Bugle 4154 - Terra Firma Warriors

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to whatever you want to call this podcast.

Just make up your own name for it.

We'll give you some vague guidance.

This podcast is called The Bugle, but if that doesn't suit you, call it whatever the fk you want.

Andy Zaltzman's Magic Toenail Show, maybe Shark Slam 5000, or Fox News News with Nick Machiavelli, or even Why Don't Turtles Have Tits?

It's entirely up to you.

I am who I think I am, I am where I am, deal with it, losers, and joining me this week are a bucket of eels, fresh from an experiment, which has shown that yes, they would be a more effective leader than at least two current heads of government of G7 nations.

Don't get cocky of slithery little shits, that is no achievement whatsoever.

And I'm also joined by A.

a palpable sense of global bafflement at everything and B two Bugle co-hosts from Australia, alice fraser and from india anuvab pal hello both of you slosh slosh slosh andy i'm the bucket of eels in this scenario i feel

and in that case i am i am the global confusion i think that you're after

global bafflement

i see you very much as uh as as as a voice of global bafflement anubab i think that is your what you've been put on this planet to do to express the bafflements on behalf of humanity

well I i don't know if you guys read about this, but as of yesterday,

we were supposed to be hit by a locust attack.

So

we've had cyclones.

We've had, you know, of course, this ongoing thing, whatever you want to call it, this COVID thing,

which is so passe now.

And we were now going to get hit by this giant locust attack that was supposed to eat all the crops in India.

Now, I haven't read much of the Bible, but I think it goes famine, pestilence, something, something, four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Now, if the Gideon Bible Company is trying to popularize the Bible in India, this is a really weird way to do it.

Yeah, well,

it's worked surprisingly well over the years, to be honest.

I mean, you say that one locust attack in, wait till there's a rain of blood and people will be buying that shit off the shelves.

Alice,

how's Australia fared this week?

Australia is faring relatively well, Andy, in that our lockdown is easing up and children are back on the streets, which I'm finding disappointing.

And just getting in your way,

talking to each other, being teens.

Yes.

Gross.

I know, that is, I mean, that is really very, very disappointing, really.

I spend two days a week at the moment babysitting my niece, who's 16 months old and I think oh I'd love to have a baby and then I see teenagers and think oh I don't want one of them

that's why people get dogs they're inherently menacing

we are recording on the 29th of May in the year 2020 it is World Paperclip Day so this edition of the bugle is held together by audio paperclips not the usual audio staples.

So we

apologise if some of the joins are not as smooth as you would expect them to be it is a bit harder to keep the pages lined up as near as normal

on this day

and look people are just going to think that's my shit editing now

well

that was beautiful it's the pinnacle that was the pinnacle of an art form and I think we should all take a minute to celebrate that yes any sort of jarring sound is nothing that a V Christmas paper keep editing

It looks like you're trying to make a joke.

On this day in 1953, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

Or did they?

New research suggests that the whole thing was faked in a studio on the moon.

It's the way the flag is fluttering and the unrealistic attempt to make gravity look normal.

Also, on this day in history, the opening of one of the most important art exhibitions in history in the year 34,866 BC.

A new exhibition by the influential artist

entitled What It Is, What I Am Not in the avant-garde Galerie Suteranien in what is now France.

Works included classic paintings such as ox, bison, another bison, probably a horse, and splodge.

His work influenced artists for around about the next 30,000 years.

As always, a section of the bugle.

Sorry, I enjoyed that bit slightly too much.

It's so good.

It's good.

You should have have a maid.

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

This week we'll look at all the new shows that have been brought about by Lockdown TV.

Some exciting new shows have emerged from the current circumstances, including The New Norm and Al,

a fascinating historical, speculative, fly-in-the-wall sick commentary examining how two significant 20th century figures would have coped if they'd been flatmates during the current lockdown.

Gulf Gulf War general Norman Schwartzkopf and Prohibition-era super gangster Al Capone make for hilarious forced buddies, as the rigid military discipline of Stormin' Norman rubs up against the rule-bending brutality and subterfuge of old Snorky Scarface.

That's the new Norman Al, all 53 episodes currently available on any streaming device.

