Author: admin

Of course Mamdani won.

At some point our idiot president decided “I think Mamdani should be the next mayor of NYC.”

It’s not that he decided that on purpose — he doesn’t have the brain capacity for that.

But in whatever dim region of his brain that continues to function, he might have realized that New Yorkers would do the opposite of whatever he suggested.

And so he endorsed Cuomo, thereby ensuring that no self-respecting New Yorker will ever vote for Cuomo. For that, we owe him thanks.

It is the day before election day. I guess we will find out tomorrow exactly how fed up people are.

Wish us luck.

I’ve developed a style of teaching through the years. I vary it from time to time, but there is always a common thread.

In order to teach computer graphics techniques and algorithms, I create interactive visuals that let me guide the students through the various concepts. So it becomes a kind of magic show, with the promise that at the end of the class the students will become fellow magicians.

I’ve come to realize that this style of presentation is a sort of “procedural storytelling”. At the core is a strong narrative, which needs to built on compelling and exciting ideas.

But those ideas are presented visually as a live interactive demo, so that people are able see those ideas coming to life and coalescing before their eyes. Which, when you think about it, is pretty cool.

We watch in collective astonishment as an incompetent would-be dictator embarrasses us with his fixation on gold plated toilet bowls and bloated ballrooms and cruelly withholding SNAP funds and raising taxes (he calls it “tariffs” and thinks that means nobody will notice it’s actually a punishing tax on the American people).

The net effect this coming Tuesday will be that the farmers and struggling working class people who voted him in will stay home in disappointment and disgust. Meanwhile millions of other Americans will race to the polls to vote for Mamdani or Platner, or anyone else willing to point out that the Emperor has no clothes.

The self proclaimed leader of the political right may turn out to be the best friend the political left ever had.

Isn’t it ironic?

I went to my dentist’s office for my regular teeth cleaning this morning. Everyone who worked there was wearing a Halloween costume, and there was a tray of candies on offer at the receptionist’s desk.

After the teeth cleaning, my dentist asked if I had any questions. So I asked her if she is the only dentist who gives candy to her patients.

She said no, and that in fact an endodontist she knows hands out Hostess Twinkies. And some dentists, she said, give out lollipops.

I remarked, somewhat tongue in cheek, that handing out candy might be good for business.

She agreed, and added that we shouldn’t really blame the dentists. “After all,” she said, “you’re the ones who eat them.”

Now our president want to test nukes
His message is “Put up your dukes.”
      Which just opens the door
      To a global hot war
Then we’ll all go kablooey. Gazooks!

If you really want to understand something, try teaching it to somebody else. One of the joys of being an educator is being forced to explicitly articulate what you think you know.

In the course of doing that, you often find that you have taken shortcuts, skipped steps, taken things for granted. But when you’re teaching the same concept to someone who hasn’t seen that concept before, you do not have that luxury.

For anyone who wants to really understand a subject well, I recommend trying to teach it to somebody else. You just might learn a thing or two yourself.

In a courtroom in downtown Chicago on Tuesday, Sara L. Ellis, a judge of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, admonished Gregory Bovino, a senior Border Patrol official who has become a face of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, for his agency’s use of force and tear gas in Chicago in recent weeks.

They used tear gas in a neighborhood where children were about to march in a Halloween parade, Judge Ellis said. A lawyer for the government said that when Border Patrol agents had used tear gas, it was in response to volatile situations. But a lawyer for the plaintiffs said that agents were inciting violence and then using it to justify more force.

Judge Ellis seemed particularly incensed by an incident on Saturday, when agents used tear gas not long before a Halloween parade was to step off.

You may not know Chicago’s neighborhoods, she told Mr. Bovino, explaining that Old Irving Park was a quiet area with many families and children. “These kids, you can imagine, their sense of safety was shattered on Saturday,” she said. “And it’s going to take a long time for that to come back, if ever.”

In response, Mr. Bovino pointed out that the ICE agents had suddenly found themselves confronted by a mob of unearthly creatures. “Your honor, it was self-defense. There were goblins and witches and zombies everywhere, and more than a few werewolves. What else were my agents to do?”

“In fact, at one point we saw Superman walking around, carrying a bag of what we can only assume was stolen loot.”

The judge looked non-plussed as Mr. Bovino elaborated. “He’s an illegal alien you know,” he added, leaning in conspiratorially.

“Although I don’t know why people make such a big deal about the guy. He’s a lot smaller in real life. Couldn’t have been more than four feet tall.”

If you wish to tear down a democracy, you need to tear down its symbols. Until last Thursday, the White House was a beautiful and modest and symmetric symbol of our nation.

Its sense of balance and lack of ostentation spoke to an ideal of the United States of America. It represented a government which understood that it belonged to the American people, and that in a democracy, a government exists to serve the will of its citizenry.

Now, of course, that beautiful ideal has been demolished by an idiot child busily building his oversized idiot ballroom. It is a structure that does serve its stated purpose, since the president never holds events for 999 foreign dignitaries.

Such an elephantine monstrosity is really more suitable for gathering your loyal supporters to hold your very own Reichsparteitag, like the ones a certain other country used to convene in Nuremberg. I wonder how long it will take before he starts soliciting private donations to commission brown shirts and ties for the attendees.

The other day I posted an old joke that Ronald Reagan once told. By odd coincidence, on the very same day the guy in the White House tried to gaslight the entire world into believing that Reagan never said things that we could all plainly hear Reagan say (from the actual audio recording).

He even imposed a 10% tariff on Canada for someone in that country having the audacity to be truthful about what Reagan had said. Apparently, telling the truth is still legal in Canada.

I wonder how well this gaslighting thing works. If he told his followers that gravity is a myth, would they all believe that they are floating up into space?

I wonder if there are any limits to this gaslighting from the Defecator in Chief and his creepy sidekick JD (which I think stands for Junior Defecator). Next thing you know, they are going to start telling everyone that Charlie Kirk, despite the things he actually said, was not a racist and misogynist hate-monger.

Oh wait…