The President of the United States isn’t worried about artificial intelligence (AI).

He thought it was no match for natural stupidity. In which case, you could say he had, well, a natural immunity. 

No, the  Overweight, Orange  Oddball did not think AI was a clear and future danger. Neither were the wars in the Middle East or Ukraine, climate change, a possible nuclear Armageddon, or another Covid-style pandemic.

The Rotund Robespierre had been invited to address the 80^th Anniversary of the United Nations  General Assembly. And so he did.  

With some caveats. 

First, he didn’t follow protocol, speaking for an hour instead of the allotted 15 minutes. And he was less than diplomatic. 

If anything, the Pugnacious President pulled out his primer on How-to-Lose-Friends-and-Aggravate-Everyone-You-Didn’t-Care-For-Anyway.  

And what was the major threat facing humanity in the World According to Fatso? 

Going by his speech to UNGA, it was renewable energy. 

The corpulent commander-in-chief was unambiguous about his disdain for climate change. He swept aside two centuries of data with a manly wave of his hand, dismissing the threat as “the biggest con-job ever” and “a hoax.”

The masculine myth-buster went on to assail the UN for pushing the “nonsensical notion.” 

The Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle said “A lie cannot live.” The poor fellow clearly hadn’t met many politicians.   

The Donald, however, was of a different stripe. The news channel France 24said Trump’s UN speech was “peppered with lies.” 

“Lice?” said His Stoutness in horror. He thought it was bad enough the UN pushed the climate change poppycock and now it was harboring vermin? 

Actually, Fat Head was furious with the UN. He felt he’d been  “sabotaged” by the august body. It was an ingrate, he concluded bitterly, because he had single-handedly settled “seven wars in six months” and it didn’t even notice. Nor was he a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize. 

The “sabotage” was three-pronged, therefore, thought through, and a Clear and Present Danger. 

His escalator had stopped mid-climb: his teleprompter had gone on the blink, and his mike had gone out.  

Prime facie, it was the stuff of treason. The First Twerp’s  bloodthirsty press secretary, Karoline Levitt, enthusiastically agreed threatening “severe punishment” to Whom It May Concern. 

The one thing the portly  POTUS agreed with was his greatness. Don’t believe me? Just ask him.

Indeed, he revealed it to the entire assembly. He predicted ruin to Western countries which allowed unchecked immigration.

“I can tell you I’m really good at this.” he confided modestly to a surprised assembly. His bleak prediction: “All you countries are going to hell!” 

He told them because he knew that he knew. And it seemed to be a person-to-holder thing. 

While decrying the climate-change bunkum, he revealed: “Trump has been right about everything. I don’t mean to sound braggadocious but it’s true.”

He continued in a quieter, even admiring tone, “I have been right about everything,” he said as an awed smile crossed his face, leaping from wrinkle to wrinkle like a nimble mountain goat across the Alpine crags. 

“My work here is done,” thought the portly potentate proudly.  

Not quite though. Before he retired, El Rotundo advised pregnant women to skip Tylenol – the US version of Panadol – if they didn’t want autistic babies. 

That was his genius. Women can sometimes make fools of men but The Donald was strictly a do-it-yourself type. 

ENDS 

If you are a sensitive person, the 21^st Century, with its relentless bombardment of sensory info, may not be the place for you. 

Say you understand the Morse code: a tap dancer would drive you crazy. 

Similarly, all the info out there could make any would-be scientist  unsure. As was Tomaki Kojima who felt he might be indecisive but wasn’t sure.

So when he finally hit on an idea for scientific study, sure enough, it was a doozy.  

Tomaki et al  wondered if painting cows with zebra-like stripes would prevent flies from biting them.  

The Japanese team meticulously put tape on beef cows and then spray-painted them with white stripes.

It was Tomaki-san’s eureka moment: fewer flies were attracted to the cows and they seemed less bothered by said insects. The zebras carped that they knew all along but their grumblings were dismissed. 

There’s only one problem. The intrepid scientist admitted it might be “tricky” applying his findings on a large-scale.

Tomaki-san and his team won this year’s Ig-Nobel Prize for Biology,

Since 1991, the Ig-Nobel Prize has “honoured” research that “first makes people laugh and then makes them think.” 

