Trump goes after … Lady Gaga?

Even on the eve of the election, Trump can’t resist getting distracted and going off message by attacking random people in his closing rallies. This time it was Lady Gaga who had appeared with Joe Biden earlier in the day.

Trump made fun of her name but he could also have drawn attention to her footwear. It is impressive that she can walk on those.

The last minute campaign frenzy

As of this morning, over 95 million votes have already been cast, about 70% of the total votes cast in the 2016 election, with expectations that it will reach over 100 million by election day morning.. Given that Trump has been bad-mouthing early voting, it is likely that it is his supporters who will dominate in the in-person voting numbers and those are the tallies that will be reported early in the counting process.

As is always the case, the last day before an election sees candidates in a frenzy of holding campaign rallies and advertising blitzes in an effort to sway those election day in-person voters. Today Trump is holding five rallies in four states (North Carolina, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan) and while Joe Biden is slightly less frenetic and going to just two states (Ohio and Pennsylvania). All these states were won by Trump in 2016.
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The hate speech conundrum

The problem of hate speech never goes away. What to do about people who say or write the most hateful things is problematic to say the least. The freedom to say whatever one likes is not absolute even in the US where the First Amendment provides robust protection for almost any kinds of speech. There are certain things that you cannot say, and this article summarizes the kinds to things that are allowed and not allowed. You are not allowed to “incite actions that would harm others” or to “make or distribute obscene materials”. Interestingly, you are allowed to “engage in symbolic speech, (e.g., burning the flag in protest)” but you are not allowed to “burn draft cards as an anti-war protest”.
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“Trump is the worst criminal in human history”

The person who said this is renowned linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky. How did Trump beat out the usual favorites for that title such as Hitler and Stalin? Chomsky explains in an interview that while those people targeted specific groups of people for extermination, Trump’s appalling policies that will aggravate global warming risks the extinction of everyone.
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The case for a single global time

Today we had to go through the dreary routine of setting the clocks back by one hour as we move from daylight time to standard time. And then in the spring , we move the clocks forward by one hour again. I was interested to learn that in China they tried doing this biannual shifting from 1945 to 1948 and then again from 1986 to 1991 but then gave it up and now no longer shift the clocks.
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A reality check before the election

With just a few days to go before Tuesday’s election, this is the time when both sides tend to start panicking about the outcome. While the Biden supporters may take comfort from polls showing that he has a comfortable lead, we all know that there are problems with polls. It is not that the polls were that wildly off in 2016. The national vote at the end was consistent with predictions of Hillary Clinton winning. But the state polls were close enough that relatively small deviations were enough to give Trump the electoral college win. We should always bear in mind that polls are always statistical and there is always a margin of error. Black swan events can occur and grey swan events have even greater chance of occurring. (I don’t know if there are grey swans but you get the idea behind the metaphor.)
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Samantha Bee on the children separated from their parents by the US government

The way that hundred of children were separated from their families for years and whose parents cannot now be located is truly a scandalous indictment on a country that proudly professes to uphold the highest values. But hey, we’re the country that loudly proclaims its belief in God and family, so what we do can’t be wrong, right?