Bugle Bingo (4225b)

Hello Buglers and welcome to Bugle issue 4225 sub-episode B for back next week but still on holiday at the moment.

This week we delve into the Bugle archives to reveal what was happening at various points of the last 14 and a half years.

Now let's spin the magic time reversing wheel and blast ourselves into the bugle past.

What year shall we go to?

Well, let's find out.

2009.

Top story this week, I'm not telling you what it is.

Ow!

Ow!

Okay, I'll tell you, just please don't ever do that again.

Torture, look, you got all the answers that you wanted, but I have lost all respect for you and I may have been radicalised.

Well, that's right, we have been away for a few weeks, and in this time torture has reared its unpleasantly intimidating head again.

When we left to go on break everyone seemed to have agreed that torture was something that was confined to America's extremely recent past.

But that complicated situation has now somehow managed to get even complicated.

First, the US government said they don't torture.

Then they redefined what torture was and reminded us that they never did that thing they don't do.

Then they admitted that they had waterboarded but argued that it wasn't torture and besides they'd only done it three times.

Then everyone else said that waterboarding was in fact torture especially due to the fact that we'd executed Japanese soldiers for doing exactly that to Allied troops during the Second World War.

Then there was an awkward silence.

Then people stared at their shoes and someone coughed.

Then in the last week or so a number of key developments happened.

First, it turns out that when they'd said they'd only waterboarded three times, what they actually meant to say was around 400 times.

now that sounds bad but let's be fair those numbers are actually very close together if you remove all the numbers between them so or just the two noughts on the end of the 400 then there's only one difference so let's let's bear that context in mind before we judge them and two noughts add up to naughts John no one's going to argue with that now Khali Chic Mohamed was waterboarded 183 times in one month alone That's a lot of waterboarding.

I don't know what your point of reference with a lot of waterboarding is.

For me, that seems like a lot, Andy.

And let's make this absolutely clear.

Khali Chig Mohammed is, to put it mildly, a gigantic asshole.

But doing anything 183 times in one month is a lot, especially if it's something you don't like to do to people.

That's six times a day.

I'm not sure I do anything six times a day.

I breathe and I swear, and I see those two as being basically the same.

They're both life-sustaining.

Obama had turned over the Bush administration ruling that waterboarding legally did not constitute torture, but was in fact merely inquisitive horseplay, I believe, is the legal definition.

That's a ruling, of course, by the Bush regime.

Split world opinion into the Bush regime and the world, essentially.

This Khalid Shait Mohammed does raise the age-old quandary from moral philosophy, John.

Is it worse to waterboard one person 183 times or 183 people once each?

Well, you just blew my mind.

I guess the logic being of waterboarding Khaled Shaykh Mohammed 183 times in a month is that if the fear of drowning didn't crack him, which it clearly didn't, the sight of his fingers going all wrinkly would have been just too much to bear.

It does really bring into question exactly how effective this supposedly effective form of information gathering is.

Because also we waterboard our soldiers to help them build up an immunity to potential torture, but I doubt we do it to them 183 times.

So will he not have developed an immunity during this?

He's basically biologically part dolphin now, but the only dolphin in existence who is also a gigantic arsehole.

Well, this is I'm I'm not a huge fan of Kalachate Mohammed, John, I have to say.

I think he's just too much of a terror for my liking.

Yeah.

By quite a large distance.

But the thing with torturing, with waterboarding 183 times, it's like anything, John.

When it becomes routine, the magic has to wear off.

You know, after the first 10 or 12 goes, he'd probably just started thinking, oh, great, a free shower.

How much damage can this do?

And in fact, would that make it okay under human rights legislation if you actually cleaned your terror suspect and washed his hair with a fruit-scented shampoo whilst waterboarding him?

I don't know.

Call Janeer if it bothers you buglers.

And I think also must be the same for his torturers, John, or as they should probably be called his physical quiz masters.

Fingers on the buzzers, sorry, buzzers on the fingers.

Where's Bin Laden?

So the novelty must have worn off.

I guess by the end, they were just making him lie on the boards, holding a chocolate bar wrapper over his face and squirting him a couple of times with a hose.

Anything to confess?

