The Class Dominator (4228)

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4228 of the known universe's leading and only audio newspaper for a visual world.

I'm Andy Zoltzmann in the shed of unquenchable truthickness in South London.

And as we we record, apparently Russian state media has warned that the UK could be, and I quote, someone else quoting them, wiped off the map by a nuclear attack using an underwater robot drone that sparks a radioactive tsunami.

Now, on the plus side,

this underwater drone is going to have to wade through literal shit to make it here because our heroic British

sewage system has been blasting untreated shit into our coastal waters for more than apparently apparently 160,000 hours last year.

Bear in mind there's only 8,760 hours in a year.

That is a fk of a lot of hours.

On the minus side, according to Dmitry Kisolyov, also known as Putin's mouthpiece, a TV news presenter without a completely unbreakable commitment to truth and objectivity, which is all the race these days, he said that Britain could be swamped by this radioactive tsunami.

Now, whilst this would possibly make swimming in the sea marginally more hazardous from a health point of view, it could also play merry havoc with the cricket season so I'm very much opposed to it and living in a state of some concern.

Of course Kisoglov is welcome to come on the bugle and try to explain his rationale as to why this might be a good idea and it should be said that this nuclear attack from an underwater drone remains unlikely to happen but if you do hear things starting to splish and splosh around radioactively in the background well let's just hope it's just a government drill now joining me from uh a a radioactive tsunami safe eighth-floor flat on a Helen Crystal Palace, sensible planning, and B, a pretty much identical genetic pool to me, is the quibbling sibling, Helen Zaltzman.

Helen, welcome.

I mean, you moved into a flat quite a long way off the ground.

Did you have advanced knowledge of the Russian radioactive tsunami threat?

Hello, Andy, from the nuclear shit-filled gene pool.

Same as you.

So, did you have advance warning of this Russian nuclear tsunami threat?

Oh, yet.

All right.

You actually did learn Russian at school.

Yes, I technically did learn Russian.

And so

I'm now well placed to translate Uncle Vanya if the current conflict requires.

Okay.

That is starting to look deeply and sensitive now, your

choice of school subjects.

Also joining us, making up an all-Jewish issue 4228 of the bugle, as promised to our people by God in the Bible if you read it backwards from San Francisco it's NATO Green shalom shalom bitches

as our forefathers used to say

how are you how are you NATO how's how's California these days it's okay so Andy

as has often happened on the bugle I have to report to you on my dealings with the nightmarish American healthcare system

I recently had

a medical debacle, you could say.

I was having to pee constantly.

I was in pain in my groin.

I didn't sleep for a week.

My wife is a clinician, and so she thought I needed labs done in a prostate exam to rule out prostate cancer.

I called my medical plan, Kaiser, to get an appointment, and they said, What is the problem?

And I said,

My dick hurts.

Sorry, Tamath.

No, it's, I mean, it's.

Deepest sympathies for your pain.

Thank you.

Well, it was like, I was like,

I wanted to convey some sense of alarm, and it felt like using euphemisms would not get the level of urgency that I was trying to get across.

So you went with the medical technical language.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I pulled out my medical dictionary and said, technically speaking, my dick hurt.

And they said, do you want a video appointment?

And I said, who is paying who for this transaction?

Are we doing doctor visits on OnlyFans?

So

I can't get an appointment.

I can't get exams.

I'm in miserable.

I do a gig and then go from the gig directly to the emergency room.

And I get my first prostate exam in an emergency room in an open bay.

The doctor tells me to lie on my side and curl up a bit while he inserts his fingers into my butthole.

And it reminds me of the line from Gabriel Garcia Marquez that the first fall brings old age and the second fall brings death.

But Marquez clearly didn't know about prostate exams.

And so they describe my prostate as not boggy, which is a good thing.

But now I know that that's a descriptor that you use for the prostate is boggy, which I find horrifying.

So what is yours like, if not boggy?

Fieldy?

It's concrete and

yeah.

Yeah, it's

resilient.

Resilient.

It's like hardened cold.

Yeah, the

prostate can only be described using

the mechanisms that are used to flame and distill scotch.

So it's either

peat-fired or coal-fired.

So

then after about a week,

my symptoms resolve, my labs go back to normal.

At some point during the process, I get some labs and my wife, the clinician, looks at them and says, either you're fine or you have imminent kidney failure.

And then our kids walk in the room and she's like, I don't want to talk about it in front of the children.

So anyway, the upshot is

probably I passed a kidney stone and either it was a small kidney stone that messed me up, but not as bad as kidney stones can do, or it wasn't a small kidney stone and I just have an incredibly tough urethra.

