He has a time machine

On August 5th, 2015 Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, wrote How Trump Becomes President. That’s right, 15 months before yesterday’s election.

Less than a week before the election he said:

I predict Trump wins in a landslide.

This was even when almost all polls were telling us Hillary was going to win. The polls continued this claim to the morning of the election. The polls, built and conducted by hundreds, if not thousands, of extremely experienced political observers, mathematicians, and pollsters got it wrong. They couldn’t see the future a few hours ahead of time as well as some guy who makes his living drawing cartoons about engineers and pointy haired bosses did 15 months prior to the event.

Trump, who had never held a political office or been in the military had to defeat, what was it, 16 republican candidates for the nomination? Then he had to defeat whoever the democrats threw at him in the general election. That first point, alone, is unheard of in this country.

For Scott Adams to successfully make this prediction one has to believe he has either, hereto unknown to mankind, god-like political insight or that he has a time machine he isn’t telling us about.

Occam’s razor says he has a time machine.

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16 thoughts on “He has a time machine

  1. logic suggests he is an acute observer of the zeit geist, and got a little bit lucky. the razor fellow. i am invoking him, as well. it is simpler than time travel, for instance. laughing.

    • yah, he seems to be very intelligent, thoughtful and observant overall. One can make some very good educated guesses with that trio.

      Course I’ve thought he was a genius since I read his “engineer/lawyer ratio” theory of civilization. Because to a hammer everything looks like a nail, when you’re an engineer and see a problem, you build something which is a positive. It’s progress.. When you’re a lawyer and see a problem you file a lawsuit, which is a negative, it stops things from happening.

      When the E/L ratio is high, civilizations can enter a golden age. When the E/L ratio is low, things grind to a halt. I’m in agreement with him that the E/L ratio in the US is getting mighty low.

  2. Or be practicing a combination of humor and cynicism, with some understanding of human nature thrown in, and happened to pick the winner by the remaining large margin of error by random luck. Flip a coin enough times and you’ll eventually see the same face come up five times in a row, etc.

    With, say, 20 candidates total, or 25, or 100, take enough guesses about that pool of candidates from enough people, and a million of them will come to have “known” the results fifteen months in advance.

    A lot of people make a lot of “predictions”. Some are bound to get it right, whether they knew anything, or observed or understood anything or whether they threw a dart at a list pinned to the wall.

    Now if one person picks accurately every time over a period of fifty years, then we have to start asking questions about his time machine. But if he actually had a time machine he’d be sure to pick wrong every now and then, and explain his “system” to us in plausible terms, so as to throw off our suspicions.

  3. He also faced the Republican establishment, who hates him.
    And he faced an extremely hostile legacy media, who conspired with the DNC at every turn, too boot.

    I’m going with the uber-Grand-Master level zeitgeist-reader. California doesn’t have the energy budget for Dilbert’s time machine.

    • Tho an interview with Ann on Tuesday she was very grim, and expecting a Trump loss….

      Hell I both predicted a trump win AND a Trump loss in this season…

  4. So, is what happened considered a “landslide”? It seems to me to have been a lot closer than that, the margin wasn’t that glaringly huge – sorry, “yooge”.

    • Naw. It wasn’t a landslide. I would probably define a landslide as 75% or greater.

      But to be that confident, and essentially correct, in the face of all the polls still boggles my mind

    • Considering the likelihood of substantial vote fraud in FL, VA, MI, WI, PA, MN, and elsewhere, the fact that he still won most of those states and it was a squeaker in those he lost, meant that the margin of win from among actual legal votes cast was HUGE. Not 70% of the general population, and not 400 EC votes without it, but still pretty large. The fact the Hillary didn’t challenge any of them likely means she went all in, still came up short, and recognized that a good audit and accurate recount would likely turn up evidence of fraud.

      • This – her minions had probably significantly underestimated the number of “found” ballots that needed to be printed to nudge a recount over the edge. The risk of being found out – with a recount being scrutinized – outweighed the slim possibility of her being elected.

        • Having a challenged precinct with cast ballots greater than 110% of registered voters and not a single ballot for Trump (but a few odds and ends for ‘others’) presents difficulties.

  5. I will admit that I called this wrong for anyone who asked me. I really didn’t think that with globalist finance, Silicon Valley technocrats, corporate media, academia, and innumerable client constituencies in her corner, Clinton would be allowed to lose. Consent would be manufactured and imposed. There was just no way that all these powerful factions would be denied an extension of their power. I tuned out most of yesterday, and to my considerable surprise, followed a link from Drudge to the NYT, where the Predict-o-meter was way over to the Trump side.

    Adams himself, in an effort to conceal his transtemporal technology, offers another explanation has to how he foretold what came to pass. It’s the power of narrative. http://blog.dilbert.com/post/152955248046/i-answer-your-questions-about-predicting-president

    • Wow. You really have to dig your schadenfreude to sit through that all. The animus and gleeful cruelty that went into making it is really disturbing in its own way. I’ve watched it twice and I’m not sure I like what that tells me about myself.

  6. I imagine that they believed their posters who automatically over count demoncrapts every section.

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