The Opinion Pieces are an eclectic bunch on current affairs & history often with a human interest aspect. The Movie/DVDs reviews are mainly on documentaries with a smattering of movie reviews.
America rightfully protested in the No Kings rally that they did not wish their country to be governed by a kinglike leader. But maybe they should have protested as well about his King Midas touch. We know he likes to touch nice things and now nothing in the White House is safe from his cold gold touch. His décor sense along with the rest of his brain suffers from arrested development and can be summed up as Arab Chic. It’s a pity the rest of him wasn’t arrested at the same time.
The latest to feel King Midas’ unwelcome grope is the Lincoln bathroom in the White House. Maybe the green tiling isn’t to everyone’s taste, but he traded in old style warmth for a sterile marble wasteland with gold highlights. If it wasn’t for his fake face tan, he could play hide-and-seek with Melania and she would never find him in there. His pallid old man’s body and veinous legs would blend right in with the veined marble. Then again, she probably wouldn’t look very hard, if at all.
These biographies have been created by ChatGPT. I included photographs from my collection to provide some colour and interest. The reason why I selected this father and son combination as my first blog created by AI was to assist me in disentangling the lives of two men with the same name. Fortunately for biographers, even though William Junior’s son was also christened William, he was not prominent in Port Elizabeth affairs and exited the scene by relocating to Cape Town. Secondly, William Junior married my second great aunt, Adelaide, who was Rev Francis McCleland’s daughter.
Who knows how Trump’s worm’s eye view of the world perceives the Russian invasion (oops, Special Operation) of Ukraine? His stance has undergone more changes than a chameleon wading through Smarties, but in Trump’s case, not so smarties. He has flipped flopped from threats against Russia only to change a week or two later. In this opinion piece SMAC has undertaken to lay bare Trump’s motivations and for that SMAC deserves a Nobel Prize of some sorts.
To start off, one must understand the basic inner workings of Trump. He’s not clever, but he’s smart in a reptilian brain sort of way. And just like his primordial ancestors, he has an incredibly thick skin and an inability to be embarrassed. In fact, he has nil self-awareness.
First point to consider is whether Putin has anything compromising on the fat frat boy. Undoubtedly he has. Putin is an old-school apparatchik and ex-KGB officer. This is spycraft 101 for the Russians – get or engineer kompromat (compromising material) through a honeytrap or bribe. One must factor in that Moscow hosted his Miss Universe pageant in 2013. The Steele dossier is a 35-page report that contains hectic, but unsubstantiated allegations. Nevertheless, one of the most salacious ones was that, while he was in Moscow, he hired prostitutes to perform a ‘golden shower’ on a bed that Obama had used on a state visit as president in order to defile it. Sounds just like the petty Don.
But ultimately Trump is amoral. First and foremost, the world revolves around himself and as a businessman, he does not let any morals cloud the deal. While he was in Russia back then, he was feeling out real estate opportunities, but all that took a backseat after Russia annexed Crimea and provided paramilitary support to rebels in Donbas and Luhansk on Ukraine’s eastern border in 2014.
But that desire has never left Trump and he knows that if he can force an advantageous peace deal on Ukraine, Russia will richly reward him with great opportunities and he might wangle a Peace Prize. Just contrast his approaches to dealing with Putin and Zelensky. Immediately after Putin’s 2022 invasion he praised Putin as being brilliant while his European and Nato allies were aghast. Since then, he has never had a constant position regarding Russia. One day he takes a hard line and then after a meeting with Putin or a phone call, Trump does a 180 degree turn and insists Ukraine accept a ceasefire on Putin’s terms.
Who will ever forget that reality TV farce that Trump and his cabinet engineered with Zelensky in the White House on 28 February. With the cameras rolling, Zelensky was humiliated by a Trump tag team who created an embarrassing spat by insisting that his trademark attire (no tie) was disrespectful to Trump. Trump wrapped up the distasteful display by saying to Zelensky that “(y)ou don’t have the cards (to play)” so you had better give up right now. Putin must have been so chuffed that he probably ordered himself another Dacha on the Crimean coast. Contrast that with Trump’s obsequious behaviour when he met with Putin in Alaska in mid-August.