No, sure.

Okay, off you hop.

See you again in two.

I bet the Spanish Inquisition was more fun than this.

One of the other developments was that the Obama administration this week released a memo revealing that Condoleezza Rice gave verbal permission for waterboarding to be used on Abu Zubadaya in July 2002.

Now this was something that she surprisingly could not recall doing during the Senate Armed Services Committee last autumn.

It must have just slipped her mind.

Andy, I've forgotten literally all of the times that I've given permission for tortures to be used on detainees.

Strange, I remember lyrics to bad songs.

I remember the Liverpool Back Four from 1982, Phil Neal, Alan Hanson, Mark Lawrenson, and little Stevie Nicol.

But I'll be damned if I can recall anything to do with authorizing torture.

So, you know, I presume that I've never given permission to torture, but poor Condoleezza probably felt the same way, and she clearly did.

It's really food for thought, Andy.

You can be absolutely sure that you never did it, then boom, someone tells you that you did.

It's chilling.

Yeah, the former National Security Advisor, then Secretary of State, now, of course, managing director of the fast food chain specializing in Italian snacks topped with South American birds of prey, Condoleezza's Condor Pizzas.

Oh, boy.

What mate?

She gave the CIA the green light, apparently.

Also, there was a memo from Donald Rumsfeld, who whinged in this memo about why the use of stress positions like forced standing could not be made more difficult for the victims.

He wrote, I stand for eight to ten hours a day.

Why is standing limited to four hours?

Now, the amount that he stood first, he suggested that even his chair thought he was a total dick.

But it's interesting.

Get off me, Donald.

It is interesting, though, that Rumsfeld viewed being forced to behave more like Donald Rumsfeld as a form of torture.

He showed an unexpected level of self-awareness.

And today, Khaled Sheikh, you're going to have to fail to make adequate long-term military plans and be strategically incompetent for 24 hours straight.

Confess!

Confess!

Now, the other argument here is, what if it does work?

Former CIA Director Hayden and Bush Attorney General General McCasey, as well as professional Dick Cheney Dick Cheney, argued that, in essence, torture does work and that it helped prevent Khalid Sheikh Mohammed from attacking the library tower in LA.

Now this is a very nice story except for the fact that this plot was foiled in 2002 and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until 2003.

But those numbers don't seem to add up.

And anyway, whether it works or not, you're still not supposed to do it.

Slapping someone in the face with an uncooked German sausage is a surefire way to make sure that they remember you.

That doesn't mean that it's a good idea.

Shep Smith, one of Fox News anchors, got so frustrated about this argument that he had a very admirable midday meltdown saying, and I quote, we are America, we don't torture.

I don't give a rat's ass if it helps.

We're America.

We do not torture.

Then there was a magnificent pause and you could hear him say, oops.

And I'm either with Cindy.

If you have a Fox News employee that angry about your national security behaviour, you are way over the line.

He is the canary in in the coal mine who isn't dead but who's just going bat shit crazy on his perch the sweary canary

2011 middle east update the forgotten countries

Andy the international news has been dominated by Libya all this week due to the fact that we as NATO have been trying to bomb some freedom into it.

And it's been all Gaddafi said this, Gaddafi said that, Gaddafi did this to his civilian population with that.

And it's all definitely newsworthy, no one's denying that.

It's just that there are other countries in the Middle East that we're not giving off physical or indeed mental attention to that are also deserving of being discussed.

What about the plucky countries that no one's really talking about?

The forgotten Middle East, if you will.

Your Israels, your Syrias, your United Arab Emirates.

What are those crazy little bastards up to?

Well, let's take a look.

Israel!

Jews news!

Israel is currently spending its days shitting itself at the moment over the situation all around it, which is not very different at all from how it's been spending its last half a century.

But there was even more instability than usual coming out of the, oh, come on, you promised, land this week.

Justin Bieber, the floppy-haired asexual object of affection for teenage girls around the world, was visiting Israel this week week and unwittingly stumbled into something of a diplomatic snafu.

He was scheduled to have a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it was called off at the last minute with both sides differing on why.

Now

before we delve much further into this story, Andy, let's not gloss over what's a very important fact.

