Thank you Aaron Van Langevelde, the Republican member of the Michigan board of state canvassers who said “We must not attempt to exercise power we simply don’t have. As John Adams once said, ‘We are a government of laws, not men.’ This board needs to adhere to that principle here today. This board must do its part to uphold the rule of law and comply with our legal duty to certify this election.

Given the degree of polarization in the US, I don’t see both sides making nice. The obvious answer is to stop trying to shove the two magnets together and get them both focused on a new common enemy. I’d prefer the common enemy to be COVID or climate change, but such a large percentage of the US is anti-science that those would just feed the current polarization. The only thought I’ve been able to come up with so far is anti-corruption, and it needs to be targeted at both in business and government.

These are extracts from Guards, Guards, a fantasy novel written by the late Terry Pratchett in 1989. Sound familiar to any current events? Historical events? The Supreme Grand Master “What a shower, he told himself. A bunch of incompetents no other secret society would touch with a ten-foot Sceptre of Authority. The sort to dislocate their fingers with even the simplest secret handshake. But incompetents with possibilities, nevertheless. Let the other societies take the skilled, the hopefuls, the ambitious, the self-confident.

A lot of times I find myself telling people that I don’t disagree with them BUT… Everyone’s ears and brain immediately shut down at the word “But”. I know it, and still can’t help myself. The word “AND"works much better. The point that I am often trying to make is asking the person whether they are actually trying to accomplish something or just rant. To change a situation, you either need enough force to override the other side or you need to change minds on the other side.

We don’t know a lot about dreams. A recent paper by Erik Hoel The Overfitted Brain: Dreams evolved ot assist generalization at Tufts Universtity suggests that one possible reason for weird dreams is your brain is trying to avoid “overfitting”. If you don’t want to read the paper itself (long but easy read), you can read an article about it at Discover Magazine. The concept of overfitting is borrowed from deep neural networks where the network is trying to “learn” from a dataset, but focuses so tightly on that dataset that it can’t generalize to similar but not identical datasets.

As a distraction from US politics, where is Peru’s president? Let’s set the scene. More than half of the members of Congress are currently under investigation for corruption. Congress removed the popular former President Martín Vizcarra on Nov 9 claiming he had mismanaged the COVID situation and claiming he had taken bribes while as a regional governor years ago. The head of Congress, Manuel Merino, took over as President and faced immediate huge protests, leading to police killing two protestors and injuring dozens of others on Saturday.

There is a subtle, and sometimes not so subtle difference between singing for an audience, to an audience, with an audience and at an audience. And there can be good reasons for choosing any of those approaches. I think of the Dixie Chicks doing Not Ready to Make Nice as a song that they could sing at an audience although that particular performance had a sympathetic crowd. I can get irritated watching a singer be overly dramatic because it distracts me from the song itself.

Just out of curiosity, I looked back at my phone and text messages over the course of the election season. I had two phone calls from campaigners before actual voting was possible and none after that. I counted 34 text messages from different groups campaigning for a democrat candidate, 32 of them for Biden, 27 of which thought I was someone named Sarah. I responded to each one, pointing out (1) I wasn’t Sarah; (2) I’ve had my cellphone number since 2006 so this is not likely some change of number faux pas; and (3) I had already voted on the first possible day by dropping of my ballot at the City Clerk’s office.

Warning: Tax geek post with no attempt to explain references for non-international tax readers. There was once a law firm at the forefront of partnership tax shelters. The actual statutory law was ambiguous to say the least and the partners at this law firm believed, in their hearts, that they were the ones who actually defined what the law and tax policy was in this area. Eventually the politicians change the law and the firm no longer exists.

As you know, the UK is leaving the European Union by choice (aka Brexit) regardless of the economic damage that is expected to cause. As a result, the UK will now have to setup customs import and export locations for goods getting shipped to and from the EU. As part of that project, they are building a 27 acre lorry (truck for the Americans) parking lot in Kent to handle backups from the port in Dover.

A high school newspaper in Kentucky broke a story on October 30 about a training slideshow used by the Kentucky State Police urging cadets to be “ruthless killers[s]” and quoting Hitler advocating violence. By 4:15 PM that day, the Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear responded with the following statement: “This is absolutely unacceptable. It is further unacceptable that I just learned about this through social media. We will collect all the facts and take immediate corrective action.

All the jokes and insults about the other side just make the polarization worse. So stop it. We are wired differently, we think differently we respond to different motivations. For example, one study Political Ideology and the Perceived Impact of Coronavirus Prevention Behaviors for the Self and Others indicates that conservatives apparently are more likely to wear masks if you point out it keeps them safer and less likely to wear masks if you point out it keeps others safer.

If politicians actually believed in their pleas to ‘think of the children’, they wouldn’t make so many outright lies. Think of the bad example it sets. And that goes double for the people writing the lies in the political ads. Criminal defense lawyers are not allowed to lie for their clients. Why is it allowed in the political process? As usual, feel free to disagree using this contact link. My world view is a hypothesis, not a belief.