Also just a week or two ago, Trump started publicly threatening to give long range Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine because of Putin’s unrelenting missile/drone reign of terror on civilian targets. A 20th October meeting was arranged between Trump and Zelensky at the White House ostensibly to finalise the deal. Two days before it, Putin phoned Trump and whispered endearments in his ear. Zelensky’s trip was rendered meaningless as Trump refused the Tomahawks and apparently a very heated meeting ensued. Then a few days later Trump u-turned again and announced crushing oil sanctions against Russia.
I wonder what Putin will have to do now to bring his pet to heel?
Trump’s décor sense is a reflection of himself: gross, cheap, tacky – choose your personal descriptor. The overblown gold embellishments in the Oval Orifice, and any of his developments for that matter, make it look like an Arab souk.
In 2016, he surprised even himself by winning the elections, but he was like the dog that chased the car and caught it. Now what! He did minor redecorating to his taste as all presidents have done, but nothing overly dramatic. However, in between playing golf, getting briefed by his cabinet at Fox News, and stumbling and bumbling through his presidency, he did unleash Melania on the historic Rose Garden. She acquitted herself well and reduced the slightly wild but colourful space to one that was a reflection of herself – “sterile, bland and devoid of any joy”. Still, it could have been verse (her guttural Slavic pronunciation). In fact, worse was to befall when Trump conquered the White House during his second coming. This time he was prepared.
In his second term he started off by paving over Melania’s carefully coiffed lawn with limestone slabs to create an even more sterile place reflective of their marriage and then boastfully erected two over-hyped flagpoles. (Note, the minor provincial town of Port Elizabeth has a flagpole twice their height). On a roll he tackled the Oval Office. He has gone over the top on the signature Trump-style décor, probably salvaged from his bankrupted Taj Mahal casino. After turning it into a gold leaf tinsel town, his childish petulance could not resist his next move. He created a walk of fame on a wall of the West Wing colonnade by hanging baroque gilded framed photos of all the past presidents in order. Bracketed by snarling portraits of himself was Biden – a photograph only of his signature and the Autopen used to create it – phew, way to go big boy.
But all the gold touches and photos glorifying himself didn’t satisfy his itch. There was something missing. Deep down amidst all the froth of his reality shows, his transactional marriages and transactional affairs, his various presidencies, and his serial bankruptcies (6), he was a property developer at heart. It wasn’t good enough being a temporary tenant, he wanted to play God and remake the White House in his own image, his personal shrine.
In a flash of inspiration after inhaling a Big Mac, he knew what he didn’t like about the White House. It reminded him of skinny jeans which he hates (because amongst other things, he could never wear them and Obama could) – NO BALLROOM. Now this was a development project he could get his veneered teeth into to take his mind off his unrequited dream of a Nobel Prize now in peaces and his tariff war blowing up in his face.
At the end of July he announced the project to build a 90,000ft2 (8370m2 or 2.1 acres) ballroom with a capacity of 650 people to replace the current ballroom of 200 people capacity in the East Wing. He stated that it “won’t interfere with the current building. … It will be near it but not touching it, and pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.” It should be noted that the two floors and basement of the central core of the White House have an area of 45000ft. The model showed a rectangular structure of about 88x48m (a rugby field is 100x50m) dwarfing the seat of America power. He is determined to finish it before the end of his term and, as usual, has bulldozed or ignored just about every authority mandated to deal with a program such as this. As always, Trump cannot be taken at his word. The capacity is now 990 and when the demolition started it looks as though the whole corridor up to the core will also be demolished, so who knows how the plans have changed.
Republicans have cravenly defended Trump by saying that even Obama made drastic changes – yes, he changed a tennis court into a basketball court!
God help the White House if he wangles a turd term.
The madcap red cap maggots think Trump’s policies are to DEI for on the back of Trump advocating for no queens (and hating Queens along with the rest of New York). Meanwhile America is shouting back, “No Kings”. Republicans answer that the No Kings movement consists of people who hate America and are actually members of that most dangerous of all terrorist organisations – Antifa.
For people who don’t follow US politics, antifa merely means anti-fascist to describe people who reject fascism – an honourable standard to uphold. It is not an organization in any shape or form, but is used as a slur much like branding a person a communist during the McCarthy era. Why it is so gleefully used by Republicans against people who refuse to go along with their diktats is that, I believe, it conjures up the word Intifada in people’s minds. This resonates with MAGA because Intifada is an Arabic word for a rebellion or uprising and was specifically used to describe Palestinian resistance to Israel in the First Intifada (1987–1993) and the Second Intifada (2000–2005).
