The Bugle - Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

The Bugle returns after a short hiatus as Andy, Alice Fraser and Nato Green discuss the forthcoming US civil war, lesbian dance theory, Liz Truss PM, and Mikhail Gorbachev.Our 15th Birthday Special Tour is coming to the UK and Ireland this year: https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/liveThere's no ads in this show, thanks to you! Cast some cents and pennies our way: https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/donateThis episode was written and presented byAndy ZaltzmanAlice FraserNato GreenAnd produced by Ped Hunter and Chris Skinner Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dancelaguard fans, you will be thrilled to know a book is coming out if you fund it via Unbound. We are publishing the Dancelaguard Reader by Alice Fraser and Dancelaguard, a glorious insight into the world of Dancelaguard, self-published romance maven, and online bestseller. If you would like to find out how to support it, go to thebugalpodcast.com. If we get enough support, we will publish the book. That's a real thing that's going to happen. Thebugalpodcast.com to support the Danciler Guard Reader. The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world. Hello, Bugles! And welcome to issue 4,238 of the Bugles, the audio newspaper commissioned by the Fates themselves to chronicle the long-slow decline of humanity into a pit of inescapable decrepit, sorry,

people like Andy Kennedy, Shok, Moneys Day. But I'm at a dissolved village as the 31st of August 2022 as we were told, but you're not going to hear this until next month. So it might be a bit out of date by the time you set 10th of October, I'm going to find the fumes listening to this. We are back after our summer hiatus, in which the global apocalyptic graph needle continued flickering annoyingly upwards, war famine drought floods, a hundred more crooked tournaments, people babbling on inca her and eating each other. All the classic harbingers got busy harbinging through the last month or so. And to try to bring a halt to all things apocalyptic.

Joining me today, fresh from the Edom Refestival, it's Alice Fraser and not fresh from the Edom Refestival. In California, NATO Green, hello to both of you. Welcome to the first post-hiatus, Google. How is your August? Lovely, I've been harbing watching the end of the world. It's been like a month since the last Bugle, and there's been quite a lot happening in the news. There's been a lot going on, and I would just, as we look forward to September,

I would like to respectfully ask everyone in the world to shut the f*** up. Just for like a week, just to shut the f*** up for a week, go to a pasta retreat, do some silent meditation, just so we can catch a breather. My dad runs some nice courses. The problem with your dad's courses, Alice, is he doesn't have space for seven and a half billion people on them. That's that is what it's needed. I mean, a week long global silence, I think might be the most practical idea for the betterment of this planet that I've ever heard. We are recording on Wednesday 31st August 2022. Happy birthday to the former Ego Maniac

Horndog Roman emperors, Caligula and Commodus. We're now in the two of the shittiest Roman emperors of all time. So my advice to you ancient Rome is don't choose your any emperors born on the 31st of August. It doesn't seem to work out for you. Perhaps they were unfortunate to be around in the first millennium, rather than the early third, I think they'd have fitted right in with us today. As always, a section of the bugle is going straight in the bin. This week, money-saving tips with the cost of living, biting around the entire universe and here in Britain in the absence of any sensible government advice or indeed assistance.

We give you bugle, government advice on how to save money in the forthcoming months. One, slayer walrus, and where it's skinned through the winter, two, rather than heating your house, heat yourself with a new thermotics radiator suit, which pumps hot water around your new metallic exoskeleton. Three, barter with your local supermarket, take a trolley full of food to the check out at a busy time, then offer to swap it for some magic beans and trust that due to the hassle of causing a scene when there's a long queue building up. They'll just let you get away with it. Four, retrospectively, average out all the food you've eaten in your life, if you've eaten too much, redistribute the overeat to the future and then imagine eating a series of unnecessary but tempting desserts. Nutrition is after all 99% psychological so it will probably keep you feeling replete and full. And finally at 6. Use the natural heat of the earth to cook

your food rather than having to pay for your own gas or electricity. Simply dig a pit several thousand miles deep in your garden or the nearest area of public parkland, winch your food down in the morning and return from work to a lovely, lovely warm, slow-cooked stew or soup that you can winch up this several thousand miles over many weeks when you get home with your bare hands. That section in the bin, also in the bin, a free reaction to the news. Are you bored of watching the news only to be let down by your nation, planet and or species? Then simply use one of our free reactions to the news to save yourself from actually having to sit through the