Masking Michelangelo, interesting art documentary about the controversial updating of the Sistine Chapel frescoes by the legendary Renaissance art star to make them more suitable for a COVID audience.

Obviously, a hell of a lot of face masks going on.

And the perspex screen between Adam's finger and God's finger.

That is a lovely touch.

Also...

Interestingly, they don't cover the penises at all.

Well, you can't.

Penises

do not spread COVID.

I mean, to be honest, you know, science...

We've had so many different bits of science.

I'm going to throw that one out there.

Let's see if it's got legs.

I mean, that's how science works, isn't it?

It's not a process of discovering something.

It's a process of suggesting something that might be the case and then letting other people work out if it's right or wrong.

Also,

new lockdown shows, so well, a new series,

rewriting the classics of ancient literature as if the authors had been living under coronavirus restrictions.

The first three in the series, Viral Virgil, Homeschooling Homer, and Self-Isolating Sun Tzu.

Homer's in Homer's Iliad, very different under lockdown.

Basically, Menelaus and Helen share a very awkward 10-year lockdown after he caught his famously hot wife having Skype sex with a young Trojan hunk.

Virgil bangs out a deluge of wistful tedium about cupboards, and Sun Tzu's Art of Bore deals with the parenting skills needed to control children in the third fing month of lockdown.

That section in the bin.

Top story this week.

Not the virus.

Not the virus.

That is not our top story this week.

The world's two biggest countries are on the brink of war.

At last, a genuine news story that is not about the coronavirus.

The world has been waiting patiently for any real news that is not virusy.

And now it has it.

India and China in a military standoff.

Sure, it would have been nice if this non-virus story was not a story about the two most populous nations in the world, two giant nuclear powers, Brinkman shipping the hell out of each other.

The words border tensions escalate, not words you want to hear, at least not since the early days of Alan Border's time as Australian cricket captain as he presided over a fractious and pleasingly unsuccessful team.

And sure, I mean, we have to talk this up a bit to make it a top story.

The fighting between India and China so far seems to involve a couple of fist fights and some mid-level taunting.

Old military tactic, that's, of course.

But still, it's a non-virus top story this week.

I don't f ⁇ ing care what it is.

It is not the virus.

Anuvab, you are the Bugles Indo-Chinese military grandstanding correspondent, and you are on the spot for us, just two or three thousand short kilometers away from the scuffle front line.

Tell us what you can see.

Well, Andy, you know, I mean, I'm virtually almost at the Doklam border, which is just at the crossing of India and China, the foothills of the Himalayas.

And, you know, there are many positives here.

Many positives.

News stories are reporting that China, the Chinese army has made an incursion into Indian territory.

India has responded by doing nothing

because, you know, it's China.

They can enter any territory they want, claim it for themselves.

And, you know, so

we've said

we've stood up to the standoff.

What we've really done is just called up the Chinese counterpart and said, Would you mind stepping back a little?

And they said, we don't understand Hindi and they haven't.

In the middle of all this,

Donald Trump, President of the United States, called Prime Minister Modi and said he could help de-escalate the tensions of China entering the Ladakh region of India.

And Prime Minister Modi rejected the offer, saying that any offer from President Trump to de-escalate tensions is actually an offer to escalate tensions.

Which is a bit of a concern.

Bit of a concern.

And I don't know how you guys feel, but the only positive coming out of India and China going to full-on nuclear war is that only 3 billion people are at risk of losing their lives as opposed to the coronavirus, which is all 8 billion people.

All I can hope for is that as the armies move into position, that they're all taking proper socially distanced precautions, because you don't want to risk anyone's health when going into war.

It was quite interesting reading about this.

It was a scuffle.

described as a scuffle in the charming way of Indian news reporting, which broke out at an altitude of 14,000 feet and of course the tension moves more quickly through the thin air at that height which is why the crisis has escalated so rapidly.

Fortunately it was just a fist fight or as rugby commentators would call it a little bit of overexcitement and I guess it's

you know it's just one of the rites of passage that new superpowers have to go through before they fully join the gang.

You've got China and India looking to move into the void caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union a few decades ago and America locking itself in its kennel and barking at itself until it leaves itself alone.

So it's you know it's exciting times.

