Scott Adams has had several great acts in his life, and any one of them alone would have been impressive. Ben Sasse, who I met briefly and who is also a very impressive guy, has also announced a dire prognosis. Cancer sucks.
Adams said last year he thought he was near the end, in pain. Then he tried another drug and that seemed to help for a while. Now I’m sorry to read that things are going south again.
I'll add "Zippy the Pinhead" and "Life in Hell" (the original Matt Groening comics pre Simpsons. Zippy was hit or miss but even the incomprehensible ones were a nice palette cleanser.
Those strips were hipster trash, more clever than funny, and more “outrageous” than clever. The TV series made The Simpsons much funnier than Groening ever did
LIH was similar to The Simpsons visually only, but is worthy as a time capsule of alt-weekly comics strips being anti-authority. Millennials can't imagine generalized opposition to the government, only saint/sinner warring officials like Obama vs. Mitch McConnell
No idea how far it's disturbed in print, been reading since the early 90s and I know it's still around. My assumption is mostly local alt papers hence the Shepherd Express reference.
I remember the first time I saw Dilbert was some strips tacked to the announcement board at a developers’ seminar. And the joke was based on understanding binary digits.
I thought, this is clever, but how many people is this going to appeal to?
It turns out: A lot, I guess. Of course, back then, the IT community was a lot smaller.
I recall he got cancelled by the Comicle (SF Chronicle) for joking about workplace diversity, affirmative action and reparations. The latter of which was a hip topic. I immediately cancelled my subscription. Turnabout was fair play. Heretell it still has no sense of humor.
'Admitted'? Hold on here. There is absolutely NO link to prostate cancer. This is point blank misinformation! Stop it. The most probable link is the difficulty of getting a GP appointment and annual blood work during the lockdowns. I had that problem. A PSA test annually (and followup) is the name of the game (especially for black men). I've had two friends die early from this and it was because they were too fucking lazy to get an annual physical. For men over 40 a PSA test is always included in the blood work. It's SO simple.
Last I checked PSA wasn't a great marker for prostate cancer and we just do it for lack of anything else. When someone gets cancer we always look for someone or something to blame (just ask Steve what happened when he got it). It's all cope. Like if we just do the right things that can't happen to us. But it will. Something will. If you live long enough you'll get prostate cancer and it might well not even be the thing that kills you.
Scott has had all sorts of health problems since forever. He considered leaving the scene some 5 years ago, etc.
The Covid Crazies were a wacky time but by the time the jab came around everyone with sense knew that it wouldn't likely matter much either way. Some fellows took it (Scott and plenty of readers), some didn't (Me and plenty of readers) but the belief that either taking it or not taking it would be your doom was a lunatic fringe position held by folk like Biden on one side and the most popular online loudmouths on the other. IOW, crazy talk. And it remains so.
As a non-jabbaroni I would be delighted to hear that my wisdom paid off in spades but I'm afraid the odds just ain't there.
To be clear, EVEN IF Scott said, "the vaccine, it killed me, it was a population thinner which operated in way X→Y→Z", it would still remain a fringe idea, as a great many of Scott's have been (which is something he actually WOULD admit).
The point is, lots of people got jabbed. In my opinion there was no excuse for such silliness by that time but that, because it hardly matters, I don't bother bringing it up.
If however you believe that you've cracked the case and can prove that mortality is still climbing steeply due to the shot, then you're going to have to do better (around here anyway) than a couple of declarations claiming that the jab did it.
P.S. I doubt you will find this edifying, but some will:
"The Vaccine" was nothing more or less than an exit strategy for all of the hyperbolic worriers of The West to explain to themselves and others why they were about to cease their wild-eyed exclamations of doom and gloom, and would return to life as it had been before they'd gone batty. It was a social psychological exit strategy. Not a means of either saving or slaughtering billions of recipients.
Except even after almost everyone was jabbed they stuck to the other measures. It was really strange or possibly not strange at all but a new data point on human psychology at scale.
I like your post above. I don't know why so many people find it hard to think in non binary (i.e. non-extreme terms). What happened was (most likely scenario by my thinking) an experimental virus escaped from a lab in China. They covered it up until it was seeded everywhere. The initial strain had a significantly higher mortality rate than than seasonal influenza and once it was clear it was sticking around alternating groups of people panicked. They tried lockdowns short term to let area prepare and discovered that people accepted it so they kept pushing that button for two years and printing money to make up for the lost jobs. It wasn't a nefarious plan. It was the old "We have to do something...this is something" political idiocy.
