The Bugle - Munich Security Conference, Cuban Cigar Crisis and RFK and the Toilet Seat

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

On this week of The Bugle, Andy is joined by Nato Green and sister Helen Zaltzman, as they jump into this week's news, from the Munich Security Conference, the Cuban Cigar Crisis, and RFK's toilet seat revelations. In other news the three touch on the further controversy of the Winter Olympics and the end of a 2 decade long pair of tights...sad times!🇩🇪 Munich Security Conference: Andy, Nato and Helen, get to grips with the recent Munich Security Conference!🇺🇸 RFK: Andy, Nato and Helen, get there heads around the latest revelation from RFK and his cocaine sniffing habits.🧦 End of an Era: Finally, the group reflect on an End of an Era, as a women's tights that have lasted over 2 decades finally perish. The perfect metaphor for the world right now?Andy's Links: andyzaltzman.co.ukNato Green's Links: https://www.instagram.com/mrnatogreen/?hl=enHelen Zaltzman's Links: https://answermethispodcast.com/author/helenzaltzman/🎧 Support The Bugle! Become a Team Bugle subscriber for bonus episodes, exclusive video editions, and the righteous satisfaction of funding satire:http://thebuglepodcast.com📺 Watch Realms Unknown on YouTubeProduced by Chris Skinner, Laura Turner and Harry Gordon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

That's right. The gargle is back. The glossy magazine. Pull-out section to the Bugle's audio newspaper for Visual World is back and better than ever. Check out our first episode, which is already live with the fantastic Alison Spiddle and John Luke Roberts, as we bring you all of the latest from the world of science and technology. All of the news now with some of the politics. Watch us on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. Audio newspaper for a visual world. Hello, buglers, and welcome to issue 4,300. 669 of the world's leading first, last and only audio newspaper for a visual world, bringing you some of the news and some of the lies since 2007. I'm Andy Zaltzman, broadcasting to you from the shed of arguable fact and provable falsehood here in South London, and joining me from the west coast of all the Americas in Vancouver, in the doubly wrongly named British Columbia, Helen Zaltzman, and in San Francisco, to the man who escaped from Alcatraz, NATO Green.

Hello to both of you. Hello Andy Hello Andy Hello Andy Have you been to Alcatraz I have Yeah So you escape from it

I just walked back to the ferry boat But there wasn't a lot of hijinks in the escape But it's still an escape, isn't it? I mean we've got to talk it up It's the 2020s I think you're more likely to get away with it If there's less hijink distraction

Yeah I just blended into the crowd On the boat That corresponded to my ticket So, yeah, it's gone soft, to be honest, over the year. Hiding in plain sight. So last week, my children who are 17, the San Francisco public schools were on strike for five days. And so my kids were on strike for five days.

And because their dad is their dad, they went to the picket line every day. And fully dressed up in union kit, which, We have a union kit drawer in the house. And then they came home and at the dinner table complained to me that the teachers who were leading the strike did not want them to shout at scabs like their daddy had taught them to do. How are they supposed to learn to strike with those limitations? I know.

So I have always taught them. If you're on a picket line, you shout at scabs. It doesn't even have to be about the strike. right, you could just let out your aggressions, you know? Like, the Matrix sequels ruined my enjoyment of the first Matrix. Like, whatever you need to get off your chest, shouted at the scabs. Yeah, teach them oratory, teach them inventing catchy slogans. That's right.

How's Vancouver, Helen? Well, Andy, the annual hot chocolate festival finished on Saturday, so it's a period of lament. Oh, right. Was it a good one? It was all right. someone brought around a white chocolate, hot chocolate, flavoured with rose and tomato, which was like drinking a beast, but chocolate.

And I'm haunted by it. I've not recovered. That sounds like that festival might have run its course if people are putting tomato in it. You never looked at tomato and thought, I'll just pop it in this beverage, see what happens. I guess you've got to keep, you've got to keep trying. That's how, that's how our species, has always moved forward towards its own destruction. Sounds like you're describing a hot chocolate gazpacho. Yeah, it wasn't quite tomato-y enough,

and also gazpacho I associate with being refreshing rather than hot mayonnaise texture. We are recording on the 16th of February, 2026. On the 18th of February in 1478, George, the Duke of Clarence, was convicted of treason against his older brother, at the King Edward IV of England and was executed in private at the Tower of London.