The Prizes are awarded by actual Nobel laureates with the prize money being another doozy: a solitary banknote for the amount of 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (USD 0.40). Even so, the note has since become a collector’s item.

Mr Tomaki’s award for a zebra’s fly-resistant powers left both thrilled.

The zebras chastely declined comment but Kojima-san was rapturous. “Unbelievable. Just unbelievable,” gushed the ignoble biologist who painted himself with stripes to honour the occasion. “It’s been my dream.” 

Another penetratingly perspicacious paper pondered the types of pizza lizards preferred to eat. Today’s lizard diet could be tomorrow’s Herpes Defence. Who knows?

The year’s winners, honoured in 10 categories, also include a European group that found drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak a foreign language, and a researcher who studied fingernail growth for decades. He’s come out with a book for the ages: Watching Nails Grow; How To Tell If Your Cat Is Plotting To Kill You. 

The 35th annual Ig-Nobel prize ceremony is organised by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights meaningless research weeks before the actual Nobel Prizes are announced.

This year’s ceremony included a section called the 24-second lecture where top researchers explain their work in 24 seconds. 

Among them was Gus Rancatore, who spent most of his time licking an ice cream cone and repeatedly saying yum and Trisha Pasricha, who explained her work studying smartphone use on the toilet and the potential risk for haemorrhoids.

Other winners this year included a group from India that studied whether foul-smelling shoes influenced someone’s experience using a shoe rack, and researchers from the United States and Israel who explored whether eating Teflon is a good way to increase food volume. 

There was also a team of international scientists that looked at whether giving alcohol to bats impaired their ability to fly.

Flying under the influence might be batty? Stranger things have happened. 

Finally, there was an Italian  paper on the physics of pasta sauce. As an aside, this team was bet by a Chinese scientist that it couldn’t make a car out of spaghetti.

To quote one of the Italians: “You should have seen her face when we drove paste.”

ENDS

Waitress: “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!” 

Actress Mae West: “Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.” 

Despite its rules, the English language is supple enough for us to have fun with it. 

There’s word play, for instance. Take palindromes which are words or sentences that read the same forwards or backwards. 

Simple ones would be “civic” or “madam.” Or my mother tongue, Malayalam.  

The classier ones would include this most-referenced epigram: A man, a plan, a canal: Panama 

Or this, famously ascribed to Napoleon: Able was I ere I saw Elba. 

This was how the First Meeting began a very, very long time ago: Madam, in Eden, I’m Adam. 

And this guy seems to have a serious problem: Murder for a jar of red rum!

Then there are oxymorons which are phrases where contradictory words are put together to produce an unexpected, even comic, effect. In the original Greek, it literally means “keen stupidity”.

Shakespeare used them (“Sweet Sorrow”). So did the Beatles (“A Hard Day’s Night”) and Paul Simon (“Sound of Silence”).

Some movie titles had them in genuinely intelligent ways. Some  examples would certainly include True Lies; Eyes Wide Shut; and Back to the Future. 

There are funny, even ridiculous, examples. “Friendly fire” isn’t, while “controlled chaos” has never been held in check.  

Another  “definite maybe” is  “civil war.” It’s an absurd and     lunatic phrase. Wars are never mannerly, courteous or polite. If anything, they are frightening, beastly and heartless. 

It gets worse in a nuclear war. In that instance, Abraham Lincoln’s famous condition takes a turn for the hearse, morphing into: “All men are cremated equal”. 

The latter was a pun, craftier jokes that exploit the different meanings of words. Most are self-explanatory as in: my friend drove his expensive car into a tree and saw, first hand, how a   Mercedes bends.  

Life is a series of ups and downs which in jokey fashion might be described thus: One day you’re the best thing since sliced bread; the next, you’re toast.

Rodney Dangerfield was a New York comic famous for delivering killer lines in woebegone fashion: “My ex-wife still misses me but her aim is improving.”

He also had this: “I just found out I’m colour blind. The news came completely out of the green.”

Some jokes come fast and furious: Have you heard about the dyslexic who walked into a bra?