The mRNA vaccine is cool tech and almost definitely safe. The only reason people think it isn't is because the government stupidly imposed it on everyone even people who clearly didn't need it.
Biontech didn't have a protien expert on thier payroll while the Covid vaccine was created. Many problems with the Biontech/Pfizer Covid vaccine are related to protien issues. I'm not sure whether the bad side effects of the Covid vaccine developed by Biontech are specific to that vaccine or are general problems with mRNA vaccines. Until I find out, I don't want any mRNA vaccines!
I've listened to "Coffee With Scott Adams" every morning since 2016 and do not recall him saying the Covid vaccine harmed him. Can you direct me to a source?
My mother particularly admired the genius of making the HR rep a joyously sadistic feline (Catbert). “Catbert” became a household shorthand, as in “he’s a real Catbert”.
In 1989 I picked up an employment case that was Dilbert IRL. My client was a smart tech guy, native Berliner, who looked and sounded just like Sergeant Schultz. After 16 years, he was RIF'ed when three shifts were combined into two. The manager was a gay guy with a colostomy bag, who chose to retain two lesbians, who wrote each other's performance evaluations.
My client applied for an open position in an adjacent department, an IBM 370 environment, under a policy calling for preference to layoffs over outsiders, a reform adopted a few years before in order to beat back an organizing attempt by the Teamsters. Despite the policy, my client was never interviewed and the job went to an outsider, from Ross Perot's EDS.
According to all the employees I interviewed, the hiring manager knew absolutely nothing about computers. On the witness stand, he claimed that the job was now harder than it was when my client last performed it, because it was now done by a software package rather than manually, LOL. One of his own techies, who had received a 1% pay raise when his duties were increased, disputed this and said my client could easily have done the job.
Jury voir dire was amazing. When the judge asked whether anyone was acquainted with the defendant, one woman said she used to work there, "and they're just horrible, horrible people, oh my God." A few seats later, a 60-ish Filipino lady said she too had worked for defendant. She pointed to my client and said, "and I remember him - he was a hard worker." Her seat would have gone to a guy who sorta looked like a young Mitt Romney, but before he even sat down he said, "your honor, you're not going to believe this." The judge goes, "not you too!" He says, "yep, and what that first lady said? She was right, just terrible people."
I had wanted to represent the guy in an action for legal malpractice, as his original lawyers failed to do any discovery and my request to reopen was denied. But my client refused, so I did the employment claim with no deposition from the Dilbert-esque manager.
He surprised us with testimony that "everyone knew" that shortly before his layoff my client had come into work drunk. My client testified that the drinking
took place on his night off, at a party thrown by the employer to celebrate some kind of United Way money-raising record, and that he just went in to check on things. They brought the gay blade back to testify that it happened on a scheduled work night.
10-12 years later, in Marin, I was walking home from work and stopped into a market. I was absentmindedly cruising the aisles when a tiny 60-something lady walked up with a big smile and said, "hello," as if we were old friends. I had no idea who she was, so I brusquely said hi and kept moving. When I got to the cashier I began feeling guilty, wondering whether she might have been some friend of my Mom's or something, and whether I'd be hearing about it. I got about 100 yards down the road when it hit me: it was the judge. In the intervening years, she had become a U.S. District Judge (sponsored by Barbara Boxer), and I thanked my stars that I hadn't recognized her. Since she'd screwed me on several rulings, who knows what I might have said. I could have had the FBI at my door the next day.
The client hooked on with a larger company, at a much lower salary, and in the mid-90's that company acquired my client's former employer.
Comic sections do exist. They are uniformly bland and boring…as if edited by a zealous intern hoping to be hired by the censors-in-charge. I suspect AI may be involved in storyline as well as artwork.
As a lifelong comic reader, I concur. Pearls before Swine still has some good ones sometimes but aside from that you just feel grateful they rerun old For Better or For Worse strips.
