Shrek might be an ogre, but a lovable one.  Trump is an ogre and an obnoxious one, in vowel and bowel. 

Trump is not only a serial assaulter as Jean E Carroll found out, but a serial insulter as many people all the way up to leaders of countries, which have long been allies of America, have discovered.  In his second term he has taken it further and has not let any opportunity pass to insult someone or some country.  Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, he has not insulted Putin, Xi Jinping or Kin Jung Un in his second term.

Reporters and journalists have increasingly found themselves the focus of his ire.  Perhaps, it’s because he knows most of his policies are indefensible, and/or he finds it increasingly difficult to argue coherently in his dotage so that unfriendly questions are immediately deflected by asking what network or newspaper they represent and then proceeds to knock their low ratings and accuse them of peddling fake news and being “terrible” people.

If the journalist is a woman, the misogynistic bully in him doesn’t stop there.  After all we know his attitude to women and their kitty cats, and since he cannot stick it to them physically anymore, he sticks it to them verbally.   

When Katie Rodgers wrote an article about his health and age, he described her as “a third-rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out.”  After Megyn Kelly was critical of him, he accused her of having “blood coming out of her wherever.”  There are many others to quote but the subject of the cartoon was when Catherine Lucey pushed him about the release of the Epstein files, he snapped at her, “Quiet! Quiet piggy!)

Kak!  This is a short, pithy and to the point word that Afrikaners gifted to the world. 

It doesn’t roll off the tongue glibly, but violently when used as a one-word response to certain situations or stupid statements in an argument.  “KAK! (pronounced KUK)”  It can also be expressed slightly softer as in, “SMAC, jy praat kak!” (SMAC, you are speaking shit!), but it is still short and pithy.  Most times kak can replace shit in South African English, but there is no direct translation for “Jy is kak sleg!”  except by saying rather mildly “you are very bad/inept.”  Pieter Dirk Uys in his hilarious anti-Apartheid shows in the 1980s coined the abbreviation, KAK, to demean staunch Afrikaner institutions like the BB (Broederbond or Brotherhood) or the NGK (Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk or Dutch Reformed Church).  He said it stood for Kaapse Akteur se Kultuurbond (Cape Actors’ Cultural Guild) which allowed him to use it without theoretically invoking the dire ire of the deeply conservative state.

Unbeknowst to the Greeks that Afrikaners had reserved the word for use two and a half millennia later to describe bad situations, they invented a rather longer and more erudite word.  Along with a lot of Greek achievements, it died along with much of Greek learning and was only kept alive by some arcane scholars in Oxford and Cambridge.  That is until Trump came along and it is now being used in mainstream media.  The word is KAKISTOCRACY, which means to be governed by the least capable or inept people.  That perfectly describes the Trump administration to a man without exception. 

SMAC got to know the word when the odd clever commentator started using it because of the ANC shitshow that has prevailed in SA for 32 years.  When the SMAC series started, the word was featured in #54 back in 2023 because, like the Trump regime, in the ANC (Almost No Commonsense) people were appointed because of their usefulness to the man in power and not because of their ability.  Luckily for SA, the Department of Finance has been led, except for a very brief period under the useless Lucy Gigaba, by men who knew what they were doing and did it properly.  Also, by and large the Justice Department has functioned well, particularly at the Supreme Court level. 

Not so for America.  Their incontinent^[1] Commander-in-Thief has ensured that there is not a single Department that is competently run.  It is as if he abhors competence because they will show him up.  Whatever the reason, he is busy destroying every State Department.

First They Came was a powerful confessional prose piece by the German Pastor Martin Niemöller in 1946 that condemned the complicity of German intellectuals and clergy who had facilitated the Nazis’ rise to power.  It has since served as a warning to free democracies of the dangers of totalitarianism.

Over the past few centuries, mathematicians have cloistered in an arcane world where they have deeply contemplated the mysteries of numbers, functions, conjectures, theorems and the like that, on the face of it, have little or no practical use.  The brilliant ones know they can live a life of gentle contemplation in their monastic ivory towers and the chosen few might even solve a 200-year-old theorem to (mathematical) world-wide acclaim.  Their serene existence would be punctuated by publishing papers, attending conferences and even delivering the odd paper at one or two.    Their existence would be justified if they got a polite applause.

Unfortunately, their Elysian world was recently shattered and they have to now contemplate their raison d’être.  Quoting from Steven Boykey Sidley article in the Daily Maverick: On the night of 6 October, OpenAI released a dump of 722 AI-generated mathematics papers, representing somewhere north of 372 proofs (or partial proofs) of unsolved and open maths problems (about 300 of them have been formally verified). 

The proofs wiped out decades (and more) of ongoing human enquiry in several mathematical subfields. And each proof took a mere three hours of compute time.  Thousands of careers will lose their fuel and their joy, maths PhD programmes will be decimated, university students will flee to other subjects, and some maths departments might disappear in the wake of student exits.