And now, what is it now? What, 550 years on, almost, that family still hasn't really learnt to get along with itself, which leads us into our section in the bin, which is a commemorative supplement, commemorating Prince William's visit to Saudi Arabia, a lovely jaunt for Prince William, still top of the UK's next in line to the throne rankings,

on a real run of form after being stuck in second place for so long. And he popped over to Saudi Arabia on an official visit trying to build trade links with the controversial kingdom and purchaser of the soul of sport. Presumably, I'm not quite sure what sort of trade links the British government must have found some sort of national resource that hasn't already been sold off, perhaps a bollard from somewhere or a bench.

There's some controversy over the visit due to Saudi Arabia's human rights record, which is so checkered that they actually print out a copy of Saudi Arabia's human rights record and wavered at the Formula One drivers at the end of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. But a royal source said that William has to go where the government tells him to go, and I guess there must be a bit of inherited congenital family weariness of going against the will of Parliament, dating back to the late 1640s. The highlight of Prince William's visit, aside from, well, rumors that the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund

are set to take a controlling majority stake in ex-Prince Andrew, those rumours have neither been confirmed nor denied, was William meeting Mohammed bin Salman. I don't know what the sort of Prince chat was like. What are you constitutionally out to do? Oh, absolutely nothing. What about you? Well, pretty much fucking anything.

Same job title, very different jobs. And you know things are a bit odd in your life as a professional prince and in your family life. when a conversation with someone who, according to the CIA, ordered the assassination of a dissenting journalist, is less awkward than a family chat with your brother or especially your uncle. Anyway, the Prince William commemorative Saudi Jones supplement is in the bin.

Top story this week. The Munich Security Conference has taken place. Obviously, political leaders, emerging from a conference in Munich, saying that something has happened, has a bit of a check of history over the past, what, almost 90 years now. But the world came together. There were some slightly stroppy exchanges between Europe, the renowned continent, and the USA. NATO, what did you make of it?

And it was slightly less confrontational than when J.D. Vance basically turned up and called Europe a cunt last year. So is this some progress? Yes, it's been described as progress that the policy has not improved, but the tone has. And that's what we call a win in 26. The Munich Security Conference is like, it's like Coachella for U.S.-European Canadian diplomats, which is to say, white imperialists, or as they call themselves, Western civilization. So much like the Olympics, they ran out of condoms in three days. Because they had come together over Prosecco and Cruditates to Frikan.

And so the big story is how everyone else is having to rethink international security in an age when Trump is president. It's not just that Trump is stupid and lies constantly and it is a bad negotiator who tries to bully his way through complex foreign policy matters like he was haggling over a woven blanket at a Wauken Street market. All that's bad enough, but he's also impulsive and fickle. Whatever you think is happening could completely change based on how the Oval Office has decided to interpret the shit in his pants, much like the Oracle of Delphi, predicting the winner of wars with Sparta by looking at sheep entrails.

Actually, that was way more advanced on NATO. I'm going to have to stand up for the ancient. Greeks are my people. The German right-wing party AFD had been banned in the past for being Nazis and shields for Putin so they were allowed to attend this time. So,

Secretary of State Marker Rubio representing the United States, the international press characterized Rubio as, quote, generally more restrained and a tad more diplomatic than J.D. Vance. Wow, what a bar to set. Not restrained and diplomatic, just more so than J.D. Vance. which is...

We're really clutching its straws here if we're finding reassurance from Rubio. But all right. Yeah, it's a little bit like saying that slamming your penis in the car door is worse for you than getting hit in the junk with a golf club. Which...

Exactly what sort of car are we talking about? And what club? Is it like a pitching wedge? Rubio said some interesting things. He said, we in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the world. managed decline. And to be fair, they've laid their cards on the table with that. They've been

impolite and disorderly lack of caretakers of America's unmanaged decline. And they're kind of busy with that. So it's understandable they don't have a lot of time for Europe. Also, he did describe Washington as a child of Europe historically. And it doesn't make you think if only we had potty trained it when we had the chance. Also, on the on the on the on the managed decline, first of all, define decline. A multipolar world, people darker than a paper bag having an opinion. What are we talking about? The West is in decline.

I think we as the West decided to decline the minute we voted for Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. And there's no no decline option. Helen, what have been your highlights of the Munich Party? I mean, I switched over to watch them all doing curling, Andy. They snapped the brooms in half and went at each other's next. The German Chancellor Friedrich Mertz said the order, as flawed as it has been in its heyday, no longer exists. And I'm quite a fan of global order, whether it's flawed or not. I just think it's preferable to complete fucking chaos.