And

what's it all about?

I mean it seems a slightly odd area to be having a territorial dispute.

I mean could those crucial extra Himalayan mountains make all the difference to the people of Kerala or Heilongjiang?

Well, you know, Andy, what's basically happening, you know, what's being defined as a skirmish, you know, I mean, one man's skirmish is another man's invasion, basically.

So when the Chinese say there's a border skirmish, what that means is that there's literally a rite of passage.

So there's a passage there called the Khattam Pass through which Chinese troops have entered India and are in India.

So I suppose a border skirmish can easily be replaced by vast numbers of Chinese trucks who've entered India and are saying this is now ours.

F off.

So I mean it's it's really how you define border skirmish and invasion really.

Now, the interesting thing is, the Indians have claimed it is their territory, and it shows up on Indian flags and maps and so on.

But as you know, and you Dallas know India well, Indian borders, you know, you don't really, on the Chinese side and on the Pakistan side, and the reason we have all these fights with our neighbors, we don't really know where the country ends.

We don't actually know, at least on the Chinese side.

It could be well into Tibet.

We don't know.

I'm sure we left full instructions instructions when we left in the 1940s, didn't we, Anubab?

Exactly.

Now, this is where I'm really missing Cyril Ratcliffe.

Cyril Ratcliffe is the guy who drew the India-Pakistan border.

Yes.

I mean,

just let me stop you there, Anubab.

Those are words you do not hear very often.

This is where I'm really missing Cyril Ratcliffe.

I mean, for various reasons.

You just don't hear those words.

What you want in a situation like this is a man with a moustache and a ruler who's just going to draw a line in the sand wherever he feels like it and just be like, that's that's that what you do not want is Donald Trump offering to mediate because what more is what's more suitable when two aggressive blokes are winding up for a punch-up outside a pub than for the man who lives on the corner and spends his day screaming at pigeons to pitch in as the referee

no no alice is absolutely right you know one of the big benefits of having Cyril Radcliffe is that he had a ruler like Alice said, and he had a map and he'd shown up in India two days before and he had terrible dysentery.

So he just drew a line wherever he felt like.

But the important thing, Andy Alice, is the line held.

We're fighting over it, but we know where the line is.

He drew the line.

We divided the country.

No one was expecting it.

Everyone thought Lahore would be part of India.

Lahore went to Pakistan.

It was chaos, but there was a line.

And this is why I love the British Andy.

A line is very important.

They didn't do anything on the India-Chinese side for whatever reason, because China was a separate country.

There's no need to draw that line, so it's chaos over there.

You know, basically, you know, Arunachal Pradesh, which is a northeastern Indian state, China has always claimed residents of Arunachal Pradesh don't need a visa to go to China because they're Chinese.

And this is the only time in India where India insists that citizens get a visa to go to China, whereas Chinese open the door and are like, you don't need a visa, you're Chinese.

This is very much part of India.

Again, because Cyril Ratcliffe did not draw a line.

What India needs every every time it's in trouble is a British man with a ruler and some dysentery who's just landed

and been told to draw a line.

If that line was drawn, we'd have a war, millions would die, but at least we'd know what we were fighting for.

There would be the Ratcliffe line.

Because that's the man who gives a shit, the man who can't stop giving a shit.

I will point out that in the current circumstances of the last few months, asking for a British person with an illness to take charge of something, that is a risky strategy where we are learning that to our cost on an almost daily basis.

One defence analyst quote on the Al Jazeera website said, and this really

gives an idea of how serious this is.

Thousands of Chinese troops are on Indian soil and they are not, and I repeat, not made of terracotta.

So the Chinese really mean business.

That's how you can tell.

He also said, we do not know what Chinese objectives are.

This is further evidence of China's new superpower status, having no discernible objective.

You dick around destabilizing stuff first, and then you formulate your objectives retrospectively based on what then happens.

Exactly, Andy.

Exactly.

You know, this is how, I mean, we understand this Chinese strategy in India because for years, when India was a socialist country, this is how Indian businessmen did business.

You know, which is they had a strategy which began with, if you live in a corrupt country, start by bribing everyone.

Then figure out what product you want to make.

First bribe every lawmaker, then figure out what you want to make.

