Told ya so

Here’s the front page story in The Oz today: Aussies no better off since GFC: household incomes stagnant for past decade. From which:

“Over the eight-year period from 2009 to 2017, average household income grew by only $3156, or 3.5 per cent, while the median in 2017 was $542 lower than 2009,” the report, which has tracked the circumstances of more than 17,500 Australians since 2001, finds.

The share of households in relative poverty — living on less than half the median income — rose to 10.4 per cent, according to analysis released today by the Melbourne Institute that will add to the controversy about the adequacy­ of Newstart, the govern­ment’s jobless payment.

All as obvious as the morning sun, if you can do away with modern macroeconomic trash and return to pre-Keynesian theory. From my tenth anniversary warning on the stimulus published in Quadrant:

Just as the causes of this downturn cannot be charted through a Keynesian demand deficiency model, neither can the solution. The world’s economies are not suffering from a lack of demand and the right policy response is not a demand stimulus. Increased public sector spending will only add to the market confusions that already exist.

What is potentially catastrophic would be to try to spend our way to recovery. The recession that will follow will be deep, prolonged and potentially take years to overcome.

— Steven Kates, Quadrant, March 2009

Why have the IMF, the OECD, the ILO, the treasuries of every advanced economy, the Treasury in Australia, the business economists around the world, why have they got it so wrong and yet you in your ivory tower at RMIT have got it so right?

— Question to Steven Kates from Senator Doug Cameron,
Senate Economic References Committee, September 21, 2009

I caught on to classical economic theory in 1980 and have spent the years since watching in every circumstance how accurate the economics of John Stuart Mill actually is, from the failure of every single “stimulus” put in place to stimulate through to watching the recovery that followed the massive cuts to public spending brought on by Peter Costello’s budget in 1996 and the return, not just to balanced budgets but zero debt. Modern Keynesian economics is junk science and has never worked on a single occasion during the entire period since The General Theory was published in 1936.

Read my text if you are interested: Free Market Economics, now in its third edition. And here is the endorsement from Art Laffer, the genius behind the Reagan recovery and now also complicit in the recovery in the United States:

‘This book presents the very embodiment of supply-side economics. At its very core is the entrepreneur trying to work out what to do in a world of deep uncertainty in which the future cannot be known. Crucially, the book is entirely un-Keynesian, restoring Say’s Law to the centre of economic theory, with its focus on value-adding production as the source of demand. If you would like to understand how an economy actually works, this is one of the few places I know of where you can find out.’

There is a constituency on the right for forcing media tech giants to become even-handed between left and right

This was the title of the post: I am tired of conservative bleating over social media, with this his basic point.

Conservatives are going to get nowhere good with their unending complaints over big tech and the internal policing of content…. Worse still, it’s boring. What proportion of conservative content on social media is now about the censorship of conservative content on social media? Enough!… This isn’t heading towards a freer, healthier online environment. This is opening the door to regulation and government watchdogs.

These were the comments which could be read as stand-alone statements. Every comment, whether reprinted here or not, went in the same direction.

This is certainly one of the biggest loads of crap posted on the Cat.

I don’t think you realise just how big Google and Facebook are and how far their reach is. Not to mention the honey pot they present for enemy foreign governments. Government have already granted them their status. They are effectively a guild being considered a ‘platform’. They only way to be considered a ‘platform’ is to be granted such status from government. In order to actually compete with them, you too need to be a ‘platform’.

FFS what is so difficult to understand about the rule of law? We have laws that “publishers” who pick and choose their content are responsible for what they choose to publish, and that, in very broad terms, “common carriers” who don’t pick and choose but just provide a service don’t have that type of liability. Why is it so hard to understand that the internet giants shouldn’t be allowed to keep sheltering from responsibility by falsely claiming to be common carriers when they’re very clearly operating as publishers? That is, why is it so hard to understand that the law should be enforced?

This person should have adult supervision while using the internet. FFS. PayPal bans you – stop complaining damn you, build your own payment network. Wells Fargo closes your accounts – build your own bank. MasterCard cancels your credit cards – build your own credit card from scratch. Google won’t let you advertise your business – build your own search engine etc etc etc. No wonder our side never wins. All want to lose with grace. Go lose elsewhere knave – we’re fighting now.

