Ev On Everything: Recent Episodes
Ev Buckley
Ev, talking about everything. Or most things. OK, some things. The Ev part is true, at least. Ev is me, an Irishman in Scotland. I'm here to talk about current affairs (politics, not infidelity), culture (society, not yeast), and whatever else is always on my mind (Pet Shop Boys, not Elvis). So if you like your podcasts thought provoking, informative, and understated, this show is for you. If you don't, listen anyway. I'm told it counts towards your community service order.
People really did try to kidnap, try and execute a sitting governor of an American state. And they didn't do it out of the blue, they weren't outliers, nor were they following a politics or a creed foreign to the other militias for where they came. Militias are pseudo paramilitary organisations, and they are based around extreme readings of the US Constitution, and some pretty strange interests in 250 year old law and precedent. They are also prepping for a major showdown at the time of the Election, and Donald Trump not only couldn't be happier that they're doing it, but he is actively encouraging them, and directing them in the only way he knows how, via Twitter. Who are the biggest threat to American democracy, bigger than Russia, bigger than the Republican party itself? Well, the people planning on disrupting the entire election with armed force, and who reserve to themselves the right to shoot anyone who commits a crime, a crime for instance like disagreeing with them about the Constitution...
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It won't shock anyone to hear that Donald Trump has not been truthful about his taxes, and the millions he has claimed to have paid have turned out to be hundreds instead. But what is shocking, to those still able to be shocked by him, are the hundreds of millions in personal debt, money that he owes himself and that he cannot write off against his many businesses and other ventures. He has to face this coming financial onslaught himself. Or perhaps there are those wiling to assist him in these trying times? People who, of course, would have none but the best of intentions towards America, its population and its policies, right? By the time this is over, Donald, and the world, might well be wishing he was only compromised by a fetish sex tape from a Moscow hotel...
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Kier Starmer is a name you might not know, if you aren't living in the UK. The new Labour Leader would have been seen as a perfectly safe pair of hands only a few years ago. That was up until the sitting Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was shown to have orally violated a dead pig's head with his penis, and didn't resign. That almost unfathomable display of political neck led directly where we are today. Stripper poles, pussy grabbing, and pig violation just aren't what they used to be in terms of embarrassment and opprobrium. And the new Labour Leader finds himself a decent man in the middle of a left-to-right mud slinging match designed to stick to people who stick it to pigs, not distinguished public prosecutors.
Who should we aspire to be governed by, if this is how we treat all who govern? The new language of unshame is as contagious as any virus...
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Ireland had an election recently, though it seems impossibly long ago, before the current, Covid reality took hold. Then, for many months, nothing happened. No government was formed, and the previous government continued in power. In fact, not only did that government continue in power, it was the second time it had failed to win a majority, and continued in power with the support of the opposition. The first time? At the last election, five years previously. Ireland went from a stable, functional minority government that had been in power through all the problems of Brexit, to one that dealt with all the challenges of Coronavirus lockdown, to a left-right coalition that somehow feels bizarrely dependable. The Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Green coalition looks like it should work. And why? Because Anyone-But-Sinn-Fein is a powerful motivator, and Ireland's sophisticated electorate and political system easily have the ability to make this work. If only that were true elsewhere...
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We're losing bees to pesticides, agricultural practises, and to them just straight up vanishing. And we're doing little or nothing to help, while doing a lot to hinder them. We're destroying meadows, impressing them into agricultural work, and malnourishing them too. And all they do all day is toil away, making honey, making flowers, giving us almonds and apples and tiny window-dramas of escape from our homes. We need to do more, like Ian Hamilton Finlay, to give them beautiful garden homes, and to rebuild their habitats. How can we lose? Who doesn't like tiny flying pandas?
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London, and to a lesser extent Glasgow have both been hit by football violence, somehow, even though football isn't restarting in the UK until later this week. The excuse used by the thugs attacking police is that they're turning out to protect statues against marauding protesters who might damage or deface them. The reality is they're looking for a fight, and violence, and found it not with protesters, but with the police themselves, who were protecting the statues, and by attacking bystanders. It's a sad development, and a familiar one to anyone who's been keeping an eye on English football support. But there's a balance to the unrelenting bleakness.
