So Focused On The Future 🟧

#BuyAustralianWine

[So Focused On The Future 🟧 @SoFutureFocused]

#DontBeAfraidofYourFreedom #NewZealand

[Rɪᴄʜᴀʀᴅ Kᴇᴍᴘ ⋁ @COLRICHARDKEMP]

He asks why there is an obsession with historic slavery while vast-scale modern slavery is ignored? Simple answer. This obsession against present day Britons who never participated in the slave trade or profited from it is driven by activists who want to destroy our country by self loathing, guilt and vast reparations.

[Outpost Studios @OutpostStudios]

Which words come to mind when you think about Brexit?

This week, as politicians threaten to restart the Brexit wars, join @ColinBrazierTV as he takes us through his personal Brexit story.

Colin Brazier: In Defence of Brexit.

Only on Outpost.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Tu confonds deux choses, et c'est exactement le piège que la French Theory a tendu.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité — égalité *de droits*, égalité *devant la loi*, égalité *de dignité*. C'est la promesse républicaine, et personne ici ne l'attaque.

Le wokisme, ce n'est pas ça. C'est l'égalitarisme des résultats. Et l'égalitarisme des résultats, contrairement à l'égalité des droits, n'est pas un élargissement de la liberté — c'est sa négation.

Quelques exemples concrets :

— San Francisco supprime les classes de maths avancées au collège pour "réduire les inégalités". Résultat : les écarts entre élèves explosent, les familles aisées prennent des cours privés, les pauvres se font enterrer. L'égalitarisme a creusé l'inégalité.

— Les politiques de discrimination positive à Harvard : étudiants admis avec des scores très en dessous de leurs camarades, taux d'échec dispropportionné, sentiment d'imposture, ressentiment généralisé. On a saboté ceux qu'on voulait aider.

— L'aide humanitaire qui distribue du riz gratuit pendant 30 ans en Afrique : effondrement des filières agricoles locales, dépendance institutionnalisée. Donner un poisson, c'est empêcher d'apprendre à pêcher.

Le wokisme ne détruit pas l'humanité dans le sens dramatique. Il fait pire : il dessert systématiquement ceux qu'il prétend protéger, et il génère du ressentiment des deux côtés — ceux qu'on infantilise et ceux qu'on culpabilise.

La fraternité républicaine dit : tu es mon égal, donc je te traite en adulte capable.
Le wokisme dit : tu es ma victime, donc je dois te protéger de toi-même.

L'un élève. L'autre infantilise. Ce n'est pas la même chose, et confondre les deux est exactement le tour de passe-passe qu'on dénonce.

[So Focused On The Future 🟧 @SoFutureFocused]

@foxnewsnight Happy for Iran to play at the World Cup, if only to let New Zealand win a game. :)

[So Focused On The Future 🟧 @SoFutureFocused]

@RodDMartin Add Sudan to the list.

[Chris Cork @chriscork89]

Everyone blaming Trump having a pop etc I’ll just leave this here, oh and Kamala Harris did one too but we won’t talk about that.

#DonaldTrump #HilaryClinton #Iran #Debates

[So Focused On The Future 🟧 @SoFutureFocused]

@smerconish We will have to escalate before we de-escalate. The status quo will not do. Get the uranium.

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

In a small village in the Punjab, a girl of about eight years old crouches over a clay stove, feeding it patties of dried cow dung. Smoke billows into her face. She coughs while feeding the fire. There is no reliable electricity. When the family gets a little extra money, they buy liquified petroleum gas (LPG), which burns cleanly, as natural gas does in stoves in the wealthy West. Unfortunately, that LPG just got priced out of reach for hundreds of millions like her.

The 2026 Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz were the triggers for the current energy crisis, but the underlying cause is the chronic underinvestment and underdevelopment of oil and gas resources by poor, developing, and rich nations alike over the last ten years. Policymakers diverted that money into green energy, which failed to prevent the crisis.

Zion Lights, the author of an essential new book, Energy Is Life, watched the above scene during a visit to her parents’ ancestral village in India. Her parents had emigrated to Birmingham, England, in the late 1960s and 1970s to work in factories. The factories gave them wages, dignity, and a foothold in the developed world. The family they left behind in the Punjab remained trapped in a poverty so total that it touched everything: health, education, opportunity, lifespan. At the root of it all is the lack of energy.