Let's not bury the lead here, which is that before it was cancelled, Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to have a meeting with Justin Bebo.

We all live in a world where that nearly happened.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, very nearly had a meeting with Justin Bieber, 17-year-old singer boy.

Is this how far from a peace agreement we now are?

We're just throwing Bieber at the wall.

Hoping he sticks.

Well, I mean, it's not...

I mean, that's not so new, is it?

I mean, let's not forget that Golden Meer had a meeting with Donny Osmond in the early 70s.

To be fair to him, John, he's not the first young heartthrob in the Holy Land to endure a mixture of public adulation and official interference.

But let's just hope he has a more effective legal team than some of his more illustrious predecessors.

Of course,

I don't know much about Justin Bieber, John.

He's just a name to me.

I have to look him up on Wikipedia, famous for hits such as Baby and the follow-up single Toddler.

And if you play his hit single Baby Backwards, it quite explicitly states that Justin Bieber will only date committed and certifiable Zionists, that he has a tattoo of Ariel Sharon on his back, and that he thinks Israel should extend their settlement programme into other areas including Jordan, Turkey and Iowa.

Although whether he knew that when he was singing it or if he was just stitched up by my people, who of course run the entire entertainment i industry, we don't know.

We've got it stitched up, John.

As proved by my unending run of success in primetime British television.

You are a one-man argument against anti-Semitism, Andy.

A spokesman for Benjamin Netanyahu said that he'd been approached with the idea of a meeting and that the Prime Minister had been, I quote, open to that.

See, straight away, that is surprising, Andy.

I'd have thought that if someone asked the Prime Minister of a major country located in one of the most violent flashpoints on the planet whether he wanted to meet Justin Bieber,

he would be closed to that.

Or at the very least, his instinctive question would be, why?

Why exactly would I do that?

I have a lot to do with my day.

Apparently, the Prime Minister's office suggested including children from communities in southern Israel that have been under intense rocket fire from Gaza in recent days.

But the spokesman said that proved impossible because Bieber's representatives had turned down the idea of including the children.

Wow.

So the special Bieber summit was scuppered over the situation in Gaza.

I guess that isn't much of a surprise, Andy, when you think about it.

So many of Justin Bieber's lyrics are based around the current affairs in Gaza and the West Bank.

You've talked about what it's like when you play it backwards.

Never mind that, Andy.

Look at what it's like when you play it forwards.

Look at that hit, baby.

If you just imagine that the subject of the song is Gaza and the Palestinian territories, it's clearly a song trying to win that land back.

Here's how it goes: You know you love me, I know you care.

Just shout whenever, and I'll be there.

You are my love, you are my heart, and we will never, ever, ever be apart.

That clearly speaks to the determination of hardline Israelis' complete refusal to agree to a two-state solution.

Bieber doesn't stop there, Andy.

He goes on saying, are we an item?

Girl, substitute that for Gaza, quit playing.

We're just friends.

What are you saying?

Said, there's another, and looked right in the eyes.

My first love broke my heart for the first time.

Now, that's a little poetic license from Bieber there, Andy.

I don't think he's suggesting by any means that this is the first time the Jewish people in their history have had their hearts broken.

But he continues saying,

And I was like, baby, baby, baby, oh, I thought you'd always be mine, mine.

Why did he think that, Andy?

Why was he so sure?

Because the land was promised to Moses, Andy.

That's what Bieber cannot get his head around in the plaintive chorus of that song.

It's all there.

It's all there.

In another Twitter message, Bieber wrote,

I want to see this country and all the places I've dreamed of.

And whether it's the Paps or being pulled into politics, it's been frustrating.

And he was quoting there directly from George W.

Bush on a visit to Iraq in 2003.

And Bieber might have a postgraduate diploma in brushing his hair, but he could not punctuate his way out of a wet paper bag, John.

There was a frankly distressing lack of commas.

Not to mention the apostrophes that should be there.

I mean, he's at least three apostrophes down.

It's an absolute disgrace.

I would nail him up if I had the chance.

This just

crucify Bieber.

It's got to be done.

Well, there's a hashtag for Twitter.

2018.