Anyone that read or listened to him with any regularity can probably cite some way that helped them. His books are amazingly insightful and a masterclass on superb writing, but he helped me with my younger son who was struggling in school. Scott normalized the power of hypnosis, at least in my home. My son was a terrible test taker, mainly due to worry and panic. A series of sessions with a hypnosis expert... and my son's teachers were amazed at the difference in him when he came back to school for a new year.
Scott also emphasized how powerful our thoughts are, and how we can "make" things happen when you believe with true, strong intent. My oldest son went on to great academic heights, but it wasn't smooth going for him in the very early years. When he finished high school and got into an elite university, I wanted so much to let his elementary teachers know. I kept thinking about it; for some reason, outright emailing them seemed out of place. They had retired, so it would have taken some digging to get contact information. One day, within a span of two days, they crossed my path in very unlikely ways. I hadn't seen either in ten years. Of course, I blathered about him. I haven't seen them since, and probably never will. A cynic might say my chance meetings were just coincidence. Because of Scott Adams, I know there was another element at play.
Scott Adams seems to have become more conservative with his diagnosis. I followed him before he put all his content behind a paywall, but his views were a bit too liberal for my taste. Nowadays I only get to read him second hand, but he seems a lot less soft-headed than he used to be. I can only hope that I will display as much grace if I get a diagnosis of cancer as he has shown.
I don't subscribe so I can't read most of it. I'm guessing it's going to say that he was diagnosed with lymphoma, got a third booster and the lymphoma got rapidly worse so the question is did the shot make it get worse. If so, interesting question, but Scott Adams has prostate cancer which is a cancer of epithelial cells. I don't immediately see how a shot that makes (possibly) a lymphatic cell malignancy worse, would accelerate prostate cancer too. Also is he saying that he got prostate cancer because of the shot or that it made it worse?
The thinking around the Covid vaccine turbocharging cancer is that it makes cancer worse, not that it causes it. In the Atlantic article the doctor in question had cancer, was getting treatment, and then after the vaccine the cancer kicked into high gear.
Lymphoma is a malignancy of immune cells, the same kind that would be activated to multiply by the vaccine. So I can at least see a mechanism. My objection is more the the magical thinking that the vaccine was part of something bad so it's all bad, magically bad, causes and accelerates all cancers, causes all health problems anyone experienced after the pandemic.
Write a letter to the editor of the Atlantic. I'm not suggesting that the vaccine is responsible for acne, but there is clearly precedent in the mainstream media for questioning if there is some connection with accelerated tumor growth and the vaccines.
Scott loved arguing for the jab on his podcast. Liberals can’t understand how diverse opinions are on the Right, since they quash all dissent on their side, and close their eyes and ears to any outside opinions
My area used to have some big time tech companies in it, and it was interesting to see which comics got posted on cubical and laboratory walls. It should have been an omen when you started to see less Far Side and more Dilbert. Nothing against Dilbert, but it was no surprise when the companies started to circle the drain of dysfunction. Many people would enjoy Dilbert but would realize what they were really laughing at and get kind of bummed (same applies to the movie Office Space).
Scott Adams has had several great acts in his life, and any one of them alone would have been impressive. Ben Sasse, who I met briefly and who is also a very impressive guy, has also announced a dire prognosis. Cancer sucks.
COVID vaccines. No one has been punished
Adams said last year he thought he was near the end, in pain. Then he tried another drug and that seemed to help for a while. Now I’m sorry to read that things are going south again.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna251908
I always liked Dilbert! It was a great comic strip. I have a stuffed Dogbert and Catbert.
None of us get out of this alive, but Scott has displayed a grace and humility that everyone should envy.
Indeed. Working to the end.
Sad news to hear.
Dilbert and the Far Side were welcome humor to greet each morning back in the 1980s and 90s.
Calvin and Hobbes as well.
Indeed.
I'll add "Zippy the Pinhead" and "Life in Hell" (the original Matt Groening comics pre Simpsons. Zippy was hit or miss but even the incomprehensible ones were a nice palette cleanser.
Neither of those were in the papers around me. Don’t think I ever saw them. Maybe a west coast thing?
