On Trump and Tylenol

Posted on

In an opening paragraph dripping with sarcasm, as the Marmalade Moron and his brainworm-addled side gimp gave us the answers to autism yesterday (see below), I was reminded of the other times that grifting politicians had helped out humanity by miraculously discovering causes and cures for well-known ailments.

OK, it’s mainly HIV and Covid, but still…

How could we forget Manto Tshabalala-Msimang – our ex-Health Minister, and now also ex-alive – who claimed that HIV could be prevented by a diet of beetroot, garlic, lemons, olive oil and African potatoes?

President (not then and thankfully not now) Jacob Zuma who did have relations with that woman, but then took a shower to prevent infection with HIV.

Let’s not omit Yahya Jammeh, ex-despotic leader of Gambia and all-round bastard:

whose only positive contribution to society was curing people of AIDS using herbs and prayer.
On Thursdays. Seriously.

Amazingly, despite all of these interventions almost 20 years ago, the spread and impact of HIV seems to have been best controlled by the rollout of ARVs and PrEP.

Weird that.

Bringing things a little bit back to the present, Covid brought all the weirdos back out of the woodwork.

Let’s stay in Africa with Tanzania’s ex-President John Magufuli and his plan to get rid of Covid by inhaling steam, and using herbs and prayer.

“You inhale while you pray to God, you pray while farming maize, potatoes, so that you can eat well and corona fails to enter your body. They will scare you a lot, my fellow Tanzanians, but you should stand firm.”

Didn’t really work for him, as he allegedly contracted Covid-19 and died from heart complications a couple of weeks later, but that’s not to say he was wrong.

Well, it is.

Trump told us to use Hydroxychloroquine to combat Covid, but then again, he also said that we should inject bleach to rid ourselves of the virus. Is there really anyone so stupid as to actually do that, though?

Yes, of course there is.

And then there’s his Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. What a goon.

He despises “Big Pharma” while still punting Ivermectin (made by… er… “Big Pharma”) as the cure for everything (it’s not). And he studiously ignores the ills of “Big Supplement” and “Big Snake Oil” while repeatedly and completely dismissing “Real Science” – including denying that HIV is the causal agent of AIDS and suggesting that 5G masts are being used to control our behaviour.

In which case, could someone please switch him off?

But back to that theatre show last night, hinted at by the Tangerine Twat over the weekend:

“Tomorrow we’re going to have one of the biggest announcement[s] … medically, I think, in the history of our country,” he said. “I think you’re going to find it to be amazing. I think we found an answer to autism.”

A whole 5 months of no research have got them further than every other scientist ever. These guys are superhuman. So it turns out that it was Tylenol all along, then? That’s slightly differnt to RFK Jr.’s previous assertions that it was vaccines and/or environmental toxins, but hey, the facts really don’t matter here.

They never have.

As Trump said yesterday:

“It’s not that everything’s 100% understood or known, but I think we’ve made a lot of strides.”

Oh, I think that there are a few things that we can 100% understand and know. And one of those is that literally whatever these two clowns state as the truth is completely the opposite. Once again, it’s the experts versus the grifters.

I’m really not sure what the Salmon Shithead and his sidekick stand to gain from this ridiculous “discovery”. I’m sure that there will be money in it somewhere for them. Because it surely can’t be the fame in being the guys who rid the world of autism, given that nothing they have said is going to make the slightest bit of difference to those diagnoses.

And as we noted above, time will tell and history will judge – and ridicule – their ongoing nonsensical, alleged “scientific” triumphs.

Sadly, in the meantime, there will be more complications in pregnancy as mothers-to-be avoid a completely harmless medication and instead choose to “fight like hell” (his words) to only take it in cases of extreme fever.

“There’s no downside”

said Trump, being wrong yet again. Because:

“While you’re pregnant, experiencing uncontrolled fevers or some of the side effects from pain, such as high blood pressure, will be a lot more detrimental to a developing baby and a mother than paracetamol will be,” said Dr Monique Botha, who studies bias in autism research at the University of Durham.

My advice?

Listen to the experts, none of whom were the ones talking bullshit at the White House last night.

Coming (going?) soon…

Posted on

I was making plans for a Heritage Day braai on Wednesday, but honestly, what’s the point when the world is going to end tomorrow?

And it’s a South African pastor who has predicted it:

“The rapture is upon us, whether you are ready or not,” exclaimed Pastor Joshua Mhlakela. “God took me to see the future… and there in heaven, in the throne room, I see Jesus sitting… and I could hear him very loud and clear saying, ‘I am coming soon.’”