The Windrush story has been

quite spectacular.

And we've basically been trying to send people back to the West Indies who arrived in Britain sort of between 1948 and 1970.

And I think it was all part of the subtext of the Brexit vote.

That we had this very vaguely worded referendum: Should we leave the EU or remain in the EU?

And what went and the leave box, the subtext that you couldn't see on the ballot paper, was and become even more of a heartless c than we were before.

There's a glorious bureaucratic angle on this, in which

the government has basically been for some years now, there'd been kind of various clod-brained supermarket economy ham-fisted attempts to deport people who've lived in the in the in Britain, not just for weeks, not just for months, not just for years, not even for decades, but for decades, several decades.

And

despite being in the UK legally, we've threatened them with deportation.

We've denied them access to health service treatment, benefits and pensions, and stripped them of their jobs.

And there is no finer way to apologise for the injustices of empire that we perpetrated on other people than by treating them like total shit.

So it's a strange time for

Britain.

I believe there's some Indigenous Australians who are trying to get something going with the first fleet generation as well.

Sorry, mate, you don't have the paperwork.

Move on.

You can't just yell terranullius at my face.

Move on, buddy.

Keep on heading out.

I love how Britain just thinks they can send people back like it's food at a restaurant, just saying, I'm full.

We've got to send it back there.

That's not good.

We are far more tolerant of food in restaurants.

Have you seen the kind of shit we eat?

Tom, Tom.

Scottish restaurants.

I mean, has...

I mean, basically you could have a murder scene on a plate and people would just lap it up.

No, no, no, no.

It needs to be deep-fried first.

A deep...

Deep-fried murder scene, or as it's also known, haggis.

Oh, yeah, boom, little Scottish food joke.

Aditi, of course,

as an Indian,

you have been, you're the lucky recipient of the wisdom of empire.

I'm still waiting for the thank you card, but

I think one of my favorite things about being a part of the Commonwealth was that our wealth was yours and your wealth was yours.

Just looking it after Four Your World.

Although, you know, I have to say, I think

it's almost like the douchebaggery is like, it's generational.

Because now it's, as an Indian, I don't think I can move anywhere in England without someone very well-meaning, very well-intentioned, being like, oh my god, you're from India, but your English is really good.

When did you learn?

And I'm like, how do you not know this?

You shoved the language down our throat for 200 years.

I'm like, is this a thing that the British culture in general has such a short, like a collective short-term memory so tiny that halfway through colonization they forgot why?

Like they were like, why are we making our slaves?

Where's the tax spend money coming from?

And that's when we spread cricket to everyone just to

make sense of the whole shabuzzle.

I have to say this, I think one of my favorite drawbacks of colonialism has been the fact that you shoved the language down our throats.

So now whenever someone's racially abusing us, we know exactly what they're saying.

But the thing is, they never know what we're saying.

Well, I found this one.

I did stand-up in India.

And a lot of Indian stand-ups do set ups in English and punchlines in Hindi.

And it did feel like it was a deliberate code.

Andy, we were talking about you the entire time.

It's been, it's your first time time in Australia, isn't it?

That's right.

And what have you, you've been here, what, just a few days?

What have you made?

Like this is my fifth day, sixth day in Australia.

I've tried to kiss a koala with consent.

The best way.

Yeah, the only way.

You know, Tonza, I was under the impression that their breath would be a lot more lozengey because of all the like...

Of all the eucalyptus eating or whatever.

No.

No.

It's called chlamydia.

And

I'm going to have to get tested after this.

You can kiss a koala on the cheek.

It doesn't have to be fully on the lips.

I'm going to tell you that.

You don't know how to love like an Indian animal.

I think my wife said that in her wedding speech.

Can I use that as a show title someday?

Tom, you've been in Australia for what, 28 years now.

What have you made of it?

I'm on the fence.

I try to kiss a koala and the people talk funny.

It's weird.

But that's all right, it'll do.

We've been demanding proof of residency from

some of these supposed,

let's call them what they are, British people.

But demanding proof of residency for

every single year of, for example, the 1960s, which is just a kind of basic paperwork that the ordinary British person keeps stapled to their ribcage.