Your proposed approach assumes that we can innovate – and entrepreneur our way forward faster than the woke corporatocracy and their government-funded SJW chums can screw us. On evidence to date, that’s a bad bet. Sure, we need to build our own platforms, etcetera, and a lot of that work is well underway. But at the same time we need to fight back against open political discrimination by a range of businesses that happen to be operating under actual or de facto government licenses. For example, WestPac will close your account if they don’t like your politics. Is the answer to create our own bank? No, that’s silly. WestPac needs to either be forced to provide an evenhanded service, or else have their license pulled. Likewise, the social media oligopoly operates under a de facto license, by which government allows them to be common carriers when they defame us, and allows them to be publishers when they deplatform us. The natural response to this sort of predatory, prejudiced oligopoly is a boot up the bum from the Commonwealth. Like it or not, we live in a heavily-regulated society in which we pay over the odds for a meddlesome government. We aren’t calling it into existence, it’s already here. So it’s only sensible to fight back against licensed bullies by using the force of the government that licenses them. Either we use the government while we can, or there’ll come a time when we can’t use it at all.

No point banging our heads against a wall trying to explain reality to these low info posters. The statement above says it all. He is unaware of the numerous SocMed start ups crushed by the likes of Visa and Mastercard and Pay Pal et al, who refuse to handle on-line transactions of conservative start ups. He thinks even though almost all avenues that lead to the info highway have been closed off by these tech giants, we can just have a few meetings and start our own tech giants and interweb thingies. Imagine a small innovator having his electricity cut. No problemo, get yourself a generator. But hey, no one will sell me a generator. No problemo, just build yourself a generator. It’s a free World right? I build a generator but no one will sell me the diesel to power it. No worries mate, start drilling, get your own oil and distill it into diesel. It’s a free World right? This is the result of believing that if it’s in a textbook, if it’s theoretically correct, then it must work in the real World. Libertarians. If the left wasn’t so evil, I’d say libertarians were worse for humanity. (Only because they are so naive, yet act like geniuses.)

I am not sure you understand the risks here. Not surprising, given that the discussion in the media and by the politicians has not yet figured it out.

Why would a future progressive government seek to monitor and control online content, when the big corporations (google, facebook, reddit etc) are already doing so for them?

It’s already quite clear that these platforms can be used to significantly enhance a political campaign. Obama proved that in 2012. Barack Obama’s digital operation was key to his re-election effort. Google “Inside the Cave,” if you want to know how that worked. In part, it centred on Facebook allowing its platform to be used, by that campaign only, in a way that significantly invaded the privacy of users. How? Whenever a facebook user made a donation, their list of friends was published to the campaign, and those friends were also approached for donations/spamming and so on. The campaign also was able to mine the vast data repository behind facebook to identify anyone who might be responsive. Sure, all political parties maintain databases, but very few have access to the wealth of information held by facebook and google. It’s a decisive advantage, especially when only one political flavour is allowed to use it.

Speaking of vast databases, facebook and google are not alone. Other very large vendors (outside of social media) have seen the value (so far, mainly for figuring out what type of ads a person on the internet might respond to) of maintaining as many cross-referenced records on people as they possibly can. One I am aware of has extensive records of billions of individuals. By extensive, I don’t mean just name rank and serial number. They have all of that, plus personal preferences, political interests, credit history, internet history, app usage and so on. Hundreds of facts about each individual, across the world. Facts derived from sneaky surveillance, cookies, ad-trackers and many other methods that would fly under most peoples radar. Any source of data is sucked up, correlated, then marketed for profit.

As an example of how troubling this is, consider any credit record you might have at any of the standard financial reporting agencies. It has been sold to one or more of the bigger global players, then cross-referenced with other data, building a detailed picture of your credit worthiness, social positions, academic capabilities, political positions, family relations, and any other personal feature that might somehow be marketable in the future. Think of the value of that for law enforcement, intelligence and the like. And as for the social engineering possibilities, the only difference between China’s social credit system and what is sitting in western data centres, is that China announced it, and proclaimed what they would use it for. The west already has the data at least, and is using it for purposes that don’t extend to managing “social credit”, but that is just a short tweak from where they already are. So, why would any conservative seek to build their own version of the same thing, to get around a current leftist / statist / autocratic monopoly on big data, when the whole idea goes against a number of things I hold dear. Many western governments are constrained by law as to how they can interconnect and cross link their databases. The commercial world is not. They have had a lot of time to consider how big data can be monetised. Think it through. The issues and risks are much bigger than you think. Foundational principles such as freedom and privacy are at risk. I don’t know the answers, but the last thing I would do is “start building explicitly conservative” versions.

