MCViewPoint

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Posts Tagged ‘Scott Adams’

Something Big is Coming – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on November 1, 2021

No matter how hard the mainstream press tries to bury such things, ordinary voters cannot miss the fact that the administration’s idiotic policies and tinkering already have resulted in supply shortages, higher prices, higher energy costs, and terrible schools that are miseducating their children and undermining parental authority. Just as bad, all this would lead to even higher taxes. They’re waking up and that means to me that the ground is shifting under the Democrats’ feet. That is “something big.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/something_big_is_coming.html

By Clarice Feldman

Dilbert creator Scott Adams tweeted this week: ”The country’s energy is strange. Everything is amped up in every direction. Something big is coming.” He’s rarely wrong about such things.

Adams said he doesn’t know what that something big is, but I’m hoping it is a major shift in America’s political tectonic plates. I may be looking too hard for it, but I, too, feel it in my bones.

Infrastructure Faceplant

For one thing, the wacky spending program the Democrats were proposing and fiddling with seems to have hit the shoals, trapped between the far left and the more moderate senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin. Even the leftward Politico cannot spackle over the dilemma, a dilemma that is the only thing preventing Democrats from turning our constitutional republic into a totalitarian socialist economic mess in which only the most authoritarian and corrupt rule over a greatly impoverished citizenry.

For the second time in less than a month, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team had to delay a vote on Senate-passed infrastructure bill amid progressive opposition, denying President Joe Biden a much-needed win as Democrats’ bigger, $1.75 trillion social spending plan also remains in limbo.

“I think it’s wholly apparent that today was not a success,” said Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger, whose state has a high-stakes gubernatorial showdown Tuesday that Democrats were hoping to boost with the infrastructure vote.

“Because people choose to be obstructionists, we’re not delivering these things to my state or to the rest of the country,” the swing-district Democrat added. “I guess we’ll just wait because apparently failing roads and bridges can just wait in the minds of some people.”

Democrats slunk out of the House chamber embarrassed — furious at the liberals who dug in and a White House that refused to pressure them to relent — and openly fretting about the long-term repercussions, given the tough climb they face in the midterms.

Virginia Gubernatorial Race

Terry McAuliffe, who was supposed to be a shoo-in for a second term as governor of Virginia, seems to be in a lot of trouble. Good polls can only measure general sentiment in my view, but all that I’ve seen show that sentiment has rapidly shifted in favor of his opponent Glenn Youngkin. To my mind, McAuliffe’s fatal miscalculation was to stand with the teachers’ unions, the obstructive, dictatorial Loudon County school board against the parents. Northern Virginia is heavily populated by tech and professional federal employees who in recent years have tended to vote Democrat, but these are people who can be expected to be concerned with the public school education of their children, and McAuliffe, reflexively tone-deaf to such concerns, placed himself perilously on the third rail.

How bad is his campaign going? It could hardly be worse. So few people have turned out in places like Arlington, Virginia, that he’s skipped showing up at the final rallies — rallies designed to snowball voter support. At one of those rallies. Pharrell Williams, a noted hip-hop singer and music producer, told the crowd it’s okay if they vote for Glenn Youngkin — not something I’d think the rally organizers wanted to hear.

The odious and discredited Lincoln Project tried to help McAuliffe by staging a pretend white nationalist display for Youngkin. I suppose, because they were torn between trying to pay honor to diversity while smearing Youngkin, they included a young black man in the mix of demonstrators, immediately undercutting the message of the scam that this was a white nationalist demonstration. In fact, one of the “white nationalists” was the financial director for Young VA Dems. About the same time this ploy flopped, others reminded voters that McAuliffe had defended the present Democrat governor of Virginia Ralph Northam’s appearance in blackface costume, and it turned out that McAuliffe’s spokesperson (who also worked for the Harris and Biden campaigns) had posted racist tweets in 2012. Just as #MeToo backfired — this week against New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, now charged with a misdemeanor sexual offense against a staffer — the cancel culture mining of ancient racist comments is now backfiring against the Democrats who had made this something of a cottage industry.

Days later, McAuliffe was charged with accepting an illegal laundered $350,000 contribution from a Sri Lankan businessman. 

