I guess I’ll keep writing posts like this until my fingers fall off.

Scalzi the pretend-Democrat like most pseudo-Dems doesn’t really understand what’s occurring now or why it is occurring. He’s lost politically and socioculturally. Old sureties have evaporated with no certain replacement; new alignments have begun. He’s clueless like most of the Republican-lite party.

Don’t intend my spiel to cover that, though.

This is what I keep going back to. Trump’s policies are constructing on the base firmly established by Obama, by George W. Bush, by Bill Clinton. Trump is not some departure from American history’s direction, he is just a malignant continuation and intensification.

I have nothing to say to and nothing in common with delusional Dems who did not recognize any need to resist Obama’s wars, his drone-murders, his de facto disdain for the left-behind of society. He was a believer in meritocracy, content to throw the poor and the downtrodden in the Toro chipper-shredder when it suited his aims (and it often did), who deported 2.4 million people from the country. And he was for the “Grand Bargain” to slash Social Security and Medicare just like Paul fucking Ryan.

If you weren’t resisting then, what’s got you out now besides, “Go, team, go?” Why is it just fine when a Democrat diminishes and disgraces our country but not ok when it’s Trump?

My face when I discovered that the bag I carry my laptop to work in is older than the intern I’m talking with:

The first 10 on today’s playlist:

Her voice….

She looks 13 because she’s 13.

BTW she learned to play the guitar in a week to perform this song. A week. Her main instrument is ukulele. Huge talent imbalances are so unfair!

Never mind all that, let’s watch Miley kill it.

I haven’t said much about Trump. What is there to say, really? He’s about what I expected to get after America refused for four decades to deal with its problems.

While it isn’t exactly predictable in its particulars, the general outline is not something unexpected. “I told you so” doesn’t really help though it’s fun to say. As the nominal “left” party blamed all its difficulties on the real left and all true political choices melted away, America chose rightward soft fascism as the default.

Trump is just a continuation of existing trends, not some outré norm-breaker, and he is very much in line with most of American history.

We are getting a version of what could have happened during the 1930s, when for the most part better decisions (after much resistance then too) were made.

No, no, nitpickers, it’s not a repeat of the 1930s. But there are certain obvious resonances.

It was funny when I was 12 or 13 or so and adults telling me that books were “too old” for me that I’d read four or five years before.

That happened frequently.

Read Moby Dick when I was in third grade. That was one of the books that I recall.

I never minded being underestimated. It’s very useful, most of the time.

This is true, and applies to me too:

A lot of what folks are now referring to as resistance is really just basic civic engagement.

— Alyssa Rosenberg (@AlyssaRosenberg) January 27, 2017

Here’s why Firefox will die.

I use one of those extensions. More than half of the extensions I use (and all of the most important ones) will no longer work after Firefox 57 is released.

I plan to switch to Chrome then as it’s faster in most ways and has fewer strange issues. Most people will do the same since the reason most continue to use Firefox is because of the extensions model.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is bad idea traps and the inability to see them. It’s a multiscalar problem — it happens at every societal level as with the housing boom and crash of 2008 down to the relatively-minor issue of the Mozilla organization clearly determined to exterminate itself, but failing to understand how it’s now just baked in.

I find it interesting that as with army ants driven by pheromones circling until they die, humans and their organizations can do the same, despite the fact that to anyone standing outside it’s immediately obvious what’s gone wrong and how to fix it.

If you want to see some really excellent acoustic guitar playing, you should watch this.

Reminds me of Deb Talan’s playing.