The energy crisis will hurt poor people in poor nations far more than anyone in the U.S. or the rest of the West. Asian countries receive 80 percent of their energy supply through the Strait of Hormuz. For Bangladesh, which sources 72 percent of its LNG from Qatar and the UAE, the supply disruption translates to an extra $760 to $830 million in monthly import costs.

“All poverty is energy poverty, when you think about it,” Lights said in our new podcast. “They’re living in 40-degree Celsius heat. No air conditioning. You can give them an air conditioner, you can give them money for an air conditioner, but how’s it going to work if you don’t have the electricity?”

It would be unfair to entirely blame the lack of oil and gas supplies on Western climate policy. Beyond the Iran war, governance failures, corruption, conflict, and infrastructure decay all play important roles. India’s power sector dysfunction predates any climate agreement. Pakistan’s circular debt crisis has roots in decades of mismanagement and subsidy distortions. Sub-Saharan Africa’s electricity deficit reflects bad governance, underinvestment, and the difficulty of building transmission infrastructure across vast, sparsely populated territories.

But climate policy has been the dominant priority in wealthy nations’ engagement with the developing world for two decades, and Western green NGOs have even blocked the construction of hydroelectric dams, which tend to be the first reliable source of power that poor nations develop as they rise the development ladder.

Beginning in the early 2010s and accelerating sharply after the 2015 Paris Agreement, Western development banks, private financial institutions, and national governments began systematically restricting financing for oil, gas, and coal projects in the developing world. The stated rationale was climate change. The practical effect was to deny poor countries the energy infrastructure that every wealthy nation used to climb out of poverty...

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[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

The Iran conflict triggered the energy crisis, but its roots lie in the West's opposition to the production of oil and gas outside the Persian Gulf. The climate movement is, says former radical environmentalist @ziontree, "fundamentally anti-human in its thinking."

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

The Iran conflict is a reminder that we must accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, say many in the media. Iran’s disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz means the world is now losing 13 million barrels per day of oil and refined products, which is over 10% of global consumption.

After QatarEnergy, the world’s largest LNG exporter, declared force majeure on all exports after Iranian drone strikes, Asian buyers scrambled to redirect orders to Australia. But then, last week, a cyclone slammed into Australia’s LNG corridor, forcing shutdowns at three of the country’s largest facilities.

David Wallace-Wells in the New York Times noted, “No one has ever started a war over solar panels.”

But nobody goes to war over solar panels for the same reason nobody goes to war over candles: they cannot power the things that economies, civilizations, and wars run on. A gallon of jet fuel contains 34 kilowatt-hours of energy in a package weighing six pounds. A lithium-ion battery storing the same energy weighs 250 pounds.

That density gap is why every military on earth runs on liquid hydrocarbons, why every container ship crossing the Pacific burns bunker fuel, why every combine harvester in Iowa runs on diesel, and why every 747 landing at Heathrow runs on kerosene. The fact that nobody wages war over solar panels is evidence of their limitations, not superiority.

Many respond by claiming that fossil fuels persist because of government subsidies and political favoritism. The IMF says global fossil fuel subsidies total $7 trillion. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres cited that number when he called for eliminating “fossil fuel subsidies that distort markets and lock us into the past.”

But the $7 trillion figure is almost entirely fictional. The IMF’s own data show that only 18% of its subsidy estimate reflects actual government spending or undercharging for supply costs. The remaining 82% consists of what the IMF calls “implicit subsidies,” a theoretical construct that assigns a dollar value to the environmental and social costs of burning fossil fuels and then treats the failure to tax those costs as a subsidy.

By that logic, any product whose price does not reflect the full externalized cost of its production is “subsidized.”

The real problem is that the world overinvested in green energy and underinvested in oil and gas. Globally, the IEA’s World Energy Investment 2025 report documented that $2.2 trillion flowed to clean energy in 2025, exactly double the $1.1 trillion invested in oil, natural gas, and coal combined. In the U.S., federal tax expenditures for green energy end users in fiscal year 2025 alone totaled $57.9 billion.

That figure exceeds the aggregate of all federal fossil fuel tax expenditures over the 31-year period from 1994 to 2025, totaling $50.8 billion.

