I only use XFCE for a few minutes a day usually, but it’s nice to be in a desktop environment that doesn’t actively punish me for being smarter than an amoeba.

XFCE isn’t amazing, but it’s functional. And functional goes a long damn way these days compared to the horrors inflicted on us by others.

Reading articles like this makes me realize how abnormal I am.

I’m sure this guy is right — but until I read the article I truly didn’t realize how big a basket of self-delusion and wishful thinking most people are. Like, I’ve read all kinds of cognitive psychology textbooks, etc., but it doesn’t sink in the way something of this nature does.

Do people really think and work like this? How do they live? How can you survive day to day with such poor self-assessment and self-control abilities?

Losing weight was remarkably easy for me. I lost 25%+ of my body weight because I decided to. I knew I could and I did.

When I read things like the linked article I don’t think that I am superior to other people but god, I am remarkably divergent in so many ways that it’s no wonder that I have such trouble dealing with so many people other than on the smalltalk level.

These articles are harmful, though — the only option is failure. The Homer Simpson “don’t even try” solution. So glad I didn’t go that route in my personal life.

Do people really have that much problem controlling what their hand picks up and places in their mouth? Why? I don’t understand. It’s just so easy for me to tell my hand not to. Even when I am hungry. But then I am so stubborn that books could be written about that.

But I just don’t understand; some fundamental incompatibility.

I don’t write about politics much. Or Clinton or Sanders or Trump.

It’s because it doesn’t matter. Sure, in the short term who gets picked for the Supreme Court makes a difference to many lives. This is not nothing, I agree.

But in 70 or 90 or so years, there won’t be a Supreme Court. There probably won’t even be an America. People have no idea at all about how hard climate change is going to shatter the world. Even the clued-in are relatively clueless because no one knows much history and they can’t imagine that something like that can happen.

But it has, it can, and it will again.

Most apocalyptic prophecies are specious bullshit. But this isn’t prophecy. It’s just baked in (ha). It is the future, as inescapable as space-time itself.

I told my partner that talking much about who is going to win in 2016 is like arguing about what color underwear you’re going to wear as the house is in conflagration all around you.

Yeah, sometimes I pay attention as entertainment. But the truth is neither Clinton nor Sanders is going to do much of anything about climate change — and especially not on a global scale — and neither will anyone else.

So I get my jollies while I can, and am glad I’ll be dead before the worst comes.