actual bullet in itself. Choose from, oh god no. When will we ever learn idiots, all of them? Fucking idiots, we're doomed, doomed, I tell you. Or the all new, that story was not quirky and amusing enough to compensate for all that went before. That section also in the bin. Can I also suggest keeping warm in the winter tip, Andy? Yes. If you're feeling a little chilly around the edges

and you can't afford heating, try pissing yourself. It's temporary, but it isn't everything. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. Babies cotton don't this, as I'm sure you know, I mean, it's well-balanced from recent months. So Alice, why limit it to pissing yourself? Why not piss your loved ones as well? That's that's the socialist mentality I like about you. Yeah, it's time for the expropriation and redistribution of pissing on one another. Yep, I had totally internalized that neoliberal approach on pissing on yourself, but

I mean, if we want real trickle down economics, someone's gonna have to piss from on high. Yeah, piss your own boots, your own bootstraps. But a lot of communist regimes have pissed all over their people, so it does kind of work out. Those sections in the bin. Top story this week, catching up with what the world's been up to over the last few weeks, starting with America. Now later, there was a slightly alarming story. An opinion poll has suggested that more than 40% of Americans think civil war within a decade is likely. Now, I don't

know what the poll said in the 1850s, but 40% seems like quite a lot of percent at the current time. How do you view the status of civil war brinkmanship in your country? Well, Andy, I felt that the poll was incomplete. Here are the questions. Do you expect political divisions to get worse? Do you expect political violence to get worse? Do you think a civil war is likely in the next decade?

The poll is the most obvious next question, which is, if there is civil war in the next decade, The poll is the most obvious next question, which is, if there is civil war in the next decade, are you happy about it? Are you going to be the one to start said civil war? Are you going to fight it? Do you plan to fight the war with bullets or with shit posting on social media? Like how much do we have to worry about you? How many guns do you have? It's going to be a very weird civil war because yes, the country is divided, but it's not in two equitable camps. One side, the smaller side, has all of the guns, and the other side, the larger side, has the entire economy. So they can shoot us to death, but we can turn off their Wi-Fi.

So we'll see how that goes. Oh, you really want a civil war? No brunch for you. So South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham said who Lindsey Graham is so white that Graham crackers are named after him. Lindsey Graham said that riots in the street will happen if Trump is arrested, which obviously riots in the streets, that's where riots go, is in the streets. I'm not that worried about it because if right-wing riots or anything like left-wing riots, they'll trash their own neighborhoods.

So go ahead. No one during a riot has the presence of mind to take the bus out of their own neighborhood to do the rioting. You know what I mean? Like, you know, you do the rioting and then it's like it's your own grocery shop and then you can't get peaches the next day. See, I think that bespeaks are very nice confidence in the ability of your riot to really break down social services because you're not going to catch a bus if your riot is going to be so good that it breaks

down the bus service. That's right. I've always had this fantasy about starting a car share service where if you're going to riot and you want to get out of your own neighborhood, you call a car to drive you to the nearest rich neighborhood so you could ride over there. It'll be called uplift, of course. Can we have a kind-sharing scheme? That's right.

So you don't actually have to do the traveling yourself. We'd better for the environment if you could just exchange riots and still... Right. It's like carbon trading of riots. Yes, I think that would work. As a woman, I prefer to internalize my riots to self-loathing.

LAUGHTER I think it's amazing. 40% of Americans think there's going to be a civil war in the next decade, and the other 60% think that there's definitely not going to be a civil war, and they are furiously willing to defend that belief with their lives. If we will keep emphatically indulging our brains in info dumps on micro-blogging platforms, all of whose growth incentives align with making you compulsively adversarial. We can't really blame anyone, but ourselves for an increasingly overwrought public forum, I think. Yeah, I think that's adequately put. I mean, later, essentially, we've got two virtual

America's running concurrently in parallel. Do you think it's just time to declare them different countries in the same physical space, which is really just formalizing the current arrangement? I think that's a chin and maleville novel. Right. So, which I enjoyed. I don't know, is that, I don't even, I may have said his name wrong, but yeah, it feels that way anyway and, you know, and so like one side is in the cities and another side is between the cities.