Marcus Rashford. a 22 year old black man who's done nothing but play football since he was seven years old has stepped forward to raise the voices of disadvantaged children who had been abandoned by their government. He started a charity to help them when free school meals were stopped by an uncaring Tory cabinet, and then he went on to effectively demand a u-turn in policy. Those Lads throwing Nazi salutes in London were instantly and immediately rendered irrelevant, but then hadn't gone away before, and they haven't now, either.
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We're discussing pulling down a statue of an anti-Abolitionist here in Scotland, and a straight up slavery advocate in Derry. And sure enough, people are terrified of enacting change, as if the statues we have in our streets are immutable fixed points in history, unchangeable forever. Gone With The Wind was of its time, and needs a virtual plaque to save it.
But no. As it turns out, Gone With The Wind was made in the twentieth century, when racism was well understood, and black culture was celebrated, at least by some. Dundas lived in the time of Abolition, and John Mitchel came after Daniel O'Connell in Irish history. Look carefully at history. The "of their time" brigade might not like seeing what the reality of the times they mourn the passing of really was. Humanity, aa in the understanding of the humanity of others, has been around for longer than they might like to think.
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The situation in American policing has very clearly become completely untenable. It doesn't appear to be in a place from which it can move forward, in any way. A clean break with the past will be necessary to restore the confidence and belief of black people, the wider community of people of colour, and America in general in their police forces. Evidence appears to be incontrovertible that on top of the history of killing of black Americans by police, and the legacy of brutal policing, the present of American policing is far more violent and brutal than many of us had believed. People have called for defunding of police, who have incredibly large budgets, but some want to go farther.
They want to abolish the police entirely. Many critics of that idea say it's unworkable, those that don't simply consider it insane and impossible. But is it? has there ever been a police service of the scale of an American state that was scrapped entirely, and replaced with something else? Yes there has. Did the community collapse into anarchy overnight? No it did not. In fact, police violence dropped drastically? So, this must have been in some idyllic paradise where people believed in the police and their communities, a peaceful place suited to such a change?
It was in Northern Ireland.
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Zooropa was an experiment in character, irony, style, and substance for U2. The strangest thing had happened. Bono was singing things that might mean more than they seemed to. They were ambiguous, insincere, and maybe, perhaps, they might not even be true. This was refreshing, and cast the band in a new light. They were now interesting, intriguing, even. There was more to them than there had been before, layers to peel away and discoveries to be made. And though they never recaptured the moment, they were, for a year or so, on the road to making exactly the music I would come to love as I got older. They could have been my favourite band, with a few more like Zooropa. So I'm going to tell you about the best U2 album you might never have heard.
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So Dominic Cummings, special advisor to the Prime Minister, broke his own lockdown rules. He traversed the country, heading to the ancestral pile to winter out the ravages of Covid-19. The only thing is, while he was doing that he was telling people over and over to stay put, in their own home, and not travel anywhere. He went to work when he should have stayed home. He went to see a castle when he should have stayed at home. He went to a hospital when he should have stayed at home. He left the people of Britain to endure the depredations of lockdown while he did as he pleased. Not a good look for a senior Prime Ministerial aide.
But, Rasputin? Really? Well, he's bound himself to the levels of power so tightly that those wielding them can't imagine life without him, and believe, firmly, what might become a self-fulfilling prophecy: That they couldn't endure long without him. The removal of Rasputin was a horrific affair, but the lesson isn't about violence or revenge. It's about there being no mechanism of oversight powerful enough to prise the spad-barnacle off the brain of the PM. Not the UK's confidence based oversight by colleagues, and not Tsarist Russia's autocratic oligarchy. When the hooks of the advisor are buried in the mind of the ruler, the ruler can't lead where the advisor is concerned. Boris firmly believes that Dom is absolutely necessary to his existence as PM. What happens if he's right?