You could always make petrochemicals or cars, doesn't matter.

First, bribe the whole parliament.

And it served us well, you know, till the Indian economy liberalized in the 90s.

For 50 years, it was fantastic.

We had monopolies and we had corrupt politics, but at least...

you know, at least you knew that you had entered the territory.

This is what China is doing.

They're first invading, then figuring out if they want to invade at all after they've invaded.

There's also this interesting thing going on, Alice Andy.

I want to know what you think.

The Indian government are in a conundrum because on one side they have to attack, you know, they have to at least counter China.

But on the other side, all the equipment the Indian army has is Chinese.

All the cell phone, all the Huawei networks, India's entire technology infrastructure is built on the backbone of Chinese chips and servers.

So, you know, so the government is in a dilemma because even when the Prime Minister is having an encrypted phone conversation with the Home Minister, the basic network is Chinese.

So I think they laid the groundwork of the invasion much before the land invasion.

Unbelievable shitness of the British government news now.

And

Britain has been rocked by another political scandal this week.

Dominic Dominic Cummings, one of the key cyclists in the Machiavelliodrome of British politics, the government's

key advisor, has refused to resign and has not been sacked after

taking a 260-mile journey during lockdown whilst

ill with COVID symptoms with his wife and child in the car, then taking a further car journey to test whether or not his eyesight was potentially lethally dangerous for use as a car driver with his his child in the back of the car to a tourist hotspot on, I believe, his wife's birthday.

I might have got a few of the details mixed up.

For those of you who've not heard of him, Dominic Cummings is Boris Johnson's key advisor, and he advises Boris Johnson in very much the same way that Lewis Hamilton advises his car how to get around a track, or how Ronald MacDonald advises cows how they might like to see whether they'd prefer to be disc-shaped rather than cow-shaped.

He

this This was quite early on in the lockdown process.

And now, I mean, to be honest, I don't think many people in Britain can say that they've abided by all the rules all the time.

But this was early on, and I guess he claims that he just did what anyone else suspecting they have a highly contagious, potentially fatal virus, would do.

A, return to work at the heart of government, B, travel the length of the country to make sure the virus wasn't just something to be enjoyed by the London elite.

And then, because he was worried about his eyesight, not being safe for driving, strapping his young child into a car and driving him 60 miles, just to be on the safe side.

We are hearing rumours, no confirmation yet,

but just to make that journey extra safe, he also cut the brake cables on his car and had someone strew shards of broken glass all over the road as well.

Just

to be safe.

I know, you know, I'm not going to judge him.

I know whenever I've got out-of-date food in the fridge,

you know, slightly moldy.

piece of meat or something, I make my kids eat it first for their own good.

Also, with his wife, he then wrote a heartfelt account of their virus life that didn't mention any of these things until the story was broken by The Guardian and The Mirror about a week ago.

What's the, I mean, here in Britain there's been a reaction, I mean even the arch Tory press and a lot of Tory members of parliament have been highly critical of the government.

What's the global response to this lunatic story?

Well, I mean,

as an Australian, I feel like it provides an insight into the cultural,

maybe, let's say, features of the British landscape.

It feels from here, and I'm not sure if you could say this from where you are, but from here it's almost like the people tasked with serving the people of Britain think that they are above the laws they make because they've been inculcated into a culture where they control the narrative around what is and is not a fact, what is and is not a law, and what is and is not a cult.

I feel like you can't really blame them any more than you can blame a kid that denies eating all the chocolate biscuits with a big chocolate ring around his mouth if he then gets away with it for raiding the biscuit tin again at the next available opportunity.

Except at this instance, stealing the biscuit is rubbing the faces of the entire population of a country.

And in the fact that you think that you're allowed to do the thing that you've been telling them for literally months they are on no account to do, it's like saying, Don't fing goat, it's very bad for public health when you're wiping goat off your dick.

Even people who agreed with you on the original inadvisability of goat fing are going to start asking questions.

In this instance, with goat as a metaphor for infection control.

Nicely put, Alam.

Those are the kind of words that we've not been hearing from the government, and it's nice to hear it expressed in such

forthright language.

Anuvab, I mean, India, of course, no stranger to lunatic political scandals.