Maybe I'm a bit old-fashioned like that. But yeah, I love a bit of order. can't get enough of it to be honest. A firm dictatorship, Andy. Just so you knew your place. Like a snug pair of underpants. Just you want to know where you left yourself. But I mean, not entirely what I was.

I guess that's one interpretation of it. You know, words as you yourself have made a career. Or words could mean many things. Yeah, at least two things. Can we go back to Rubio for a second? Rubio said that the US under Trump did not want a Europe that was weak or shackled by guilt or shame.

to which Europe said, in one voice, excuse me, how dare you? We are not shackled by guilt or shame. We are liberated by guilt and shame. Thank you very much. It is why our cheese and chakritory are so delicious. It's the guilt and shame. Also, that's a bit of a slam to the Catholic Church of America, isn't it?

If you're ruling out guilt and shame, that's part of Trump's core base, isn't it? That's right. Yeah, who else will vote for him? but the guilty and ashamed. And Rubio said that said mass migration is not, was not some fringe concern of little consequence. It was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West, which is interesting thing for Marco Rubio, the American Secretary of State to say, because he's Cuban.

I mean, historically, yeah, mass migration to North America is really the root of the current Current dispute, really, if only we left it well alone when we had the chance. Gavin Newsom, the suspiciously slickly coifford governor of California, attempted to reassure Europe. And, I mean, as I said, Europe, the continent that really facilitated the rise of Trump, pretty much from the moment that Chrissy Columbus thought, I fancy myself a boat trip. Gavin Newsom said that Trump is just a passing, essentially, non-fatal virus.

He said, if there's nothing else I can communicate today, Donald Trump is temporary. He'll be gone in three years. I guess the points that arise from that are, A, will he actually be gone in three years? I mean, even if he's gone in three years, he will never really be gone. The aftersulfur of the Trumpian regime looks set to stink out American politics for the foreseeable future. Yeah, that turds not flushing. That's the title of his next book. And his cacistocratic template for the crumbling remnants of global democracy

seems as taken hold widely around the world. It's going to be hard to shift. Point B, if he does go, where will he go next? And the hope remains into space, ideally, not to return. The fear is that he will become self-proclaimed emperor of the world. Point C, three years, that's still a fucking long time. I mean, you think what has happened in the last one and a bit years, then there's still three years to go.

Who knows where we will be. And D, that shows a touching and perhaps naive belief in the inviolability of the US Constitution, which has been used, I think, to clean up some of those issues with Trump's pants that you were referring to earlier on. As long-time listeners of the bugle know, Kevin Newsom started his political career in San Francisco. So I have been dealing with his bullshit for 24 years.

And the rest of the world is discovered. Newsom said, you know, I mean, at the same time that Newsom, our current governor, who is governor of California, which is the eighth largest economy in the world or something, also has time to open a side gig as a podcaster. You would think being governor was a full-time job, but no, Newsom needs to do some podcasting. And Newsom has hired some cheeky young people to manage his social media feed and troll Trump, and that's people find that entertaining. But he also has said that he didn't want to have, like, prosecutions of, you know,

the MAGA regime after they are out of power to, bring justice to the to the victims of the law breaking so this is like like newsom has spent his whole career sort of splitting the difference between you know between the right he's another sort of triangular later and it doesn't work like you know he keeps having right winger's on his podcast he uh you know his his signature move as uh as governor was um using a trump supreme court decision to uh you know round up homeless encampments uh but he has nice hair. And as I have been in a room with him,

and if you were in a room with him, you will ovulate, regardless of your gender. So he has that effect on people, despite being completely full of shit. Is this podcast? Is it bigger than this one? If it is bigger than this one,

maybe Andy should get some worse people on. Also, does he have merch? Does he have a Christmas jumper like Andy's got? In other America's news, Well, this is something that really puts everything in perspective. A cigar festival in Cuba has been called off due to the American blockade, from which the world has had its attention almost completely distracted. It's had remarkably little news coverage, I think, NATO, the Cuban blockade.