The rash of popular ‘No Kings’ protests against the indiscriminate use of presumptive Presidential executive orders, that have little or no legal basis, harkens back 250 years to the American war of Independence against a distant monarchy that existed in a gilded bubble. (Alright, Britain was a sort of democracy but there was no universal franchise and the King held enormous sway.) Trump’s unique approach to the Presidency along with a compliant Supreme court threatens to hollow out all the underpinnings of America’s democracy and turn it into a horrible tribute show for the Orange Jesus.
Contrary to Trump’s vain boasts which, as usual, are light on facts, he is proving to be an unpopular President. He and all his toadies and the ‘Voice of America’, Fox News, repeatedly state that his resounding victory gave him a mandate. Really? A mandate to do what – to upend the whole well balanced American democracy with a machine gun blast of vile executive orders like a demented rapper high on his tanning spray?
It is true that the Republicans also won both houses and control the Supreme court 6 – 3, but let’s look at his personal mandate. Yes, he did beat Harris by 2.28m votes but this was after she replaced the doddery Biden on the slate with only 107 days to go. It should be noted that he did not actually receive more than 50% of all the votes cast. Also, “Slo Joe, I call him Slo Joe, you know” had actually beaten Trump by 7m votes previously. So much for his popularity.
As the 47th President, he is the most unpopular President ever at this stage of his incumbency with a 37% approval rating. To achieve this high honour, he had to beat that other most unpoular President, Donald J Trump Jr, in his previous incarnation as the 45th President which he has done handsomely.
Back to the No Kings rallies. While the tacky King Midas with his golden décor touch skulked and sulked in his personal shrine at Mar-a-Lago complete with fake Times magazine covers about himself, 7 million Americans turned out in all 50 states in 2700 protests to express their displeasure. With crowds seething with cartoon figures, narco blow up frog costumes, out of control horny unicorns, protesting grannies and sarcastic posters, not one shot was fired, no tear gas or smoke had to be deployed and everyone was happy without having to get high first. It was remarkably unifying.
As the US motto fittingly states, “E pluribus unum” (out of many, one).
By the mid-eighteenth century, South Africa still only possessed one port – Cape Town. This did not imply that sailing vessels did not occasionally anchor offshore and send a small boat ashore either to collect water and other victuals or more ominously to mount surveillance operations. So it was in the case of a French sloop, Le Necessaire, in 1752 off Humewood.
In doing so, a calamity would befall a tiny French boat leading to the exposure of ulterior French intentions.
Trump selects people based on their preparedness to do his will whether they’re in his cabinet, staff or key Federal positions. Good looks also play a large part in this – think Kristi Noem, Karoline Leavitt, Pam Bondi and, most recently, Lindsey Halligan. Competence is not a key requirement, in fact, it is not a requirement at all. Witness the case of Halligan who was appointed to the high position of interim US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia but has no prosecutorial experience – nil, zero, nada, zilch. At least she can do no damage. She can only irk Trump’s perceived enemies by executing his retributive legal attacks. Other credentials for appointment to high office is to have been employed at His Master’s Voice, Faux News, where they graduate in the art of arse kissing – 23 so far this year.
Trump was elected by choosing hot button issues for the conservative Americans and inflaming the hell out of them with his freewheeling and fact-free style to the point that each group with a grievance was prepared to overlook his personal factory defects and the other issues that they didn’t believe in. Pursuing this strategy, he surpassed himself by appointing a person who is unqualified in a job that affects the lives of every American, is a conspiracy theorist and, to top it all, a clown – Robert F Kennedy, or RFK, of the Kennedy political dynasty.
RFK copied Trump’s signature MAGA movement with the slogan of MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) when he was appointed Health Secretary. This is a man who claimed he had a parasitic worm that ate part of his brain and then died – probably of indigestion. He loves eating roadkill and has swum in water known to be contaminated with sewerage. Like Halligan, his credentials for the job could be listed on a fridge magnet – none. However, he did bring along all the medical conspiracy kooks into Trump’s camp. Although he vaccinated his own children, he has since changed his stance. Even before Covid and the mRNA-based vaccines came along, he bought into the concept that the MMR (mumps, measles and rubella) vaccine causes autism. That whole movement was based on a statistically insignificant study that has been comprehensively debunked. As Health Secretary, he has had to backtrack on his opinions and has weaseled out by saying that the state should not be telling people what to do. He is not even prepared to state that it is recommended to vaccinate.