Has this been a big story in India?

Well, they have covered it, but you know, this sort of negligence is what we actually call normal life in India.

This sort of ethical breakdown is seen as ethical, actually.

But I did a bit of research, Andy, to figure out if this was the most callous thing done by a British government servant ever in history during a pandemic.

And it appears it may not have been.

I did a bit of research in the 1919 pandemic, which swept through India when India was in the hands of, and I'm going to mispronounce this,

in the hands of one Lord Frederick Thessiger, first Viscount of Chemsford.

And he was known as Lord Kemsford.

India was gripped with the Spanish flu, millions are sick, Mumbai hospitals in desperate need of beds.

Lord Kemsford thought this would be a good time to go looking for a particular Royal Bengal tiger that had bothered him because he hadn't shot it through the head.

And so, while the cases were rising, he was missing.

He'd gone off with a bayonet and an elephant to look for a tiger.

To be fair, he was only looking for the tiger to see if his eyesight was still good.

It's a great point, Alice.

So I think I don't know if he wins or Dominique Cummings wins,

but in terms of present-day Indian politicians, all of them have been violating the lockdown.

But that's not uncommon because you know, it's India and any set of rules is only personal.

It doesn't apply to the population.

There's an element to this story in which it is, you know, a storm in a Westminster teacup

in that, you know, fundamentally

it doesn't affect people's lives.

But the government is insisting on keeping the teacup with a storm going on in it and forcing people to drink tea

out of the teacup.

They are bringing this on themselves.

Boris Johnson has exacerbated the situation by, well,

being himself.

I mean, the story is also a distraction in many ways.

It's distracted from more important issues, as Johnson and his government being barely functional polyps and another bodged government scheme with the the contact tracing, an effort to belatedly ram the cat back into the bag, but the cat is now a fully grown lion and the bag is a condom full of locusts.

Oh two locust references in the show.

But and and this week Boris Johnson faced the Parliamentary Liaison Committee.

Now this is an important parliamentary committee which traditionally cross-examines the Prime Minister three times a year on what what the government is doing.

This is the first time Johnson's faced in.

He's been Prime Minister for nearly a year now and I can't believe those words are not a complete lie.

And he responded to their questions very much like a self-obsessed f ⁇ kho who hasn't got a f ⁇ ing clue about anything relevant would do for whatever reason.

He also stopped his scientific advisors from answering questions from journalists, which is not a great look for fans of openness and accountability.

And it's been instructive to see the change in Boris Johnson.

Gone is the confident blusterer and truth twister who hoodwinked Britain into making him king, replaced by a hesitant blusterer and truth twister who can't even trick his own face into looking like it believes him.

Boris Johnson has been telling people to move on, which is like being told to get back on the horse by someone who's just knocked you off your horse and is now sitting on your horse, poking you with a javelin every time you try to stand up.

So Boris Johnson has finally sat down with the Commons Committee for the first time.

Apparently, he's been avoiding it a lot.

Ordinarily, a Prime Minister would engage with this particular committee semi-regularly.

Bear in mind, Alice, this is a Prime Minister who, during the election campaign, hid in a fridge to avoid a journalist.

So there is a pattern of behaviour here.

Well, he passed his use-by-date in that fridge, and now he's come out and just proven that he absolutely cannot answer a question.

Cannot, will not, definitely, cannot.

He just came out with so many bizarre and startling statements.

I think my favourite one was when Johnson said he was forbidden from announcing any more targets and deadlines, which raises the question, who is forbidding him?

And

isn't he the prime minister?

And also, why does he constantly pretend that he's still a private schoolboy?

He's constantly using the language of private school.

When the Dominic Cummings scandal came up, he said,

I didn't mark him down for that, for his family trip.

Mate, most people leave school and then stay left.

I can't even remember most of what happened in high school, let alone allow the structures imposed on me by the system to continue to fully control my conceptualization of the outside world.

One side story from the Dominic Cummings story is that

Twitter's anti-pornography filters blocked his name.

So stories about him

weren't being...

shared maybe as widely as they could have been.

I mean, this could prove to be a very valuable tactic, I think, in politics.

