President Trump told attendees at the political rally earlier in the day to “take back our country”. Rudy Giuliani told the same crowd at the rally “If we are wrong, we will be made fools of, but if we’re right a lot of them will go to jail. So let’s have trial by combat.trial by combat” and is now condemning the assault on the Capitol as shameful. I’ve been watching interviews of reporters who talked to the mob that rushed the Capitol yesterday.

Ok. My December 20 post Case Nightmare Orange was wrong. It considered whether President Trump might try to use Homeland Security forces to disrupt the Congressional certification of the Electoral College results. There was, however, a distinct lack of police manpower to deal with protests that everyone saw coming. Looking at this video, there was no way those four police officers could deal with that mob. It didn’t look like much more manpower than normal around the Capitol building.

So today the initial transition period for the UK leaving the EU is over and the next stage of transition periods begin. Since the UK government did sod all to actually prepare, at 11PM on Dec 31 the government issued notices saying, among other things, that shipments from Great Britain to Northern Ireland don’t need export paperwork for another 12 months (because no one knows what the paperwork should look like).

Suppose, in some far off land, there lived a president and his inner circle who had gaslit themselves into believing that an election had been stolen rather than lost. That somehow or other the opposition who couldn’t organize themselves out of a paper bag had convinced the deep state and all the judges and republican owned voting machine manufacturers to change just the presidential votes. Now suppose my post about Your Brain on Grievances has some validity and they decide on one more attempt to retain power when the Congress goes to count the votes.

There is an interesting article on Politico about Grievance Addiction focusing on Donald Trump. The author is James Kimmel, Jr., a lecturer in psychiatry at Yale Med School and he notes that “your brain on grievances looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.”

I was reading a discussion on social media about a request for a book recommendation and, after awhile, thought maybe I should be diagramming arguments. The request was for science fiction book recommendations from a conservative, non-libertarian view. The person submitting the request specifically asked for books where “the central tenets of conservatism - tradition, hierarchy and authority - are working for humanity; where tradition is used to help, guide and comfort people rather than cynically used as a tool to keep people down.

Senator Thom Tillis is angry that Twitter is not sending a witness to an Anti-Piracy hearing he is holding in December. Setting aside the question of why the Senator is actually holding a hearing in December, I’m puzzled why the Senator thinks Twitter is a giant avenue of piracy. Lies and deceit, yes, but piracy? The Senator’s letter to Twitter claims that “[Twitter] continues to host and permit rampant infringement of music files on its platform” and that it hasn’t taken any “meaningful steps to address the scale of the problem.

An update on an earlier post about a training deck used by the Kentucky State Police urging cadets to be ruthless killers and quoting Hitler advocating violence. At the time that story broke on Oct 30, the Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet claimed the material had been removed in 2013. Since that date, state police have not replied to subsequent records requests. Maybe that particular slide deck was removed in 2013, but the Lexington Herald Leader reported today, confirmed by the Governor and the Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet that another training video had been approved for training use in September of this year that featured Nazi symbols.

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.

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.