Those strips were hipster trash, more clever than funny, and more “outrageous” than clever. The TV series made The Simpsons much funnier than Groening ever did
LIH was similar to The Simpsons visually only, but is worthy as a time capsule of alt-weekly comics strips being anti-authority. Millennials can't imagine generalized opposition to the government, only saint/sinner warring officials like Obama vs. Mitch McConnell
I was on the east coast when I read them
"Red Meat" too though not sure it ever seen much publication outside "The Shepherd Express".
never seen it
https://www.redmeat.com/
No idea how far it's disturbed in print, been reading since the early 90s and I know it's still around. My assumption is mostly local alt papers hence the Shepherd Express reference.
I remember the first time I saw Dilbert was some strips tacked to the announcement board at a developers’ seminar. And the joke was based on understanding binary digits.
I thought, this is clever, but how many people is this going to appeal to?
It turns out: A lot, I guess. Of course, back then, the IT community was a lot smaller.
I recall he got cancelled by the Comicle (SF Chronicle) for joking about workplace diversity, affirmative action and reparations. The latter of which was a hip topic. I immediately cancelled my subscription. Turnabout was fair play. Heretell it still has no sense of humor.
Nothing he said was untrue.
A genius, and still a nice fellow. The obituaries will be unpleasant, unbalanced and undeserved.
They'll probably start out with "controversial cartoonist Scott Adams..."
Or 'far right'.
"Controversial far right . . ."
“Divisive”, maybe “fascist”, or “racist”
He admitted it's from the Covid vaccine. Who's going to jail for this?!
'Admitted'? Hold on here. There is absolutely NO link to prostate cancer. This is point blank misinformation! Stop it. The most probable link is the difficulty of getting a GP appointment and annual blood work during the lockdowns. I had that problem. A PSA test annually (and followup) is the name of the game (especially for black men). I've had two friends die early from this and it was because they were too fucking lazy to get an annual physical. For men over 40 a PSA test is always included in the blood work. It's SO simple.
The Biden HHS recommended not bothering with PSAs after age 70, so Biden was mistreated by his own bureaucrats.
Last I checked PSA wasn't a great marker for prostate cancer and we just do it for lack of anything else. When someone gets cancer we always look for someone or something to blame (just ask Steve what happened when he got it). It's all cope. Like if we just do the right things that can't happen to us. But it will. Something will. If you live long enough you'll get prostate cancer and it might well not even be the thing that kills you.
Universal PSA has long been recommended against along with universal mammograms, the risk rewards math isn't in your favor.
What’s the risk?
Unnecessary prostate removal which has been proven to be extremely common.
Big if true.
But... IS it true?
Scott has had all sorts of health problems since forever. He considered leaving the scene some 5 years ago, etc.
The Covid Crazies were a wacky time but by the time the jab came around everyone with sense knew that it wouldn't likely matter much either way. Some fellows took it (Scott and plenty of readers), some didn't (Me and plenty of readers) but the belief that either taking it or not taking it would be your doom was a lunatic fringe position held by folk like Biden on one side and the most popular online loudmouths on the other. IOW, crazy talk. And it remains so.
As a non-jabbaroni I would be delighted to hear that my wisdom paid off in spades but I'm afraid the odds just ain't there.
To be clear, EVEN IF Scott said, "the vaccine, it killed me, it was a population thinner which operated in way X→Y→Z", it would still remain a fringe idea, as a great many of Scott's have been (which is something he actually WOULD admit).
The point is, lots of people got jabbed. In my opinion there was no excuse for such silliness by that time but that, because it hardly matters, I don't bother bringing it up.
If however you believe that you've cracked the case and can prove that mortality is still climbing steeply due to the shot, then you're going to have to do better (around here anyway) than a couple of declarations claiming that the jab did it.
P.S. I doubt you will find this edifying, but some will:
"The Vaccine" was nothing more or less than an exit strategy for all of the hyperbolic worriers of The West to explain to themselves and others why they were about to cease their wild-eyed exclamations of doom and gloom, and would return to life as it had been before they'd gone batty. It was a social psychological exit strategy. Not a means of either saving or slaughtering billions of recipients.
Except even after almost everyone was jabbed they stuck to the other measures. It was really strange or possibly not strange at all but a new data point on human psychology at scale.
