If Trump is going to put America first, then the Netherlands wants to be #2.

This has to be one of the funniest parodies of the new Trump administration. Enjoy!

…of times as we knew them.

I keep asking myself why Donald Trump got elected President of the United States. And I can’t find an answer. It seems I’m not alone in this, as two months after the election, and two weeks before the inauguration, I’m still reading news articles trying to figure out “what went wrong?” or “how did this happen?”

But I keep looking for an answer and I may have found it, at least in large part, in a March 2016 (yes, that long ago!) article in the Washington Post reporting a conversation with Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams. Scott Adams predicted a landslide Trump victory eight months before the election. The article makes for very interesting, and pretty compelling, reading.

One thing Adams talks about is rationality, and how humans are basically irrational, (and emotional.) As a member of the academic/intelligencia minority, I recognize I live and work in a bubble. Within that bubble things make sense to me, and all the other people inside the bubble seem reasonable to me. When I talk about Trump with them, there’s understanding, sympathy, and empathy. It just reinforces my failure to understand how Trump was elected. The world inside the bubble is rational, but the world outside the bubble is just the opposite.

A world dominated by irrational people cannot, by definition, be understood by people using theories and models of rational human behavior. I’ve spent nearly all my life trying to make sense of the world around me (like most academics), and I’ve been somewhat successful. But I’m about to give up and concede that it’s all just a random mess, an unpredictable morass, a hopeless errand. I’ll just take a seat and watch from here…

Most reviews of 2016 described it as one of the worst years in history (which is a very myopic and modern take on history, since surely 1914-18, and 1929-44 must take the “worst years in modern history” prize, and some of those years before 1900 sound like they really sucked). But back to the present, and yes, 2016 was pretty bad in a global sense, what with the Brexit vote, and the election of a prize dickhead to the US Presidency.

Still, it’s traditional, and perhaps mostly in a hopeful way, to wish others a Happy New Year, even if you see little evidence of widespread happiness, or much new on the horizon. New horrors more likely. So Happy 2017!