So that's what's been going on for me.

Right.

Congrats.

Yeah.

Is congratulations the correct term?

Yeah.

I guess it is.

Sort of like getting engaged, I guess.

I feel I like to accomplish something.

Yeah.

And well, Bugle listeners, if any of you want to describe an intrusive medical procedure with reference to a giant of South American literature, do email us.

Perhaps you want to explain an endoscopy

in the style of Isabelle Allende.

It's up to you.

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

This week, we review the latest reality-driven children's books as children's literature seeks to express more accurately for our youngsters the reality of the world and future that they are looking ahead to, including Tommy Turbut and the Trawler of Doom, exciting scrapes, and an introduction both to the economics of fishing quotas and the environmental cost of the fishing industry.

Norbert the Naughty Knight.

Crusades-based fun and frolics as Norbert and the Crusader crew dispense some eye-meltingly gory brutalities in the name of Christ, and repeat with graphic depictions of siege life and hilarious bouts of fatal dysentery.

And we look at the Petula the Petulant Piglet series, including Petula says goodbye to her siblings, Petula comes to a dawning realization of what sausages are, Petula Last Swill and Testament, and of course the heart-rending series finale from Abattoor to Abattoir, when the young pig, having got the dream gig as a backing singer for the reformed Swedish pop icons,

finally meets her maker in a quite harrowing, harrowing scene.

That section in the bin

We are recording on Monday the 2nd of May 2022.

Tomorrow, Tuesday the 3rd of May is National Paranormal Day.

I don't know what nation it is Paranormal Day in.

I couldn't be asked to check and I'm just waiting for some

quite possibly.

But let's just assume it's wherever you live.

And therefore, this episode of The Bugle is being haunted by no fewer than five celebrity ghosts from the past and future.

See if you can pick them out by playing this episode backwards into a Bluetooth-enabled Ouija board, then listening to the echo bounce back off a mysterious force field between naught and 500 miles above the surface of the earth.

If you are listening to the show whilst on or near a UFO, it will sound a bit weird as if it's simultaneously underwater, on fire, and in Latin.

Also, the 3rd of May is World Press Freedom Day.

There will now be a special five-second gap in which you can tell us, as a part of the World's Press, exactly what you think about this show.

If that's not enough, there will be an extra blank minute at the end of the show for you to finish off.

On your marks, get set.

Well,

thank you for your firmly expressed candor.

We will take all of that on board.

Top story this week: misogyny.

Now, misogyny and sexism, are they the real MNS or the new S ⁇ M?

You tell me, buglers, but here in the UK, it has been a week in which men, the far-famed demographic group who make up just under 50% of this nation's population, but can boast around 65% of its MPs, have been contributing, as is so often our way, 100% of the stories of frankly abominable behaviour in politics.

Reports have suggested that a total of 56 MPs, including three cabinet ministers, are facing sexual misconduct allegations, assuming that they are all or mostly men.

And I don't think that is a large assumption to make.

That's around one in eight male MPs, which seems more than would be ideal, with all due respect to the seven out of eight who've somehow heroically managed to keep their wandering whatevers to themselves.

It'll come to them.

It will come to them.

And topping this all off, this story kind of reached its nardir stroke zenith.

Delete, according to whether you are judging it based on the depths being plumbed in our post-morality, who gives a shit?

Look at Ukraine.

Stop complaining about me sticking my plonker in a pot plant political landscape.

Or if you're basing it based on whether you enjoy collections of words that you never thought you or anyone else in the known universe would ever hear.

For example, these words, member of parliament, caught watching pornography in the House of Commons on his telephone.

twice, once whilst next to a female government minister, then claims he was trying to look for tractors.

Helen, you have spent much of your working life studying language.

Where does this stand amongst the sentences that really should never have been constructed in the order that that was constructed?

I'd say it's an easy top 50.

I'm just leaving room for worse to happen.

What I found intriguing, insofar as any of this is intriguing, was that

this MP, Neil Parrish, said the situation was, funnily enough, it was tractors I was looking at, and I did get into another website that had a sort of very similar name.

And what could that be?

Is it something to do with plowing?

What is a tractor-related URL that could also be pornographic?

Don't tell me.

I simply don't want your opinion about this.

It's a rhetorical question for you to protest

later.

But in a way, it's the most honest thing a Tori has said in a long time.

That he was looking for tractors and found...

Well, then he went back to the website knowing that he was looking for sex tractors.