Go back to your room and look up the meaning of these words: Monopoly, Cartel, Publisher, Carrier.

There’s lots of payment processors out there, but if the big guys really manage to put their foot down most of those little payment processors will be forced to abandon customers too. There’s always cheques and bank transfers as a fallback … at a significant nuisance factor. Interesting question whether a big payment processor can legally cut off a smaller payment processor from the transaction network, not for violating any rules, but merely for having a customer that isn’t politically correct. For example, the “David Horowitz Freedom Center” is politically outspoken for sure, but has never done anything illegal to the best of my knowledge. So you have one big player in the marketplace who not only refuses to do business with XYZ (under a “free society” that’s would probably be OK), but also applies pressure on everyone else to refuse to do business with XYZ (which is certainly anti-competitive and probably an unfair trade practice).

I am tired of conservatives not acting, because they worry about what the left might do or say.

I just don’t know where to start with this crap… “In fact, they may just be opening the door for future progressive governments to start monitoring and controlling online content.” Well it isn’t the future sunshine, it’s happening now…from both progressive and not so progressive governments…..after Christchurch….Bitchute, 4chan and various other sites were blocked in this country…..I think Gab was also blocked here for a while…it might even still be blocked….you have to get a VPN or know how to change your computer to access Bitchute. “Stop whinging and start building explicitly conservative organisations.” Well yes…..all well and good but those “conservative platforms and organisations” that have been built…such as Gab (a free speech platform) or Minds (a Facebook alternative)…or those that are currently being such as the one that Jordan Peterson is building….are constantly subjected to attacks from the left….smeared as platforms for the fascists, far right, the hard right, the extreme right, nuttzies, white supremacists, incels and all the rest of the crap that they throw at the centre and the right.

Here’s just a smidgeon of “conservatives” who have been banned from platforms….platforms that still host Antifa, far left groups and organisations (that preach violence), religion of pieces extremist organisations, Hamas, Hezbollah…..and I could go on and on and on…. Sargon of Akkad…hardly conservative or far right….banned from twitter, banned from Patreon..oh and after his “banning” from Patreon….he moved to a startup run by Russians called “Subscribestar” which was then blocked temporarily by Mastercard and Paypal because both Mastercard and Paypal were being subjected to pressure from far left pressure groups. His youtube channel has now been demonetised. Robert Spencer…hardly far right…he runs a website that monitors the religion of pieces…..he had his account closed by Mastercard and Paypal…….because of activism by a religion of pieces organisation….I kid you not.

David Horowitz…..account closed by Mastercard
Lauren Southern..banned from Patreon
Milo..banned from everywhere
Alex Jones….banned from everywhere
Laura Loomer…banned from everywhere
Pamela Geller…banned from everywhere and doxed by Antifa
Paul Joseph Watson..banned from Facebook and Instagram…still active on Youtube…but for how long?
Avi Yemeni….banned from Facebook and Instagram…still active on Youtube…but for how long?

And I could go on and on and on. Oh and closer to home…we have a television network called Sky News…which during the evening has the AUDACITY to host some conservative/right wing/libertarian commentators….haven’t you heard about Sky after Dark? For hosting conservative commentators Sky is constantly under siege from pernicious and very ugly far left activist groups such as “Sleeping Giants”…or as I prefer to call them…”Sleeping Midgets”…..because of their far left activism…many advertisers have pulled business from Sky…..I have personally fought back at an advertiser that succumbed to pressure from those midgets and this particular advertiser is now back on Sky advertising….but what I am trying to say is that even if conservatives set up a completely new television station…it needs money and thus it would require advertisers…..and yet those advertisers would be subjected to the same pressure from far left scum to cease advertising. I think that it’s entirely appropriate to “whinge”…..actually it’s better to be angry.