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Yes, I did a show wholly and entirely about the way I find it very strange that there are so few kinds of music that don't involve cymbals in some way, be it big climactic symphony moments, smooth ride patterns in jazz, or grabbing crashes in metal. They're in religious ceremonies, they're in indie rock hits, and they're in every drum set on planet earth. You listen to music, you hear cymbals. Such is the way of things. It's strange that there's no instrument remotely so ubiquitous. They're ancient, too. Have we never come up with anything better?
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Donald Trump probably does like some people of colour. But he probably likes them in roles and contexts in which he can understand them, namely the role of being paid to entertain him. And he does like plastering his name on things that aren't really his, in an effort to gain publicity by associating himself with anything that will draw a crowd, be it a virtual one, of minds and eyeballs, or an actual one to the convention centre next to his hotel. Hence plastering his name on the Tyson v Spinks fight, and on calls for the death penalty for the innocent Central Park Five, and on allegations of the entire Mohawk nation being criminals. He's certainly not shy about it. So it's strange to think that he took it so personally when Barack Obama stood in front of a photoshopped image of the name Trump on the White House, in 2011. The room laughed, and Trump found his new calling in life: Hating Obama. A lot of things flowed from that moment, including Trump suddenly waking up to criticism of his Covid-19 response, just as soon as it came from a certain former President. Sadly, waking up to it didn't mean acting to change it. The central idea from Trump, even with tens of thousands of Americans dying, was still Obama.
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The Lost Words is a gorgeous object, a wonderful thing to hold and behold, and it is a trove of wordplay and artistry. It reminds me of the times I've been closest to nature, and to the natural world, the headline moments that stand out in my memory, like beacons. So I tell the story of an encounter with an eagle, as close as I ever want to be to one in the wild, and an owl in the antipodes. And there's a poem about a newt, the lion of the pond, and the predator you didn't know your garden had. But most of all there's a book, a big, inviting, beautiful book that we all should own and cherish and adore. A masterpiece of words and illustration and a joy from start to finish.
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Back in the political prehistory of 2015, a strange new development took over the Tory party here in the UK. It wasn't a policy, or a manifesto, nor was it some divisive issue that drew new battle lines inside the party. It was a strategy. A simple, powerful, effective strategy that would, in short order, sweep away the existing leadership, and with it the moderate, centrist wing of the party. At its heart was an idea as old as British identity itself, pith. Condense your idea down into a simple, easily digested few words and use them as an answer to a complex question.
What was new, though, was that these words were now weaponised. Honed to razor sharpness, they left every speck of actual, comprehensible meaning on the grindstone. They were purified emptiness, intended not to mean anything at all whatsoever, and to be wielded against discourse. They were windmills for the people to tilt at over and over until the slogans themselves began to look comfortingly certain and familiar, compared to the endless miasma of debate. They were used to destroy David Cameron immediately and Theresa May, naively playing with them, had one blow up in her hands. Then along came Boris, and with him, a critical shift from sloganeering about abstract politics, to sloganeering about literal life and death. How did we get to the stage where people will literally be counting the dead whose loss can be ascribed to two words on a podium?
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If you've listened to popular music since the seventies, you've very likely listened to Florian Schneider, if not in his own work then in the work of others he was a great influence on. But unlike some acts who are influential, it's hard to imagine anyone else stepping into the Kraftwerk void. There's no Kraftwerk "B" to provide the direction into the electronic new country for recording artists faced with endless vistas of technology, who want to stick with their roots in popular rock music.
But everyone talks about the immense influence of Kraftwerk. In this episode I start with the experience of listening to them, on albums and live, and the way Florian Schneider, with a vocoder, a synthesiser, and a voice, wrote himself into history.
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The calm streets and quiet life of lockdown feels good. The stress of city living is relieved a little, and some of the rough edges have been smoothed out, ones we maybe thought were an inevitable part of city living. A lot of things we thought couldn't be done have been done, thanks to our concerted effort to save lives. We now find ourselves needing to create a set of rules that allow us to leave lockdown carefully, learning as we go. We can use those rules to exert a double effect, on Covid-19 and on our society and some of the ills we thought it was stuck with.
What if we returned to allowing some travel underneath an air pollution cap, and we never again allow our cities to become the sickening, choking places they were before lockdown?