But

I don't agree with people watching porn at work if that is not their job, but it is better than most of what the Tories do when they are working.

Right.

So, I mean, it is possible, isn't it, that he was, you know, I guess just trying to find something that had a more robust sort of moral code than sitting amongst other Conservative MPs and behind the Johnson front bench.

So, you know,

maybe we should try and look on this from the positive side.

NATO, did this story reach your side of the Atlantic?

Yes, it is.

And I am incredibly relieved about this story because not that long ago, I was on the Bugle and we were talking about Jeffrey Cox and the corruption investigation.

And

what a refreshing change of pace from corruption and

the British government not knowing what a party is

to get into this misogyny story.

And I understand it.

I mean, like, you know, he said he was looking at tractors and then he ended up on a porn site.

Who among us hasn't made that mistake?

You can imagine the unexpected porn vortex I found myself in after looking for recipes that used cumin and star anise.

It sounds implausible that you start out looking at tractors and then end up at porn, but the first rule of porn is that if you can think of it, there is a porn for that.

And

I don't even need to look to know that there is a genre of tractor porn.

By the way, there's also definitely bugle porn out there, where porn actors vaguely resembling bugle co-hosts just stick it in the bin.

Oh, no.

We did get sent some slightly alarming fan fiction many, many years ago.

Chris, I can't remember if you were on the show at that point.

No, it was pre-mie, but it was still very much a conversation.

I think that's it.

And it was horny.

Yeah.

Horny and haunting.

I'm a little surprised that

the internet works well enough in the Houses of Parliament for people to stream porn.

It's got some very thick old walls.

Yes.

I did expect...

the accused MP to defend himself by saying, I had absolutely no idea it was pornography.

I thought I was watching a wildlife documentary on the mating rituals of apes.

I could not for the life of me understand why David Attenborough had not popped up yet.

I was watching someone else's video medical appointment.

But in the end, so Neil Parrish, MP and former farmer, so he claimed he was looking for a tractor brand called the Dominator, specifically the Class Dominator Combine Harvester.

That is a very Tory-sounding Combine Harvester.

It is.

He got taken to another site which contained pornographicals, as discussed.

And he then revisited that site on a later occasion, but not to see whether the Class Dominator Combine Harvester had had somehow managed to develop a hybrid contraption that was half combine harvester, half woman, the long-awaited mermaid for the farming world.

Now, obviously, what puzzles me most about this is that the class dominator 115 CS is renowned as one of the most erotically charged combine harvesters available on the market anyway.

From its sensuous threshing cylinder to its almost seductive straw walker to its unstoppably horn-inducing cutter bar.

So quite why Parrish felt the need to seek his Grilltharian kicks elsewhere remains something of a mystery.

And even if the class dominator did not sufficiently, how should we put this on a family show, scroop his agricultural potong tongue, well, what's wrong with the good old-fashioned Massey Ferguson 399?

A 130-horsepower supertractor so goddamn ripped, you would have to be a permafrosted pope not to want to drive it behind the nearest haybale and get down to some seriously agricultural business with it.

I digress.

Now, of course, I mean, Helen, do we need to be a little forgiving that, you know, previous generations of MPs were not presented with such easily accessible temptation in the pre-internet days.

The closest similar incidents our bugle researchers could find was from 1867, when Sir Strangeford Mellard was overheard making a strange grunting noise and sensuously stroking a curiously shaped Greek vase he'd hurloined from the British Museum.

I mean, is he just a victim of his times?

Well, he has been caught twice.

How many times has he done it?

That he wasn't caught.

Well, that's a good question, because I don't know.

I mean, if you extrapolate from the broader national crime statistics, in which,

you know, at a ballpark figure, let's say 95% of all crimes are not solved.

And I've made that statistic up, but it sounds about right.

And assuming that, you know, being in Parliament, he gets away with more, I reckon that's probably his 6,000th visit to a Horny Tractor stroke pornography site.

It is often boring in there, probably.

As British people, did you know anything about Parrish before this?

Absolutely not.

No, I mean, no one had heard of him.

So I looked him up

because I was trying to figure out, like, is this, because he's resigning over it, and is this a loss to the legislative process that his voice will not be heard?

And here's a quote from one of his speeches.

No government, irrespective of their political persuasion, can stop what blows on the wind.

When you're right, you're right, everybody.

And

his legislative record of the policies that he worked on,

I think it's a huge loss to the Commons to lose this pioneering policymaker on the top issues facing the people of the United Kingdom, who was an expert on policies regarding dog control, the fines imposed on grocers, and the culling of badgers.