If you can have a dodgy behind-the-scenes unaccountable advisor whose name will not crop up due to such filters, expect us to see behind-the-scenes micro-Machiavelli's in the Cummings mold going by names such as Peanid Spludge Gobbler, Gonad Gonadze, and Dick Najiball.

Just keep them out of the search engines.

Great mics, think alike, Andy.

I said Dominic Cummings' name is being filtered out by Twitter's anti-porn algorithms.

Dom Cummings, obviously short for his full name, Dominic Cummings, which is short for his other name, Dominatrix Shortcommings.

Other government ministers, realising the license this gives them to misbehave while avoiding significant part of the public censure they might be incurring, are planning on changing their names to gaping hole, tentacle hentai, and cream pie step brother.

Wasn't that a spin-off from the Grateful Dead in the late 60s?

This is the time when I say English is my second language.

I don't know what you guys are talking about.

Yeah, but you're Indian.

It's your second of about 15 languages.

In other Twitter news, Donald Trump is trying to end Twitter.

He's got very angry this week.

Twitter has started highlighting some of his tweets, which might not be entirely, for example, truthful or not encouraging violence.

As only Trump can, he stood up for free speech by threatening to shut down an outlet of free speech.

He said Republicans feel that social media platforms totally silence conservative voices, which would explain the eerie silence over the past four years from Trump's own social media feeds.

It's a fairly extraordinary

story.

They've had to put fact-checker warnings on a tweet that he did about a postal vote fraud.

He's also, as we've talked about in previous shows, been essentially accusing a TV news host of murder,

despite the pleas of the widower of the woman who died almost 20 years ago desperately asking him to stop and there being absolutely no evidence whatsoever suggesting that there's anything in his

claims.

The problem for Trump from a free speech angle is that, for example, certain outlets do not want to let him have his freedom to freely accuse people of murders that they are not even slightly suspected of having committed.

Now, I'm pretty sure that's what George Washington and the Split Squad were after when they ditched the UK.

That tax and representation nonsense was a smokescreen.

What they really wanted was the freedom to accuse George III of killing Queen Victoria.

I mean, Andy, you sent this story through yesterday when he was merely accusing people of murder.

Since then, he's threatened to suspend the rule of law to shoot rioting protesters.

And it's so depressing.

I feel like

trying to make meaningful satirical jokes about Trump is like chasing a hyperactive dog with constant explosive corrosive diarrhea, trying to catch it in a bag and turn it into art.

After a while you can't help feeling a little unclean and like maybe someone needs to stop feeding that dog whatever they're feeding it.

Like fact-checking is no more censorship than STD testing is putting your dick in a cage.

Fact-checking is no more an infringement of your right to free speech than vaccine testing is an infringement of your right to inject yourself with bleach.

Fact-checking is no more a corruption of the public's right to access information than speed cameras are a corruption of your right to do car jousting on the public highway, standing through the skylight of your Toyota Prius Alpha G with a spear.

Like

you don't, you're entitled to say whatever the fk you want as long as it's not inciting violence.

You don't then have a right to avoid someone else calling you a lying shithead with a gaping anus for a mouth.

Mark Zuckerberg from the Facebook

founder said that Facebook will not be, quotes, arbiters of truth.

So will not put such fact warnings or falsehood warnings on its post.

And in the case of

this supposed murder that Trump accuses Joe Scarborough of having committed, there is no need for Facebook to be arbiters of truth because the police and medical examiners were arbiters of truth almost 20 years ago.

So when Zuckerberg says we will not be arbiters of truth, what he really means is we will be enablers of lies.

It's a small difference, but I believe an important one.

I mean,

it's sort of astonishing to me that he says that Facebook is keeping, is refusing to interfere in such things when they have an algorithmic process that presents you with information or removes information from your site.

I feel like someone needs to sign Facebook and Twitter and all these social media platforms up to a media code of conduct as the algorithmically curated networks that they are.

They're media networks.

They're not the public square, however much they would like to object that they are and point to the fact that they happen to have a gallows in the corner.

But Andy, Alice, you know, I have a question, and just to play devil's advocate, I can sort of see Trump's point of view about social media.

Because think about it: what kind of social media would we want if fact-checking and truth started featuring and if fake news was corrected?

