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.
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.
To paraphrase the Bard, “Cry hoax and let slip the dogs of Infowars (and Fox, all the Cabinet toadies and more).” Normally Trump uses the word hoax as an offensive weapon to put the Democrats on the back foot. In the Epstein files case, he’s using it as a deflection, in other words, as an offensive defence. But let’s go back a bit to put a bit of meat into the muddled stew that constitutes Trump’s life.
Having stroked his ego with the successful realIty TV series, The Apprentice, Trump decided to create the biggliest ever reality TV show based on the US Presidency. Having flirted with a variety of political parties, he eventually settled on the Republican Party to contest the 2016 election. He saw there was a bunch of disgruntled conservatives who had a variety of gripes and completely distrusted the Federal government. They hated the rich financiers who they reckoned controlled everything, they hated the weak, commie leftist liberals who embraced LGBTQIA, Black and women’s rights and were soft on crime. At the same time, they bought into every conspiracy theory, no matter how wacky. With his fact free and loose freewheeling style, this was something he could work with. He created the MAGA slogan which actually became a movement itself. What was to become the (MAGA) Base, comprised rabid right-wing podcasters, conspiracy nut jobs, Qanon, The Proud Boys, the alt-right, The Oath Keepers, in fact, anyone who had a grudge. He also got the unquestioning backing of Fox News who daily sacrificed their journalistic integrity to support him and he somehow managed to get the evangelicals onside even though he is the antithesis of everything they stand for.
Like a good farmer, he assiduously nurtured his Base, mulching and watering them daily. Using lies, misdirections, misrepresentations, exaggerations, deflections and hoaxes faster than a school shooter spits bullets from his AR 15 assault rifle, he won the 2016 elections against the polling expectations and probably even his own. When he assumed office, it was obvious that he hadn’t thought things through. Like the dog that actually catches the car it’s chasing – what does he do with it? Using medieval English royalty monikers, he would have been called, King Trump, The Unready. After four chaotic years the Orange Jesus was ignominiously booted out of office by a sentient Zimmer frame.
Emboldened by the Base, Trump denied losing and still uses it as a rallying cry for them along with all his victimhood falsehoods. Rallying for his re-election in 2024, he turbocharged his trusty playbook. He added talking points of inflation, that all illegal immigrants are probably MS 13 or Trens de Aragua gang members, of shredding the Federal behemoth and how he was going to use tariffs to screw the whole world to usher in America’s new Golden Era. In between all this he appealed to the heart of the Base by repeatedly promising to release all the files of their favourite conspiracies – Area 51 and UFOs, the JFK and MLK assassinations and finally the Epstein paedophile files.
He kept his promise but the releases were been decidedly tepid. Over a month ago when Pam Bondi was asked about the Epstein client list which the alt-right were salivating about, she said it was sitting on her desk. It is undeniable common knowledge that Epstein and Trump were bff’s for over a decade before they had a falling out over a real estate deal so it is obvious that Trump’s name would feature prominently given their shared proclivities as regards women. Even if they were not lolitas, the optics would be disastrous and that is one thing that Trump is attuned to. When the list was not published, the Base started erupting. Bondi then revised her statement to remove the specific reference to the client list. The frustrated Base went wild and rebelled when they realised they had been played.
In a classic Trumpian manoeuvre, he reframed his promised drive to get to the bottom of the Epstein case as a hoax perpetrated by the Biden administration as he stated, “I can say this. Those files were run by the worst scum on Earth. They were run by Comey, they were run by Garland, they were run by Biden and all of the people that actually ran the government, including the autopen.”
This is classic political gaslighting – making people believe the opposite to reality. The ultimate shell game – now you see it, now you don’t.
27/28th April 1994 were miracle days for South Africa when it witnessed the first truly democratic elections in the country. Sure, there was some pre-election violence particularly between the IFP and the ANC jockeying for power, but compared to other countries in history who had gone through such a radical and virtually overnight upheaval of their existing order, this was remarkably benign.
One positive takeaway that became legend from those days was the voting line – the snaking queues of people patiently waiting under the African sun to make their mark for the promise of a better future. That voting line became a symbol of our transition. Port Elizabeth has celebrated it with the Voting Line sculpture on the Donkin Reserve overlooking the town. It comprises 67 life size people from all walks of life cut from stainless steel plate and strung out in a meandering queue ending up with Madiba at the base of Port Elizabeth’s gargantuan flagpole pole. Heady stuff.