That's according to his own website, his top legislative priorities.

Yeah, well, he was was

the chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee from 2015, which is probably just a baccanal for him.

All those vehicles.

Further reports have emerged

as the broader issue of misogyny in politics has gripped the media recently, including that one of the Christmas parties held in 10 Downing Street that's being investigated for contravening COVID laws involved the handing out of a Sexist of the Year award, which, you know, on the one hand was probably considerably more hotly contested than the even vaguely competent Cabinet Minister of the Year award or the member of number 10 Downing Street staff who least debased and damaged our democracy award.

But, I mean, this government sort of wears its appalling cards firmly on its sleeve.

And all this has happened in the self-proclaimed mother of parliaments, the confused, embarrassed, considering disowning all her children, mother of parliaments.

Beyond that, there was also a story in the Mail on Sunday about a Conservative MP claiming that Boris Johnson was distracted from his prime ministerial duties in the Commons by Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner having limbs like Sharon Stone did in a film once.

These have been pretty dark times for, you know, as a fully paid up member of the patriarchy

as I am.

I mean, and you, NATO, I know, you know, you define yourself very much as a patriarch.

It's getting increasingly hard to defend the franchise, is it not?

Yeah, I mean,

I would have gone for a more current reference than a 30-year-old movie to describe someone.

What's Sharon Stone been in recently?

Just switch it for that.

Whatever that is.

Yeah.

But

the allegation about Angela Raynor was that she had crossed and uncrossed her legs, which is what Sharon Stone did in the movie, except that Angela Raynor was fully clothed.

And the whole thing about Sharon Stone Seed in the movie was that you got to see her, and this is a technical, clinical term, bald taco.

And saying that a woman moving her legs is the same as a woman exposing her actual vagina is like saying a pigeon is the same as a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

In a strictly technical sense, the pigeon is the biological descendant of the T-Rex, but there's hundreds of millions of years of evolution between them.

No sane person would confuse the two.

And Tyrannosaurus Rex also had a sweet pussy.

So

one MP, an anonymous conservative MP, said that Angela Rayner knows she can't compete with Boris's Oxford Union debate training.

Now, I'm no expert on Boris Johnson, but does he have a reputation for being articulate and lucid?

Is that what he's known for?

Well, it is in some parts of the

political spectrum.

That's uh it but it's very it's kind of invisible to to other people.

Uh, I guess it's like that, you know, that that that blue dress, yellow dress thing on the internet a few years ago, where some people looked at looked at this picture of a dress and said, That's a blue dress and others said that's a yellow dress.

And it's similar with Boris Johnson, that you know, some people look at it and say, That's, you know, an an articulate, convincing debater in the grand Oxford tradition that has shaped our politics.

And other people look at it and say, What an absolute bumbling who is a scar on the very concept of democracy.

So, you know, you can look at the same thing and come to different conclusions, I guess.

Right.

I thought he was just some spoiled asshole whose main gift was getting women pregnant, lying, and failing to administer any single government function with the remotest competence.

Yeah, proud to be led by him.

That's what they teach you at the Oxford Union.

Bearing in mind, his debating skills also included during the

election campaign in 2019, hiding in a fridge when confronted with an awkward question.

It does slightly raise questions as to the standards at Britain's top universities.

In terms of the state of British politics, there has been gradual progress over the hundred years since women were given the vote, but still only around about a third of members of the House of Commons and less than 30% of the House of Lords are not men.

But let's look at the recent stats on this.

As recently as 1987, fewer than 5% of MPs were women.

It's gone up sevenfold to 35% over the last three and a half decades.

If that rate of progress continues, in another 70 years, over 1700% of MPs will be women.

That equates to more than 11,000 female MPs in what would have become a very crowded and considerably less infantile House of Commons.

So

nothing will get done.

They'll just be queuing for the two loos that are in Parliament the whole time.

And they'll still be debating about whether it's time to update the building.

The worst thing about this story, well, debatably, one of the worst things about this story is the hashtag is GrowlerGate.

Oh,

that is

vulgar.

That is indeed

vulgar.

I suppose, NATO, to you, perhaps a growler is a large bottle for putting things like kombucha in.

Whereas here, it has a more smotty connotation.

Oh.

I'm excited to have more vocabulary.

Yeah, take that with you into Whole Foods.

In terms of

the misogyny and sexism faced by women in politics, according to Kwasi Kwateng, the Secretary of State for Business, this is just the result of a few bad apples.