I like your post above. I don't know why so many people find it hard to think in non binary (i.e. non-extreme terms). What happened was (most likely scenario by my thinking) an experimental virus escaped from a lab in China. They covered it up until it was seeded everywhere. The initial strain had a significantly higher mortality rate than than seasonal influenza and once it was clear it was sticking around alternating groups of people panicked. They tried lockdowns short term to let area prepare and discovered that people accepted it so they kept pushing that button for two years and printing money to make up for the lost jobs. It wasn't a nefarious plan. It was the old "We have to do something...this is something" political idiocy.
The mRNA vaccine is cool tech and almost definitely safe. The only reason people think it isn't is because the government stupidly imposed it on everyone even people who clearly didn't need it.
Biontech didn't have a protien expert on thier payroll while the Covid vaccine was created. Many problems with the Biontech/Pfizer Covid vaccine are related to protien issues. I'm not sure whether the bad side effects of the Covid vaccine developed by Biontech are specific to that vaccine or are general problems with mRNA vaccines. Until I find out, I don't want any mRNA vaccines!
I've listened to "Coffee With Scott Adams" every morning since 2016 and do not recall him saying the Covid vaccine harmed him. Can you direct me to a source?
On Instagram Scott said he believed his turbo cancer was triggered by the Covid vaccine and he regrets taking it.
I don't remember seeing this
He can’t “admit” any such thing, no matter how strongly he suspects it
My mother particularly admired the genius of making the HR rep a joyously sadistic feline (Catbert). “Catbert” became a household shorthand, as in “he’s a real Catbert”.
In 1989 I picked up an employment case that was Dilbert IRL. My client was a smart tech guy, native Berliner, who looked and sounded just like Sergeant Schultz. After 16 years, he was RIF'ed when three shifts were combined into two. The manager was a gay guy with a colostomy bag, who chose to retain two lesbians, who wrote each other's performance evaluations.
My client applied for an open position in an adjacent department, an IBM 370 environment, under a policy calling for preference to layoffs over outsiders, a reform adopted a few years before in order to beat back an organizing attempt by the Teamsters. Despite the policy, my client was never interviewed and the job went to an outsider, from Ross Perot's EDS.
According to all the employees I interviewed, the hiring manager knew absolutely nothing about computers. On the witness stand, he claimed that the job was now harder than it was when my client last performed it, because it was now done by a software package rather than manually, LOL. One of his own techies, who had received a 1% pay raise when his duties were increased, disputed this and said my client could easily have done the job.
Jury voir dire was amazing. When the judge asked whether anyone was acquainted with the defendant, one woman said she used to work there, "and they're just horrible, horrible people, oh my God." A few seats later, a 60-ish Filipino lady said she too had worked for defendant. She pointed to my client and said, "and I remember him - he was a hard worker." Her seat would have gone to a guy who sorta looked like a young Mitt Romney, but before he even sat down he said, "your honor, you're not going to believe this." The judge goes, "not you too!" He says, "yep, and what that first lady said? She was right, just terrible people."
We lost.
Lost because everyone who knew how bad the defendants were was dismissed from the jury? Or was there 'more to the story'?
What became of Berliner 'Schultz'?
I had wanted to represent the guy in an action for legal malpractice, as his original lawyers failed to do any discovery and my request to reopen was denied. But my client refused, so I did the employment claim with no deposition from the Dilbert-esque manager.
He surprised us with testimony that "everyone knew" that shortly before his layoff my client had come into work drunk. My client testified that the drinking
took place on his night off, at a party thrown by the employer to celebrate some kind of United Way money-raising record, and that he just went in to check on things. They brought the gay blade back to testify that it happened on a scheduled work night.
10-12 years later, in Marin, I was walking home from work and stopped into a market. I was absentmindedly cruising the aisles when a tiny 60-something lady walked up with a big smile and said, "hello," as if we were old friends. I had no idea who she was, so I brusquely said hi and kept moving. When I got to the cashier I began feeling guilty, wondering whether she might have been some friend of my Mom's or something, and whether I'd be hearing about it. I got about 100 yards down the road when it hit me: it was the judge. In the intervening years, she had become a U.S. District Judge (sponsored by Barbara Boxer), and I thanked my stars that I hadn't recognized her. Since she'd screwed me on several rulings, who knows what I might have said. I could have had the FBI at my door the next day.
The client hooked on with a larger company, at a much lower salary, and in the mid-90's that company acquired my client's former employer.