When asked to make a sentence with “lethargy,” TV host Johnny Carson famously replied with a lisp:  “What the world needs is more, not leth-argy”.

And the comic cracked this after the film came out: “Never argue with a dinosaur; you’ll get jurasskicked.”     

Then there’s wit, the ability to come up with intelligently funny, even scathing, stuff. 

This from John Lennon: “So what if I don’t know what apocalypse means? It’s not like it’s the end of the world”.

The poet and writer Dorothy Parker could be sarcastic. She had this to say about Katharine Hepburn’s performance on Broadway: “She ran the  gamut of emotions – from A to B.”

But she could also be practical: “Brevity is the soul of lingerie”.

Even so, the master of the bon mot would have to be English writer, playwright, and full time cynic Oscar Wilde: “Some men cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.” 

And there is very little to beat his wry observation:  “True friends stab you in the front.”

ENDS

You know what they say about two wrongs? 

They’re only the beginning. Look at North Korea. First there was Kim Il Sung, a self-professed military genius who invaded South Korea in 1950 only to be booted out at great cost to life, limb and everyone but himself: he continued to flourish as North Korea’s Great Leader. 

He could be counted on to run any economy into the ground. And he did it with a skill not seen since Bernie Madoff. 

His greatest triumph came in 1990 when the North Korean economy collapsed following the break-up of the Soviet Union. 

His successor was the pudgy Kim Jong Il. Dear Leader tried to make North Korea an export-driven economy not unlike Malaysia but his plan of exporting large, ornate and grandiose statues of himself didn’t find a ready market until the self-confessed economic genius hit on the idea of slipping in nuclear bombs as sweeteners. 

The international outrage that followed forced him to reconsider. Even so, he  took comfort in the advice he received from Vladimir Putin: “If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your preferred choice.” 

His son thought he would not follow in the footsteps of  his less-than-illustrious ancestors.

“Not by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin,” cried North Korea’s soon-to-be Big Enchilada and he turned out to be prescient. The  beefy boy grew into a dumpy despot with more chins than Elizabeth Taylor.

He thought he’d done a better job than his predecessors.

For one thing, his country had more nukes, tanks and soldiers than they had food for the people but that, thought the ample autocrat, was “neither here nor there.” 

The trick now was never to allow his enemies any access to his  heath records.

Example: When Fatso recently met Vlad the Russian in Beijing, the portly plenipotentiary’s staffers wiped down all items he touched. The “Look Ma, no DNA” routine comprises part of security measures to counter foreign spies.

It gets weirder. The corpulent Czar even packs his own toilet. Where Supreme Leader is concerned, it’s “Love Me, Love My Crap.” 

Nothing is beyond belief: he even has his own Patrol for Poop-Protection. 

Such measures, apparently, are standard protocol since the era of Kim’s predecessor, his father Kim Jong Il.  The special toilet and the requisite garbage bags of detritus, waste and cigarette butts are so that a foreign intelligence agency, even a friendly one, does not acquire a sample and test it. 

Apparently, Israel’s Mossad spy agency had charted Yasir Arafat’s complete health profile through a stool sample. 

It’s routine so to speak. In 2019, after a Hanoi summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, Kim’s guards were spotted blocking the floor of his hotel room to clean the room for hours, and taking out items including a bed mattress.

You might say paranoia ran deep in his heart. But the tubby tyrant didn’t care. He knew his enemies were just jealous because “the voices only talked to me.” 

In truth, Korea’s Jabba the Nut was a Marxist so he should have  been an atheist. But he played it safe and declared he was agnostic. 

Even so, he is still a mental mess having been diagnosed as a paranoid dyslexic. The armies of paranoia marched behind his eyes. 

That’s why he spends all his time worrying if there is a Dog. 

ENDS

In the 1960s, the thing was to show patriotism. 

But it had to be carefully stage-managed. Which meant, whenever a Minister of Education visited Seremban, the schools could be relied on to have smiling pupils lining his route waving delighted flags.

The carrot:  we were each rewarded with a paper cup of ice-cold Milo, sweet enough to render a troop of monkeys catatonic with diabetic shock. 

Compulsion has its benefits. Had my school been more democratic, the practice would never have begun.  