The Epstein fallout has taken a lot of attention and the creeping sense that maybe the patriarchy hasn't done quite as well or behaved quite as polite. as it might have done over the years, also by America's war with itself. It's possible war with Iran, by the supposed leader of the free world reposting racist memes, and of course by all the sport that's going on. But Cuba has been undergoing a significant bout

of 2020's American interferomania, I believe, is the technical term, and now the Cigar Festival, one of the leading cigar festivals, the Festival del Habano, has been indefinitely postponed. Yeah, Andy, as you may know, I lived in Cuba for a short while, and it's during Trump 1.0. And here's the thing about Cuban cigars. Because of the blockade and the light police state that exists in Cuba, people have to both simultaneously comply with rules and violate the rules. So, for example, if you go in a tour of a Cuban cigar factory at the beginning of the tour, they say you can only buy cigars in the cigar shop at the end of the tour and do not touch any other cigars during the tour. And then on the tour, every single person rolling cigars leans over and whispers to you, would you like to buy a cigar from me right now? So that is what I assume will occur with the Cuban Cigar Festival, is they will not do it,

and then somehow manage to do it in a secret way that doesn't draw attention to itself. I'm familiar with it. The festival del Habano is sort of like Wimbledon crossed with Glastonbury, but with cigars instead of tennis players and music. So I hope that paints an idea of what it's like. Helen, I can't remember if you were planning to go to the Cigar Festival this year. I know you love a festival. I do love a festival, Andy, particularly devoted to one object.

And I was going to go on the Colombo float to this one. They did apart its cigar spokesmodel, but alas. It's unclear at this point whether the festival will happen at a later date. bad news for the competitors in the festival, including in the blue-ribboned events, such as speed cigar smoking, cigar jousting, cigar smoke ballow, cigar javelin, and blowing cigar smoking people's faces in a conversational intimidating or sexually intrusive way. So there'll be some gaps in the TV schedules for the broadcasters that we're going to be covering the festival. I'm actually a medalist in the event of smoking a cigar in Havana while drinking rum and listening to

jazz. I have placed in that. I'm internationally wrecked in that. What a triathlon. So with the blockade, Cuba's now facing a huge electricity crisis. America, it can't basically use bribery and coercion to force Cuba to the negotiating table. But in the Trumpian world of international diplomacy, is it possible to tell the difference between a negotiating table and a medieval rack. These terms, diplomacy and negotiation have taken an absolute battering recently. And in Trump's role as self-appointed global policeman, he's giving bent copper's a bad name, frankly.

I mean, so, you know, I am a professional negotiator, and I keep saying this, Trump is a bad negotiator because he is trying, he's maintaining the blockade of oil in order to force Cuba to negotiate the negotiating table in order to get them to abandon communism. But lifting the blockade would mean simply giving them capitalism. So the, which is what they want, is more commerce. So it's like, it's just, it's a strategy that fails on its own terms. And there is a shorter distance between two points here, which is if you want Cubans to

to abandon communism, send money. That's what we'll do the trick. It's the problem that America hasn't got over the disappointment that natural causes managed to do to Fidel Castro what the CIA completely failed to do over several decades of fairly creative attempts. Just a bit of jealousy, basically. You know that story about how the CIA tried to kill Fidel

by, like, dosing him with LSD and hoping that he would go insane and jump out of window? This is during the MK Ultra period. I'm on a first name basis with Vidal, by the way. I figured that was implied by my politics. Health Secretary not being entirely healthy news now. Helen, you are the bugles Robert F. Kennedy Jr. correspondent. And, I mean, well done.

You did volunteer for that role. And so many people wanted to do it, but you put in the best pitch. Big fan. He's added to his impressive catalogue of, I don't know, anti-medicine statements by saying, I'm not scared of a germ, I used to snort cocaine off toilet seats on a podcast. So... This was an onion headline, but no, it came from him. Yes.

So many headlines are like that now. I mean, this seems to be to me, Helen, another example of something that not very long ago would have been an instant resignation act, but now no one bats even half an eyelid. Yeah, I think actually this could win quite a lot of people round to him. They're like, a man of the people snorting cocaine off a toilet. I don't know if you can get a vaccination anyway for things you might catch from snorting cocaine off a toilet.

And therefore it's not really at odds with his principles. He is also from a rich family and therefore might have had a toilet just for coax norting purposes that nobody was allowed to defecate into. I'm no expert on drugs. As you know, Helen, I had cricket as my psychotropic mind-altering substance throughout my formatively. Not that I've ever found. Narcan. If anyone's tried.