The non-left in the West has not yet woken up to what they are dealing with: the left who don’t play by the rules. If you play by the rules you’re stuffed. So far Trump has got this; Farrage maybe and a few other leaders and potential leaders in Europe and Brazil. To beat the left you have to act like the left.

Conservatives seem to be bound by the “conservatives should act by their principles” mantra. it’s a losing proposition as we have been watching steadily unfold for the last few decades. conservatism is pretty much dead and buried, it’s only the sheer stupidity of the left that allows the odd conservative to get into power these days. or look at the UK, conservatives are labor light. A take no prisoners approach is what is required. scorched earth policy when it comes to any forms of marxism.

I have long thought that we should play them at their own game. Turn the other cheek and they will stomp all over anyone who disagrees with them. Reasoning does not work with them, they just change the rules as they go along, to get their own way.

For the 3 zillionth time (exactly – I’ve been counting): NOTHING will change unless we engage in some creative destruction. All strictly legal, of course. As I posted a few days ago, those self-proclaimed strategic masterminds who vow that all we need to do is sit back and ‘let them trip themselves up,’ are utterly deluded. Sun Tzu didn’t proclaim that ‘magic happens’ or ‘let the universe provide. Chillax dude!’ Neither did he advocate that letting your enemies make their own mistakes was a passive, solitary, one-size-fits-all tactic. Change does not just ‘happen.’ It needs to be forced. You have to MAKE change take place. That all begins with attitude. The conservative attitude – with a minute number of exceptions – seems to be that the moral high ground precludes any aggression or even assertion, in the face of threat from an enemy. Dazzled by our own righteousness, we are oblivious to the fact that the moral high ground on which we proudly pose, has been surrounded, and is being progressively undermined by the industrious vermin we gaze down upon. ‘Primitives!’ we sneer, crossing our arms, shaking our head, and closing our eyes. All the while, those ‘primitives’ are building a human pyramid, and before too long, their ‘primitive’ sharpened sticks will be thrust through our flabby flesh from all sides. But let’s continue to pretend the threat is not existential. Let’s not get our hands dirty, or – heaven forbid! – crack a fingernail. Plan, scheme, strategise, undermine; neutralise the enablers first, to weaken the enemy’s ability to withstand the barrages that will follow. This is a head-thing. Get over the head-thing, and the capacity is present to dominate.

A summary of my post above for those with short attention spans: We will not win this by only focusing on how we can get to the finishing line (it’s a metaphor – just stay with it) – we need to reduce our opponent’s ability to compete with us. Whether it’s switching urine samples in the change room, getting in their face with yo-mama insults, or stepping it up and actually smashing a kneecap, there is no such thing as fairness or sportsmanship in this race. The meek will be mercilessly crushed. We are being crushed.

I think this person has blown more than a valve. I think the head gasket is a goner. For some real world perspective, here is the co-founder of Facebook (clearly a MAGA hat wearing knuckle dragger) who says that Faceborg MUST be broken up for plenty of very good reasons, all of which have nothing to do with being conservative, or whingeing or whatever else. If these are good reasons (and I think they are), then why are reasons of unequal play not good enough for a debate about changing the status quo?

FFS, it isn’t hard. Alinsky rule 4: ″make them live up to their own rules”. Yes we are in an existential fight for civilisation. No prisoners, no mercy. That’s what the left is doing. Time the right realised it and did the same but we have the odd ideologically pure fools who want to impose Alinsky 4 on us and hence tie our hands.

Many here mentioned Gab so I checked online,this summary is from Wikipedia. Gab is an English-language social media website known for its far-right user base. The site has been widely described as a “safe haven” for extremists including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right. The site was launched in 2017 and claimed to have around 850,000 registered user accounts by December 2018. It primarily attracts far-right and alt-right users who have been banned from other social networks. The platform populace is mainly populated by users who are “conservative, male. Is this a fair summary? or could Wikipedia be a wee bit biased?

Folk have already pointed out the many alternatives to Facebook etc. that are already up and running. You can also support individuals who are setting up their own channels. And, like Vox Day, you can fight back (eg. his Indigogo battle). The only other thing I’d like to mention is the idea of government & private companies as seperate entities that have differing goals. So – imagine there’s a group of people behind both, manipulating or using both, to their own ends, whatever they many be. We don’t know what happens in those meetings of government officials, mega-rich, and big company owners when they get together. What do they discuss? What do they plan? What are their goals/dreams/ambitions? Well, we can take a guess. As Roger pointed out, when Chad Robichaux’s ads were taken off Youtube, they told him the offensive word was ‘Christian’. When he changed the word to ‘Muslim’ and submitted again, Youtube were happy with it. I suggest we’re thinking in wrong categories.