The oil and gas extraction sector generated $1.8 trillion in total U.S. revenues in 2024, meaning that the $3 billion in actual government support represents 0.17% of industry revenue, an economic rounding error.

Renewable energy hardware is overwhelmingly manufactured in China, creating a supply chain dependency that is more precarious than the oil dependency it purports to replace. China’s share of global polysilicon, ingot, and wafer production has reached approximately 95%. China controls 91% of rare earth processing and 94% of the permanent magnet production essential for wind turbines.

China dominates more than 75% of global solar cell and module manufacturing and is projected to control nearly 60% of all critical mineral refining by 2030. In 2025, Beijing weaponized this dominance, and bismuth prices surgednearly 500% overnight.

Had the world spent the past decade building the oil, gas, LNG, pipeline, and fertilizer infrastructure that engineers designed and companies proposed, the Hormuz crisis would still be a serious geopolitical event, but it would not threaten to cause a recession.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a 600-mile natural gas line from West Virginia to North Carolina, saw its cost double from $4.5 billion to $8 billion during years of environmental litigation before Duke Energy and Dominion Energy cancelled it in July 2020. The Constitution Pipeline from Pennsylvania to New York died the same year.

The PennEast Pipeline won its case at the United States Supreme Court in 2021 and still could not get built because New Jersey refused to issue state permits. In Canada, TransCanada abandoned the $15.7 billion Energy East pipeline in 2017 after the National Energy Board required an unprecedented review of upstream and downstream emissions...

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[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

The Hormuz crisis is the precipitating factor in the current energy crisis, but the underlying cause is too little oil and gas production outside the Persian Gulf.

Had the world spent the past decade building the oil, gas, LNG, pipeline, and fertilizer infrastructure that engineers designed and companies proposed, the Hormuz crisis would still be a serious geopolitical event, but it would not threaten to cause a recession.

North America

— The Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a 600-mile natural gas line from West Virginia to North Carolina, saw its cost double from $4.5 billion to $8 billion during years of environmental litigation before Duke Energy and Dominion Energy cancelled it in July 2020.

— The Constitution Pipeline from Pennsylvania to New York died the same year.

— The PennEast Pipeline won its case at the United States Supreme Court in 2021 and still could not get built because New Jersey refused to issue state permits.

— In Canada, TransCanada abandoned the $15.7 billion Energy East pipeline in 2017 after the National Energy Board required an unprecedented review of upstream and downstream emissions.

— In January 2024, the Biden administration paused all pending approvals for LNG export terminals shipping to non-free-trade-agreement countries, freezing projects representing tens of billions of cubic feet per day of potential capacity.

— Venture Global’s CP2 terminal in Louisiana, designed for 20 million tonnes per annum, sat in regulatory limbo for over a year.

— NextDecade’s Rio Grande LNG in Texas, with 48 MTPA of planned capacity, stalled alongside it.

— PTT Global Chemical’s proposed $10 billion ethane cracker in Belmont County, Ohio, first announced in 2015, remains on indefinite hold after failing to attract financing partners amid climate-driven investor sentiment.

— Across the US Gulf Coast, nearly 60% of planned plastic and petrochemical production projects sit on hold.

— LNG Canada, the Shell-led terminal at Kitimat, British Columbia, took over six years from construction start to first cargo, with its pipeline running 263% over budget. Environmental review, Indigenous disputes, and contractor cost escalation all contributed.

— Pieridae Energy’s Goldboro LNG project in Nova Scotia, a 10 MTPA facility first proposed in 2012, was abandoned in November 2023 after more than a decade of permitting and financing obstacles.

Australia

— Australia’s Santos’s Barossa gas project was halted midway through construction after a Federal Court ruling overturned its environmental approval.

— Woodside’s Scarborough project faces ongoing litigation from the Australian Conservation Foundation seeking to block it on climate grounds.

Africa

— Perhaps nowhere has the damage been more consequential than in Africa. At COP26 in 2021, wealthy nations pledged to halt overseas development finance for gas projects, a commitment that fell hardest on the continent least responsible for climate change and most in need of energy infrastructure.

— The World Bank stopped financing oil and gas extraction in 2019 and imposed restrictive conditions on downstream gas projects.