What if we support our music communities by opening bars and nightclubs that guarantee live music, to support musicians hit hard by the lockdown?
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Would you be shocked to learn that a few square feet of solar panels can't run an entire rock concert? Jeff Gibbs thinks you're going to have your world turned upside down by this fact, and others like it. It turns out that they don't find silicon for semiconductors on the beach, they actually mine it out of the ground. Billionaires are investing in green energy and funding environmental groups, and biomass has massive emissions numbers. These, and other shocking (not shocking) revelations pepper The Human Planet, a film that, at its heart is not made in good faith. It is obfuscating, and it spends 100 interminable minutes rehashing old arguments long debunked, playing with statistics, and presenting opinion as fact. It pushes a damaging agenda and you're only going to be worse off for enduring it as I did. Don't watch it, but do listen to this episode of Ev On Everything, which is half as long, is somehow 1000% more factual while in fact being entirely made up of pure opinion.
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So some people don't believe Boris Johnson was ever sick, thinking the Prime Minister would just take a few weeks of a sickie at the height of a national crisis to get a pity vote. It's hard to believe people believe that, but then, they believe in drinking bleach and swimming in sewage, at least according to their elected representatives they do. So Boris didn't change, but while he was in hospital the world changed. What had been a strangely light hearted approach to distancing and isolation, with people confident of their ability to come together and weather the storm began to shift to mild resentment, and to people flaunting rules. A new approach is needed. Boris was the wrong man before he went to hospital. Could he be the right man now?
It's Boris Johnson. So... no. He has to deal with enforcing the rest of social distancing and lockdown, fining offenders, and deciding what we can and can't learn from our experiences. And despite claiming to have learned from his recent experience, Boris may not be the man to learn from mistakes of any kind...
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Newcastle United Football Club is on the block (Auction, not chopping. Though the Saudis doing the buying are familiar with both.) and will almost certainly be sold in the coming days. That raises very serious questions about the kind of people the Premier League want owning their clubs. Sadly, those questions related entirely to matters financial, and in the modern age a bankruptcy or a history of TV piracy is literally a more serious obstacle to owning a football club than is executing 800 people. Why is that?
It's simple: The Premier League was built on money. Not the money we all see in the headlines, like transfer fees and immense player wages, but the TV money that was at the centre of the foundation of the league in the first place. No wonder then that the calibre of person owning a Premier League club can be... lacking. Not just oligarchs, but thieves, sex offenders, and now the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. It was ever thus, and the new low is hardly a surprise. But it's certainly a problem. This episode, Ev On Everything is on about football clubs, their owners, and the original sin of TV rights perhaps being the only thing that can stop this deal going through.
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It used to be if you were in the market for a chunk of Planet Earth to exploit, you could get your literal chequebook out, and some Napoleon or other would sort you with a prime slice of somebody else's homeland. After all, that's how half of the USA was claimed, and if you were after Ireland, you didn't even need the cheque, someone might just give it to you. Gratis, no questions asked. In the modern world, we naturally frown on that kind of thing, and besides, there really isn't any land left to snap up. These days, backbone infrastructure is a better bet, but some people just haven't lost that acquisitive frame of mind. Enter Elon Musk, who may well be making a play for the infrastructure of nations, but for the moment has contented himself with grabbing a huge chunk of Low Earth Orbit, the most useful area of space over our heads.
He isn't the first to try this, and won't be the last, but he's definitely the most ambitious and brazen, and the only one with his own pet space program to help him on his way. Today we're discussing Starlink, because it's appeared in the sky over the United Kingdom, and because the time to discuss it is before it becomes a de facto presence in all of our lives, and our skies, and not after.
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Yes, this isn't a review, it's more of a discussion, and you don't need to have seen either film to enjoy the show. When Studio Ghibli released The Wind Rises in 2013, the response was universal praise, except from people who thought that Japanese weapons manufacturers aren't a good topic of a positive, glowing biography. Some people thought that maybe making warplanes for Imperial Japan isn't a good life choice, and doesn't merit the attention of a studio more usually associated with forest spirits and magic castles. Spoiler alert, those people are wrong. But why? Why is it ok to make a beautiful (heart-stoppingly beautiful, actually) film about the designer of the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, in a way we probably wouldn't about someone who made machine guns for the Nazis, or some other death machine for a totalitarian regime? The answer includes the beauty of flight, the wonders of human achievement, and the aforementioned flying pig.
