know, reading the memorials about Gorbachev, I was in high school when the Soviet Union ended, so I remember broad strokes, but not the details.

And he resigned on Christmas Day, and the Soviet Union dissolved the next day, which is Boxing Day.

So they needed to break up the country in time for the sales.

Boy, there were some things really sold off at cut prices.

You know, and they say that Gorbachev let the Soviet Union dissolve and

Eastern European communism end without bloodshed.

Run that by Ukraine, Kosovo, Georgia, Chechnya, Serbia, Bosnia, Chechnya again, Albania, Croatia, Chechnya, Georgia, Macedonia, Abkhazia, Dagestan.

Except for that, no bloodshed.

Gorbachev is a man famous for glass-nosed, the reforms that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and a weird birthmark on his forehead.

When he died, everyone in the world's first thought was, oh, yeah, weird birthmark on his forehead.

And also perestroika.

Imagine if Abraham Lincoln was known by the entire world for two things, ending slavery and like having a dumb laugh.

He's remembered for two things, ending slavery and having a ridiculous hat.

I mean, it's interesting looking back now.

I think we're basically about the same age.

It was a defining moment in our teenage years.

And the fall of communism was hailed by writer Francis Fukuyama as the end of history.

But I mean, it's typical, isn't it, the modern world that history, it probably should have ended then after a successful first series, but it proved it was too popular.

Now we're all having to dredge through the unwanted, unnecessary, thematically derivative, unoriginal, poorly planned, and tediously predictable history to the sequel.

But, you know, at the time, you know, it seemed that

we'd reached the end of the era of childish military grandstanding.

I mean, it's history to the squeakal, isn't it?

Damn it.

Well, that brings us to the end of

this week's bugle.

We will be back next week with full coverage of the unveiling of the new British Prime Minister.

NATO, do you have anything to plug?

My comedy albums are back on Spotify, the NATO Green Party and the Whiteness album, or you can get them on Bandcamp, which gets more money to the artist.

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, I will be in Oakland at the show Critical Hit, doing a long work in progress set.

And then next Saturday, I'll be back at the setup at the Speakeasy.

Alice, you are filming your show in London soon.

On the 11th of September at the Museum of Comedy, I think it's about 4 p.m.

Tickets are still available, but they are selling fast, which is astonishing to me because I haven't been plugging it very well.

So if you're in London and would like to see Kronos, it will be the last time I perform it live,

and I will be filming it that day.

And then, if you want to see it, I assume I'll be selling it after that, or I'll just film it and keep it to myself.

Also, I have the Gargle, the Gargle, the sister magazine to the Bugle, it is the glossy magazine to the Bugles audio newspaper for Visual World.

It is full of nonsense, and also some serious analysis of things that aren't politics.

It's basically all of the news, none of the politics.

Occasionally, Andy, mostly me.

And don't forget, there are 15th anniversary Bugle live shows coming up.

We have an extra show in London, so our London shows are the 15th and the 22nd.

The 22nd is new, I think, the 15th is sold out, or very nearly sold out.

Birmingham on the 27th, Glasgow on the 30th of October, and Dublin on the 3rd of November.

Details at thebuglepodcast.com and click the live link at the top.

We will be back next week, also with the return of the Bugle Wall of Honor.

Until then, goodbye

hi buglers it's producer chris here i just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast mildly informed which is in podcast feeds and youtube right now quite simply it's a show where me and my friend richie review literally anything so please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.