Regulating to prevent censorship and discrimination, enforcing 1st amendment rights is not opening the door to regulation that requires censorship and rewards discrimination. A basic tenet of a free society is that you cannot discriminate in commerce because of prohibited grounds. We don’t want Woolies denying food and Energy Australia cutting off the power because they don’t like LNP voters. We don’t want Dr Mohamed, Dr Muhammad or Dr Mohammad at my local medical centre saying “begone kufr, we only treat people who keep halal here.” If I don’t agree with Joyce Allan, I shouldn’t have to start my own airline to be flown to Perth.

If it ain’t illegal it ought to be illegal to censor it. Pretty simple.

Twitter too

Big tech must be treated like media: Sims.

ACCC chair Rod Sims has described technology giants Facebook and Google as publishers, who should be regulated in a similar way to traditional media.

Following the release of the ACCC’s final report into the market power of digital platforms, Mr Sims said Google and Facebook should be subject to the same laws as publishers and broadcasters.

And not before time. Moreover, it might even become a bi-partisan issue. At least you can hope.

Yesterday, presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign sued Google, alleging that the company wrongly suspended the campaign’s Google Ads account during the critical hours following the first Democratic debate. The Complaint is venued in federal court in central California.

Its allegations are explosive. Gabbard accuses Google of trying to sabotage her presidential campaign because she, like Elizabeth Warren, has argued in favor of reining in the tech monopolies, including Google. Here are some of the Complaint’s allegations:

4. In the June 26-27, 2019 Democratic Party presidential debates, tens of millions of Americans got to hear Tulsi Gabbard’s voice for the first time. And people liked what they heard: Gabbard quickly became the most searched-for Democratic presidential candidate on June 27-28. In the crucial post-debate period—a time when presidential candidates receive outsize interest, engagement, and donations—Americans around the country wanted to hear more from Tulsi Gabbard.
***
7. On June 28, 2019—at the height of Gabbard’s popularity among Internet searchers in the immediate hours after the debate ended, and in the thick of the critical post-debate period (when television viewers, radio listeners, newspaper readers, and millions of other Americans are discussing and searching for presidential candidates), Google suspended Tulsi’s Google Ads account without warning.

8. For hours, as millions of Americans searched Google for information about Tulsi, and as Tulsi was trying, through Google, to speak to them, her Google Ads account was arbitrarily and forcibly taken offline. Throughout this period, the Campaign worked frantically to gather more information about the suspension; to get through to someone at Google who could get the Account back online; and to understand and remedy the restraint that had been placed on Tulsi’s speech—at precisely the moment when everyone wanted to hear from her.

Utterly unacceptable. People go onto these platforms because they are suckered in with the promise that they will not be censored and once the network is built up find themselves sandbagged by a bunch of ignorant techies. Let them be sued, and as far as the eye can see.

Wicksell and William White

This is a comment from Sunni Bakchat dealing with monetary policy.

If the morons in the Reserve Bank had a broad education they’d know about Wicksell rather than just Keynes. Clearly Keynesian economics does not have the answer or it is being interpreted incorrectly. This idiocy from the Reserve Bank will continue until their hand is forced. For there is not an original thinker or courageous person to be found in the institution, or just about any other western reserve bank at present. For those seeking a little inspiration, William White, former chief economist at The Bank of International Settlements is all over the subject.

Alas, I had never heard of White. Now I have gone looking: INTERVIEW WITH DR WILLIAM WHITE, FORMER HEAD OF THE MONETARY AND ECONOMIC DEPARTMENT AT THE BIS. A sample:

I’m working on a piece for the G30 which basically deals with the future of central banking and the future of monetary policy. I sense from talking to many of the members, many of whom are previous central bankers, that they are very concerned about the direction this has taken, in particular the continued over reliance on stimulative monetary policy to get us out of the predicament we are in. It has turned into a kind of Pandora’s box. Swiss Re has recently published a paper called “Financial Repression: Quantifying the Cost” which looks at the cost of these unusually low interest rates for the insurance industry. Clearly, they are really, really worried about it and I don’t blame them.