But as I said, with 56 MPs facing misconduct charges, when 13% of your male apples are one or more of mouldy, rotten, radioactive, or actually a wrapped curled up and painted green to look like an apple, then you're not going to win any prizes for your craft cider or indeed your tat-tatan.

Especially when this barrel of apples has been chosen to represent all the other apples, because it is supposedly, theoretically at least, the best apples that you can possibly get.

He also said that in politics there are some instances where people don't act according to the highest standards.

For example, the years 2019 to 2022.

Of course, misogyny is not something that is exclusive to Britain, although it is still an enthusiastically pursued national hobby, it turns out.

It's also a facet of American politics.

NATO, bring us up to date with the latest celebrity misogynists who are

entertaining news audiences in America.

That's right, Andy.

I would say that you British people are spoiled, because Neil Parrish at least had the decency to look at porn twice and then resign.

And if he were an American Republican congressman, he would get a book deal, a show on Fox News, and be declared the future of the Republican Party.

And that is indeed what has occurred.

I will see you looking at porn twice in the House of Commons and raise you Republican congressional cocaine orgies.

So

the

House Republicans, like the Tories, don't mind what you do, whether it be looking at porn or attending a cocaine orgy, as long as it doesn't interrupt a good legislative proceeding.

Madison Cawthorne is a Republican congressman, a 26-year-old, wheelchair-bound, arch-conservative, future of the Republican Party from North Carolina, who went on a podcast a couple weeks ago and talked about Republican congressional cocaine orgies that he had been invited to.

To be clear,

no one has since said definitively that there are no Republican cocaine orgies.

Just that it's not the kind of thing that you should talk about on a podcast.

So

you're supposed to talk about it, but instead of Republican, you're supposed to say liberal media Hillary Clinton and then say QAnon told you to say it because Republicans work on transference.

Republican cocaine orgies sound like the worst possible kind of orgies.

It would be like watching a pile of honey-baked ham slowly dissolve until nothing was left but bone and sugar residue.

Would you say that Republican cocaine orgies would be better or worse than Tory tractor orgies?

It's a tough call.

I would say that the Republican cocaine orgies would be better in that thanks to the cocaine, they would be over more quickly.

Well, you don't know how long it takes when there's a tractor involved.

I know.

Sometimes you got to refuel.

So, So Cawthorne was talking about the Republican cocaine orgies.

It's been all over the news.

He's had to answer to the other members of the Republican Party.

Some of his colleagues have turned on him.

He's up for re-election.

Other Republicans are trying to challenge him in the primary.

His campaign spokesman did not respond to requests for comment because his name is Luke Ball, which is definitely a porn star name.

Now, Cawthorne is an interesting guy.

He went on another podcast and said, I was raised on proverbs proverbs and push-ups uh which but he dropped out of a conservative christian college with all d's so anyone can be saved but with all you have to have a c average um

that the pot i like the the story was that he talked told this story he told this story about the the cocaine orgies on a podcast called the warrior poet society podcast which i looked up and now i'm so terrified i will never sleep again um

because the description of the website reads as follows: We believe there are warrior poets everywhere, and they have spanned the centuries.

No, man, you're thinking of the clap that spanned the centuries.

It is our sincere hope that this special community of like-minded individuals will continue to grow and affect change for the better.

If you're listening and not reading along on the website, they spelled effect with an A and not with an E, which means that they want to say that they want to adopt the posture and attitude of change while not actually accomplishing change.

And we want warrior poets in police departments, military, and as federal agents.

It is our conviction to use our mind and bodies to protect others, whether you want us to or not.

That last bit was implied.

But then the website is all selling like guns and military gear and pictures of people at rifle ranges and in full flak suits.

What I'm trying to say is for the Warrior Poet Society, I saw no poetry.

There was a lot of warrior,

but nary a couplet to be seen.

So,

and then, like, I'm just overwhelmed by the collapse of the legislative branch because this parish here, Cawthorne's Cocaine Orgy, and then I was up late in the middle of the night and saw a breaking story from Australia that Tasmanian MP Brian Mitchell deleted his Twitter account because a story came out that in 2011 he tweeted, I will gargle balls for money to buy an iPad 2.

So

I am beginning to get the feeling we are not sending our best and brightest.

So

a little more on Madison Cawthorne,

he's had a few what you might call bloopers in his brief political career.

Enough to make it look, well, I mean, to

go through some of them, he's been caught driving with a revoked driving license.

He's twice tried to take a loaded gun through airport security.

So clearly a man who likes a challenge because it's so much easier not to do that.