And so when I need to drive from a city to another city, if I have to stop and get out of the car, I like make sure to like hide that I'm a Jew and run to the bathroom. You know what I mean? One of the things that the extreme right wing has done is they come up with these like internet code words for things. And so the internet code word in the like extreme white supremacist internet for the coming Civil War is Bougaloo. And the logic of the derivation of that term is Civil War II electric Bougaloo. So that is to say that if you don't know, in 1984,

there was a movie in the United States called Breaking Two Electric Bougaloo that told a heartwarming story about a group of young people of color in Los Angeles using break dancing to defend a community center from gentrification and being bulldozed by real estate developer. And that is what the extreme right wing has taken as the inspiration for the coming civil war

that they're planning. So not only is it cultural appropriation of the name, but they're not even break dancing for the civil war. The civil war would be great if there were break dancing, some denim vest, a cut glove. If every battle were a dance battle. I know. I remember the 80s where people just walked around

with squares of cardboard and a roll of linoleum. In case you suddenly found yourself in an adversarial breakoff, needed to drop down and do the worm. That's how I spent the 80s, like all of us. That would be a good way of handling the Civil War. And what bothers me most is they picked the name Bougaloo just because it's a catchy sequel title.

Breaking to Electric Bougaloo. They couldn't go with Civil War II, Civil War War, or two Civil II War, or Civil War II, the Civil War who shacked me or civil war episode 5, the Empire Strikes Back. And in this case by Empire, I mean the assistant manager of a garden supply store in eastern Washington who is weighing the QAnon. No, they had to do Bougaloo. Not the squeak call, come back over that. The squeak call is pretty good. Look, I'm not big on making individuals culpable for broad social dynamic problems, so I'm going to blame all of this on our evolutionary monkey brain, which I've traced back to a homo-rector's called Cag,

who was a real slut for drama. He was the first slut-ertha. That was before anyone had invented the globe, so he just refused to believe in hills. So the Trump story, which has been one of the big stories in America through the Bugal hiatus, and I'm not saying that this became a big story because we were not around to satirize it, but you can draw your own conclusions. Andy, are you saying that you are not one of the redacted informants in the search warrant? I'm not saying it, and I'm not also not saying it. You went on holidays and it was all downhill

from there, or as Kag would say, it's all over there from here. I mean, are we overreacting? I mean, we've all nicked a few bits of stationary when we've left a job. You know, the odd bit of memorabilia to a minus of times gone by. It's just generally those bits of stationary

don't have the words top secret written on them in cartoonishly big letters. It's a fairly extraordinary chapter in the seemingly unending story of Trump. What can you just bring us up to date with what's been going on? Oh boy. So one day, a few weeks ago,

there was a news notification with no warning, the FBI is searching Trump's house right now. And everyone in America with, I'm sorry, what now? And they seized two dozen boxes of papers that Trump took to Mar-a-Lago when he moved out of the White House. Now, moving day comes when it's time for Trump to move out of the White House on January 20th, 2021, and it's a typical

moving day. He's shouting at Melania, make sure to pack the toothbrushes and the underwear and my charging cords and anything labeled top secret. You know, it's weird that Trump was so fixated on all these documents because as we all know, Trump can't read. So his official papers are just like drawings of dicks on a manual Macron's face and receipts for hamburgers. And Republicans freaked out.

So the FBI called it a search, and Republicans called it a raid to make it sound more dramatic. And it was the kind of raid where you call ahead of time to make an appointment. And the FBI coordinated with the on-site secret service and the secret service said, go ahead and parallel park behind the 11 golden golf carts with don't tread on these stickers on the back. The documents that they got were so secret that the FBI agents who collected them didn't have the security clearance

to look at the documents that they took, but they are cleared, I guess, for the guy who gives Trump colonics. So it's a weird security level that they have. You wouldn't be entirely surprised if they'd found a couple of nukes hidden away in his garden shed. Either as, you know, little things he'd helped himself to on the way out. I mean, I guess, you know, that's a positive, isn't it, that he doesn't yet have his own nuclear deterrent that we're aware of?