AI, if mismanaged as it’s likely to be, is humanity’s biggest existential threat, far more immediate and unstoppable than climate change.

First It Came

First it came for the creative people
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the call centre staff
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the psychologists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the journalists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the doctors
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the accountants and lawyers
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the historians
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for the mathematicians and scientists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not one

Then it came for me
Because there was no one left
And I entered the Matrix

Trump just missed his Nobel Prize.  No, not the Peace Prize, but the prize in Physiology or Medicine.  Instead, he let a bunch of flaky European low-lives trump him as he didn’t realise that he was on the cusp of a breakthrough.  Perhaps he was distracted by all the wars and geopolitical spats he had created or by his latest squeeze, his first aide, Natalie Harp.  Sure, he has not got a great physiology and just thinking about medical complexities gives him a headache.  He can’t even take Tylenol for it because RFKjr says it might give him autism, but all the elements were there for the breakthrough.

The prize winners, Deisseroth, Hegemann and Nagel, wanted to understand how a tiny, single-celled alga called Chlamydomonas senses light.  While they were beavering away, Trump, who is an expert on beavering away and chlamydia, made the three scientists green with envy because he had just created the world’s largest algae petri dish in Washington.  It did more than just sense light.  It attracted TV cameras and even found a way to cause a tear, not only in itself, but also in the reality matrix surrounding his administration.  Trump had been busy on this research since 2016, although he did take a four-year sabbatical when he was stiffed out of his job by a walking stiff.  During his times in office, he experimented by surrounding himself with pond life who were brain dead but nevertheless joined his choir visible in parroting his talking points*. 

 

Trump’s pond life – #2026 version

This was just preliminary research to see how far he could stretch reality before it tore.  This research led to his tour de farce, his pool, that changed from a blue to a green hue and cry while he reflected on it.  Unfortunately, like a light that attracts moths, this algae seemed to attract thousands of thugs who vandalised his experiment with knives.  He tried to fix things by gently stirring in nano-bubbles of ozone, but it was too late.  The result and the prize had been snatched from his grubby mitts just like the last election and he was green with envy. In a fit of pique, and many tantrums later, he drained his swamp so that his precious algae would never see the light again.

*  For the younger generation, Monty Python produced a sketch called The Dead Parrot in which a client complained that he had been sold a dead parrot which had joined the choir invisible amongst a bunch of similar cliches.

Trump announced today that his trial separation from Reality has turned into an official divorce due to irreconcilable differences.  “Reality is a bitch,” he complained on the Supreme Courthouse steps after they had handed down a 6-3 decision in his favour.  “She had far too many unrealistic expectations of me,” he added. 

In an early morning Truth Narcissist rant he expanded on the theme: “I like to build skyscrapers and things especially the pie-in-sky sort with a side order of chips and a diet coke, but I allowed her to redesign the Rose Garden.  When I said there wasn’t enough gold, Reality went off in a huff because I was using the golf cart at the time.  She has since given me the hot tongue, cold bum treatment from Mar-a-Laager where she has decamped to.  I was not happy about the whole camp thing either and she doesn’t even like the way I dance to YMCA as she says that I dance with gay abandon, but it is not something I am prepared to DEI on a hill for. 

“You know that, because I’m clever, like when I tell people that there’s a silent b in debt, they turn around to me and say, ‘Sir, you are clever.  How do you know all these things?’  I tell them that I am a stable genius which makes me an SI (Supreme Intelligence) which is better than an AI or even an XI.  Actually, I cleverly tell everyone who will listen that XI stands for Unknown Intelligence as no one can solve for him with his slit-eyed Chinese way.  In fact, sometimes I don’t know if he is asleep or just being inscrutable.  At least with me, you know when I’m asleep.  But coming back to silent b’s . . .  Hey, I bet you thought I was going off script.  That was just my famous weave like when I played tight end in High School.  All the cheerleaders thought I was a tight end when I didn’t buy them drinks, and I think I still have the tightest end of any President in History.  But about debt – only stupid people like Dumbocrats’ pronounce it deBt.  Actually, I love debt so much that I’ve increased it by $2 trillion since I became your favourite president for the second time.   Then I started a me me coin called $TRUMP and Reality accused me of profiteering.

“But Reality really upset me when she stopped me from seeing my BFF, Epstein.  She actually drove him to commit suicide – that’s how tough she is with other people so you can imagine what it was like to live with her 24/7.

“Reality then complained when our pool went green after I had spent so much on it and that I was always flying off to play golf when we needed to sort out domestic affairs.  I tried to seduce her with my new architecturally enhanced ball room and lovingly decorated our house with marble and tasteful kitsch – nada! 