To a boy, we loathed it. 

We had to wait at least half an hour before the worthy trundled past complete with sirens, outriders and the paraphernalia of power. We’d be sweating, sticky and hot at a time when air-conditioning, like colour television, was unheard of. It seemed pointless anyway – the car’s windows were usually tinted so you couldn’t see anybody. 

I remember waving an unenthusiastic flag at someone in a big car, said to be Pak Khir, on at least three occasions. 

Many years later, when I met Khir Johari, the amiable, former minister of education, I told him about those compulsory turnouts. To his credit, he looked mortified and apologised immediately. He did that so naturally, I melted. 

Indeed, he turned out to be a very lovely fellow. Moreover, he had a fount of funny stories about Malaysian politics that kept his audience in stitches. He was that rare politician, a former teacher with a  marvelous sense of humour.

Let’s face it, it’s more than I can say for the bunch we got saddled with in the 1980s onward. 

The compulsory conscription of pupils no longer occurs but only because present-day parents no longer countenance its practice.  

But give me the old days anytime. It was easier to be patriotic then. We all went to the same schools, learnt the same things and played the same games. There was a common sense of identity, certainly more than a semblance of it.

The cynical playing up of ethnic and religious differences to win popular support is not a recipe for fostering patriotism on any given day, let alone the nation’s 68^th birthday. 

Why is it impossible to believe that a shopkeeper or anyone else simply made an honest mistake when he flies the flag upside-down? 

The mere fact that they took the trouble to fly the flag at all should win them some appreciation, not condemnation.  

But no, mistakes are punished severely. Two businesses in Johore were ordered closed for 30 days over flag gaffes. 

Now does anyone in his right mind seriously think the same  businesses in Johore might feel inclined to hoist the  national flag again next year? 

People in authority should be less prone to being judgmental. Perhaps leaven small issues with humour instead of vituperation. 

When US actress Raquel Welch donned a bikini made out of the American flag, there were those who grumbled about the propriety of the star spangled swimsuit. 

Nonsense, scoffed the New York Times. If anything, said the paper, it glorified the flag because Ms Welch “is a marvelous breathing embodiment to womankind.”

Happy Merdeka folks. 

ENDS

If we’re familiar with two things, it’s food and where to get the good stuff. 

Before Michelin introduced “two-stars” to indicate “excellent food worthy of a detour,” Kuala Lumpur residents had their own BKT index which showed precisely where, in Klang, a 30 minute drive from KL, the best bah kut teh was served. 

So it came as  no surprise when a national culinary team won gold at the Best National Dishes in the World Competition, held in Dubai last Saturday. 

Yes, it was titled as such. I’d blame the copywriter but maybe that’s Dubai for you.

First, a pointer.  Whenever you patronise a place that uses  “cuisine” instead of “food,” expect your bill to be at least 60% higher than normal. 

Now, back to Dubai. What was the best international dish in the world, according to the Dubai Deemsters? 

It was Nasi Kerabu aka Herb Rice. 

You could say the said rice leaves an impression. It’s in a hue so virulently blue that it may have driven US pop singer Halsey to dye her hair turquoise.

These actions have karmic consequence. The blue tinting of Halsey’s hair was what finished off poor Cyndi Lauper who’d thought orange was the way to go.

Everything’s up in the air now. The fat fruitcake currently occupying the White House has proclaimed Orange the new Plaque so who’s to know how the karmic wheel will spin? 

But I digress as we were talking about the competition, no? Apart from the signature rice dish, the six Malaysian chefs prepared chicken and shrimp dishes delicious enough to convert the heathen. 

The two dishes were also chili-fiery so the sweet and ice-cold cendol served as dessert later may have been such a relief to said judges that it pushed Malaysia over the top. 

As the lead chef said after the fact: “I love it when a plan comes together.” 

He was quoting someone, not the Cannibal for sure, but certainly some Hannibal. 

The Syrians came in second which was no mean feat. Its head chef Youssef Youhanna was already famous for his best-selling book A Device Dodger’s Directory of Damascus but this had to be icing on the cake. 

No, he didn’t make cake but sensibly had opted for what he generally prepared in his house. And everyone knew hummus where the heart is. 