If you don't know the films, or the aircraft, there are pictures up on @evoneverything on Twitter, so you know what I'm on about as you listen. Check them out, you have to see some of these airplanes to believe them!
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So, in a zoo in Hong Kong, two pandas finally found themselves in the mood after a 10 year dry spell. It's unclear what we can learn from this, but assuming it has something to do with the zoo being closed to the public for an extended period for the first time in these bears' lives, we can indulge in a little well directed speculation. What if we stopped flinging money at panda breeding programs, and maybe just let them get on with it? A little peace and quiet, and a little privacy?
What if we did the same thing elsewhere? Baiji, right whales, supposedly Venetian dolphins, and actually Venetian swans? What if we just shut up for a while, and let them all relax and take it easy? It can't be that easy... For most market-oriented corporations, it's not that easy. Or at least, it's not that easy to leave things alone, and at the same time make piles and piles of cash to form into conscience-shaped mattresses to sleep easily on. But aren't we learning right now, that with the right motivation, we can in fact leave well enough alone, and well enough will, well, do well?
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Yes, it seems clear that the only horse in this particular race to the bottom has to be the one in the silk pyjamas of Donald J Trump, but petty selfishness isn't the only way to monumentally screw up a Covid-19 response. It's just one of the stupider ones. In the running of course are the United Kingdom and its herd immunity, and a special mention goes to Iran, with a strong effort in the field of outright denial and statistical lunacy. What of Brazil, though, where sewage swimming is seen as key to this whole crisis? And Thailand? We touch also on Donald Trump's hatred for his hometown of NYC, and Ireland's fast response to the spreading virus.
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So various companies are responding differently to the lockdown. Some are resistant to the idea of basic social responsibility, others are finally seeing a little disruption of their own after disrupting perfectly good industries themselves. Airbnb, for instance. People staying in might take some strength from the common thought that perhaps meaning and purpose could be added to their lives by some crisis or catastrophe, and that might save us from some of the worst mental health effects of being locked down.
Albert Uderzo created some of the most important stories of my life, and the memories I have of reading his work in the library near my home in Dublin are very dear to me. He passed away this week at age 92, and I'm both deeply sad, and delighted also to be reminded once again of his work. If we weren't locked down, I know where I'd be today. In the library, with Asterix and Obelix.
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Now you can go to gigs from the comfort of your own couch, and not feel like you're missing out! Support artists directly over Bandcamp, listen to live coded music in a marathon session at Euler Room, buy from bricks and mortar stores, like Monorail, or any number of ways that musicians have found to keep reaching audiences. This could genuinely birth whole new ways of organising our society and culture, centred on people, not on share prices and investment value.
But that's not much help if your boss is pressuring you to go to work in an office, unnecessarily and at great personal risk. Step forward Elon Musk, and many other less Twitter prone bosses for who minimising the crisis and keeping the factories open was the real priority here. How safe could you possibly feel under the leadership of someone who thinks it's useful to compare coronavirus deaths to WHO world rankings for mortality? Or just car crashes?
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They're cancelling gigs across the world, and some of the cancellations are mandatory, some are out of the good civic conscience of the artists. The former are insurable, the latter are very much not. The Government of Italy is nationalising an airline, and the government of America is trying to buy a vaccine and the exclusive rights to it, while their leader blames the whole catastrophe on the foreigners. Coronavirus may be appalling, terrible, terrifying and life threatening, but it doesn't ever seem to run out of material...
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Coronavirus is now touching every part of our global society, and we are obliged to act. Can we keep randomly hooking up on Tinder? (Yes, or we probably won't stop, anyway.) Is it more important to go to a football match, or a racing meet than it is to work in the same offices as our bosses? Can we keep treating sick employees as shirkers who need to be encouraged back to work with veiled threats to the advancement of their careers, or will we just have to accept that office blocks aren't sustainable in a world of respiratory pathogens? We were warned this was coming, and now it's here.