You know, I feel, you know, don't you feel we're long past that world?

What is this, 2005,

where you would expect

information to be filled with facts?

Would we be going back to another world that we are long past?

That is a world that we cannot risk going back to.

A world where truth is definable.

Human conversation would end as we know it.

Destruction of the cultural heritage of Aboriginal people in Australia news now.

Alice, as a white Australian, this is very much in your ballpark.

Bring us up to date.

Yes, it's heartbreaking news.

A number of Aboriginal heritage sites of major significance have been destroyed in Western Australia, in the Pillborough region.

A Rio Tinto obtained legal permission to blast these sites before they were fully uncovered.

The things that they contained, including evidence of continued human occupation through the last ice age, a 28,000-year-old tool made from bone,

each one of the oldest examples of these technologies known in Australia, a piece of 4,000-year-old plattered hair belt whose DNA has been linked to today's occupants,

the traditional owners of that land.

And I, for one, applaud this behaviour on the part of our mining companies.

It's a sort of a form of spring cleaning, I like to think of it as.

You know, historians and people with a love of culture and the wonder of human existence are essentially the hoarders of the natural world, always trying to hold on to the glorious miracles of human survival in the astonishing complexity of our shared past.

I mean, it's not like Australia has spent the last 200 years diminishing and denying the multifaceted and sophisticated science and civilization of its indigenous population in favour of a facile linear narrative of Anglo-centric superiority that conflates colonial dominance with evolutionary fitness and a right to cultural ascendancy that includes eliding the presence of previous occupants as mere ciphers and crayon-drawn placeholders for a God-given right to European annexation or anything like that.

Look,

I am as big a fan of European culture, legal and rights-driven narratives as the next privileged bookworm with a Cambridge education.

I just don't think I need to pretend that nothing else has ever had value to enjoy Shakespeare.

Well, I mean,

I mean, maybe I'm seeing this

from a white European perspective, but whilst it might be land of cultural and spiritual importance to the Aboriginal people of Australia, what about the cultural and spiritual importance to white people like me of the tradition of exploiting any and all mineral resources, regardless of the consequences and non-financial costs?

Is that not a heritage that we have to protect as well?

You mentioned Rio Tinto was responsible for this lovely action.

I'd like to know what people in Australia think of this fantastic Indian company called Adani, who, after they were done with

destroying large parts of the state of Gujarat, have set their eyes on large parts of mines in Australia.

And I read about a bunch of protests against them.

And I feel like this is the sort of thing that brings the world together.

You know, large global corporations who've destroyed things in one part of the world really take the best practices to another part of the world and thereby bridge that gap between India and Australia.

Are they being talked about?

Yeah, it's reassuring, Anaba.

We do talk about Adani, we talk about Rio Tinto.

It's reassuring to know that there are organizations in this world that would literally blow the top off the Parthenon if someone had dropped a coin underneath it.

You know, just already been done.

But I guess, you know,

it's a fair contest, isn't it?

You know, the

mining industry against

archaeological cultural heritage.

It's like a kind of rock, paper, scissors style game of 28,000-year-old bone-tool tool industrial explosives unfettered capitalism you know it's yeah kind of three corner games it's the thing is industrial explosives and unfettered capitalism tend to gang up on 28,000 year old bone tool so it's you know it's yeah yeah

the thing is the difficult thing about something being you know priceless is that priceless isn't worth as much as some money

I think I think that's a good place to end this episode charting the the latest week in the lunacy of our great species.

Thank you for listening.

We'll be back next week with a regular bugle.

On Saturday, the 13th of June, we're going to have the inaugural bugle live-streamed quiz.

And it will be the greatest quiz in the history of all humanity,

as I'm sure you would...

unhesitatingly agree, buglers.

On the 27th of June, we will have another Bugle live-streamed live show.

Alice, other than the wonderful wonderful last post, which is up to what, episode 150-something, yeah.

Anything else to alert or listen to?

I still have my regular Tea with Alice show that isn't funny at all, and also Savage is available on Amazon Prime.

But do listen to the last post.

It's a lot of fun and very stupid, and excitingly, not set in the real world.

Anuvab, any shows you'd like to tell people about?

