Ken's Blog

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…

It is a sad fact of life that no matter what you do, you can’t really save people from themselves.

I am still trying to come to terms with that.

Today one of my students, who is from China, told me that he discovered my blog yesterday. He asked if I was worried that putting my opinions right out in public might get me in trouble.

I responded that on the contrary, I see it as my responsibility as a citizen of the United States to do my part to stand up for our democracy, and to fight autocratic political shifts which threaten that democracy. Then I told him an old joke from Ronald Reagan:

“Two men, an American and a Russian, were arguing. The American said, “in my country I can go to the White House, walk to the president’s office and pound the desk and say ‘Mr president! I don’t like how you’re running things in this country!'” The Russian said “I can do that too!”

“Really?”

“Yes! I can go to the Kremlin, walk into the general secretary’s office and pound the desk and say, Mr. Secretary, I don’t like how Reagan is running his country!”

Somehow I don’t think our current president would get that joke. An that’s why I need to keep speaking up.

I don’t think there is anyone left in the U.S., if they are being honest, who still believes that the president is compos mentis. It must be difficult for the people around him to continue to pretend otherwise.

Here in NYC, we are therefore facing a crisis. The Defecator in Chief has already starting sending violent goons into our city.

I think Nancy Pelosi has the right idea. Those of us who still believe in the United States of America, in democracy, in respect for our Constitution, and frankly in basic decency, should accept that this is an invasion by forces that are actively trying to destroy our nation.

When the hired goons show up and try to attack our city’s citizens, our police should arrest them, just as any criminals would be arrested. We should have zero tolerance for this nonsense.

One thing I can say for Mamdani: Of the three mayoral candidates, he is by far the one most likely to defend this city against these creepy idiots.

Speaking of the No Kings march, I find that I cannot get out of my head the image of a 78 year old toddler, sporting a stupid toy crown on his head, gleefully defecating on millions of Americans.

Was the intent to disgust the nation? To make sure that everyone who voted for him would understand that they had made a terrible mistake?

Or are we simply witnessing the complete unraveling of a human mind? Which by itself would be sad.

Except that this particular unraveling human mind has the ability to launch nuclear strikes.

I ended yesterday’s post with a question: What is the actual strategic impact of the fact that seven million protesters showed up this past Saturday?

Seven million is not enough to convincingly sway national elections, since it could be argued that those were mostly people who didn’t vote for you-know-who. But here’s a clue:

Someone I know told me the other day that he tried to write a letter to the New York Times on this topic, and his letter was blocked. His theory was that it was blocked because he used the phrase “general strike”.

Those two words together are very powerful in America. This is, after all, a capitalist country, and corporations take their bottom lines very seriously.

For example, in the wake of the Jimmy Kimmel incident, we and many others summarily cancelled our subscription to Disney Plus. It took only three days after that for Disney to bring Kimmel back on the air. Clientes locuti sunt.

These days, politicians are largely funded by corporations, in the wake of the Citizens United decision. So when corporations speak, politicians must listen. And when consumers speak, corporations listen.

Which shows the real strategic power of a seven million person protest: The implied threat of a general strike.

Pretty powerful stuff. No wonder the New York Times is afraid to talk about it.