Surprisingly, the Italians were eliminated early: “We just-a needed some Gouda luck.” The Japanese felt bitter thinking they had been given short shrift; “Udon even know our cuisine.”  

But the French were the most outraged. They had been placed third which was wholly unacceptable to a nation that had gifted the baguette to the planet. 

Much to the fury of central banks the world over, they’d also been the people who’d invented the Michelin star system of grading restaurant fare. Over the years, it’s had the effect of boosting food prices and thus, central bank chagrin. 

But the Dubai dilemma was different and delicate. The judges thought alcohol was as necessary to cooking as a bicycle was to a fish. 

“Sacre bleu!” exclaimed the French head chef as he wondered how his coq was to be prepared without the vin? ( His coq au vin was, essentially, bone-in chicken slowly braised in red wine).

“Don’t go bacon my heart,” he  pleaded.

But the judges were unrepentant.

“Dill with it”. 

ENDS

Above all, do no harm.

It’s the overriding objective of the Hippocratic oath, a promise all doctors know. 

Not Akmal Salleh. He’s the go-to guy for petrol whenever there’s a fire raging. And, just when you thought it was safe to believe in medicine, the firebrand is a Russia-trained medic. 

Dr Akmal joins a list of former alumni steeped in the time-honoured practice of divisive race politics to rise in the hierarchy of Malaysian politics. The list includes  four former premiers. Translation: there’s method in his madness, only it’s called the Hypocritic Oath.

The English writer Samuel Johnson put it succinctly. Patriotism, he declared, “is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” 

And scoundrelly stuff seems to be the order of the day.

More than a year ago, a 24-hour convenience store was found selling socks with the word “Allah” printed on them.

It was an honest accident and the owner, an ethnic Chinese businessman, apologised repeatedly. 

No thanks to Akmal, the incident got whipped up to the extent that a few stores got fire-bombed. 

The fact that barely anyone remembers it now illustrates how disproportionate the then-response was.  

Now the fuss is over the flag. The vituperative medico got his knickers in a twist after a hardware shop in Penang accidentally  displayed the national flag upside down. When the owner realised the error, the mistake was rectified and the fellow even apologized.

You’d think that would satisfy a “reasonable” man. Nope.  

The way the pushy physician  pressed for the Chinese shop owner’s prosecution, you’d think he was Heinrich Himmler. 

If only Umno Youth, the branch of the United Malays Nationalist Organisation that Akmal heads, treated corruption with the same evangelical fury….but that is another story.

Things have now changed in a way that makes you believe there might be a God. 

Earlier this week, a chapter of Akmal’s own youth wing  posted an incorrect version of the national flag on social media. It led to a hasty apology and red faces all around – especially in the light of the initial holier-than-thou threats. 

It defused  that particular crisis but it now appears there’re other fish to fry, 

Nurturing  mountains out of molehills was all very well but Umno Youth yearned to see former Malaysian Premier Najib Razak aka Jibsworth exchange his prison cell for house arrest.  

Yes, they wanted him snug as a bug in a rug in the comfortable, air-conditioned climes of his luxurious, Jalan Duta  home where he might serve out the rest of his sentence for “abuse of power and corruption.” 

Lest we forget, Jibsworth together with his pal, the rotund and still-missing  Felonious, were responsible for what the Wall Street Journal described as the “heist of the century.“

It revolved around the theft of RM19 billion from the Malaysian government. The money was raised through US dollar- denominated debt which taxpayers are still paying for.

Putrajaya has paid out RM43.8 billion so far and a balance of RM9.7 billion remains. 

This gargantuan robbery was committed under Jibsworth’s premiership.

You’d think Akmal might be incensed with his former leader’s greed, but no, Umno Youth is calling for the First Felon to serve out his sentence in the comfort of his home. 

Strange would be an understatement, wouldn’t you say? 

ENDS 

The President of today is just the postage stamp of tomorrow. – Words to live by considering the current incumbent.

What does a leader do when confronted by suggestions his policies are bad?

If he’s Donald Trump, he fires bearer of said news and declares victory. 

If it worked before on reality TV, why not in the White House?