Can you just sniff a wicket on a toilet seat? I'm no officiato of cocaine snortage. But presumably, if you're in a position to snort cocaine off a time, toilet seat, you're presumably also in a position to snort it off something else instead that is not a toilet seat, such as a basin or a shelf in a bathroom or a toilet system even. In novelty books. It just seems a weird choice to go for the seat of the toilet. I mean, I know there's many things you can question Robert F. Kennedy's judgment on, but for me,

this is the worst, the fact that he's actively chosen the seat of a toilet. toilet rather than any other possible surface in available to him. He could wear a metal tie and just flip the tie up and do it off the tie. The, what he says, I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats. The only say in response to that is, how did that work out for you? Are you still doing that? No. Well, then shut the fuck.

So, and I'm not saying that RFK is obviously the kind of person who snorts cocaine off of toilet seats, but if you Google Robert F. Kennedy. the suggested questions are as follows, what kind of worm did RFK have? What kills tapeworms in the brain? What kills brain amoeba? How long can brain worms live? And what damage can pinworms cause? That's what Google thinks you want to know about if you're looking up RFK.

And I'm not worried about COVID I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seeds. It's not a public health argument. It's a non-sequitur. I mean, if you want to know where those worms came from. Yeah, right. You're not worried. To paraphrase prominent infectious disease, Dr. Yoda, you should be. It's like saying you don't need to get your cholesterol checks because I swallowed a lot of ecstasy and discovered my veins are made of stars.

RFK said this on a comedy podcast. And Andy, there's a lot of parallels to the bugle, I think. It was the Theo Vaughn podcast. Andy is known for erudition and lexical dexterity. Thea Vaughan speaks English. The bugle satirizes politics. Theo Vaughan stares vacantly into space while right-wing politicians spread misinformation.

Both Andy and Theo are famous for their stupid hair. So it's the same thing, really. I'm just looking at Google images of his stupid hair, and it's nowhere near Andy's. It's a pathetic attempt. I'm glad I've still got the edge although presumably if it's a podcast in which right-wing politicians are bloviating, the listenership is around about 40,000 times bigger than the

Bucharest. Look, Andy, you've got choices. You've got choices. RFK has had personal struggles with addiction to drugs, to publicity, and above all to complete bullshit. But such comments are not entirely helpful from the Health Secretary in a country where Measles is making an undeserved surprise comeback. And of course, RFK is famously a vaccine skeptic.

Actually, let me phrase that. I don't like that term vaccine skeptic. RFK is a big fan of people dying unnecessarily from easily preventable illnesses. I think that's the term we should be using. He loves nothing more than hearing of the tear-stained bereavements of families who fell victim to his inanely anti-scientific brain rock. So anyway, we'll have full details of RFK's actually. in toilets through his life on the next, on the bugle over the next 20 years.

And before we move on from America, NATO, some very, very sad news for you, the Homeland Security Department, of which I know you're a huge fan, has, well, entered a temporary shutdown or partial shutdown. How are you dealing with it? Please respect my privacy in this sensitive time.

So the Department of the Department of, of Homeland Security has been shut down as Democrats demanded reforms in exchange for continued funding. Their demand is for ICE to be subject to the same regulations as local law enforcement, which sounds reasonable until you remember that mapping police violence counted 1,314 people killed by police in the United States in 2025. Democrats don't mind if ICE keeps murdering people. They just want it with more paperwork. So now, Republicans agreed that, to require ice agents to wear body cameras, which is not the thing that we needed

because people are already filming ice agents everywhere they go. So all we get from the body cameras is the real-time narration of the internal monologues of the ice agents muttering to themselves, why does everybody hate me? I'm such a nice guy. Maybe I should have gone into animal husbandry instead. Everyone's got a podcast these days.

That's right. So Democrats want to add requirements that ICE agents not wear face masks and get warrants before making home arrests. ICE leadership have said that they need the mask to protect agents from people finding out who they are and coming to their homes to bother them unjustly for things that they do while they're going to other people's homes and bothering them unjustly. It would be unfair to have people looking for you and harassing you just because of who you are like for a job that you. you chose to have. So Trump said about the Democrats, we're talking, but we have to protect law enforcement. And I have to ask, do we, though, do we have to protect law enforcement? Hear me out. What if we protected everybody? So the shutdown bleeds out all the money that ICE got in Trump's so-called big, beautiful bill that gives ICE a bigger budget than any military in the world other than

