• Interesting NPR report on the recent disputed election in Cameroon, where the 92-year-old president, Paul Biya claims to have won an eighth 7-year term despite him spending much of his time cheating at gold at his Florida resort in Switzerland: “In Cameroon, the world’s oldest leader claims victory — again.”
Emmanuel Akinwolu’s final paragraph puts that election in the context of African politics more generally, but since he knows he’s writing for an American audience, I’m not sure he’s only talking here about African politics:
Biya’s long absences and his government’s tightening grip have fueled anger and uncertainty. Cameroon’s crisis reflects a broader pattern across Africa: youthful populations ruled by aging leaders clinging to power through managed elections and weakened institutions.
As far as I understand, Paul Biya is still in relatively good health for a 92-year-0ld. He hasn’t been taken for multiple MRIs without explanation, nor been administered regular dementia screenings that he mistook for “very difficult IQ tests.” Nor has he drifted off to sleep mid-post on his social media accounts. But I’m still not convinced he’ll still live through his entire term as president.
And when he dies, there will be celebrations in the streets.
• I’ve long admired the design and message of many of the propaganda posters the United States produced during World War II. but I had never seen Mexico’s contributions to this art form until I came across this thread of them on BlueSky. Mexican WWII posters went hard.
• “Are You OK, Google AI? Do You Need A Policeman Or A Grownup?”
The bloggers of Wonkette have been exploring the wonders of A.I. Not on purpose.
Using Google to search for an older post on the site about refugees, one of them typed in “Wonkette refugees,” which somehow convinced Google’s new Clippy-esque “A.I. assistant” to start providing — i.e., hallucinating, inventing, fabricating — an entire alternate universe in which their site was ripped to shreds by controversy, spawning a host of new projects from supposedly ex-Wonkette bloggers — all of it wildly detailed despite being entirely imaginary, implausible, and bizarre.
Doktor Zoom was surprised to find that Google A.I. even provided excerpts from his own imaginary new blog that it imagined he started after it imagined he left the site. “I’m no expert on me,” the real Dok writes, “but I don’t think I write like that.” (If Google A.I. had provided not just an excerpt, but a link to this alternate-universe Doktor Zoom blog this would have been a much creepier, Black Mirror-meets-Cam story.)
Stories like this are somewhat comforting in that they reassure me that Skynet and the Rise of the Machines is still not a likely near-future scenario. (But then I realize the scope of the suffering that will follow the collapse of the A.I. Tech Bubble and I’m less reassured.)
• I enjoyed this story from earlier this month — “Cheyenne Man Breaks Wyoming State Record With 2,085-Pound Pumpkin.” The headline is somewhat misleading as growing a 2,000-pound pumpkin requires a team effort. The growers’ passion for this project and their enthusiasm for the competition were fun to see. Measurement-vs.-weight is a fascinating sub-topic in the competitive pumpkin-growing community, but mainly I’m just delighted that there exists such a thing as a competitive pumpkin-growing community.
I went back to find that story again after reading this from The Smithsonian: “The Giant Pumpkin World Record Just Crept Closer to 3,000 Pounds. Here’s How Science, Sweat and ‘Soul Crush’ Keep Growers Reaching for the Heaviest Fruit Possible.”
Somewhat dismayed to learn that the new record was established by twin brothers in the UK. Back when Biden was president, America grew the world’s largest pumpkins. But not anymore. Sad.
• I was disappointed to learn that Mafia-run rigged poker games are now a high-tech enterprise involving X-ray tables and special glasses or contact lenses for reading cards marked with special inks.
This seems like cheating at cheating. Call me a hide-bound traditionalist, but I don’t respect a rigged poker game unless it involves somebody like Ricky Jay doing what he does here.
• CBN — the right-wing white Christian cable network’s “news” division — has always been enthusiastically credulous for every new grifter hitting the Warnke Circuit with dramatic “ex-Satanist” testimony. But this headline was particularly startling for seeming to suggest a brand new theory of the atonement: “Jesus Saved His Dad from Satanism, and Freed Him from a Dozen Demons.”
Then again, it’s not really a brand new theory — a lot of these white Christians already believed that “Jesus Saved His Dad” who was otherwise powerless in His addictive need for bloodthirsty vengeance.
For a lovely counterpoint to that slander against the character of God, see Richard Beck on Julian of Norwich: “The Quantity of a Hazelnut.”
“It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it.” Preach, sister.
• Julian of Norwich is not officially a saint. But the “ex-Satanist” Bartolo Longo now is.
Longo was a devout philanthropist who gave lots and lots of money to build shrines, and there’s a long history of paying back such donors by later canonizing them as saints. Whatever. But my cousins at the Vatican still ought to have been a bit more skeptical about Longo’s claims of having been a “Satanist.” The main reason that Bartolo Longo is remembered as an “ex-Satanist” is because Cornerstone magazine wasn’t around back in the 1800s.
But in St. Bartolo’s defense, at least he never stole huge chunks of George Carlin’s act and tried to pass it off on his own stuff.
(It still irks me that Wikipedia’s page on Mike Warnke details his marital scandals and his massively debunked lies about having been a “Satanic high priest,” but it doesn’t say anything about his whole “Christian comedy” career stemming from him being a joke thief and milking a church audience that wouldn’t realize they were just being served warmed-over Carlin bits. (The park-in-a-driveway/drive-in-a-parkway bit and that type of stuff, not the Seven Dirty Words, obviously.))
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