Nostradoofus

OK, this post is going to be a little shorter and a little snippier than usual.

I just got done reading yet another story about how Nostradamus predicted so many world events in amazing fashion -- this time trying to tie in his bad poetry with the 2012 nonsense.

Ordinarily, I would write a lengthy piece on skeptical evaluation, the errors of omission and re-contextualization committed by his followers, and the fallacious reasoning used to justify their conclusions. I feel that's unnecessary. Instead let me just say this:

You can only be considered a prophet if you actually predict something.

You know how after 9/11 people started saying that Nostradamus had predicted it? Where the hell were those people on 9/10? Oh, that's right, there was no prediction, just interpretation after the fact.

That's what every single one of Nostradamus's "successes" have been. There has never (not once!) been a world event predicted via a reading of his works. Afterward, though, there is always some credulous idiot willing to interpret two lines in his massive corpus to somehow apply.

Until anything he wrote is shown to have actual predictive ability, then all the Nostradamus hype is just wishful thinking, and I'm sick of it.