So he's resisted calls to return the boxes, describing them as mine, according to three advisors who have been giving their names to the New York Times. I don't know what would give him that idea that a guy could just see something and sort of be in its presence and say it's mine, but I've definitely lost jokes like that. I've definitely said jokes in company and seen them on stage later and was like, you just, you were just next to that joke, that isn't yours. That happens with cricket stats as well. But I guess the concern, NATO, is that, you know, where does this leave ordinary Americans like yourself? If the FBI can just suddenly unreasonably demand the return of highly sensitive official documents of considerable national security

implications from Donald Trump, then it can demand anything from anyone. I mean, just you wait, there'll be next to be your family, holiday photos, your embarrassing teenage diaries, your secret statuographic poems about long dead historical you have your handwritten logbook detailing every single cup of tea you've ever drunk. I mean, where will this end? I ask you. See, I'm not worried about that Andy because I have cleverly hidden all of my family secrets and photos and documents in public posts on Facebook. In other American news, a big bit of legislation from the Biden administration, the Inflation Reduction Act has been passed, which is quite hard for us to understand here in Britain because our government's attitude to inflation seems to be scream if you want to go faster.

The Inflation Reduction Act is what I call it when I respond to a flirty text with a discussion of how reversible the sector meet should be a default state. I'm fabulous, Jack. Think about that. Tell me it doesn't reduce your inflation. Yeah. I mean, that does presuppose that people listen to the bugle while tumescent, which yes, now that I turn my mind, I did assume that, Andy.

You did assume that, and that is well below 25% of our audience. It's a $750 billion bill covering healthcare tax and climate Biden described it as one of the most significant laws in our history, not the most significant probably. I think that's probably fair to say. It's been hailed around the world as a sign that America is finally taking climate seriously. I think it's 370 billion roughly of funding into energy security and climate. America hasn't so much dragged its feet on climate change as put its feet in a raging coal fire while saying these are the best and warmest slippers I've ever had. So how important is this bill, both for America as a nation, the Biden administration and the future of the planet as an inevitable bull? It's been an interesting moment because the so-called inflation reduction act, it is most known for some tax increases on corporations to fund the most

significant investments in climate change in a generation and also a number of important efforts around health care and expanding health care and access to prescription drugs. So not things that are intuitively about inflation. At the same time, we wanted more, it's the incredibly significant climate action, perhaps not significant enough, given that everything is on fire or underwater. And at the same time, or around the same time as the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden announced a student debt forgiveness. And so I'm sort of confused right now

because I'm both happy that they did the things that they did and also disappointed that they didn't go far enough when the need is so great. I'm both happy and disappointed at the same time. I'm disappointed. I'm appointed. What is the word? So, and what's most shocking is that as soon as the inflation reduction act was announced, the Democrat, the midterms are upon us and

the projection was that the Democrats were going to lose in a blood bath and as soon as they announced that the deal They're polling improved and Biden's polling improved the inflation reduction act incredibly popular student debt relief incredibly popular it turns out that doing things that are helpful is politically popular And I don't think any of us realize that before. I think most of the Democratic Party believed that making bad things less bad was the path to victory and not doing things that were affirmatively good. And so this could make Mark a major turning point in American politics. Yeah, I mean, Biden, I feel like it could be a major turning point, but Biden said that we are in a season of substance, which I think

is a deeply hopeless way to frame changing things for the better. A season of substance, three months longer of doing good things and then we're out. Back to the winter of discontent. I mean, in terms of the environmental side, it doesn't seem to be an effort to kind of persuade American business and industry that there will be as much money to be made from saving the environment as there has been from will be as much money to be made from saving the environment as there has been from destroying it, which seems to be kind of speaking the language they understand. So maybe a breakthrough we've been waiting for. On student loan forgiveness, it prompted a rather extraordinary comment from any get