I’ve written a lot about this stuff, not least of which a paper that was published by the Dallas Fed in 2012 . It was called “Ultra Easy Monetary Policy And The Law Of Unintended Consequences.” It contained page after page of all the things that might go wrong. Moreover, knowing that even my imagination might be inadequate, I treated that paper as a kind of work in progress. So every time I opened up The Financial Times or something else and I saw something unpleasant that wasn’t in my paper, I clipped it out and added it to the pile. Unfortunately, the pile is getting bigger and bigger. There is a possibility at least that this whole exercise could end very badly.

Larry Summers argues that the Wicksellian natural rate is now below zero, and the financial rate can’t go below zero, so therefore we have a real problem. Well, my reaction is to suggest we try through policy to get the natural rate back up again The way that you do that is to raise expected profit rates for viable companies that are being held down by all the zombie companies bring supported by banks or governments in one form or another. It will be painful, absolutely no question. There will be a lot of vested interests, which will be hurt. But the way out of this thing is to get rid of the excess capacity and give people an opportunity to make an honest dollar.

There is hope, as dim and faded as it might be.

Candace Owens too hot for Playboy

An interview with Candace Owens that almost disappeared due to a rising tide of political correctness inside the once-unrestrained and uncensored Playboy magazine. Candace Owens is the founder of Blexit and the “Red Pill Black” YouTube Channel. She currently hosts “The Candace Owens Show” on PragerU.

On the 18th of August, 2018, Playboy magazine flew me out to Washington D.C. to interview Candace Owens; it was to be an interview conducted in the time-honored tradition of Hugh Hefner’s libertarian philosophy. But for the next nine months, the interview was placed in a state of limbo. After nearly a year of confusion and obstruction, I began to ask questions: one source inside Playboy told me that the suppression of the interview was timed with a politically-motivated purge by the President of Media and other executives; other sources alerted me to the fact that archived articles were being expunged from the website, while columnists were being replaced and interviews with conservatives were suddenly being cancelled. This was the same publication that had contracted me as a conservative columnist. This was the same publication that once published William F. Buckley Jr. With over a decade of media experience, I’ve never once lobbed a protest relating to editorial malpractice, but what troubles me is that while my editor wanted to publish the interview (which Playboy had commissioned and paid for), pressure groups from within Playboy did not. Upon investigation, it seemed the same censorious executives who had been rewriting the Playboy philosophy since 2017 were now at odds with the editors and readers of Playboy…..With the Bunny Empire being pulled in different directions by repressive ideologues, which one source described to me as “Gloria Steinem feminists,” I asked to publish the interview independently. On May 16th, I was given the legal right to do so. It’s being published as an indelible protest of ideological discrimination and unofficial forms of censorship.

Picked up from Rafe with gratitude.

Australia may have the world’s most incompetent central bank

Cannot be sure since I don’t watch them all, but it’s gotta be a contender. Look at this from today’s AFR: RBA’s Lowe flags ‘extended period’ of low rates.

Speaking at the annual Australian Business Economists Anika Foundation lunch in Sydney, Dr Lowe also said the RBA board “is prepared to provide additional support by easing monetary policy” if growth in economic demand “is not sufficient” to lift inflation “in a reasonable timeframe”….

“It is highly unlikely that we will be contemplating higher interest rates until we are confident that inflation will return to around the midpoint of the target range,” Dr Lowe said.

So they don’t know that low interest rates slow economic growth. They’re not alone, but it would be nice if they were at least aware this is potentially a genuine consequence of keeping rates artificially low. But that isn’t even the issue. Their problem is that the inflation rate is too low!

This is unreal. They are trying to get the level of money demand to rise to create more inflation. Go on, explain your reasoning, if you can. Real demand will never rise since real supply, the basis of demand, will never rise with such policies in place. Do these people know anything?

Illiteracy and the modern student

Via Instapundit: DISPATCHES FROM THE SOCIAL MEDIA VIRUS: Minds Destroyed By The Internet.