But he stepped up to the place.

Also a Second Amendment right to get on an aeroplane fully tooled up, or at least it's not explicitly prohibited by the amendment.

Whoever drafted that Second Amendment didn't seem too fussed about what people took on aeroplanes for whatever reason.

He's facing allegations of sexual harassment.

We can see why aspiring Republicans might think they actually need that on their political CV.

He called Ukrainian President Zelensky a thug.

Now,

I think, without wishing to, you know, whilst trying to retain the objectivity for which this podcast is renowned, I think this is one of the easier conflicts to pick a goodie versus baddie in.

But anyway, he's gone for Zelensky as a thug.

And he reportedly denied a staff a leave in a week in which two family members had died.

So displaying the kind of cold, icy,

souled lack of humanity that evidently the Republicans think voters are are looking for.

I mean, that's quite a lot of glitches in a 26-year-old's political career.

I mean, it's starting to look like one of the legacies of Trump is that finging up massively is now strategy rather than accident.

Yeah, you say glitches, Andy.

Yes, it's potato.

Glitchy potato.

Glitch you potato.

Yeah, I think the question that we have to answer today is: yes, MPs looking at porn in the commons commons as bad, but are they really Republican cocaine orgy armed militia podcaster restoration of imagined biblical era masculinity?

Bad,

give it time, NATO.

Give it time.

We're playing catch-up in this country in so many respects.

Elon Musk News now.

And Elon Musk, the notoriously fictitious entrepreneur, has elected to use his gazillions not to buy the bugle, as rumoured,

and instead to buy Twitter.

There was a lot of chatter on the worst.

Chris, I'm sure you picked up on this on the Bugle social media feeds.

That he wanted to buy the Bugle and turn it into a podcast about drilling through the Earth's core so you can fire takeaway meals through vacuum tubes directly into anyone's mouth from anywhere in the world.

But those efforts founded, and he's been trying to buy this podcast for over 20 years on his reluctance to make host Andy Zoltzmann, CEO of the new Divinitax You know God Electric Temple business, which Musk has

rumoured to be created.

That promises a 35% success rate on all prayers.

That's more than three times the amount received by traditional bricks and mortar places of worship.

So that deal is off.

And instead, as was also rumoured in the Room of Us, he went for Twitter, the micro-messaging site that's firmly established itself as a third millennium equivalent of shouting at traffic.

What does this mean for humanity as a whole, Helen?

Well,

I suppose we no longer have to fear being drowned and burnt by climate catastrophe as much because the alternative

is, you know, what are you missing?

I guess so.

I mean,

there's always.

Always a positive spin.

Yes.

A positive in the sea of negatives.

Nate, are you excited by this

takeover?

Yeah, my one complaint about Twitter,

and

Elon Musk has said that Twitter, he feels like, has not lived up to its potential of facilitating free speech.

And

that's been my big complaint about Twitter is as a Jew, I don't get enough death threats from Nazis.

I get some, but I'm really looking forward to Elon Musk freeing up the death threats from Nazis.

So

they've been silenced for far too long.

Yes.

I mean, it is a slightly weird...

thing, isn't it?

The feeling that Twitter has restricted people from saying saying what they really think, rather than opening up a hole into the dark soul of uh the human mind.

He has pledged to be a champion of free speech, and as a free speech absolutist, I'm sure that you won't have a problem with me calling him a

Chris, why have you bleeped out revolutionary entrepreneur who's changed the way we live on this planet?

He just can't say anything these days.

Um a a number of people have threatened to leave Twitter as a result.

There are alternatives to Twitter, um which include writing anonymous insults, shoving them in a bottle and lobbing them in the sea to be picked up on a distant shore, or just graffiti local buildings, but using that disappearing foam that football referees use to mirror the ephemerality of the tweet.

Elon Musk described Twitter as being like a town square.

Now,

Helen, we grew up in Tunbridge Wells, where I was the town square.

But what did he mean by it being

like a town square?

Did he mean like a withered husk of a once thriving centre of communal life where people no longer?

Somewhere that has a Bavarian-style Christmas market in December and some closed-down branches of BHS.

Right.

Well, I can see what he's looking at now.

When you talk about something as the town square, for me, as someone who has spent a fair amount of time in Latin America, that makes me think that he's talking about Twitter as the Zocolo, the Mexican plaza, where they will sell you balloons and fresh churros, which could be delightful.

That sounds good.

What about if it's instead of balloons and fresh churros, it's NFTs of balloons and fresh churros?