Two things, Andy.

I would like to plug Alice's last post only because

she did send me to another planet as a legal representative of that podcast.

And secondly,

we do a podcast in India called Our Last Week, which is on Spotify, which I normally don't plug because it's just nonsense.

But this week

is a cricket episode, a cricket conundrum episode.

And featuring on it is leading Indian cricket commentator Andy Zoltsman with cricket conundrums.

So, that comes out Thursday.

So, any

fans of cricket conundrums or whatever is left of cricket at the end of this pandemic can listen.

Well, thank you for listening once again.

If the planet as a whole is listening, please grow the fk up at some point this year.

Until next week, Buglers, goodbye, and we will play you out in time honor tradition with some lies about our premium-level voluntary subscribers.

To join them, go to thebeaglepodcast.com and click the donate button.

Goodbye.

Rachel Harding thinks the world could do with some more positive phobias.

Fear is a natural evolutionary impulse, argues Rachel, for which we should be eternally grateful.

It is what has stopped us going the way of the now seriously endangered overconfident jungle pigeon and the thoroughly extinct cocky cliffhorse.

But, continues Rachel, phobias always tend to be negative.

I personally am aphobiophobic.

I'm terrified of not being terrified of enough things.

Rachel's fellow Rachel, Rachel Moore, is much taken with the first Rachel's idea.

The second Rachel ventures a couple of suggestions.

How about trying to get people to take up ecle pagopanthophobia, the fear of not appreciating flowers enough, or maybe even amato paracophilophobia, the fear of not telling people you love them.

These could have great social impact.

We just need a celebrity to say they've they've got these phobias and within a few years they will be rampant.

It's all for the good of humanity.

David Fowles believes that the global aviation industry will need to modernize in the wake of all the stuff etc.

And one of the ways in which it should do so is by being more flexible with where it takes people to.

Airports are an outdated idea, suggests David.

With modern parachute, drone, GPS and above all mattress technology, it should be possible to drop people off pretty close to where they actually want to go, reasonably safely, and thus save the environmental cost of ground transportation.

By my calculations, concludes David, under my scheme, 75% of airports could be turned back into fields.

Jon O'Michel once spent a year plotting out a comic book detailing the adventures of Vegetar, whose superpower was the ability to turn meat into vegetables.

Vegetar was trying to move the world away from excessive meat eating for the good of the environment, whilst also providing alternative crops for the affected farmers, because he was a great guy.

Jono then abandoned the idea however.

I ended up thinking that Vegetar was a bit of a tool, explains Jono, and would have been better off persuading people politely and lobbying governmental organizations rather than spoiling people's barbecues.

Jonathan Stewart likes to see the look on his neighbours faces when he turns up outside their house with a load of friends dressed as archaeologists with metal detectors, chisels and all the rest of the kit and with some heavily annotated ground plans before peering into their garden, pointing at a specific spot and saying, I'm pretty sure it's there, about 10 feet down, but it's worth doing the whole plot and seeing what we find.

It's a great prank, says Jonathan, although it usually only works once, so I move house quite regularly to have new people to try it on.

Mark Foley used to try the self-same prank on his neighbours by the greatest of made-up coincidences.

Mark recalls an occasion on which the neighbour threatened to call the police and shove, quote, that hammer somewhere you do not want it to be shoved.

Mark duly withdrew, giggling quietly to himself.

Three days later, his neighbour popped round and told Mark that he'd unearthed a 3,000-year-old bronze terrapin and invited Mark to join him in the rest of the dig.

It was, acknowledges Mark, quite weird.

And finally, continuing the archaeological theme, Lawrence Mitchell wonders if we've got the great pyramids of Egypt all wrong.

What if they weren't burial thingies at all, speculates Lawrence.

It does seem a bit of a stupid way to entomb someone with all due respect to the Egyptians.

What if instead they were in fact some form of early computer, or an escape room type installation that everyone in Egypt could use at once or maybe even sports venues like inverted stadiums with the crowd on the ground and the player trying to chuck a ball into a bucket on top?

Lawrence concludes somewhat stropperly, I just don't think we should assume they were pimped up coffins, that's all.

Here endeth the lies.

Bye-bye.

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.