Always looked forward to Family Circus or Hägar come Sunday, but as I got older, appreciated Dilbert more and more.
Do comics still exist? I haven’t read a local newspaper in 20 years.
Comic sections do exist. They are uniformly bland and boring…as if edited by a zealous intern hoping to be hired by the censors-in-charge. I suspect AI may be involved in storyline as well as artwork.
As a lifelong comic reader, I concur. Pearls before Swine still has some good ones sometimes but aside from that you just feel grateful they rerun old For Better or For Worse strips.
BTW, it was Scott Adams who encouraged and mentored the creator of the "Pearls Before Swine" strip after reviewing his samples.
Nice!!!!!!
The Argyle Sweater is, or was, a decent Far Side knock-off. I believe he stopped alternating capitals, which was really annoying.
Anyone that read or listened to him with any regularity can probably cite some way that helped them. His books are amazingly insightful and a masterclass on superb writing, but he helped me with my younger son who was struggling in school. Scott normalized the power of hypnosis, at least in my home. My son was a terrible test taker, mainly due to worry and panic. A series of sessions with a hypnosis expert... and my son's teachers were amazed at the difference in him when he came back to school for a new year.
Scott also emphasized how powerful our thoughts are, and how we can "make" things happen when you believe with true, strong intent. My oldest son went on to great academic heights, but it wasn't smooth going for him in the very early years. When he finished high school and got into an elite university, I wanted so much to let his elementary teachers know. I kept thinking about it; for some reason, outright emailing them seemed out of place. They had retired, so it would have taken some digging to get contact information. One day, within a span of two days, they crossed my path in very unlikely ways. I hadn't seen either in ten years. Of course, I blathered about him. I haven't seen them since, and probably never will. A cynic might say my chance meetings were just coincidence. Because of Scott Adams, I know there was another element at play.
Scott Adams seems to have become more conservative with his diagnosis. I followed him before he put all his content behind a paywall, but his views were a bit too liberal for my taste. Nowadays I only get to read him second hand, but he seems a lot less soft-headed than he used to be. I can only hope that I will display as much grace if I get a diagnosis of cancer as he has shown.
On Instagram, Scott said he believes his turbo cancer was triggered by the Covid Vaccine and he regrets taking it.
What is turbo cancer but a cancer you didn't know you had until it was too late?
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/09/mrna-covid-vaccine-booster-lymphoma-cancer/671308/
I don't subscribe so I can't read most of it. I'm guessing it's going to say that he was diagnosed with lymphoma, got a third booster and the lymphoma got rapidly worse so the question is did the shot make it get worse. If so, interesting question, but Scott Adams has prostate cancer which is a cancer of epithelial cells. I don't immediately see how a shot that makes (possibly) a lymphatic cell malignancy worse, would accelerate prostate cancer too. Also is he saying that he got prostate cancer because of the shot or that it made it worse?
The thinking around the Covid vaccine turbocharging cancer is that it makes cancer worse, not that it causes it. In the Atlantic article the doctor in question had cancer, was getting treatment, and then after the vaccine the cancer kicked into high gear.
Lymphoma is a malignancy of immune cells, the same kind that would be activated to multiply by the vaccine. So I can at least see a mechanism. My objection is more the the magical thinking that the vaccine was part of something bad so it's all bad, magically bad, causes and accelerates all cancers, causes all health problems anyone experienced after the pandemic.
Write a letter to the editor of the Atlantic. I'm not suggesting that the vaccine is responsible for acne, but there is clearly precedent in the mainstream media for questioning if there is some connection with accelerated tumor growth and the vaccines.
Scott loved arguing for the jab on his podcast. Liberals can’t understand how diverse opinions are on the Right, since they quash all dissent on their side, and close their eyes and ears to any outside opinions
I had an idea for my own comic strip many years ago. But, I could not get Dilbert characters out of my head. So, I just gave up.
My area used to have some big time tech companies in it, and it was interesting to see which comics got posted on cubical and laboratory walls. It should have been an omen when you started to see less Far Side and more Dilbert. Nothing against Dilbert, but it was no surprise when the companies started to circle the drain of dysfunction. Many people would enjoy Dilbert but would realize what they were really laughing at and get kind of bummed (same applies to the movie Office Space).