People distrust statistics and the experts who spout them because everyone — including me — has at least once in their life had some soi disant expert tell them something they’ve directly experienced is impossible due to this or that statistic.

For instance, it recently happened to me in the context of the election. I was told on some site that I won’t name because I am nicer than I used to be that there were no voters who will now vote for Trump who had originally supported Bernie. That statistics showed that this “just didn’t happen.”

I personally know three in the office where I work. Not one, but three.

This kind of dismissive sneering arrogance is what makes people distrust the self-appointed cognitive elite. I distrust them too, even though I share many of their characteristics.

But I want no part of them, because my tribe is no tribe.

It’s too bad Venus isn’t a little further from the sun. Then we could have two planets to screw up.

Funny how I was accused on several sites of being a BernieBro when I expressed doubts about Clinton*, despite not really being a Bernie supporter (mainly because I thought he’d be ineffective and wasn’t really radical enough for me).

Let’s see: didn’t really support Bernie, never voted for him, did not see him as being very effective in office, and yet I’m a BernieBro. Ok, then! Sure, that makes loads of sense.

When I mentioned that I supported Jill Stein far more strongly, it was like their brains melted down; you could almost hear the circuits liquefying, observe the smoke pouring out like in an old 1960s sci-fi b-movie as they skirled ever-more shrilly “BernieBro! BernieBro!”

It’s no mystery at all why Clinton lost.

It doesn’t matter who you supported. If it wasn’t Clinton, you were a BernieBro. See how much good that did.

*Doubts that turned out to be very fucking justified, as we see in the tragic present.

Every word in this headline is funnier than the one before it.

Bingo? Is that a person or a canid?

“Doublings: I suggest that you hold in your hands two distinct books. The main text of each is the same. It is all too easy to compare these two books to the two Don Quixote invented by Borges, the one written by Cervantes, the other, identical in words, written much later by an imagined Pierre Menard. Despite the words being the same, so much has happened that the meaning is different.”

-Ian Hacking, from the foreword to Michel Foucault’s History of Madness

The first 10 on today’s playlist:

My political predictions are usually terrible. However, my tech ones are typically far more spot on.

So here’s one: after Mozilla moronically deprecates XUL\XPCOM, Firefox as an ongoing project will be dead within three years from that time.

Now to establish what criteria I’m using by “dead.”

By this, I mean that within three years all non-maintenance development will have stalled, with no new features being added; the only development done will be security-related, sort of like the state Thunderbird is (alas) in now.

This is a gimme prediction as it’s almost inevitable. Without the one thing that makes Firefox unique and special, no one will have any reason at all to use it.

Easy one.

I noticed this from the NYT editorial board today:

Could there be a more perfect illustration for exactly why Trump won?

Yeah, America is already great if you are trust fund rich with a college degree and a sweet pad a little down from 5th Avenue.

But it’s not so great if you are poor and black. Or poor and white. Or affected by automation. Or by illegal immigration. Or by factories skedaddling to Mexico and along with them your job. Or if your family and friends are regularly dying of opioid overdoses. Or if your health care is still atrocious or too expensive despite the ACA. Or if you can’t afford college. Or if you need reliable public transportation to get to work. Or if you need childcare. Etc.

But cool, for the 10-20% that is composed of the affluent and the professional and managerial classes, yeah, I suppose America is already pretty great.

As for the rest, screw all of them, I guess. That’s certainly the perennial position of the NYT and is why Trump rode this sort of fatuous imbecility straight to victory.

What a time. We have one party that is both naive, stupid, and delusional conspiracy theorists. That’d be the Democrats.

And the other party is evil, stupid and sadists. That’d be the Republicans.

The only commonality is stupidity.

Great.

I obviously think Obama was a pretty shit president. I knew from the moment he picked Larry Summers for a cabinet position during his first term that he would be, that his campaign like Trump’s was all built on lies.

However, Trump will probably make Obama look good. He will by comparison appear to actually be the cool audacious super-competent genius that his delusional supporters claim that he is.

Trump is what you get when you care about crap like “cool” actions and “audacious” speeches rather than actually making people’s lives better.

It’s going to be a long four years.