That seems to be where it's going.

Maybe he assumes that people have

interesting and well-balanced chats in town squares.

That has not been my experience of town squares.

I'm thinking about getting off of Twitter and going to an alternative platform called Complaining to My Friend over a Beer.

I mean, when you look at modern town squares, I mean, a lot of them do have 300 Russian robots spreading rumours about the government in.

So you can see why

Twitter might match that.

We will keep you fully up to date with Elon Musk's attempt to take over A, the World, and B, the Bugle podcast, over the next 4,000 years.

Slightly more positive democracy news now.

And, well, in recent years, democracy has not always delivered the results that you might want to gladden the hearts of those who see it as a vehicle for aiding the progress of the human race.

But Slovenia provided a bucking of the broader recent trend by voting for a pro-environment party rather than the incumbent populist prime minister.

Now, Slovenia, I've just recently been there on holiday.

It's a lovely country, absolutely beautiful alpine country.

It's known for its phenomenal selection of wines, a propensity for ski jumping, cyclists who really know their way around France, to a frankly tour to France winning level, for not being a Test cricket-playing nation and having produced no world snooker champions.

But we had a lovely couple of weeks there and it's just had an election and the Freedom Movement Party, founded less than a year ago as Green Actions Party, unseated the

Prime Minister Janis Jancia, a former communist turned right-winger, dubbed the Slovenian Trump by Der Spiegel newspaper.

And

we're just not...

I can't adjust to

an election

whatever country in whatever country it is in producing a result that does not make me want to smash my television to pieces.

I mean, this was a...

You're actively pro-saving the world from environmental disaster.

Was it a mistake?

Maybe people are bored of being ruled by toxic farts in wigs, and they want a period of politics which is...

There's a bit more emphasis on boring admin.

Minor beer is glamorous.

Minor beer is exciting.

But maybe it will kill us less fast.

Right.

Let's go.

Let's find out.

It's a very naive view, Helen.

Very naive.

It speaks to the bar being on the floor.

The freedom movement ran on a platform of transition to green energy, open society, and the rule of law.

Running on a platform of rule of law is like running on a platform that government should exist.

What's alternative?

I want to be the head of state, but not for the laws.

I'm here for the pageantry only.

Well, we've got one of them.

Chance has spent the past two years fostering the belief that Slovenia was under attack, according to the news, by international left-wing conspiracies or remnants of the communist elite that he claims control the political seat in the country.

Now, Andy, speaking on behalf of the international left-wing, let me be the first to say, I wish

for communists in the year of our Lord 2022,

controlling the tiny country of Slovenia would be what you would call a stretch goal.

We're aiming lower right now.

To give you some perspective, in San Francisco, the big project for local communists is unionizing a chocolate shop.

So we're going to do that,

and then it's the domino theory, and then Slovenia, and then the world.

There were protests

of the government over the last couple of years, and one of the protest organizers was quoted in the press saying, you would have thought the government would have taken the fact that thousands of people protested each week seriously.

And as someone who's been an organizer and an activist for a long time,

over the years, I've developed some pre-recorded off-the-shelf talks to give to people because I have to give them so often.

And here are the titles, and you can ring them up at any time.

The titles are, Can They Do That?

The System is fed up,

The Struggle is Long, Comrade.

There is a subtle but important legal distinction between illegal and fed up.

And one of them is the state definitely does not take it seriously if thousands of people protest each week, and that's it.

Oh, you adorable, innocent babe, to think that someone trying to do fascism would be deterred by thousands of people protesting in a country of two million.

So, I just want to

give a bugle public service announcement.

It is my role on this podcast to teach you how to overthrow your government.

Thousands of people protesting is a respectable start, but you can't stop there.

You do got to do some angry tweeting.

You got to speak to someone's manager.

You got to do graffiti.

Do you have people on stilts and in clown suits at the protests?

Do that.

Block a freeway.

Build up.

Go down at each other on the steps of the Capitol.

Burn sofas and attire.

That's how you get it done.

You don't just protest and then call it a day.

Right.

Thanks for that.

That was very inspiring.

It was.

New line of merch coming now.

Fallatio on the steps of the Capitol.

Great.

That's what happened last January the 6th.

Just all got out of control.

Well, that brings us to the end of this week's Bugle.

Thank you very much for listening, Buglers.

NATO, do you have any shows or other podcasts to alert our listeners to?

This Friday, I'm doing two shows at Cheaper Than Therapy in San Francisco.

And also,

I have some albums out, but there is currently, I don't know if you have heard about this, a dispute underway between

involving Spotify and comedy record labels.