The National Legal and Policy Center is asking the FEC to “promptly investigate” whether the contribution to the Virginia gubernatorial candidate violated federal laws prohibiting campaigns from accepting political donations from foreign nationals.

“Terry McAuliffe has a history of accepting foreign contributions.  The FEC must fully investigate these serious charges that he accepted $350,000 in illegal foreign contributions for his current campaign,” said Washington, D.C. attorney, Paul Kamenar, counsel to NLPC, who drafted and filed the complaint with the FEC.

LycaTel LLC, owned by Sri Lankan-British national Allirajah Subaskaran, gave McAuliffe $350,000 in July, the Free Beacon first reported in early October. The company is a New Jersey subsidiary of Subaskaran’s U.K.-based telecom conglomerate, which boasts a complicated web of offshore businesses and has been the subject of tax-fraud and money-laundering charges in France.

(Of course, as you imagine, Northern Virginia voters, whose main source of news is the Washington Post, will know little of such things, as the paper actively supports McAuliffe and buries these stories, so if you know any please send them the link to this.)

If, as I hope, McAuliffe loses, it will mean a gut check for those Democrats heading into a 2022 reelection fight. It tells them that people are sick of this craziness and their own careers are in danger. I expect that since their personal political careers are the first of their interests, self-seeking congressional Democrats will cut their strings to the loonies in the Squad and the Sandernistas.

Changing the Climate

Ostensibly to chat with the Pope about such theological issues as climate change — apparently the latest religious belief superseding what most people consider Catholicism — President Biden (who reportedly took 800 staffers with him to the Climate Conference in Glasgow, Scotland) cruised through Rome in an 85-vehicle motorcade.

What more could you ask to show how seriously Biden takes the issue of greenhouse gases and fossil fuels?

Speaking of “serious,” how can you not laugh at a president so stupid that he said, “When you buy an electric vehicle, you can go across America on a single tank of gas figuratively speaking. It’s not gas. You plug it in.” Sure, you do, and you have to plug it in every few hundred miles and wait for hours for it to charge unless somewhere someone has invented some very very long and sturdy extension cords. And, of course, plugging it in requires electric power from somewhere, and there’s a substantial shortage of it because of the same loony energy policies that are now forcing up gas and electric power prices around the country and the world.

Immigration Follies

Thousands of aliens are heading toward the border to join the more than one million who already illegally crossed under this administration, and, almost entirely unvetted, have been transported around the country. Citizens, many of whom jumped through years-long hoops to satisfy what is still immigration law totally ignored by this administration, are incredulous at the latest report, as Roger L. Simon explains:

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is in talks to offer immigrant families that were separated during the Trump administration around $450,000 a person in compensation, according to people familiar with the matter, as several agencies work to resolve lawsuits filed on behalf of parents and children who say the government subjected them to lasting psychological trauma.

“The U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are considering payments that could amount to close to $1 million a family, though the final numbers could shift, the people familiar with the matter said.”

$450,000 a person? This when millions of actual taxpaying American citizens are suffering, barely able to make ends meet during the pandemic, and inflation is on a record pace. Not even Anthony Fauci, allegedly the highest paid government official, makes that much, at least in salary.

Psychological trauma? How about causing psychological trauma to a whole country at once? Never in my life have I heard anything so insane.

No matter how hard the mainstream press tries to bury such things, ordinary voters cannot miss the fact that the administration’s idiotic policies and tinkering already have resulted in supply shortages, higher prices, higher energy costs, and terrible schools that are miseducating their children and undermining parental authority. Just as bad, all this would lead to even higher taxes. They’re waking up and that means to me that the ground is shifting under the Democrats’ feet. That is “something big.”

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.

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Hysteria Based on Phony Numbers, BLM Edition – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on June 20, 2020

If you think the data says police are killing black citizens at a
higher rate than other groups it is because you are not good at
analyzing things. Which puts you in good company with 95% of the public.

Maybe 5% of the public knows the numbers you see in the media are
INTENTIONALLY misleading. For example, if you think it means something
that a higher percentage of the black population is killed by police,
you are in the 95% who are being duped by data that is misleading.