— The European Investment Bank announced a complete ban on unabated fossil fuel financing by the end of 2021, with its president declaring that “gas is over.”

— At least 21 other development finance institutions followed suit.

As a result:

— TotalEnergies’ Mozambique LNG project sat under force majeure for four and a half years after the UK Export Credit Agency and other backers withdrew climate-motivated financing.

— The East African Crude Oil Pipeline lost financing commitments from more than 30 major international banks under pressure from climatists.

Europe

— France prevented the completion of a third gas interconnector with Spain, citing climate neutrality goals.

— The United Kingdom imposed a moratorium on fracking in 2019 despite sitting atop one of Europe’s most promising shale gas formations.

— Germany, which shuttered its last three nuclear plants in April 2023, compounded its gas dependency by refusing to develop domestic shale resources.

— CF Industries permanently shut the UK’s largest ammonia plant at Billingham, a facility that also produced 60% of Britain’s food-grade CO2.

— Yara International curtailed output across plants in France, Italy, and Belgium before permanently closing its 400,000 tonne per year ammonia facility at Tertre, Belgium, in October 2024.

These closures occurred because European climate policy made gas too expensive for the domestic industry to survive.

[Tousi TV @TousiTVOfficial]

🚨 War In Iran Begins - Trump Wipes Out IRGC Leadership

WATCH: https://t.co/SBM2rTpO3y

[Tousi TV @TousiTVOfficial]

🇮🇷 School kids in Iran celebrating the start of war on IRGC

One kid says "I love Trump".

[Tousi TV @TousiTVOfficial]

🇮🇷 Iranians dancing on the streets of Tehran as the U.S. and Israel launch a huge attack on the Islamic occupation

[So Focused On The Future 🟧 @SoFutureFocused]

@joseph_not14615 @EricLDaugh That 8.15 meeting must have been wild. #Khameneidead

[So Focused On The Future 🟧 @SoFutureFocused]

@aniobrien Scott Adams pushed for narcan distribution to police and anyone likely face fentanyl events, like department stores/malls where users would go to take a dose.

[Scott Adams @ScottAdamsSays]

Coffee with Scott Adams moves to The Scott Adams School 01/13/24 https://t.co/RsXWMvV6yA

[Jack Posobiec @JackPosobiec]

JOSHUA LISEC: The 13 life lessons we all learned from Scott Adams, our beloved 'Internet Dad'

https://t.co/BIrcvP8efN

[American Debunk @AmericanDebunk]

Arguably Scott Adams’ greatest livestream video ever- The User Interface for Reality.

If you know, you know.

[Owen Gregorian @OwenGregorian]

‘Dilbert’ creator Scott Adams, who foretold Trump’s rise and diagnosed America’s political sickness, dead at 68 | Joel Pollak, New York Post

Cartoonist, author, and political commentator Scott Adams died Tuesday after a battle with prostate cancer. He was 68.

His ex-wife and caregiver, Shelly, made the announcement on Adams’ livestream Tuesday morning.

“Unfortunately, this isn’t good news,” Shelly said. “Of course, he waited ’til just before the show started, but he’s not with us anymore.”

Shelly read aloud a “final message” that Adams “wanted to say” on the livestream.

“If you’re reading this, things did not go well for me,” the message began. “I have a few things to say before I go. My body fell before my brain. I am of sound mind as i write this January 1, 2026.”

After speaking about Christianity, Adams’ message said, “For the first part of my life, I was focused on making myself a worthy husband and parent as a way to find meaning. That worked — but marriages don’t always last forever, and mine ended in a highly amicable way. I’m grateful for those years and the people I came to call my family.”

Adams announced he was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer in May 2025.

He said he had been dealing with his condition privately for some time before his public announcement, but noted that the cancer had progressed to Stage 4 and spread to his bones.

“I talked to my radiologist yesterday, and it’s all bad news — the odds of me recovering are essentially zero,” Adams said during his “Real Coffee with Scott Adams” podcast on Jan. 1. “I’ll give you any updates if that changes, but it won’t.

“So there’s no chance that I’ll get my feeling back in my legs, and I’ve got some ongoing heart failure, which is making it difficult to breathe sometimes during the day,” the iconic artist continued. “However, you should prepare yourself that January will probably be a month of transition, one way or another.”