For a while we dared to dream even through Mbeki’s pipedreams and misguided pontifications, and Zuma’s selfish corruption. But, 31 years on, we have reached the point of no return. At best, we are a perpetual mediocrity, a continually failing state that is one misstep away from the vortex of a Zimbabwean descent into economic hell.
What has brought on SMAC’s dystopian view of the future? It was the report last week that applications for the 5,500 Police positions had closed after – wait for it – 1,000,000 had been received! Really! Is being a policeman such a nice job that everyone just wants to be one? Obviously not! The uplifting concept of the voting line has been replaced by the unemployment line, the SASSA queues and the job application line (and crime of course).
The bald truth is that the ANC has failed the country – dismally. While it has been laser focussed on ideology and transformation, and while underwriting corruption, it has forgotten or does not know how to grow the economy at a rate faster than the population and illegal immigrant growth rate. Pro rata, the economic pie has got smaller exacerbated by the increasingly skewed wealth distribution among Blacks leading to desperation as witnessed by the police job applications.
It might be argued that from such a wide selection, those lucky 5,500 successful candidates will represent the best choice after race, gender and disability ratios have been met but do they really want to be cops? No! They have no deep-down internal desire to be the good guy and to catch the bad guy. All they want is a government job – a sinecure for life. They will never have pride in their work and strive to make a difference. Of those 5,500 successful desperados, some will do well but many will relax once appointed and consign the police service to mediocrity for the rest of their lives and that is the ultimate crime – the price of 31 years of ANC failure stretching on to a future of continual failure.
There is no ceiling to Trump’s character flaws. Is his desire to have the glitziest or biggliest or largest just part of his crass and puerile showmanship because he’s not very bright and it’s the only game he knows: or does he suffer from inadequacy issues?
We saw recently how in awe he was of the Emir of Qatar’s cast-off luxury jet which was a younger model than his and was more tastefully decorated in gold than his clunkier old jet. It seems to parallel his trading in of wives for younger models until he ended up with the most transactional and iciest of them all. Judging by the body language, he’s not getting any nooky at home and since he can’t grab them by the kitty cat or spend his down time with porn stars anymore, he’s taken to groping the US flag and even kissing it. So being the self-crowned Midas king of bad taste and MAGA, it is natural that he desired a public display of the erection of the mightiest symbol, the US flag on the largest flagpole he could afford. In a cringeworthy televised vaudeville act he supervised the exxxxxxx of his gift to America. He thought he was very clever referring to the e-word multiple times and saying that he couldn’t say it, nudge, nudge, wink, wink. What a raconteur this man thinks he is. Apart from its height of 88ft (26,8m) or 100ft (30,5m), depending on the report, he waxed lyrical and spewed unsubstantiated superlatives about the attributes of his erection to the fawning reporters so perhaps we should put it into perspective.-
What many SMAC consumers don’t know is that SMAC moonlights (or is it the other way around) as a hack historian on Port Elizabeth. The heights commanding the Port Elizabeth CBD and harbour are known as the Donkin Reserve and can arguably be considered the founding point of the town. It was here that the Acting Governor of the Cape Colony, Sir Rufane Donkin, designated the surrounding area to be known as Port Elizabeth, named after his beloved late wife Elizabeth, and erected a pyramid as a memorial to her. Astute readers will note that I do not refer to Gqeberha as that was just a general name given to the area by the Khoi en route from one pastoral gig to another and they weren’t hanging around to erect pyramids and do civic stuff. (Miaow) He also declared that the area was to remain unencumbered. Apart from the lighthouse, it remained so until the 2010 Soccer World Cup and, also suffering from inadequacy issues, the Council decided to erect the largest flagpole in South Africa. It is 60m (later increased to 68m) and carries a huge flag of 12m x 5m.
That trumps your flagging ego, Donald!
PS. The world’s tallest flagpole at 201m is in Cairo, just another shithole African country. Port Elizabeth’s doesn’t even make the top 50, so where does that leave Trump’s much talked about erection?
By throwing his considerable heft around and through lies, blackmail and threats, Big, Bad Don, or the Bigliest Clown of the 21st Century, has managed to strongarm his BBB (Big Beautiful Bill) through both the House and the Senate. But for the Republican Party, it might prove to be a Faustian bargain. The BBB is like a BBL (Brazilian Butt Lift) and just as gross, or as Musk puts it, “a disgusting abomination”. And just like the BBL, the misrepresentations by the promoters are not going to age well and the BBB is actually going to push America’s problem of a fiscal deficit over the edge into uncontrollable territory.
The BBB could ultimately prove to be the downfall of Malice in MAGAland’s idea of the new America. Appropriately SMAC’s response is based on the 1961 country hit, which resonates with the MAGAlanders’ heroic John Wayne type outlook on life, and is titled, Big Bad Don.