“I struggle to understand her accent and she can’t interpret my hand gestures so our communication broke down a long time ago.  Reality also then accused me, in her thick East European accent, of sleeping with Putin which is just low IQ because his age and man boobs don’t do it for me and, even if he plays with babushka dolls, he doesn’t have a kitty cat I can grab.   I complained to Blanche about it.  After involving NI (National Intelligence) and SI, between them and his French surname, they managed to work out that Reality was accusing me of sleeping with a putain, a whore.  I just don’t understand women and Reality in particular.  Why does she still hold that Stormy in a D-cup against me?  The Stormy night only lasted a few hours anyway and cost my company a measly $150,000 – Chump change.  Then Reality hit me with 34 felony charges for declaring my 1/12^th night stand to be tax deductible – I ask you with crocodile tears in my blue eyes.

“Well, you can’t win them all, but I do win all my golf tournaments and I should have won three presidencies already except the second one was rigged unlike my tournaments. Thank you for your attention in this matter, your favourite precedent, Donald Trump.”

Day after day you wake up in this country to the same old headlines of corruption, incompetence and laziness.  Initially SMAC fought back with satirical opinion pieces illustrated with ridiculing cartoons.  After lambasting the same-old, same-old SONA speech year after year, sonorously read off by that master of platitudes, Cyril, SMAC realized it was time to move on before his head turned to putu pap.  He even cancelled his Daily Maverick contribution to preserve his positive outlook on life.  After a diversion into the delusional world of Putin came the master of all delusion, Trump, who grabbed the world by its collective pussy and got SMAC’s full attention.  Every single day Trump does something so stupid, so cringeworthy, so narcissistic that an intelligent person’s brain eventually ends up like the ball in a pinball machine played by an expert player if followed for too long.   The only survival strategy was to go cold turkey which has worked for a few weeks.

So, although this Quick SMAC is not about him (who must be obeyed in the current US Administration of bootlickers), SMAC timorously invokes his name as a segue into a similar businessman in South Africa.  If Trump has delusions of grandeur and has conned people out of a lot of money and their votes with his overhyped self-promotion, promises, exaggerations and lies, he has a mirror locally in the slimy Iqbal Surve.  He is in fact Trump lite, about 50kgs lighter, and doesn’t want to rule the world, but just SA. 

A few years ago he wanted to become a media mogul and do his black transformation bit so he decided to buy the Independent News & Media (think Cape Times, Argus etc.) and to trash it with his vision of ‘journalism’, fake stories and self-promotion.  One problem though, he was short of funds so he approached the PIC (Public Investment Corporation which is supposed to prudently invest government pension funds).  In South Africa there was a popular radio game show that ran from 1955 to 1975 called, Pick a Box, with the catch phrase, “Money or the box!”   All Iqbal had to do was to PIC the doos*.  This was Dan Matjila, head of PIC, and the doos spewed out billions from his cash register.  That went tits up when Iqbal stopped paying the interest on the debt.  It got worse when he squeezed even more money out of the doos with a pie-in-the-sky media play that was going to be worth tens of billions.  Sounds just like Trump, doesn’t he.  This move was too puke inducing for SMAC to pursue at the time when SMAC was quitting commenting on SA.  However, since SMAC takes an interest in aeronautical matters, his eye was attracted to a recent article about a helicopter crash published by Independent on Line, a part of Iqbal’s empire of 3^rd rate news reporting. 

The headline screamed helicopter crash in Zim, the caption of the attached photo repeated the claim and so did the reporting in the article.  In their incompetence they used a photo of a private jet crash.  To compound this, it looks like the jet was AI generated as the engine assembly is odd, the fuselage seems to be unpainted and there are no plane numbers visible.  Perhaps they were a bit cheap and didn’t want to pay for even a stock photo but at least they could have got the helicopter bit right.

*doos is Afrikaans for box and also used as an insult as in, “You’re a c&%t!”

Trump has more early morning brain farts than your average pubescent boy has early morning wet dreams.  The comparison is apt.  Both have messy and normally embarrassing outcomes.  Trump is no stranger to both results with the exception that he’s never embarrassed.  That particular piece of his 101-piece jigsaw puzzle is missing – a factory fault.  The difference is that wet dreams are the involuntary remit of pre-mature boys whereas the brain farts of the magnitude of Trump’s are the territory of a post-mature arsehole.

His latest wet dream brain fart is the petty one of renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America because he is irked that Canada won’t be cowed by his trade war threats.  The fact that was known as Lake Ontario before the USA even became an independent nation is meaningless to Trump because his knowledge of history only extends as far as his last Big Mac.

The last time he did this was early on in his ill-conceived global trade war using unilaterally decided tariffs as a weapon.  He had a particular animus towards Mexico probably because of immigrants and drugs entering the States and made a great play of issuing an executive order that changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America – as petty as petty can get.  If he ever joined the Navy he would immediately rise to the rank of Petty Officer and remain that way until retirement. 