All this, and more, in today's Me And The Dog.
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It's tragedy and farce all at once for the political classes over the Coronavirus outbreak, with Donald Trump talking in the past tense about a crisis that has het to even approach the high watermark of its death toll, and with Boris Johnson's government Borising its way around scheduling emergency meetings for the future when it's good and ready to have them. And some of the regular people aren't far ahead in the lunacy stakes, stockpiling comfort luxuries and causing hoarding-triggering shortages by hoarding. We can hope this is the low ebb of the crisis, before we all cop ourselves on and start coming together to deal with it all, but here in the UK, anyway, this is the nation that voted for Brexit. And America voted for Trump... It's not actually darkest before the dawn, you know.
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So a man who isn't married has had a child. It's not news, except Boris has managed to make it news, because he's a man who has a history of denigrating single mothers, and who has refused to confirm the number of children he already has. A man who had the police called to his address over a serious concern about domestic violence, and who still uses the word "illegitimate" to describe children born out of wedlock. Which he currently is.
There are more important things to be concentrating on, of course, but the UK government, right now, doesn't seem to think anything at all is important enough to merit its time or attention. Its delayed response to Covid-19, its refusal to engage with flooding victims, and even its own drugs policy all speak of a government that simply doesn't care about anything at all, and is quite happy to be seen not to care.
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Why is Trump pardoning Rod Blagojevic? Why is he listening to Kim Kardashian about how should go free from prison? Why does he care at all about Conrad Black? At least those are non violent crimes. What about Arson? Murder? Would he pardon someone for those offences? (Yes, yes he would, and has.) Why stick his political neck out over sometimes decades old offences and why associate himself with the freedom of people guilty of crimes reviled by almost all of society? A lot of it has to do with people with direct lines to Trump, whether literally or via news media, influencing him to do so. But I do have another theory, less benign, and more worrisome...
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SARS was a very, very scary outbreak. It came out of nowhere, and did most of its damage before we were ready to deal with it. And then it went away, as quickly as it came. MERS followed a decade later and it was even more dangerous, by some measures. And it resolutely didn't g anywhere at all. It's still with us. So what now, for our latest novel Coronavirus? Are we safe? Depends on how you look at it.
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It seems hard to believe now, but there was a time when Brexiteers claimed with a straight face that the United Kingdom was shackled to the corpse of the EU, dragged down by it, slowed by it, and hobbled. Of course, this was never true, not now or ever. But they said it anyway. How strange then, that the UK should choose of its own volition to corpse itself and tie itself to the EU regardless. The only uncertainty now is how bad it's all going to get...
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We all have a fundamental, built in idea of fairness. A sense of what is right and wrong in terms of equal competition and a notion of what we often call fair play. We know unfairness when we see it, even if it's unclear how something is unfair, or what the details are. The details of Saracen's cheating are not clear. But he fact of it, and the sense of it are very clear indeed. The club unfairly broke regulations on salaries, giving themselves an advantage in the acquisition of, and retention of players. They used that advantage to win, and to win big, leaving a long list of vanquished opponents in their wake. Opponents who couldn't be sure, but must have suspected something was up with the level of talent that their vanquishers managed to keep and add to year on year. The extent of the co-investments, property deals and whatever else was happening isn't yet known, but the outrage that has been simmering for months has exploded. Me And The Dog talks about Saracens, and the many tendrils of poison they have woven through English and European rugby, for years.
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So there is this thing here in the UK, called Prevent. It sounds like a good thing, on the face of it. It's all about heading off extremist ideologies in individuals before they become a problem, or even dangerous. Having members of their community monitor their language for issues. Their community, monitoring their language.
Wait... doesn't that sound... totalitarian? And if it's about extremism, why is Extinction Rebellion on the list? They're a protest group, right? Not a dangerous terrorist group. Well, the UK government put them on a terrorist list, and now Prevent is suggesting that children who have problematic views on climate change should be reported to the police. This is wrong, and it's the subject of today's slightly weather afflicted Me And The Dog.