his Republican politician, Lauren Bobertts from Colorado, have I pronounced that right? Yes, you have Colorado. They can they can they get offended if you call it Colorado and they're heavily armed and so will respond in kind. Okay, we'll go with a guy with Colorado and and and Bober. Anyway, who said that Biden is robbing hardworking Americans to pay for Karen's daughter's degree in lesbian dance theory. Now, this was, I'm an curious thing for a serving politician to say,

can you actually do a degree in lesbian dance theory? And if so, I have some questions for you, NATO. Is lesbian dance theory a theory about lesbian dancing? Is it a specifically lesbian theory about dancing general? A canadans or indeed a theory be intrinsically lesbian and can a non-lesbian espouse a theory or dance defined as lesbian? Are two lesbians theoretically dancing together, actually doing a lesbian dance, or if two non-lesbian non-dances do a lesbian dance, do they become lesbian, or do they become dancers, or do they become lesbian dancers theoretically? These are all important questions. If two lesbians dance in a forest is one in a week.

That's I think from the old degree that went from the late 17th century. But I mean, these are all important questions. They actually touch on issues of identity, society, history, language, meaning, creative expression, and pedantry. And I think that's a pretty strong basis for a degree. So is that degree available, or is this just someone talking bullshit again? Look, I mean, if you've ever gone dancing with lesbians,

you know that any number with lesbians, you know that any number of lesbians dancing is involving theory. There is theory to be involved. What's interesting about, I mean, Laura Bobert said Karen's daughter and According to white women in America, Karen has become the N word of white women to refer to white women who partake of the long and proud tradition of weaponizing white femininity in the service of white supremacy in the carceral state. And so, so that's, I mean, Karen's daughter, majoring in lesbian dance theory,

is kind of what Karen gets for calling the police on the black guy on the block all the time. So it's appropriate come up, it's, I'm not familiar with majoring in lesbian dance theory. I think it's, it was an interesting strategy. I mean, the Republicans lost their minds over this thing. And their strategy was not to say that student debt relief was too expensive. Their strategy was to attack the debtors as bad people, that people having...

This is socialism. People took out loans and people who played them back. And we're letting people off the hook for believing in the lie of opportunity in America don't learn that was sort of their message. Ted Cruz who is a C-stude at Princeton is mad about barista's reading Foucault to which I say Foucault wrote the more complex and abstract knowledge becomes the greater the risk of madness. And looking at today's Republican party I think we can all agree that Foucault was wrong. Plenty of madness, complexity, nowhere in sight.

So that's what they're upset about, not the cost of the program, but just the idea of people learning stuff that they don't value. Like no, you shouldn't explore ideas and be challenged in college. College is only for sexual assault, blackout drinking, and putting the word, obfuscate in a sentence for no good reason,

as our Lord Brett Kavanaugh taught us. Yeah, that's the problem we're putting the word, obfuscate in a sentence for no good reason, is that it obfuscates the meaning of a sentence. I have to admit, I didn't pay a huge amount of attention to this lesbian dance theory cuff-o except to make the note that the cuff-o is one of the best and most lesbian dance moves with both the sapphic dignity

and a deep, vulvic symbolism. The thing that struck me the most about it was there's a real failure of Republicans to make something sound uncool. You know what I mean? Like when they say things like, you can't excuse student debt that people won't sign up to do jobs they had. And you're like, cool. I don't understand why there's been down series sounds like the most fun degree you could possibly do.

Well also, I mean, you know, when it comes to degrees, it's still not about what you learn, about how you learn, or what you learn about learning. I would argue it's better to do a lesbian, dance theory degree properly than a nuclear physics degree, shittly, and it's a lesbian, dance theory degree. To me, it would be way better than, for example, a PPE degree, politics, philosophy, and economic some Oxford, which the evidence suggests really leaves you with no career options, apart from failing to get a proper job and ending up having to do some kind of waste of time work experience as a Cabinet Minister, Chancellor

of the Exchequer, or PM. So, you know, let's not denigrate these marginal, albeit fictional degrees, of the policies. This week, multiple of my friends have moved their 18-year-old children into college, and so I had the opportunity to moved their 18-year-old children into college. And so I had the opportunity to give those 18-year-old some advice. And my advice was, the world is ending and you have no future, so have fun with it. So, one thing I will say about the debt relief is the Democrats had to means test it. It's $10,000 of debt relief if you make less than $125,000 a year. Mainstream Democrats in the Biden administration