Of course, all the tech bros, mindful of their billions and Trump’s retribution, fall in line and using Google Maps in the U.S. will see “Gulf of America,” and people in Mexico will see “Gulf of Mexico.” Everyone else will see both names.  Likewise for the rebranded Lake America.

Picking Rodin’s statue, The Thinker, is appropriately snarky because he is the antithesis of a thinker.  The depth of his thinking is no deeper than his famously thin skin which matches his shallow character.  It is also apt because of the whole Emperor’s clothes thing.  Changing that to The Stinker is an obvious next step as all his brain farts stink and he literally does too.  Judging by the reactions of people around him at pressers, he sometimes fires off some real whoppers.  He is also spotted with suspiciously bulky underwear and it isn’t the latest in bulletproof apparel to protect the family jewels.  Normally, this never be something to mock in an 80-year-old, but since he is a malicious and serial insulter and since he is inordinately proud of the AI slop portraying him as a manly heroic figure, it’s game on.

Trump is much more than a GOAT.  In fact, he is a GLOAT – Greatest Liar Of All Time – and some of his greatest are the lies that he tells about himself.  As a bored again Christian he often portrays himself as, if not the saviour of mankind, at least the saviour of America with his miracles and his love of his people.  (Remember too that he had to wander around in the wilderness for 4 years and be charged with a back-breaking 34 counts before he was resurrected.)  As a fisher of men though, his arm span is not large enough to describe his self-declared achievements. 

He has constantly sought immortality through his executive orders, riding roughshod over convention and law.  He has appended his signature tag, that is in desperate need of defibrillation, to so many fatuous orders and boldly signed them with his Sharpies that by now they must be Blunties.

He is so desperate to be the greatest President ever that he has started economic and physical wars with enemies and allies alike but which he is incapable of ending.  Starting so many wars also gives him the dubious claim to the Nobel Peace Prize for ending all of them (eventually).

Having failed to gain that recognition, he is using his prestigious talents in the art of interior design (according to himself) to convert Federal buildings into something akin to the interior of a Dubai nightclub.  Suffering from ADHD – Attention Deficit Hyper Decoration disorder – he soon ran out of marbled bathrooms and wall space for his gold tat in the Whitehouse.

So, to set his greatness in stone, he has or intends to undertake monumental works.  After all, they will remain long after he has shuffled off, whereas no amount of executive orders can protect his tacky décor choices.  Without a plan, and after a night of Stormy tossed dreams, he woke up with an idea for an erection – he was going to build an enduring legacy, a grand ballroom.  He promptly smashed the old one down before anyone could object.  With the courts threatening to stymie him, he pivoted disgracefully and declared it to be an emergency and that he was building a huge secure Fuhrer bunker below his gold and marble grandiose erection.  In addition, he has teased plans for a huge Arc de Trump and immortalising himself as the 5^th president on Mt Rushmore.

To further promote his legacy, he has moved on from trashing his predecessors, particularly Obama and Biden. Like a delinquent graffiti artist, he now actively tries to get his tag slapped onto everything from airports through to the Kennedy Centre and everything in between.  It looks like he’s moved on from the blame game to the name game.

  

His latest brain fart occurred on 27 August when he posted on Untruth Sociopath his ranking of the greatest presidents, naturally with himself at the top and Obama and Biden stone last.   But in line with modern thinking on how to bring up kids and avoid hurting their delicate little egos, he should just get a participation certificate at best.

Men, when they are young, tend to wake up with a morning glory.  Unfortunately, that joyful event dissipates with age and Trump is well past that age.  However, it would seem that he has replaced that with his peculiar mental hard-ons that he wakes up with in the wee-wee hours of the morning.

His recent debacle surrounding the reflecting pool is a case in point, or a pointed case, whatever the case may be.  No I am not talking about him using guys he knew who proved to be singularly unqualified, or that the price increased 10 fold over what he originally sold his idea at, or that he blamed all and sundry for their aggressive attacks on his pool liner, or that he forced his Justice Department to arrest and try one man with the most heinous felony of merely touching a part of floating loose liner, or, or . . .

No, the bit that proves that this was just a random ill-formed thought bomb that he woke up with was that he wanted the liner to be coloured patriotic American flag blue.  He triumphantly trumpeted that aspect thinking that his opponents would turn green with envy at his decorative skills (they’re lucky he didn’t choose gold) when in fact it was his pool that turned green. 

If he was so offended by the green algae then why didn’t he just also paint the oval WW2 War Memorial pool that sits at one end of the reflecting pool blue as well?  Obviously, his nocturnal thoughts are like a morning glory that focuses the immature male brain on the problem in hand to the exclusion of wider considerations and future downsides.