Every day, long after nine you could see him arrive. He stood six foot one, weighed two forty five. Kinda narrow at the shoulder and big at the hip And everybody knew ya didn’t give no lip to Big Don.
Nobody seemed to know where Don called home. He just flew around, golfed and stayed all alone. Maligning people, he wasn’t at all shy. If anyone opposed, he just said goodbye, the Big Don
Couldn’t have raped her, she was below par. Then he got into a fight over a big porn star And got a crushin’ blow when put on the stand Said I’ll see ya later when I win my next hand, Big Don
Then the polls collapsed at the end of the next term, But while the party cracked, big Don stood firm. GOPers were saying this term is our last. They all said they′d better jump fast, ‘cept Don
Through the lies and the smoke of his self-made hell Shambled a bent old man, a hollowed-out shell, Grabbed a 3-wood and hit the ball with a groan, But he won the round ‘cos he played there alone, Big Don
(Ding Dong) (Ding Dong) Big Bad Don (Ding Dong)
A last throw of his dice, again attacked the Fed But the GOPers said, “There’s an exit up ahead!” As two twenty men escaped a political grave, There′s one left they’re not going to save, big Don
With hammers and timbers they battened him down. Still smoke and gas and bile belched from that clown. The word salads and tangents came so thick and fast, That even Fox dupes knew this was the end at last for Don
(Ding Dong) (Ding Dong) Big Bad Don (Ding Dong)
No third term, he was shunned and on his own. Even Melania glared icily and left him alone. Finally, his orange face became white and deadpan. His epitaph read, ”Here lies a vain, stupid man.”
(Ding Dong) (Ding Dong) Big Bad Don (Ding Dong) (Ding Dong)
It was Sunday, the 1st of September 2019 when Trump discovered his superpower. But perhaps we must backtrack a few days to give context.
On Wednesday 29 August 2019, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) gave Trump a briefing on hurricane Dorian, potentially a category 5, which was heading on a trajectory to smack into Florida 4 days hence. Since Donald responds well to pretty pictures, they had their Advisory 21 from 5am that morning, pictorially showing the predicted track, blown up and displayed on an easel in the Oval Orifice. He probably saw this as an opportunity to show up previous presidents’ responses to natural disasters and so cancelled his visit to Poland. He must have cogitated a bit more on it as the weekend approached since his reptilian brain probably only remembered the chart’s prediction showing it hitting just to the north of Mar-a-Lago and a bulge extending to the Gulf of Mexico on the other side of the dangly Florida appendix.
Without consulting FEMA again, after all he was the resident ‘stable genius’, he tweeted on Sunday, 1 September: “In addition to Florida – South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated. Looking like one of the largest Hurricanes ever. Already category 5.” The panic that ensued in Alabama where Dorian was not expected caused the Alabama office of the National Weather Service to issue an advisory 20 minutes later that Alabama “will NOT see any impacts from Dorian”.
If he had just consulted Advisory 32 from 5am that morning, he would have seen that the prediction was for the hurricane to hook north and follow the eastern seaboard. He took so much flak that on Wednesday 4 September, he held a televised press meeting showing the original Advisory 21 only now mysteriously marked up with a Sharpie to extend the vague 4-5 day prediction to include a nibble of Alabama as justification and presented it as the original! Note that it is a Federal offence to alter an official weather map but that was meaningless to Trump. He was now God and he wielded his Sharpie heroically.
Fast forward to 2025 and his second presidency. In some ways he had it tougher than Moses. After all, while waiting for Slo Joe to pop his clogs, he had to wander around his golf courses for four whole years buttonholing everyone about the election fraud committed against himself. He got his way when Slo Joe showed that beathing and stumbling around were a highly overrated path to success and Trump was elected president for the second time. He and Project 2025 had used the interregnum wisely: They had completed their 1000+ page revolutionary MAGAfesto while he sharpened his Sharpie and practiced his erratic signature which looks like the movements of a demented squirrel on tik.
When he returned to his rightful place, he was mightily upset. His people had been worshipping false gods in Biden, Harris et al and had embraced heretical concepts like DEI, gender affirmation, climate change and immigrant cat eaters. He signed edict after edict to eradicate these concepts and lead his people back onto the path of MAGA righteousness. Moses issued 10 commandments. With Sharpie in hand, Trump issued 143 edicts in the first 100 days on the throne with 26 coming on the first day – suck on that Moses! It was a dirty job but someone had to do it.