hold a deep belief that anything good requires an excessive and useless amount of admin. Healthcare means test it, debt relief means test it, child tax credits, means test it. These motherfuckers would means test blow jobs if they could figure out how to make sure every blow job came with a drop down menu, six forms and an accountant. There is one foolproof, they're worried that they're giving debt relief to people who don't need it because they could afford college. And they don't want to give debt relief to rich people. And there

is a foolproof way to know that the person with student debt isn't rich, which is the debt itself. Rich people don't have college debt, they just pay for school. They don't take on debt just for fun to act like they're like down somehow. There's no cultural appropriate, like they don't have like like small vats of debt around the house to show off like they collected artifacts from you know a visit to a Malawi tribe somewhere. You know what I mean? They just they don't have the debt. So it's like the most useless form of means testing. But moving back across to the correct side of the Atlantic, UK news now and well Boris Johnson, he's seen to be former Prime Minister and possibly soon to be future Prime Minister if the papers are to be believed that he's essentially already on the comeback trail. Anyway, he's said that Britain is absolutely not broken after a summer of chaos.

Now when Johnson says Britain is absolutely not broken, by the rules of John Sonion truth thickness and languageery, this means how the f*** is done for nothing works and everyone f*** off. It's been a summer of kind of, it's been a strange summer politically in which essentially we've had no government at all. Boris Johnson has just kind of, it's been a strange summer politically in which essentially we've had no government at all, Boris Johnson has just kind of been on holiday and not turning up to work. The government has given up trying to do anything to help people through the difficult economic times and we've just been waiting for the result of the interminable Conservative Party leadership election more of which later. But the state, this is a list amongst the things

that are not working in Britain at the moment for various reasons ranging from industrial action decades of underinvestment and the government's philosophical belief in political incompetence. These things are not working. The court system, the transport network, democracy, the police, the postal service, telecoms, the health service, money, life, England's opening batsmen are moat business leisure, the climate trade diplomacy, the government, everything else, and stonehenge, which is still next to 64 days a year.

Stonehenge is right once a year. Once once a year is not enough, Alice. A broken rock is right once a year. Of course. Warships, a new £3 billion aircraft carrier broke down because someone forgot to oil its propeller shaft apparently, which was the first thing I do want to receive in a new warship. I mean that's warship owning 101 as far as I'm concerned, that and checking the honk work. So essentially, it's just, it's just, it's just kind of sinking into this kind of pit of acceptance that everything's a bit of f***ing at the moment. And I'm going to say this, our new Prime Minister now looks set to be Liz Truss, who is winning the two horse race against Rishi Sunak,

voted on by the Conservative Party memberships. And they're basically trying to appeal to a fraction of a percent of the electorate and then the challenge after that will be to try and appeal to a broader section of the electorate which is about 2% that actually decides elections. So, you know, who knows it might work. Trust has been using her trademark cocktail of dog whistle, nothingness and it's really hit home with the Conservative Party membership. Sue Nuck has been desperately reacting to every question by saying he thinks what he thinks the voters want him to think he thinks, and it's not really been working for him. So it's due to be bequeathed, Liz Truss is our Prime Minister next week. But she has not been really, I think, she's not been fronting up to the challenge. She's quite well clear and therefore it's been avoiding interviews, including a flagship interview with the BBC Radio on their breakfast news show. Now obviously with a new leader

of a country, you want their policies, opinions and track record to be scrutinized forensically by top quality political interviewer or at least have something that inevitably descends into an unedifying sound by Layden Becker. You at least want that, but Truss has been very cleverly avoiding scrutiny because as the old saying goes, scrutiny can go f*** itself. And she pre-flounced out of her scheduled interview with BBC Radio a few days in advance. It's quite hard. I mean Alice, you've been here over the summer and probably been a bit more, because I've been away a lot and then busy with in my alternative universe of comforting cricket numbers. I mean what have you made of the, it's kind of curious arcane political tradition by which we, you know, our Prime Minister regenerates into someone simultaneously different and the same.