So a bunch of comedy albums, including mine, have been impeded on Spotify.

So, support the artists, buy my albums on Bandcamp, The Whiteness album, The Native Green Party.

That's the best way to do it.

Add Nato Green on Twitter, Mr.

Nato Green on Instagram, if you should need to find me.

Helen, anything to plug?

You can listen to my podcast about language, the illusionist at the illusionist.org and in the pod places, but preferably not Spotify due to their evil deeds.

Don't forget, I'll show them.

Don't forget.

You can sit here.

In fact, just listen carefully, buglers.

You can hear the corporate empire crumble.

Don't forget, you can come to my Soho Theatre show, Satirist for Hire, from the 9th to the 21st of May, but only on Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

That's a two-week run, missing three days each week.

Tart time Satirist for Hire.

Do send in your satirical requests to satirise this at satiristforhire.com.

You can also listen to the news quiz via

well, via the BBC Sounds app, and then

you seem to have to wait a month to listen to it anywhere else.

Thank you for listening, buglers.

We will now play you out with some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

Don't forget, we are ending the lie offer.

Oh, we've ended it.

Have we ended it?

Well, should we give people another...

You said the end of the month.

It's like May or or something now.

But when you generally, when businesses do that, they then announce a slucker surprise extension.

So people think, oh, I haven't actually missed the end of that.

So I've taken it offline.

Oh, taken it off.

It's done.

But anyway, we will churn through the backlog of lies, and there will be a new offer for Bugle Premium-level Vodency subscribers imminent to contribute to the Bugle to keep the show free, flourishing, and independent.

To make a one-off or occurring contribution, go to the BuglePodcast.com and click the donate button.

Here are some lies about the people who got in before the deadline.

Matthew Kidd is constantly surprised at how surprised people are by how unimpressed he is, and how impressed people are by what the creatures of this world do in wildlife documentaries.

Come on, says Matthew, if you haven't got off your brightly coloured behinds and evoluted to the ability to speak, write, organise charity tea mornings, or build rockets, the very least you should be able to do is run ridiculously fast, have an absurd-looking trunk or other appendage, and be able to splat out your feathers to look funky, or to chunny a kid's lunch into their waiting mouths.

It's not much to ask, is it?

Rachel Kennelly concurs to an extent and also highlights the fact that wildlife documentaries on TV only tell part of the story because everyone plays up to the camera.

It's just human nature, says Rachel, and that is as true of creatures that are not human as ones that are.

So inevitably we get to see these animals putting on their best show.

I'd rather know what they're actually like when they know that David Attenborough is not there, with his showbiz trailers, his lighting rigs, his crew of camera people, technicians, hair and make-up artists, catering staff, runners and the underlings he has dressed up in animal outfits to coax out the lions or whatever on a slow day's filming.

Steve Hallmark was surprised to discover well into adulthood that the word coop, as in cage for chickens, was not pronounced co-op.

I'd always assumed, says Steve, that chickens tried to work collectively for their mutual benefit, which really impressed me to be honest, even if they seemed to have come to the conclusion that their mutual benefit involved being cooped up in a cage.

On reflection, concludes Steve, the fact that they were cooped up in their co-op ought perhaps to have alerted me to my linguistic mistake.

By contrast, Bob Hendrick always pronounced co-operate as cooperate and assumed that its meaning of working jointly towards a shared goal was due to that being what you would probably do if you found yourself in a coop with loads of other people or other creatures who also didn't want to be in that coop.

I guess, reflects Bob, it's just a chance of alphabetical similarity, a linguistic coin kidensi, and I wouldn't be surprised if I've said that wrong as well.

John Gibson is constantly infuriated by the term midnight.

I'm an adult, admits John.

And let me tell you that midnight, as currently configured, is unequivocally not in the middle of the night.

The middle of the night, as everyone knows, is halfway between bedtime and uptime.

On the rare occasions I do get to bed before so-called midnight, for example at 11.30pm, I can't get to sleep for worrying about whether I'll get in trouble if I don't get up at precisely 12.30am.

Frankly, it's a mess, concludes John.

And finally, Lily Thompson concurs and would go one step further than that, even.

Lily claims that, in fact, in my mind, midnight is something that can only be defined retrospectively after you've woken up, and then you can calculate mathematically exactly when the middle of your night was.

But I would add that midnight has to be when it's still dark.

Otherwise, what's the point of anything?

Here endeth this week's lies.

Goodbye.

That is emphatically your lot.

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.