Ever since Louis Pasteur discovered the principles of vaccination in the 1860s, it has been the most successful medical intervention ever developed. Only the discovery of penicillin comes close. Gone are the scourges of smallpox which wiped out swathes of people particularly in parts of the ‘new world’ when the Europeans introduced their culture with a side order of smallpox Gone too is polio which saw rows of children in wards filled with iron lung machines and people, like my father with a withered leg, or rubella which can cause blindness and deafness in foetuses. Pasteur’s other great contribution to society’s health was the discovery of germs and how pasteurisation of milk can eliminate the many possible infections caused by drinking untreated milk. RFK is passionate about this too.
Having started worrying about vaccination and autism, his latest mission is to find the causes of autism. This has been studied for years without any answers yet he reckons he can nail it down in a few months. Pressure from Trump, obviously desperate to deflect from a reputation infected by the Epstein virus, led to premature ejaculation by RFK. In a hard-on press briefing on 22 September, he announced that his study group had found a link between acetaminophen (paracetamol) and autism. Trump in a stable genius moment doubled down and then repeatedly directed pregnant women not to take Tylenol (because he couldn’t pronounce the chemical name) which could make him liable to a law suit. In the latest televised cabinet meeting on 10 October, RFK contradicted his premature ejaculation without an apology about the mess he created and said, “It is not proof. We’re doing studies to make proof.”
American Gothic is one of the most famous American paintings of the 20th century. Britannica gives the following interpretation of the painting: With its completion at the beginning of the Great Depression, some interpret the painting as a satirical comment on the unwillingness of rural Americans, and more specifically Midwesterners, to catch up with the modernizing world. That seems like a reasonable description of your common or garden MAGA supporter. So, given the dark times America is going through and the collapse of the American Dream, SMAC decided to make light of these times by reimagining the American Gothic
Trump and his shenanigans dominate the news cycles to such an extent that it’s difficult not to get sucked into their gravitational pull and write yet another piece concerning the free world’s most unlikeable man. With this in mind, scratching through basically finished but old spiked pieces on my computer yielded this tawdry but amusing sidebar to the tawdry Trump world.
Take a look at my girlfriend, she’s the only one I got. Not much of a girlfriend, I never seem to get a lot. … Breakfast in America by Supertramp.
That long running banal saga, KUWTK 1 , like all good American shows, spun off a lot of lucrative franchises and ventures. Having got rid of her darker half, the unstable (Khan)Ye (god help us), Kim is carving out a new career with her SKIMS range of elastic body stockings which she self-promotes. Her numerous narcissistic selfies in her SKIMS show a perfect hourglass figure without all the bumps and baggy bits that go with it courtesy of the elastic sausage casing.
Not wanting to be caught wanting, Kourtney, a lesser Kardashian light, must have felt even more out of the limelight now that KUWTK has run its course. To boost her profile and her ego, she gushed on TV how sex fasting made it sooo much better. Given that she’s been with her spiky boyfriend, Travis Barker for just over a year 2 , they should still be all over each other like rabbits – looking at ways to tone it down rather than to spice it up. But then, looking at the way Travis has accessorised his skin, he must have plenty of inadequacy issues particularly when his scrawny white body comes up against the tawny voluptuousness of a Kardashian. Keeping it up with a Kardashian must then be an issue …. or not an issue as the case may be. Perhaps he needs the downtime to build up pressure to improve his uptime.
Why is it that famous people want to share their intimate details with whole world like some open-air therapy class? This pathetic narcissistic behaviour is not limited to the A-list celebs. We even have Melinda Gates, probably the richest woman in dowdy shoes apart from the late Queen, wanting to share her innermost feelings with the world who inhabit an existence diametrically opposite to the one she has inhabited for 27 years. It is like some crazy version of an AA meeting. “Hi, I’m Melinda Gates and my partner jilted me. I’ve been single for 6 months and 4 days. Perhaps I can give you some Windows into my situation. I was just DOSsing one day when Bill decided to stick his software – that’s what he’s got, ha ha – into a sleek new machine with great specs to download himself. He never updated me on his status until he caught a virus. He didn’t want to contact his competition, Dr Google, and he only got verse when he tried Dr Suess. Since then, I’ve been on a sex fast. It’s cleared my skin, I’m regular and I feel rich now that I’m divorced.”