Well, it's sort of astonishing to me watching her co-... I like his... Her appeal seems to be a sort of a constant and committed wild-eyed, thatcher cosplay, or a maybe like a evil post-menopausal Barbie situation. Her only fans is just... I can imagine the the iron lady dominatrixing a hot working class dude with a smudge of coal on his abs to represent being in northern mining town that's been f***ing. But like, it's just a sort of an astonishing performance that she's putting on of, like,

deliberating competence. Is this what- So this is the thing, I've been at the Edinburgh Friends Festival and sometimes I see some comedy that other people seem to enjoy and go, is this what... So this is the thing, I've been at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and sometimes I see some comedy that other people seem to enjoy and go, is this what people like? And then I feel like the whole world is gaslighting me and I sort of feel like that with Liz Truss of like, you know, I between the two of them, sure it's a vanity of small differences in the differences mainly how vain each of them are. But seems to me, like just as an outside viewer that like Rishi Sunak could use a calculator if you asked him to in a windstorm and Liz Truss could I'm sure you want somebody who's capable of operating basic machinery. I

I don't know. I don't know and maybe I want them to pick the wrong person, but like it does seem like they are picking the wrong person But I don't know why I think Rishi Sunak's the right person, except that he seems, again, like you can walk in a straight line if you asked him to at the head of a gun. But it's not about being the right person, it's about being the less wrong person. And it's not even about being popular at elections, it's about being, you know, electably not totally unpopular. And so I mean, that's, I guess, the challenge, I think that might even be too higher But bath for trust to a click later if you've been following following our political ruckians at all A little bit and you know look and be careful what you wish for for the last three years of the the Boris Johnson regime haven't you been saying

We'd be better off if this country was run by a bowl of soup and if no one was actually in charge and now your dreams have come true. So you know it's I mean in some ways I think it's a it's a the idea of Liz Trust becoming Prime Minister does feel like a breakthrough for women. Say what you will about that, she was competent. You know, feckless incompetent opportunists corrupt men or a dime a dozen, but feckless incompetent corrupt women are a dime each. Harded to come by. Right. Yeah, that's a positive.

That's a great step forward for equality. Yeah. That's a positive sign on it. She just sort of seems to be going looking into the past all of the time, partly with the thatcha cosplay and partly, we're like trying to revive the SACSENS versus the NORMANS thing by refusing to say if Macron is a friend or a foe. Yes, this is curious, so Macron, the French, and crucially, let's emphasize this, he is not Napoleon. Now Napoleon was a bit, it was an easier

question to answer, is busy friend or foe. We've laid his cards very violently on a series of tables over a couple of decades in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was a question at the end of another interview in which I think it was a barrage of simple kind of binary questions. Obviously asking irrelevant, childish questions were even more infantile binary answers is now one of the key pillars of democracy that we expect. So I mean we have a God-given right to expect another from our seems to be God-given Prime Minister, but I mean this is You know it was a curious question not to not to I mean we're not still in the I don't know we're still in the 100 years war

I mean it's possible. I mean there was you know the 14th 15th century celebrity conflict that lasted over 100 years. I'm gonna go over 100 years, one, I'll make it a thousand. So, I mean, it's possible, I'll just get him back to basics. I'm gonna go. A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A- Gal Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union, has died at the age of 91, two years younger than Ronald Reagan when he quit this mortal realm and another Cold War win for the West.

Goatting West was quite a close run thing in the end. Interesting thing, the reaction to it around the world, the most open, youthful and progressive leader the Soviet Union ever had, which was not a wildly hotly contested title, like most acrobatic Pope, most jovial goeth or most charismatic barnacle. Was he followed when he became to power in the mid 1980s? He followed a series of Soviet leaders who'd been one or more of nearly dead, effectively dead and actually dead. And instead of trying to open up the Soviet Union, he launched Perestroika now until then Perestroika would be in what what football managers said when they wanted to do center forwards. We need a

