Thursday August 13th 2020

10:00 In the morning Lois and I go round to our near-neighbour Frances’s back garden to check for damage from last night’s thunderstorms – good thing we are doing this, because one of her beanpole “wigwams” had blown completely down. We re-tie it and set it to rights.

we re-tie one of our neighbour Frances’s beanpole-“wigwams”

that blew down in last night’s storms.

Frances is going to be away all week, and the builders who are constructing 6 horrible new houses right next to her property are fence-building at the moment. We want to check that they are respecting the official property line between the two plots.

We also phone Frances’s son Andrew to alert him to the fence work, so he can stop by and check on exactly where the fence is going up.

from behind our bedroom curtains we keep a close watch

on the "fence guy", who is building a fence between the horrible

new houses and our neighbour Frances’s house – a bit sneaky of us

perhaps but you have to be nowadays!

We think about phoning Ted Cruz’s office – the American politician who almost beat Trump to the Republican presidential candidacy in 2016. We think he keeps a file on all neighbour property line disputes, and this, unbelievably, almost got him the candidacy 4 years ago: and his file covers not just the US but also Britain, we think, although we’re not 100% sure: if we email him, we’ll certainly find out one way or another!

Who doesn’t remember this headline in the Onion News from 4 years ago?

HAMDEN, CT—According to a Quinnipiac University poll released Monday, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz now holds a considerable lead among voters who are currently locked in a months-long dispute over the boundaries of their neighbours’ yards. “We found that 74 percent of homeowners who have angrily confronted a neighbour to explain precisely why the property line as presently demarcated is actually off by several feet strongly favor Cruz for president,” said pollster Adelia Mayhew…

“Furthermore, while Cruz enjoys a roughly 35 percent lead with voters who have taken it upon themselves to cut down tree limbs they believe extend onto their side of the lawn, he commands greater than 80 percent support among voters who, after months of heated arguments, hire someone to build a 7-foot-high fence along the disputed boundary while their neighbour is away at work.” Mayhew added, however, that Cruz dropped to second place among those voters currently packing powerful explosives into old tree stumps on their property they wish to remove.

Cruz certainly made neighbour disputes his own specialty in 2016:  and he certainly “owned” the problem – pity it wasn’t enough to keep Trump out: but Trump may have had a lead among fence-erectors, and this may have tipped the balance against Cruz – Lois and I aren’t completely sure.

14:30 In the afternoon we hold the first ever online meeting of our U3A Danish group, on Skype. We haven’t been able to meet face-to-face since lockdown began some months ago.

Surprisingly, in view of the widespread of distrust of IT and computers among our group, all the members manage to take part. It’s true that some of them only managed it with the help of sons, daughters or wives/husbands/partners – but so what, WE DID IT !!!!

It worked reasonably well but the quality of the call deteriorated towards the end, with some unidentified extraneous background noises, some of which sounded like somebody was vacuuming, and another that sounded like a Force 10 gale was blowing through somebody’s living-room.

But Danish always sounds like it’s being spoken on a bad Skype connection anyway, at the best of times. The first description I came across of how a Dane sounds, when he's speaking Danish, was "it's like he's got a hot potato in his mouth”. 

What madness!!!!

20:00 We listen to the radio, the second part of Ben Wright’s interesting series on “The Crisis of American Democracy”, which centres on the problem of gerrymandering, seen in the decisions taken every 10 years about where to draw the lines of voting districts both for Congressional and more local elections.

Every ten years, decisions are made about where to draw the line in electoral districts, and the delineation of these districts can make a significant difference to the number of representatives from the 2 main parties who are elected to office, both nationally and locally.

The real problem for the US stems from the fact that in most states the drawing of these lines is under local political  control.

And there are various methods which are used to swing more and more advantage to the party already in control, and therefore in charge of the line-drawing. “Packing”, for instance, refers to the practice of packing a lot of voters of one persuasion into one single district, so that its influence is localized; whereas “cracking” means splitting up an area with a big majority for one party into 2 or more districts, so that these voters’ influence is diffused and watered down. Yikes!

There is also an inbuilt difference between typical Democratic and Republican voter locations, in that Democratic voters are more likely to live in a densely packed concentration of like-minded residents – ie in cities or parts or cities, whereas Republican voters’ residencies are more widely scattered.

Computers and algorithms now make it relatively easy to determine the most advantageous district lines for one party or the other. And Republican areas were particularly successful after 2010 in drawing the lines to their own advantage. Some independent researchers’ computers have tried to "better" the lines drawn by the Republicans in many areas, trying for experimental reasons to increase the Republicans' advantage by redrawing the lines, but they failed to do so – the reason being, that the districts had already been optimized to the max from the local Republicans' standpoint!

Yikes (again)!!!!

Has the system contributed to polarization in US politics? When I was at school in the 1950's and early 1960’s people in the UK used to remark on how unpolarized US politics was compared to our own. But that isn’t the case any longer, I think.

Optimization of the voting districts tends to mean that somebody wanting to be a candidate doesn’t fear a victory in the election by the opposing party, and so he only has to ensure that rival candidates from his own party don’t beat him to the candidacy. That tends to make the would-be candidates become a bit more extreme in their campaigns, just to "cover their backs", says Wright – more to the left in the case of the Democrat candidates, and more to the right in the case of the Republicans.

How fascinating. And we look forward Ben Wright’s concluding programme (part 3).

22:00 We go to bed – zzzzzzzzz!!!!!