Last Friday, US President Donald Trump sacked the head of an important economic institution hours after it released weaker-than-expected jobs data that suggested his tariff policy was hurting the US.  

The Orange Oddball claimed Erika McEntarfer, head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), had “RIGGED” jobs figures “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” 

Actually, the capitals-crazed Top Dog didn’t need Erika, or anyone else, to make him look bad. He could, and often did, that by himself. 

America’s Certifiable Chieftain is convinced that tariffs are the US’ way forward. The markets don’t agree and the BLS’ figures  didn’t help. 

Indeed, Friday’s figures released by BLS showed that employers in the US added only 73,000 jobs in July, far below forecasts of at least 109,000. 

To add insult to injury, the agency revised down employment growth in May and June, reporting 250,000 fewer jobs than previously thought. It was the largest downward revision in employment in 45 years.  

In fairness, the Saffron Sage isn’t the first President to be data-rebuked. During Joe Biden’s presidency, statistics for 12 months over 2023-4 were retroactively revised downward by 818,000 jobs. 

Even so, the BLS’ latest revisions weren’t unexpected:

analysts said it was consistent with other data showing a slowdown. 

If there was one thing America’s Beefy Bossman hated more than illegal immigrants, it was criticism. And any talk of a slowing economy under HIS watch, was DEFCOM 4 and not to be tolerated.  

It was back to the old playbook: Deny, Obfuscate, Contradict and Punish.  

That’s exactly what the Corpulent Commander-in-Chief did. 

He denied and contradicted. “The Economy is BOOMING under TRUMP” he posted on his Truth Social network. 

Interestingly, he referred to himself in the third person, a trait often associated with narcissism.  

The Hefty Head Honcho had better get used to bad news because the majority of economists are now united in decrying his “Brilliant” tariffs. 

Even the Economist, a right-wing  publication, described his  tariff war as “mindless” and “bound to cause havoc.”

Some people see more sinister overtones in his latest outburst. This from former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers: “Firing the head of a key government agency because you don’t like the numbers they report is what happens in authoritarian countries.” 

Mr Summers was alluding to Project 2025, a political initiative to reshape the US federal government and consolidate executive policy in favour of right-wing policies.   

The Nobel-craving, Heavyset Head of State has consistently denied any attachment to Project 2025 but analysts note that his term seems devoted to entrenching the executive’s grip on the state. 

Next in his cross-hairs could be Jerome Powell, the hapless chairman of the Federal Reserve. The central bank continues to leave interest rates unchanged much to Donny’s chagrin.  

The First Felon is demanding a cut, but the Fed is holding fire until it sees the full impact of tariffs on the US economy. 

The trouble is Donald “I-know-more-about-interest-rates-than-anyone” Trump knows he cannot lose. 

That’s just not in the script. 

ENDS 

It’s so hot, the cows are giving evaporated milk. – Anonymous 

When we were playing in a pub in the late 1970s, the only free drink we could expect from management was ice-water. 

Except it was never called that. In the spirit of the booze-fuelled environment we were in, it was always sky juice on the rocks.

I’d say we need a lot more sky juice right about now, preferably falling from the heavens in bucketfuls.

There are certain things Malaysians, especially those living in Kuala Lumpur, accept with resignation. Traffic jams spring to mind. 

But when did the haze become part of the Kuala Lumpur condition?

People accept the haze with the same fatalistic resignation they accord cancer. The Meteorology Dept now casually throws it into the weather mix – “hazy and hot with a 30 per cent chance of rain in the evening.” 

To us elderly gents who remember the “no haze at all” years, it’s a disturbing  phenomenon that began in the 1990s. Suddenly, the Indonesians, who’ve been practising  “slash and burn” cultivation techniques for generations, were letting those fires get out of control. And like an invading army, smoke is no respecter of borders.   

Now that we accept it, we quibble, we rationalise and, yes, we play it down if only to make us feel batter. 

“Yes, it’s hazy but at least you can’t smell it.”  

“C’mon, it’s nowhere near 1997. Now that was a  real horror. This is nothing.” 

In fact,  I do remember 1997 as a real horror. In late 1997, the Kuala Lumpur skyline emerged as a  dystopian landscape of fog, fire and unholy smoke. 