Perestroika's. Damn it. Okay, the thumbs up from PED and we'll call it a draw. That meant restructuring Perestroika, previously in the Soviet Union, the thumbs up from PED and we'll call it a draw to all. That meant re-structuring, perestroika, a previous in the Soviet Union, the general view had been that if something wasn't working, then you just kill millions of people and keep doing it the same way. And it didn't always work entirely well. Glasnost as well was another thing that Gorbachev brought in,

a shortened hybrid word for looking back more fondly on music festivals, just by having not enjoying them much at the time. High-dap by Gourge Off to mean openness. And you know, his well-liked and respected in the West, but all this report suggests that not look back on fondly in Russia, particularly not by Putin, who seems to be setting about rolling back pretty much everything golet off ever did. What's the reaction being to his death in America, NATO? Well, Andy, I hope you're happy because now Britain isn't the only failed imperialist power who's bubbling retreat from its former client states leads to decades of violence. It's not just you and Harold Wilson. You know, reading the memorials about Gorbachev,

I was in high school when the Soviet Union ended. So I remember broad strokes, but not the details. And he resigned on Christmas Day and the Soviet Union dissolved the next day, which is boxing day. So they needed to break up the country in time for the sales. Boy, there were some things really sold off at cut prices.

You know, and they say the curvature of let the Soviet Union dissolve an Eastern European communism and without bloodshed, run that by Ukraine, Kosovo, Georgia, Chechnya, Serbia, Bosnia, Chechnya again, Albania, Croatia, Chechnya, Georgia, Macedonia, Abkazia, Dagestan, except for that, no bloodshed. Gorbachev is a man famous for a class-nosed, the reforms that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and a weird birthmark on his forehead.

When he died, everyone in the world's first thought was, oh yeah, we're birthmark on his forehead. And also, Parastrica. Imagine if Abraham Lincoln was known by the entire world for two things, ending slavery and like having a dumb laugh. He's remembered two things, ending slavery and you're having a ridiculous hat. Sure. So I'm not aware of it. I mean, it's interesting looking back now. I think I think we're a bit basically about the same age. No, so I remember, it was such a defining moment in our teenage years. And the fall of communism was hailed by writer Francis Fukuyama as the end of history.

But I mean, it's typical, isn't it, the modern world, that history, it probably should have ended then after a successful first series, but it proved it was too popular. And now we're all having to dredge through unnecessary thematically derivative on original poorly planned and tediously predictable history to the sequel But some you know at the time You know it seemed that we'd reach the end of the era of childish Military grandstanding minutes history to the squeak wall, isn't it? Damn it! Well that brings us to the end of this week's this week's vehicle. We'll be back next week with full coverage of the unveiling of the new British Prime Minister.

NATO, do you have anything to plug? My comedy albums are back on Spotify, the NATO Green Party in the Whiteness album, or you can get them on Bandcamp, which gets more money to the artist. If you are in the San Francisco Bay area on Saturday, I will be in Oakland at the show Critical Hit, doing a long work and progress set.

And then next Saturday, I'll be back at the set up, at the set up, at the speak easy. Alice, you are filming your show in London soon. On the 11th of September at the Museum of Comedy, I think it's about 4 p.m. Tickets are still available, but they are selling fast, which is astonishing to me because I haven't been plugging it very well.

So if you're in London and would like to see Kronos, it will be the last time I perform at Live, and I will be filming it that day, and then if you want to see it, I assume I'll be selling it after that, or I'll just film it and keep it to myself. Also I have the Gaggle, the Gaggle, the system magazine to the Bugle, it is the Glossy Magazine to the Bugles Audio and Newspaper for Visual World, it is full of nonsense, and also some serious analysis of things that aren't politics.

It's basically all of the news, none of the politics occasionally, Andy, mostly me. And don't forget, there are 15th anniversary bugle live shows coming up. We have an extra show in London. So our London shows the 15th and the 22nd, the 22nd is new. I think the 15th is sold out, or very nearly sold out, Birmingham on the 27th Glasgow on the 30th of October, and Dublin on the 3rd of November, details at theBugelboggas.com and click the live link at the top. We'll be back next week,

also with the return of the Bugle Wall of Honor. Until then, goodbye. .