Because you don't know when you're going to need to prove your identity from the 60s, you know, when the FBI are going to turn up at your door and demand to know exactly where you were on the 22nd of November 1963, so they can rule you out of their inquiries into the Kennedy assassination.

Well, I think it's only Lincoln left, isn't it?

Got to get a Lincoln joking somewhere.

Hey, Andy, if you've got paperwork from the 60s, you weren't there, man.

The problem is, the proof that people had of their arrival in Britain, their landing cards from the initial journey, were treated like the logistically important and historically irreplaceable documents they are, if and only if, you leave your historically irreplaceable documents in the care of Islamic State,

who don't seem to have a huge affection for stuff from eras gone by, or a museum director who just hates his job and wants to destroy all physical elements of human existence.

They basically threw them away.

Now, I'm not a technical expert, as I believe I've proved during this show.

You know, I think it's actually a bit strange to me that they're so insistent on like paper-paperwork, considering half the communication that happens in the British public is apparently through a bus.

Yes.

Have you?

Like there's in this story itself, right?

There was that.

There we go.

Oh,

that's it.

Oh, there's the headline.

Whoops.

Forgot to do it.

Should have done that at the start, shouldn't I?

There we go.

I mean, that took me a long time last night.

Oh, well, come come on.

There we go.

So here we are.

This is one of the vehicles that Theresa May, when she was home secretary in 2013, there we go.

Well has she heard of the internet?

Is that all because

all the young kids are not on the internet now?

They are looking out of windows spotting vans.

Just a big hobby now.

It said the van says for the dear listeners at home, it says, in the UK, illegally, go home or face arrest.

And there's a story this week that apparently Theresa May intervened to make the language more intense, like to either strengthen it up, toughen up it a little bit.

Originally, you know, it's a British science who originally just said, excuse me, terribly sorry about all this.

Would you mind perhaps considering returning to a place of origin at your earliest convenience, what, what?

And just a picture of.

Just a picture of a crumpet.

It made no sense at all.

So I'm glad that she got involved and sort of clarified what she was doing.

So with the traffic in London, I mean,

that is really only going to reach about eight people at a bushel.

the true meaning in case you're wondering of what the subtext of go home or face to rest is this is the subtext of it now here it is

you're making me homesick

classic British double bird

2019 top story this week the environment is being saved it's great news here Britain has been visited by the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, who has basically made our politicians aware that the planet is

extraordinary reaction.

She was the girl who kicked off this wave of school climate protests that we've talked about before on the bugle.

And it was extraordinary seeing the reaction of our politicians.

She addressed a parliamentary committee, and politicians were then kind of lining up to thank her for finally telling us that we did need to do something about and it does raise the question why were we not told before about climate change why did this one 16 year old get privileged access to this secret information that even our senior political leaders were not aware of it's one of the great scandals of British politics

and she's been much criticized by the right-wing commentariat in this country by the sort of people who describe themselves as being classical liberals which is a phrase that means I'm liberal, but before the abolition of slavery,

and it's good to see that the Venn diagram between people who don't believe in the science on climate change and the people who are willing to publicly bully a child is, in fact, a circle.

She attracted criticism from Brendan O'Neill, who's a writer from Spiked magazine, who said she looked like a cult member with her monotone voice and look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes.

Spiked magazine is a magazine that apparently

promotes free speech.

So let me use some of my free speech to tell Brendan O'Neill to go jump up his own ass and die.

And she's also been criticised by...

Switching this episode off in it.

And we know he's a huge fan.

Imagine fan.

He's also been criticised by Toby Young.

Now, NATO, to give you some context, Toby Young is the Lord Voldemort of rich white male privilege in that every time you think he's done he comes back and he seems to plan to spend a lot of time being angry with a child.

Lord Voldemort is the most evil wizard in the world, and his big plan was to kill a baby.

F ⁇ ing hell, Voldemort.

Anyway, what are we talking about?

Planet's something like that.

Reading about Brendan O'Neill, it's hard to take a grown man seriously with basically his argument is that a girl made him feel bad by mentioning science.

Brendan O'Neill wrote this in this article.

Anyone who doubts that the green movement is morphing into a millenarian cult, just think as a cult that wears particularly nicely made of hats.