Maybe all she hankers for is stardom after years as a grey little woman in the grey shadow of a grey geek. Perhaps she should release a sex tape like Kourtney did in 2003 and so many other celebs have done to perk their fans up. But, she sure as hell doesn’t need to advertise as there must be plenty of young bucks out there without much cache who would love to see if their modern hardware can handle her old clunky software with a bit of plug and play.
1 KUWTK – Keeping Up With The Kardashians, an American unreality show. Puke 2 Kourtney Sex fast – interview early March 2022
While researching this piece, I found that, like Kim, Kourtney too has a carefully curated lifestyle and wellness brand marketed via her esoterically named estore called Poosh – I kid you not. So, any South African disappointed at buying her overpriced rubbish would obviously explete, “Kourtney se Poosh!”
AI stands for Artificial Intelligence but it also stands for Artificial Insemination. Are they independent concepts or intertwined in the world going forward?
Undoubtedly AI is going to revolutionise the human experience. But, is it going to be worse than the car which quickly made farriers, livery stables, poop picker uppers and the like redundant. What about the desktop computer which overnight forced the typing pool to either return to homemaking or to rapidly upskill themselves. An interesting feature will be that while all previous technological changes from the industrial revolution onwards badly affected the working class, this will affect the middle class.
But the worst effect will be on the body of ‘truth’ that underpins the human experience. Up to now, hard truths, like science and history, are directly relatable to some physical artefact. However, AI seems to generate new hard ‘truths’ as well as push new soft ones.
The problem that once a ‘truth’ has been generated it’s out there in the digital universe forever and cannot be removed. When researching a topic, AI will incorporate its other, possibly falsely generated, AI truths in conclusions going forward. This is technically called positive feedback which is not the “Well done Janet,” you receive from the teacher for a good answer. In the real world of cause and effect it’s a bad thing. Like the microphone that picks up the sound from a loudspeaker and feeds the louder sound back into the amplifier to make it even louder and so on until it’s an ear-splitting screech within milliseconds. The AI generated ‘truth’ ends up feeding off its own reality and thereby true reality gets debased. Sure, we can try to check its veracity but it can generate outputs far faster than we can debunk them and this doesn’t even take into account bad actors or countries that wilfully distort reality. Musk’s Grok was a recent example when it went off piste and seemed to incorporate Hitler and the Nazis into any answer it generated. Musk blithely stated that they would just tweak the algorithm not to. Huh! Apart from worrying why it did it in the first place, it highlighted how just altering a few parameters can alter how AI sees the world which will eventually end up being how we see the world. Or what about a bunch of legal cases in America in the past year where filings by lawyers using AI included references to non-existent cases!
Decades ago when robots were becoming commonplace, we were not worried that they could take over. After all, we joked, their attention span is only as long as their power cords. With the advent of the all-pervasive internet, that is no longer true. AI will become embedded everywhere.
The reality of the world is that it’s going to be owned by the algorithm and not humans and it will debase it. And so, we come back to what AI means. I believe AI will end up artificially inseminating humans with its version of reality and end up overpowering humans. Moreover, when combined with direct links from the brain to the digital world via things like Musk’s Neuralink, the future is truly frightening for mere mortals. The film, The Matrix, was a dystopian but reasonably accurate presentation of what brave new world awaits us. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
When I started this piece, I wondered what a Grok, Musk’s AI program, would look like. For a bit of fun, I asked ChatGPT what it thought. In a flash it came back with a comprehensive and fluent description. I was shaken as I had asked it to conceptualize something that didn’t exist and it did so without breaking a sweat or batting an AI-lid. I decided to anthropomorphize a Pac-Man but chose a green colour without any reason other than human gut feeling (and I’m proud of that undefinable concept). The dots represent anything that has been digitised by humans, be it data, images, science, history, creative stuff, thoughts, etc, and the product of AI itself in the future which will eventually overwhelm human input. The ghosts represent whatever you wish them to be.