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How did a ballistic missile attack on a US airbase, something that just a week ago would have started a war, become something that probably counts as a deescalation? And if that's what it is, can it be trusted, coming from Iran, and will America accept it and follow suit? Or does Donald Trump have more to say about this, and could there be a Boeing angle? Its corporate reputation could be tangled in this and complicate matters even more. All that's certain is that this does not end here, and Iran will not forget about the attack on their government. But perhaps we can hope the direct, tit-for-tat killing stops here?
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Kata'ib Hezbollah isn't a name widely known outside circles interested in Middle Eastern politics and military matters, but they have been thrust into the light by America's killing of both their leader and more than twenty of their rank and file members, as part of its recent efforts to hit Iranian linked military assets and people in Iraq. Fighters against Isis, Iraqis, and close allies of Iran, their position is complex. But they are employees of the state of Iraq, regular, paid military personnel. What does it mean that America attacked and killed them?
Donald Trump vowed "disproportionate" action, inherently de-legitimising any response by America, assuring us that at least some part of it would be and unnecessarily violent overreaction. And that reaction could come agains the people of Iraq.
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If there wasn't enough to be appalled and scared about in America assassinating an Iranian leader, the prospect of further war crimes, and the threat to attack Iranian culture and engage in purely symbolic air strikes has laid to rest any potential hope that this crisis might see wisdom and common sense prevail. The president of America threatened to commit war crimes in response to any retaliation that might follow his last war crime. It's a complicated situation, but a very simple moral principle. Don't line yourself up alongside Isis and the Taliban if you don't want to be counted among them.
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Today the hashtag WWIII is trending on twitter. Is it with good reason? Do we need to worry that the killing of an Iranian General, someone steeped in blood and definitely no civilian, may lead to all out, world spanning conflict? Is this a Franz Ferdinand moment? It could be, Iran certainly has the wherewithal to make it that, and the dominoes are poised.
What possessed Donald Trump to do this, and why doesn't everyone else do it constantly too? This is a very, very rare situation, and the ramifications are troubling. With the ball firmly in the Iranian court, what can we expect next?
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After a quick reminder that Australia is still on fire, it's time to tackle the age old challenge faced by every tippling sipping enthusiast: Dry January. Instead of talking up the merit that I'm sure exists in taking month off the sauce, I take this opportunity to share a few thoughts on the place of alcohol in my life, and my culture, and some of the reasons I love it so much. And also how thankful I am that I seem to have a naturally self limiting, healthy relationship with the drink.
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Still in Dublin, I'm staring up at the stars without Lupo, and talking about the festival of Hanukkah and where it came from, sadly so I can explain why people committed hate crimes to coincide with it. I've wondered in the past why it is that so many people are antisemitic, when so few people are directly affected by Jews or the actions of Jews. Well, it has to do with the reasons why someone wrote 9 11 on those London walls. I have no particular insights into jewishness or antisemitism, but speaking out on an issue like this is an obligation, so here goes...
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Today I'm walking through Dublin city, initially with some very intrusive traffic but soon in the quiet of university courtyards. I'm out to see my family for Christmas drinks, and it's a great time to talk about where Christmas has ended up, about two centuries since it began to coalesce into the modern holiday we know, with secular trappings. The ancient solstice related feast is less important now that we live in a society of (relative to centuries past) plenty, and the need for a point of light in the long winter months is less intense. So what do we need from Christmas, and what can we take from it, with all its consumerist baggage?
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It's nearing Christmas, and I haven't stopped putting out shows yet. Even without Lupo, late at night, in Dublin, I decided to go for it and throw one up. Scott Morrison is trying to pretend he believes in Climate Change while doing nothing about it, and trying to say he cares about the victims of fires in New South Wales while prioritising his holiday over them. Boeing aren't just bad at making medium sized airliners, but have seen a major issue with their new spacecraft. That leads me to talk about a sleeper should-be-a-hit TV show that is relevant to that situation and that also happens to be excellent and well worth your time.