America and China. It doesn't shut ice down today, but it will deplete them. On the other hand, it immediately shuts down the TSA and FEMA. You know, the people responsible for the safety of air travel and disaster response in the middle of a bunch of winter storms. The signature move of the Democratic Party is a dramatic, symbolic stance that actually undermines their own stated policies. UK news now, and it's been a tricky time for the UK. We've had 40 days and 40 days and 40-19. of consecutive rain in some parts of the country, Helen, which generally, as Bible fans would tell you, doesn't bode well. It generally means something absolutely apocalyptic is going to happen. At the moment, we're just struggling to come to terms of our new official

status as a puddle. Also, Andy, NATO and I both live in places with fire seasons, so the absence of 40 days of rain feels like the apocalypse. Britain's seventh richest person, Jim Radcliffe, has given one of the most insincere apologies in the entire history of half-assed apologies. He apologised for his choice of language after complaining. He didn't. He didn't apologise. I could say he demi-semi-micro pseudo-apologised.

Is that the right term? It's a fuck-you in an apology. shaped glove, Andy. As is so often at the way, he'd... The phrasing is, sorry, my choice of a language has... My choice of language has offended some people. This is the type of apology I call the boomerang. Like, I'm sorry, you felt that way.

It's not, I'm sorry for what I did. And the choices that I made, it sounds like it says sorry, but it's like, I'm sorry, you decided to have feelings in response to my behavior. Yeah, his, his behavior was, complaining about Britain being colonised by immigrants. By the Normans in 1066, he's still steaming about that. Don't get him started on the Saxons. Don't get him started on the Roman Empire, Andy. It's his Roman Empire.

To put further context, I also complained about the number of people on benefits and backed up his argument with some completely made up and wildly false statistics about the rate of net migration. To factor into this, Jim Radcliffe, as I said, seventh richest person in the UK, owner of Manchester United Football Club and various large businesses, he is now resident in Monaco, where more than 75% of the population

are originally not from Monaco, including him. He is also the owner of a chemical plant that recently came cap in hand, claiming 120 million pounds worth of government funding because it was struggling. And his personal worth is something around the 17 billion pound mark, and yet he had a good old whinge about people sponging off the state. He owns Manchester United, as I said,

around three quarters of who's not very successful first team squad, which cost over a billion pounds in transfer fees, and not from the UK. And yet he's been bleating on about financial wastefulness and there not being enough jobs for British people. It's even by 2020 standards, Helen, this is some extremely high tariff hypocrisy that he's gone for here.

Well, for extra fun, Andy, his business asked the government for hundreds of millions of pounds of support because it's a loss maker. And in 2010, he moved it to Switzerland so that he paid £100 million less tax per year. And he founded one of his businesses initially to try to create a replacement for his land rover defender,

which true loser behaviour. He complained about the UK's fracking ban. He's laid off 450 people from Man United staff since taking over and taking away their free lunches. Just cartoon villain shit. Yes. Well, that seems to be increasingly popular, the cartoon. I mean, who would have thought, you know,

we all grew up watching these cartoon villains. and it seems that for a lot of people of our generation and the generation, the half a generation before, these people turn into role models rather than people to be scared of. So maybe that's, I blame kids' TV in the 1970s and 80s for giving people these aspirational characters to look up to. I think, Andy, you, I mean, you said that he made up a bunch of stats

and specifically he said the population of the UK it was 58 million in 2020 and now it's 70 million and he was wrong about that the population was 67 million in 2020 and the last time it was 58 million was in the year 2000 that's an error of 9 million people but to be fair he's worth he's a billionaire worth uh what you said it's 17 billion pounds uh so for from the perspective of his net worth a 9 million error is about 0.04 percent So it's easy to see why he couldn't track that detail. Unsurprisingly, Nigel Farage did not roundly condemn Ratcliffe's comments. And basically said that Radcliffe had a point.

He said, you ask yourself why public services are diminished. You ask yourself why rents have gone through the roof. The population explosion has done that. Well, obviously, we spend quite a lot of our time questioning statements that Nigel Farage had made, not just the population explosion, also the fiercely protected national traditions of refusing to invest properly infrastructure and public services and flogging off anything that moves or doesn't move to anyone will have it and failing to regulate the housing market properly, plus the fact that huge tranches of the wealth of our nation evaporates into the corporate ether never to be seen

or spent again. And also, he is asking us to ignore the fact that this so-called population explosion took a really chunky upward spike after Brexit, which from memory he was quite a big fan of and quite a big bullshit about. But anyway, once again, we're in 2026. This is just the way shit rolls. You know, I'm not a big

sports fan. I don't know anything about Manchester United. I am, I do have a football team, which is Leeds, which I support despite never having seen a game and knowing nothing about the team, but I like them for the sole and exclusive reason that someone gave me a scarf.