Should take a close look at Greffersonberg.

As you say, increasingly looks and sounds like a cult member with a monotone voice.

That is just all teenagers, Brendan.

All teenagers.

And obviously, I mean, not necessarily a cult.

You might just have a dream of working as an announcer at a train station.

The look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes, the explicit talk of the coming great fire that will punish us for our eco sins.

He highlighted this, and I guess that shows that these days, there is a fine line, a fine and evidently hard to discern line between deranged member of a cult and someone who's vaguely up to speak all the sites.

Spiked magazine were in trouble a couple of months ago when it was revealed that they'd actually received a sum of money from the Koch brothers, NATO, your fellow countrymen, of course.

And what that basically means is they're a bunch of

so nicely translated into

modern modern colloquial English.

Also, to be honest, in fact, this supposed look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes, presumably that's because she knows that by saying anything, people like Brendan O'Neill will write articles.

And also, to be absolutely fair to her, if she is looking at climate change science, she is looking at the apocalypse.

If I meet anyone under the age of 21 who does not have a look of apocalyptic dread in their eyes, I think they are off their rocker.

Oh, it's a cult.

Yeah.

A sinister cult that threatens to preserve our planet and everything we hold dear.

Terrifying.

Truly, weirdly terrifying.

Surely, guys, one of the prime defining features of cults is that they tend not to be supported by thousands and thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Yeah,

there's very few scientists that backed up the bug one from Wild, Wild Country.

Of all the things for teenagers to lecture us about,

the scientific evidence about the threats that climate seem like, I would prefer that.

I don't know if you've ever tried to listen to a teenager talk at length about how we don't really appreciate Nietzsche enough, but I'll take client science over that any day.

It's her visit here has been the sort of cresting of a wave of the last couple of weeks that included a mass protest by Extinction Rebellion, which is a large group of young people.

Sorry, I mean us.

I'm a cool young guy.

Sorry, granddads.

I'm about to skrill ex a a dubstep all over this Snapchat.

WikiWiki Wild Wild West.

There's been a lot of Skrillex references on the people recently.

I just googled this.

It's the worst thing.

Is Skrillex paying you for product placement?

Yeah.

Extinction Rebellion is a group that describes itself as a movement that uses non-violent civil disobedience to bring issues on climate change to the fore, and they say they want radical change to minimize the risk of human extinction and ecological collapse.

I'm so self-interested.

Well, to that I say, get back to San Francisco in 1967, you fing hippies.

Minimize the risk of human extinction.

Well, let's light up a doobie and sing some Dylan round a campfire, you stinking beatnik.

Jesus.

I saw a headline in the Independent that said

Extinction Rebellion climate change protesters glue themselves to the London Stock Exchange, which I understood to mean naked climate change protesters glue their own clothes to the London Stock Exchange.

It's quite a good way of protesting to glue yourself.

Always said, there is no more potent protest than anything that involves the exposing of a Peterson testicles.

There is nothing anyone wants to see less than a hippies ball sack.

Was that from the news?

I mean, we did miss Easter last week.

That was actually a quote of one of the Pharaohs when he insisted Jesus pop a loincloth on while he was up on the crucifix.

When did the pharaohs get into that?

Oh, the pharaohs, sorry.

Sorry.

Listen, I'm a little behind on my Bible studies.

Fair enough.

You're an even worse Jew than me.

Oh, I found my poster quote for my next door show.

Anyway,

well, I guess Jesus, he probably would have glued himself had the technology been there.

Instead, obviously, nails

were the option

to make his point.

Oh, God, we're all going to hell.

We are.

Don't worry, we are.

And I mean, if you think climate change is bad here, wait till you see what is going on there.

Way above pre-industrial levels.

That is it for this week.

And do download this week's gargle and indeed all previous episodes from your usual podcast placings.

We will be back next week with Bugle 4226 assuming there is still anything in the world worth talking about.

There might not be, it might all be fixed.

You never know.

Until then, goodbye.

You can listen to other programs from the Bugle, including The Bugle, The Last Post, Tiny Revolutions and The Gargle wherever you find your podcasts.

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.