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Today we talk about Australia, it's fire season and how bad it is, and how unique. Some fires are good for the ecology, and help nurture new growth and regeneration. This isn't that. this is scorched earth in the real sense, with everything dead and things burning that have never burned before. Climate Change denial feeds into this, as it prevents political leaders from planning and preparing for the consequences of shifts in climate and weather, lest they have to acknowledge there might be a problem. And maaaaaybe I forgot Scott Morrison's name. Maybe.
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Why is it entirely likely that Donald Trump's trial in the US Senate will be delayed, for up to a year? Isn't this open and shut case time, even allowing for the Republican Party lining up foursquare behind him? Well, in the distant past of 2016, before the world went crazy, a precedent was set for just refusing outright to engage with a normal political process, as a way to subvert it completely. And it looks like it's about to happen again! Let's look at why there's about to be a year long shrug from House Democrats, then a clean hatchet job on the Trump Presidency.
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I had a terrible cold recording this episode, so in it I'm cooped indoors in a toasty warm room, with all the effects on audio quality of losing the lovely outdoors ambience, edits for Lupo interruptions, and my cold. Boris is already going full Trump, Labour are licking their wounds, and the Lib Dems are yet to emerge from their defensive foetal position on the floor of the Commons. The SNP are bullish, and oh yeah, there is a NATIONALIST MAJORITY IN NORTHERN IRELAND. That nobody is talking about.
Then there's the sports washing, which has been going on for years, and which had a dim spotlight thrown on it this weekend as a major football star spoke out about human rights in a country his team would usually make millions from.
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So the parties that won yesterday were those with a simple, clear message, and the parties that lost were the ones with a muddied, badly articulated message. Voters left Labour over racism, and went to a party with a major racism issue itself and voted in a leader with a history of using racist language and stereotypes. The SNP dominated Scotland soundly defeating every other party. The Liberal Democrats never got over their coalition problem, and the UK faces a difficult future, that we have to be wary of and prepared to engage with.
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I love voting, the physical act of it. I go to the polling place and cast the ballot into the box, and it feels great! I recommend it to everyone. And in this episode, I talk about why you should do it too and feel great like I do. How your vote will resonate, and why you can feel like you did your part through the whole next parliament. Go out and vote before 10pm today, and listen to this if you need to motivate yourself to go, as I tell you why the act of voting is such a wonderful thing.
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Yes, the PM ran away from a journalist on live TV, managed to squeeze in a characteristic lie in the few seconds he was on air, and hid in a fridge. Why is he like this? Well, the party he represents has a strange approach to manifestoes: they wrote one the electorate would hate, and simply hoped never to have it scrutinised. Then they packed their whole front bench away and waited for this election thing to blow over. Since I forgot the social media plugs this time: Twitter @evbuckley and www.patreon.com/musichappens.
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In a clear effort to distract from his blanket bad press over his inability to empathise with a sick child, the Prime Minister tried to draw attention away with a knee jerk BBC Licence Fee trial balloon. Was it that simple? Why the BBC, and why is it so often targeted? Talk about the reason the licence fee can't be replaced by a subscription fee, indoors with extra echo and sibilance, because the rain today was too bad even for me.
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The actual Prime Minister can't bring himself to demonstrate one iota of empathy for a very sick child lying on a pile of coats because no beds are available. We already know this about Boris Johnson, but perhaps this incident will crystallise his personality and unsuitability for high office with the public. We pass an old mill and some dogs get wet.
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Yes there's a goose, and to be clear the sound of my voice is drowned out by the weir, it's not a literal thing where I get drowned, out by a weir. Today I'm talking about tactical voting, some of the reasons it's a bad thing, or at least it's bad to have to do it and it means your voting system is broken. I touch on the American Electoral College and third party candidates, tactical voting in the upcoming election here in the UK, the godawful mess that is First Past The Post in single seat constituencies, and the greatest voting system of them all, all things to all voters, Proportional Representation by Single Transferable Vote.
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Me and Lupo wander about Glasgow's parks, taking in the River Kelvin and the Botanics, and we talk about the state of political messaging in a world gone mad with social media and instant reactions, and we also talk just a little about why anyone would even make this podcast, in an oversaturated content world.
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