It felt like the end of the world not least because the Asian Financial Crisis was upon us. Companies were going bust, people were losing jobs and it appeared Pandora had simply dumped the contents of Her Box all over Southeast Asia. 

The good news is this isn’t 1997. Not by a long chalk. 

It’s hazy and bloody hot but it could be worse. And let’s face it, that’s something to talk about right there. I mean, if the weather didn’t change once in a while, most people wouldn’t have a conversation starter. 

“I bet you doctors just love this haze. They must be minting money.” 

And so on…..

Maybe climate change is behind this. I certainly don’t remember such hot nights when I was growing up. Two nights ago, I think it was still 30 degrees after 11. 

Seriously, I don’t think anyone In Seremban ever had air conditioning in their houses in the 1970s but I  remember, with a fan on,  we still had to have blankets when we went to bed at nights. 

But strange things are happening courtesy of climate change. In North Vietnam, apparently, a heatwave is causing hens to lay hard boiled eggs. 

Worse, it was so hot in Washington  yesterday, Donald Trump was chagrined to see a squirrel fanning its nuts. 

Finally, this weather business is unpredictable so we should stop cursing the Meteorological Department.

Weather forecasting is a lot like sex: it may produce some practical results but that’s not why we do it. 

ENDS

What makes him think that a middle aged actor, who’s played with a chimp, could have a future in politics? – Ronald Reagan, on Clint Eastwood running for Mayor of Carmel 

Thou shall always blame someone else. 

It was a Golden Rule for Donald Trump. When confronted with a misstep – from deadly Texas floods to fatal air-crashes into the Potomac – the Donald’s reflexive, go-to option was to blame Joe Biden. He even blamed his hapless predecessor for Gaza, a stretch if ever there was one. 

All this in addition to the Golden Rule itself: he who holds the Gold, Rules. He’d never forget that. It was how a Grifter-in-Chief kept his bank balances healthy after his term ended. 

This reality seems to have eluded the Republicans. The same group used to pillory the Biden “crime family.” But Hunter Biden’s “lapses” are penny-ante stuff compared to the billions being raked in by the Trump Empire.

When asked if this wasn’t hypocritical, a Republican Senator retorted that “at least, it’s done openly.” 

Apparently, transparent conflict-of- interest behaviour is manly cheating in the Republican Book of Ethics. Except there’s a small problem – it’s forbidden by US law. 

The US Constitution’s Emoluments Clause expressly prohibits a sitting President from “accepting  gifts, payments or any benefits from foreign governments.”  

Truth be told, no one thought the Donald worried about trifling things like The Law, least of all the US Supreme Court. 

He’d promised to go to Washington to “drain the swamp” but there’d been too many friendly alligators there and he’d ended up being their King, 

Mr Trump was an intensely insincere man who vowed to do everything he could for the working man, except become one. 

He was a profoundly religious politician who, when he assumed office, insisted on taking the oath of office upon the Bible. Yet his prudence dictated that he not touch it lest one or the other burst into flame. 

His faith allowed him calm, nay resolve, in the face of revelations that his Big, Beautiful Bill would add over US$4 trillion to an already-colossal  deficit. 

He merely recited what he remembered from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the children for they shall inherit the National Debt.”

Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu tried to suck up to him by nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize, a grotesque endorsement that one late night show host likened to “receiving a Husband of the Year nomination from O J Simpson.”

But the US Internal Revenue Service knew the truth: it felt the Donald  should be nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. His income tax returns were the most imaginative works of fiction being written today. 

The President was a modest fellow who was generous to a fault: he didn’t mind the strain of having to be right all the time. Actually, he enjoyed it so much he kept telling everyone how good he was. 

Don’t believe me? Ask him.

The US legislative system was based on a simple principle – that no party could fool all of the people all of the time. That was why the US had two parties.  

That was the theory. In practice, the Donald  never consulted Congress, issuing, instead, a slew of Executive Orders that no one read, least of all himself. 

What’s amazing is that the American people not only put up with it, they accept his near-constant lying. 

They will have to put up with that for a very long time, even after he’s left the presidency.  

Because, even in death, he will lie still.

ENDS