It sounds like maybe Mhlakela got there just after Mrs God had shouted that dinner was ready or something, I don’t know.

But much like all the other times that the world has been ending for religious (rather than thermonuclear war) reasons, this also won’t happen and there will be some quick goalpost moving, some pathetic explanation trotted out for the pathetically gullible, and we’ll all move on again – until next time.

Just remember to get your loyalty card stamped.

Of course, not only has organised religion been deeply involved in this sort of nonsense for many years, this time, it’s also all been fuelled and amplified by that highest of intellectual forums: TikTok.

Obviously, if it does happen (which it clearly won’t), I’m going to look a bit silly, but that’s a chance that I am willing to take. And if you look at what the Bible says will precede the big day (and you’re willing to tweak the words a bit and put a bit of spin on it), then you can absolutely see why some people genuinely think that Pastor Mhlakela might have got it spot on. War, famine, earthquakes (at a stretch) and widespread abandonment of the church.

And actually, maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. We humans do seem to be insistent on destroying the planet (and each other) as best we can. You can see why the Big Guy Upstairs might choose now to pull the plug.

But honestly, if all the insufferable Christians get beamed up, maybe the world would be a better place.

And if we can stretch it out to Wednesday, then I can paraphrase Matthew 24:40-42:

“Two men will be braai’ing together in the garden; one will be taken, the other left. Two women will be sorting the salads inside; one will be taken, the other left. So you, too, must keep watch! For you don’t know what time your Lord is coming, and whether He’s going to arrive late with a whole frozen spatchcocked chicken.”

The worst braai guest.

See you tomorrow. And see you Wednesday, too.
Really, I will.

Useful map

Posted on

Not sure why you would ever need it, but if you ever did, then here it is:

Basically, a handy guide to which country you would end up in if you left the UK (or Ireland) and went straight North, South, East or West.

I might have to do one of these for SA.  I know that if you head straight out from Suiderstrand, you end up in Uruguay. And if you head south from anywhere, you end up in Antarctica.

The East coast needs some work though.

The Carrier

Posted on

This is a post about a rather unsettling piece of artwork I saw on the internet today.

But first, since we’re talking about carriers (the title is the name of the artwork), let me just document the demise of a couple of birds that I know about in Agulhas over the last two days. Both from avian influenza, one a Cape Gannet (species listed as Vulnerable) and one an African penguin (species listed as Critically Endangered). Two deaths is bad, but it’s not a lot to go on scientifically. However, AI (the virus not the annoying computer thing all over Facebook) is rife in South Africa at the moment. Are these discoveries just unfortunate chance or is this a sign of a bigger problem on the way?

Watch this space, I guess.

But then the artwork thing. And this is not AI in any sense of the acronym.

A hyper-realistic sculpture from Australian (but born in Sierra Leone) artist Patricia Piccinini. It’s… yeah. It’s this:

Created in 2012 as part of her Curious Affection exhibition, it’s a bit odd and a bit disturbing, but then so is a lot of her other work. I’m really not sure what to read into this, so I went and found someone that (thought they) did:

It seems the carrier and woman are connected in some way, physically but also emotionally, therein lies the conflict. Perched up high, she looks comfortable and content to rely on his assistance, yet what is their relationship, why is he carrying her, is it an equal partnership, or is he just performing a service? We can wonder if the carrier is the next step in post-human technology, his life seems perfectly engineered to the task he performs, and it is feasible that he is happily self-employed.

It’s a lot to take from an odd ape carrying a woman in a frock, but it’s far more than I was able to get from it. So fair enough.

But this isn’t an unusual piece from Piccinini. Her work regularly drags DNA across species boundaries:

Her Madonnas are not clothed for piety but brazen and naked, half-ape, bristling with hair. Babies in swaddling have adult faces and snouts. Nature’s expected laws of delineation – defining scales from skin, bones from feathers, sacs from follicles – are collapsed, all rules rewritten.

Thank goodness she wasn’t set loose on anything for Canberra’s centenary celebrations in 2013. She’d probably have come up with a giant 100ft hot air balloon called the SkyWhale with eight pendulous breasts and a friendly face. Ha.

I’m sorry… she did what? It had… ten… ten pendulous breasts. Oh, OK then.

Of course it did.

What’s uncanny about Piccinini’s work is not that an artist’s mind can conjure such creatures. It’s that the finesse of their detail make every variegated body that she crafts seem suddenly possible.

Amazing skill, but actually I don’t want them to “seem suddenly possible”.
Really not my thing. Properly odd and yes, deeply unsettling.

Sleep well this evening, won’t you?