What people think they know about U.S. history or economics is downright horrifying.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/06/thomas-woods/hysteria-based-on-phony-numbers-blm-edition/

By

From the Tom Woods Letter:

Well, Dilbert creator Scott Adams has gone and done it now.

He just published the following Twitter thread, which I reproduce here without comment:

Today is the last day of my seven-day challenge to provide a current example of systemic racism in America. No examples yet, just conceptual takes.

One view is that racist people in a non-racist system creates “systemic racism.” For example, the justice system is colorblind by intention, but not by outcome. The reason for different outcomes is assumed to be racism, but studies can’t isolate that variable.

And here we have a new problem. If “look at the data” is an argument for ANYTHING, why are we having mass protests about police killing black citizens at a higher rate than other groups when the data says otherwise?

If you think the data says police are killing black citizens at a higher rate than other groups it is because you are not good at analyzing things. Which puts you in good company with 95% of the public.

Maybe 5% of the public knows the numbers you see in the media are INTENTIONALLY misleading. For example, if you think it means something that a higher percentage of the black population is killed by police, you are in the 95% who are being duped by data that is misleading.

Don’t trust me about the data? Good call. You shouldn’t. Trust the left-leaning people who are experts at analyzing data and statistics. They are all hiding. Hear the dog not barking. No professional data/statistics expert on the left are helping us sort out the data. Why?

You f***ing know why. They would be cancelled by their own team if they told the truth. Don’t believe me? Again, good call. We live in a world where no one is credible. So let me offer a test of my claim.

Find me the most credible and left-leaning data/statistics expert, and put that expert in a long-form interview with a well-informed right-leaning interviewer on the topic of police violence. Let’s say Ben Shapiro. This will not happen. Ask yourself why.

You know that executive order Trump just signed that creates a national database of police misconduct? Half the country is in for a big surprise if the data is deemed credible. To be fair, that surprise could go either way.

Cancel culture has forced white people to lie to black people for self-preservation. No solutions are possible when debate is effectively outlawed and the data experts are in hiding.

We are now experiencing mass protests over an issue the data can’t find, in a context of continuous race relations improvements, and everyone started out on the same side after seeing the George Floyd video. More white people than black protested.

How did we get to this absurd point in which the country is being ripped apart by AGREEMENT? Well, it wasn’t because millions of independent-minded citizens looked at the data and made wise decisions, many of them in agreement with their own side by coincidence.

The biggest red pill in the world is the realization that your opinions on politics are assigned to you by people who know how to make you believe you made up your own mind. There is probably some genetic propensity for conservatism or liberalism, but not policy details.

Most of you know I’m a trained hypnotist and I write about the techniques of persuasion. Viewed through my filter, the current upheaval in the country is predicated on something real and important-to-fix (racism), but the way we are ACTING on it comes from external persuasion.

I don’t see a public trying to find solutions. What I see is hypnotized puppets fighting other hypnotized puppets while the puppet-masters cash their checks. And no, I don’t blame George Soros. This isn’t about money influence. It’s about something far more powerful.

You aren’t yet ready for the truth. But you will be.

Now let me add:

Current controversies are far from alone in this.

So much of what people think they know is contradicted by readily available data that they don’t bother to consult or even know where to find if they did want to consult it.

What people think they know about U.S. history or economics is downright horrifying.

But rather than fruitlessly shake my fist at the institutions teaching them this crap, I built something of my own, the dashboard university I call Liberty Classroom.

If you’re a victim of educational malpractice — and let’s face it: who isn’t? — you’ll be like a kid in a candy store.

Go and absorb the knowledge:

http://www.LibertyClassroom.com

Oh, and incidentally, here’s our secret coupon code page.

Be seeing you

 

 

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Scott Adams has had a brilliant insight about the demand for reparations – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on June 15, 2020

Keith Richburg’s Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, about his job as the Washington Post’s bureau chief in the 1990s, proves it.  Richburg’s painful realization as he witnessed the daily horrors of life in Africa, whether from nature’s or man’s cruelty, was how lucky he was that his ancestors were enslaved:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/06/scott_adams_has_had_a_brilliant_insight_about_the_demand_for_reparations.html

By Andrea Widburg

Whenever Democrats push race to the forefront of the news, reparations pop up.  The theory is that, because their forebears were kidnapped from Africa and enslaved in America, blacks will never catch up economically to whites.  It doesn’t matter that there are no slaves or slave-owners today; that most whites are not descended from slave-owners; or that racism impoverished, rather than enriched the South.

