Problem viewing in Internet Explorer

Impossible to say without seeing your site.

site is karlnorth.com

Google, always your friend when facing these things, tells me that those tags are created by MS Word and other MS software.

Don’t paste content from Microsoft Word into WordPress as the pasted text will also contain Word’s own formatting. Sooner or later, this formatting will stop your pages from being displayed correctly (if at all) in Internet Explorer. If you cannot possibly manage without Word, paste your text into NotePad (or another text editor) first, then copy from NotePad into WordPress.

Or use the inbuilt Paste from Word option in the Visual Editor. Or Windows LiveWriter.

From your Word document, you can also save as Plain Text