And so, so I have, I have that. The funniest thing to me about this is that, is that he said that immigrants were colonizing the UK. Yes. And don't make us think about this. No, so please, please. Unclear on what colonization is. That showing up to do the jobs that you don't want to do at rates of pay that you don't want to be paid and providing delicious cuisine

that you would not have access to on your own is not historically what colonization is it, NATO. It turned up, gave them the English language they didn't know they wanted. He gave the jobs serving us. That's right. Took their spices. Yes, well, irony and hypocrisy

are both having absolutely fucking belting decades. Helen overshadowing that news and all other news in the UK including the continued power rumblings in the Labour Party a story emerged that has really shaken the nation

to its core a woman in the town of Barnard Castle I don't know quite how to say this she's had a pair of tights for nearly 20 years and finally but it's got a hole in.

Taken so young. Stop all the clocks. Cut off the telephone. These tites were bought. In 2007, a historic year for civilization in the year that both the bugle and answer me this, your podcast began. These tites have survived over 2,000 estimated wares. I mean, surely one of the most historic objects in the history of British garmentry.

They've seen through eight prime ministers, which must be a record for a pair of ties. I feel like we've had eight in the last couple of years, Andy. I think 153 education secretaries and 4,810 Premier League managers. And yet they finally given up the ghost. Well, Andy, you know, Brits are resilient and the tights owner, Joanna Buchanan, plans to try to glue the hole together or stitch it up so the tights can live on. I guess, I mean, we've been trying to do that as a nation really ever since Brexit, but you know that once the tights of a nation, literal or metaphorical, have been laddered,

they will never truly be a strong again. I mean... You're just always thinking of what they're capable, you know, what the whole appears. You can't forget the hole, even if you manage to fix the hole. You're like, this could happen again at any time. I can never relax. I can never trust again. Yeah.

I mean, this is a pair of types that tells the tale of a nation over two decades of fracturing division and civil war, albeit modern-style civil war, which is just people screaming at each other online. These leg-coutrements track the fracturing of democratic discourse around the world and the downward spiral of human communication. This is hosiery that has spanned the rise and fall of empires and civilizations. will it span the release of Age of Empire 4

and Civilisation 5, 6 and 7 at the computer games? Truly did not expect my podcasting career to outlive these tights and yet here we are. These hypersocular, nanotrogyl, tibio-fibulactory and coverages survived the Arab Spring, COVID, Brexit,

Trump's first term, two Russian invasions of Ukraine, multiple conflicts and catastrophes and yet finally, finally, they laddered pretty much at the moment that Donald Trump posted that racist video

of the Obama was a week or so ago that's just another thing to add to his rap sheet. I guess the question, Helen, is where now for Britain after this? I mean, this is surely a harbinger of troubled times ahead.

I think, Andy, it shows that we need to move beyond the systems we currently have that are full of holes and maybe try something new, maybe get a pair of leggings. or some stout trousers.

Helen, I think based on what you just said, you have a bright future writing wall text and art museums. I've been thrown out for doing that. What was that when you wrote, it's just a fucking shark in a fucking tank? It's just blue. Winter Olympics news now. and well some interesting stories in the Winter Olympics

other than the fact that that a lot of human beings still retain absolutely zero respect for the concept of physics and they've been hurling themselves down mountains and doing things that really physics suggests the human body should not do for our entertainment. You're going to do what physics tells you to you, Andy? Yeah, generally, yeah.

Maybe that's when I'm stuck in this chair instead of being on the roof. But the Winter Olympics has been, well, a number of censorship scandals. Most notably, the Ukrainian skeleton rider of Vladislav Harskovich, who had his accreditation rescinded and was not allowed to compete in the skeleton due to his refusal not to wear a helmet on which there were pictures of Ukrainian athletes who had been killed during the war with Russia, several of whom were friends of Horacevic himself. We called it a helmet of memory and the IOC...