Scott Adams’s brilliant insight cuts through all this: the comparison isn’t between black wealth and white wealth in America.  Instead, the comparison must be the difference between blacks’ average net worth in America and blacks’ average net worth in Africa.  After all, the act of stealing blacks from Africa is the “but for cause” of all wrongs done to blacks.

Adams imagines a neutral space alien calculating reparations.  He informs earthlings that black versus white net worth in America isn’t the correct calculation:

“If I’m going to calculate the, let’s say, the theft from the black community, if you were to measure the theft — let’s say just theft — that this slavery was. In other words, you stole the productive part of their lives, etc., and you used it for yourself. So here’s the number I need: I need how does the average economic situation for the average black person in this country and then, to compare it, I want to compare it to the average life of a black African.”

And you say, “What?”

And the space alien says, “Yeah that’s the comparison. So, you want to compare what would happen to the average black person if they had stayed unmolested in Africa and there had never been a slave trade. Because that’s what you’re comparing to. Because if the people who were brought to America as slaves, and then their descendants, are doing much worse than if they’ve never been brought with slavery, then that’s the amount of reparations. That’s how much they lost is all the money they would have made if they just stay in Africa.

You know what the problem is, right? They would owe money to white people.

Adams is correct.  Keith Richburg’s Out Of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, about his job as the Washington Post’s bureau chief in the 1990s, proves it.  Richburg’s painful realization as he witnessed the daily horrors of life in Africa, whether from nature’s or man’s cruelty, was how lucky he was that his ancestors were enslaved:

Sometime, maybe four hundred or so years ago, one of my ancestors was taken from his village, probably by a local chieftain. He was shackled in leg irons, kept in a holding pen or a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. And then he was put in the crowded, filthy cargo hold of a ship for the long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic to the New World.

Many of the slaves died on that voyage. But not my ancestor. Maybe it was because he was strong, maybe just stubborn, or maybe he had an irrepressible will to live. But he survived, and ended up in forced slavery working on plantations in the Caribbean. Generations on down the line, one of his descendants was taken to South Carolina. Finally, a more recent descendant, my father, moved to Detroit to find a job in an auto plant during the Second World War.

And so it was that I came to be born in Detroit and that thirty-five years later, a black man born in white America, I was in Africa, birthplace of my ancestors, standing at the edge of a river not as an African but as an American journalist — a mere spectator — watching the bloated bodies of black Africans cascading over a waterfall. And that’s when I thought about how, if things had been different, I might have been one of them — or might have met some similarly anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage.

Does that sound shocking? Does it sound almost like a justification for the terrible crime of slavery? Does it sound like this black man has forgotten his African roots? Of course it does, all that and more. And that is precisely why I have tried to keep this emotion buried so deep for so long, and why it pains me so now to put these words in print, for all the world to see. But I’m writing this so you will understand better what I’m trying to say.

It might have been easier for me to just keep all of these emotions bottled up inside. Maybe I should have just written a standard book on Africa that would have talked broadly about the politics, the possibilities, the prospects for change.

But I’m tired of lying. And I’m tired of all the ignorance and hypocrisy and the double standards I hear and read about Africa, much of it from people who’ve never been there, let alone spent three years walking around amid the corpses. Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose in the images of the rotting flesh.

Here’s more information about life in Africa.  And here’s the world Black Lives Matter wants, one without functional police (warning: graphic violence):

UPDATE: It turns out that others with less prominence than Scott Adams have been thinking along the same lines. Back in 2015, Blue Collar Perspective already suggested that the comparison should always be between people’s ancestral lands and their lives in America. It strikes me as very American for lots of independent thinkers to arrive at similar out-of-the-box solutions. This is another reason to reject Big Government, statism, and other collectivism: They force everyone’s thoughts down the same funnel, preventing new ideas.

 

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