My students are unable to analyze, follow and understand written text. To be more specific, they are unable to decipher compound sentences, understand relationship between subordinate and main clauses. They can’t grasp the logical relationship between sentences, let alone paragraphs, which are totally opaque to them.

When I started to teach (only 2 years ago), I prepared material written in normal, rational, technical prose — for adults, or as I understood they would be. Immediately, it became apparent that there was zero comprehension. Well, thought I, let’s make it a bit simpler. So I reduced the paragraphs to bullet point lists.

Still nothing? Hmm.

I started to write step by step, basically cut-and-paste instructions, highlighted the important points, wrote in notes and cross references (like NOTE: you did this in step #2 please refer to #2). Abject failure.

So, especially in the exams, I started to write in answers in the follow up questions, like so: “If you correctly answered #1 as ABC what is the cause of …?”. Basically I give them the answers in followup questions, plus cut and paste documents. My exams are open book, open notes, Internet access.

95% of them fail.

It’s too bad that, despite winning that minor bit of unpleasantness called World War II, Churchill has become an unperson in the academy due to doubleplus ungood badthink on issues of colonialism. There’s much to be learned from how he crafted his speeches, as his latest successor at No. 10 Downing Street points out in this 2014 video:

Mueller “was not about finding the truth”


DAZED AND CONFUSED

The most obnoxious part of the “testimony” is how deceitful the Democrats remain. They restate their accusations without evidence from Mueller’s testimony just as there was none in The Report itself. The above is from Drudge. This is from Instapundit.

MUELLER SAYS HE IS ‘NOT FAMILIAR’ WITH FUSION GPS, THE FIRM BEHIND THE STEELE DOSSIER:

Mueller revealed his surprising lack of familiarity with the firm during an exchange with Ohio Rep. Steve Chabot, a Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee.

“When you talk about the firm that produced the Steele reporting, the name of the firm that produced that was Fusion GPS, is that correct?” Chabot asked.

“I’m not familiar with that,” said Mueller, while scouring through his 448-page report of the Russia probe.

“Let me just help you. It was. It’s not a trick question or anything. It was Fusion GPS,” said Chabot.

And from Andrew McCarthy: With Collusion Collapse, Public Loses Interest in Mueller Theatrics.

Mueller seems to have lost interest as well: ‘The years have clearly taken a toll:’ Reporters from NBC, NYT question health of Robert Mueller.

Mueller is such a weasel! Limited questions from every area that reveal just how deceitful he has been. Madly, the accusation is that Trump ran for President so that he could build a hotel in Moscow. Worse than pathetic. And Alexander Downer makes a feature appearance!

ADDING THIS FROM INSTAPUNDIT:

THE SHOCKING CONCLUSION: Mueller “was not about finding the truth.”

Related: Jordan to Mueller: Why wasn’t Joseph Mifsud charged with obstruction?

With this from the Instapundit comments:

For the umpteenth time:

Today’s left, including now the leadership of the Democrat Party, does not believe in the concept of objective truth.

They don’t seek the truth because they don’t think it even exists. Evidence, facts, and other variations of “the truth” don’t exist for them either.

It’s always and only about the narrative. What they get a critical mass of people to believe? None of what Enlightenment thinkers believe to be important (facts, evidence, logic) matters. Only the ability to convince gullible people to believe the narrative matters.

If you need to understand this concept in your bones, the best book on it is Explaining Postmodernism.

ALEXANDER DOWNER ENTERS THE TESTIMONY From Key Moments From Robert Mueller’s Congressional Testimony:

As part of his attempt to discredit the Russia investigation opened by the FBI in 2016, Rep. Devin Nunes, the California Republican who is the intelligence committee’s ranking Republican, just said that the inquiry was “not opened based on an official product from Five Eyes intelligence, but based on a rumor” from an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer. Downer was the Australian who told the FBI that George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, boasted over drinks in London that summer that he’d heard that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton, in the form of stolen emails.

Papadopoulos later admitted to the FBI that he had first heard this from Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor with contacts in the Russian foreign ministry who said that Russia had obtained thousands of Clinton-related emails.

Downer, the Australian diplomat, alerted the U.S. government in July 2016, only after what might have seemed like a drunken boast at the time took on a menacing cast when WikiLeaks began releasing Clinton-related emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee by Russian hackers.