Sorry, what is skeleton? That's someone where you slide down on your face on a tea tray and you can get concussion just from how fast you're going. Yeah, you go down an icy slide at, I don't know, sort of 80-odd miles an hour, maybe. Yeah. I was confused because I thought all sport involved skeletons. not amoeba sports

yeah good point one of the fastest growing sports in the world amoeba sports so the IAC guidelines stipulate the no and we talked about this

recently no kind of demonstration of political religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas he was told minutes before he was due to compete that his accreditation had been

rescinded by the IOC who recently suggested that Russia could be allowed back into the Olympic movement, even without Putin withdrawing from Ukraine. And so they said that him having pictures of the victims of the war on his helmet was political propaganda, essentially. But you do have to ask who is really making political points about Russia. I mean, the IOC themselves don't allow Russian athletes to complete under their nation's flag, which is quite a political statement in its sense.

and they also do allow Russian athletes to compete at all, which is also a political statement. Again, I mean, hypocrisy comes up in pretty much all the stories we talk about. And if they really wanted to stop political expression, particularly in sports like that, then all the skeleton riders, the Lugistas and the bobsledicesticians, would be banned due to their blatantly political and unconcealed satirical suggestion that things are going downhill very fast. So what did you guys make? It was a kind of weird, you would have thought if they'd just let it slide, no one would have particularly made much more fuss about it?

Are these deliberate puns, Andy? I just can't tell anymore if it's so hardwired. In other equipment-related censorship, the Haitian Winter Olympics team, which has two athletes in it, was also banned from wearing its kit because it had a painting of Tucson Louverture on it, who died in 1803. and who, you know, one of the defining figure in Haitian history, Naita, you gave me a book about him,

once written by the great writer, CLR James, who also wrote a fantastic cricket. Did I keep you a copy of the cricket book? I can't remember. No, I don't think you did. I sent you a copy of Black Jacobins. Yeah. Such a great book. So it's, I mean, this is a kind of weird bit of, I don't know what kind of politically, you know, politically

controversial message having a picture of essentially the father of modern Haiti on their kits for the opening ceremony. It's a controversial message that slavery must end and the 18th century European oppressive imperialism is bang out of order. They've clamped down on that message being sent to watching sports fans. Yeah, and the costumes had to be repainted at the last minute so that he no longer featured. So now there's just a riderless horse. Which, in a way, is drawing more attention to it, I think. There's no horse events in the Winter Olympics, are there? Like, no horses on skis, Andy?

No, which is sad, I think. I have suggested in the past that horse dressage would be probably the most popular spectator sport in the Olympics. In the Olympics, were it introduced, Husky Dog ski jump as well. I'd like to see that. But at the moment, no horses in the Winter Olympics. And the final bit of Winter Olympics censorship, the Italian state broadcaster has been criticized its opening title sequence for its Olympic coverage

began with a Leonardo Vinci's Vitruvian man but it had its plonkster and chuggles redacted so to speak so it's a kind of weird predicted I'm pretty sure I said redacted but it's a weird bit of censorship this I mean, it's not, the Vitruvian man is not a sexual image.

The clue is perhaps in the title, Vitruvian man after Vitruvius, the ancient Roman architect and engineer, whose writings on proportion inspired Leonhard de Vinci, who did not title his painting, hey everyone, check out my junk. So it does suggest that it wasn't, you know, these were not, that this did not require to be censored. But again, it's the 2020s.

They could have put five testicles on him like the Olympic ring. instead of just blurring it out like an action man doll. Yes, yeah. And yeah, they could have, you know, his, you know, adapted his member to look like a bobsled, which, you know, doesn't require a lot, to be honest. That brings us to the end of this week's bugle. We are having a week off next week.

We'll have a sub-episode for you, and then we'll be back in a couple of weeks. Don't forget to come to all. all of my tour shows details at andesaltzman.co.uk dates over the next two or three months. Is that vague enough for you? It's the tour extension of the Zoltgeist. Helen, anything to plug? Well, my podcast, Answer Me This, Andy, which has now outlived those tights, is back from retirement.

That's at Ansomewit's Podcast.com. If you want to listen to something that's just to quell your own inner screams temporarily. And there's also my podcast, The Illusionist, which has a recent episode about how shit the language is we have for space. I think humans really need to take a good, hard look at themselves. Very disappointing. In so many ways. NATO.

Yes, I am taping what will be my third album and first special, February 28th in San Francisco, two shows that are both sold out. But if buglers come, I will be glad to see you. I am doing my final practice shows of the In the Darkest Hour tour before taping Saturday, February 21st in Sacramento at the Sacramento Punchline, and Sunday, February 22nd in Los Angeles and the Lyric Hyperion. Ticket tickets where you get tickets. Also, Mr. Nato Green on Instagram. Thank you for listening to Bigelers. Until next time, goodbye.