How does a 43-year-old beat a 25-year-old at the Super Bowl? 

BrainHQ.

He swears by it.

For those of us not in the NFL, Brain HQ has been proven in a 10-year, 2,800-patient study to slash the odds of developing dementia.

How did we make it through January 20?

The secret, bi-partisan campaign to save democracy, as reported in Time:

. . . This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures. . . .

How do we heal?

We can’t just write off tens of millions of people who believe Trump “won by a landslide” and that they are fighting to save America from pederasts and cannibals.

Nor can we write off the tens of millions who see those tens of millions as kooks — they know Trump lost, they know schoolchildren were massacred at Parkland, they know Jewish space lasers are not the cause of wildfires — but who believe they are standing up to an evil thing called “socialism.”

Socialism — better rebranded Capitalism-Plus — includes public roads and schools and sewage systems . . . fire departments and unemployment insurance and Social Security and Medicare . . . and, in places like Canada and Europe, free health care and longer vacations.

So it’s not a matter of good and evil nearly so much as a matter of degree.

Some roads and bridges should perhaps be privately-owned, with tolls.  Should we move in that direction, as we did with privatizing prisons?

I would argue it was a terrible idea to privatize prisons; but this isn’t the stuff of good and evil so much as of  discussion, study, debate, and compromise.

Where “socialism” is evil is where it’s led to totalitarian abuses* — in the former Soviet Union and China, Cuba and North Korea, say.

Which is why Democrats — though they do favor a higher minimum wage and affordable health care — exchange no love letters with Kim Jong-Un and oppose torture.

But is it evil to have standards for safe, clean drinking water?

To enact a minimum wage that would reduce the need for social welfare while invigorating the economy?

(Have you finally read Nick Hanauer’s letter to his fellow zillionaires?)

You can argue around the edges — are we going too far in requiring people to wear seatbelts?  are we setting speed limits too low?

But these aren’t matters to elicit bloody assaults on the Capitol or split families apart at Thanksgiving.

We on the left and in the middle have so much persuading to do that I again want to commend to you The Science of Reasoning With Unreasonable People 

Finally, if you have 14 minutes, enjoy Seth Meyers’ recent Closer Look.  He takes his time getting to the main event, but comedic genius can’t be rushed.

*It’s not just socialism that can go awry.  Plutocrat-backed nationalism can lead to totalitarian abuses, too, as in Russia today or Germany and Italy in the last century.