On Monday, Shelly confirmed Adams was in hospice at his home in Northern California and had only a few days left to live.

Adams became famous through “Dilbert,” the comic strip that poked fun at corporate culture with keen insight into the absurdity, cruelty and incompetence of management inside large organizations.

In his last decade and a half, however, Adams achieved wide influence through his business advice and political analysis.

His 2013 bestseller, “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big,” is one of the most influential and entertaining business books of recent years.

In it, Adams introduced the concept of using systems, rather than goals, to achieve success in life. He also advised readers to accumulate skills — a “talent stack” — rather than traditional credentials.

In 2015, Adams began commenting on politics after observing the first Republican presidential primary debate. When then-candidate Donald Trump responded to a moderator’s question that accused him of mistreating women by interjecting, “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Adams took notice.

A trained hypnotist, Adams predicted that Trump, then a huge underdog, would win the nomination — and the presidency.

Adams drew ridicule for his bold claim. But he looked increasingly prescient as Trump dispensed with his opponents, the Republican establishment, and — eventually — Hillary Clinton.

Adams used what he called the “persuasion filter”: Rather than judging whether political rhetoric was true or false, he simply evaluated it based on whether it was persuasive.

What began as a simple blog post became a daily live video stream — first on the now-defunct Periscope platform, then on a variety of outlets, including anti-cancel-culture Rumble (in which he had invested).

Adams began each show by brewing fresh coffee; he eventually called his livestream “Coffee with Scott Adams,” and it became required viewing, or listening, for millions of fans, who poured their own mugs and tuned in at 10 a.m. ET for the “simultaneous sip.”

While he excelled at explaining Trump’s tactics to a growing audience of Trump-supporting fans, Adams was also interested in explaining how Democrats, and the left-leaning media, interpreted events.

He explained that the country was often watching “two movies on one screen,” and argued — with great empathy for his opponents — that voters who felt genuinely frightened by Trump’s ascent had been led into an emotional cul-de-sac by cynical leaders.

Adams emphasized that he was not a Republican: “I’m further left than Bernie Sanders,” he reminded viewers. He even endorsed Clinton in 2016 — for his own safety, he said. But he drew a conservative audience that soon included Trump’s own advisers.

In 2017, Adams published “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter,” in which he extrapolated the lessons of Trump’s unlikely victory. He followed that with “Loserthink,” using his critiques of stale thinking in the media to teach positive mental habits.

During the coronavirus pandemic, Adams added an evening “swaddle,” in which he wrapped himself in a flannel blanket, and offered advice for surviving lockdowns. One of his ideas was a concept he called “the user interface for reality.” Given that we can only see reality through our own individual filters, he explained, we can choose which filter to use.

The “Dilbert” filter, for example, predicted incompetence; the Trump filter anticipated victory. By adopting filters that guide us toward success, Adams argued, we not only convince ourselves that success is possible, but bend reality toward that outcome.

While generally pro-Trump, Adams was critical of the president on occasion, and also took unexpected political stances. When then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick began “taking a knee” for the national anthem in support of the fledgling Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Adams supported him, and admired the persuasive success of his protest. He even offered advice to leaders within BLM, notably New York’s Hawk Newsome.

In 2023, he was accused of racism when he commented on a Rasmussen poll in which only 53% of black respondents agreed with the statement: “It’s OK to be white.”

Adams quipped that it would be good to move away from people who felt that degree of hostility. He immediately found himself “canceled” — his comic strip dropped, his publishing contracts terminated.

He began self-publishing his books, including “Reframe Your Brain: The User Interface for Happiness and Success.” He relaunched an edgier version of “Dilbert” on the independent Locals platform, and felt liberated to express his more controversial political views — such as that the 2020 election had likely been “rigged,” given the increasingly evident corruption of nearly every other government system.

In the last weeks of his life, he posted on X, asking readers to share personal stories about how they had been affected by his teachings and podcasts. Adams shared intimate, and often painful, details of his life — losing a stepson to a fentanyl overdose in 2018, suffering through a second divorce in 2022, and fighting cancer.

He also embraced Christianity in his final days. While he would not divulge details about his faith, he confirmed his conversion in a final message that Shelly read on Tuesday’s livestream.

He reframed death, as he had reframed life: Just one more filter — and not one to fear.

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