An Aristotelian Approach To The Southwest Meltdown

As I've said here now and then, I'm an Aristotelian, which means I look for causes. What caused the Southwest meltdown? Legally, the proximate cause in this case is probably also Aristotle's efficient cause, which is what appears to be a badly botched management decision in Denver on December 21. A YouTube aviation commentator, Juan Browne, explains it best:

At about 1:40, he begins,

. . . but it was an incident at Denver's airport back on 21 . . . from the 21st of December through about the 24th of December that ignited, that started, this meltdown before the IT failed. As we all know, Southwest Airlines is a point-to-point airline system, but it does operate through other airlines' major hubs, and over here at the major hub of Denver, Colorado, as this bomb cyclone storm began to hit, on or about the 21st of December, an operational emergency was declared by management there specifically regarding the ramp agents, as the temperatures plunged and ramp agents were, of course have to work outside with the aircraft, were having a more and more difficult time of dealing with the aircraft in these freezing temperatures, a strongly worded memo went out from management to the ramp agents declaring that there was too many people calling in sick, and that they were going to have to declare an emergency, and if anybody is sick, they're going to have to have a letter from their doctor the day that they return to work, uh, everybody is going to have to work mandatory overtime, and anybody that is calling in sick and doesn't have a doctor's letter by the time that they show back up for work, they will be terminated.

As this word got around to the ramp agents at Denver, apparently (this has not been verified), upwards of 200 ramp agents quit, and these are jobs that pay about $20 to $28 per hour working with the aircraft out in the weather. Once that hit Denver, the aircraft began to stack up, getting parked, they couldn't get the aircraft into the gates. If, when you cannot get the aircraft into the gates, especially in this kind of weather, you have to start canceling flights, so that started a rolling cancellation of flights from Denver, Colorado. Soon those cancellations of flights ended up shutting down the entire Southwest operation, first at Denver, and that was followed by Dallas, St Louis, Nashville, and Chicago's Midway Airport. The entire Southwest operation was shut down. Now, with this many aircraft being parked, this is when the IT problems began with the SkySolver software thnat Southwest Airlines uses. This software is circa 1990s vintage, 40 year old software that they use to schedule pilots. flight attendants, crews, and marry them up with the aircraft and form the scheduling sequence. This 1990s software is capable of handling about 300 changes. We're talking changes in the thousands now, and the software was simply overwhelmed, and so all the automation for scheduling apparently failed, forcing schedulers to revert to manual scheduling, an extremely complicated job, completely overwhelming the system, thus forcing the airline to do a complete reset. . . and start all over[.]

UPDATE: Review of Twitter posts suggests that as of December 21, ramp agents were leaving work due to frostbite, which I would imagine constitutes unsafe conditions, and the memo may have provoked he walkout in response.

It's been more than a decade since I last flew Southwest, and I was shocked to see that it's now the largest US air carrier. The economy can't be exposed to this sort of calamity. The mass walkout in Denver appears to be confirmed, with the only question being just how many quit -- Juan Browne's version is 200 or so while the tweet below says 120:

Guys… this is why Denver canceled so many. They got this letter and 120 ramp agents walked out pic.twitter.com/uicHcPL3VT

— Overheard At Southwest (@AtSouthwest) December 24, 2022

I see someone named Chris Johnson, Vice President of Ground Operations, is the author of the memo, and this says to me that Johnson himself and at least one of his bosses need to be escorted out. Clearly the most indulgent policy over sick leave would have left a better result than what occurred, and we must recognize that it was Johnson's call to make.

Another version of Southwest's problem is the idea that the airline went downhill after its founder's retirement:

Southwest's problem is that its leadership, after legendary founder Herb Kelleher retired, were financial guys, not operations specialists. Southwest's unions are right in pointing to the airline's low-tech crew-scheduling software called SkySolver as the culprit in the December breakdown. It was also at fault in a smaller but still devastating Southwest breakdown last year linked to an unexpected air traffic control (ATC) outage in the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Jacksonville control center.

This is more like what Aristotle might call the formal cause, the management culture from which the efficient cause arose. In this context, though, the SkySolver software problem is one of several cascading results from the efficient cause, not the origin of the meltdown. I've seen various opinions that say the current CEO, Bob Jordan is more of an operational type than a financial type, and that he'd been trying to turn things around, but apparently to no avail after just 10 months on the job. This video gives me the impression of a corporate pretty boy who speaks in glib generalities:

I assume the Southwest board is already contacting an outside law firm for a thorough investigation. I would hope there would be at least two areas of focus, what the simmering issue was behind the mass walkout in Denver that triggered the meltdown -- at best, Chris Johnson should already be on administrative leave -- and who authorized the situation in Nashville where the police were enlisted to tell passengers their flights had been canceled and clear them out. That person also needs to be fired. (It sounds as though there was a serious sitdown in Denver between the airport authority and Southwest; something like that needs to happen in Nashville and probably elsewhere, too.)

I would imagine, though, that the board is going to have to decide fairly soon that Mr Jordan isn't what they need to turn the company around.

The Southwest Airlines Nashville Incident

It's hard to know where to start with the incident from Christmas Eve at the Nashville airport, in which by this account at The Hill,

According to a statement released by [Nashville airport] officials, a Southwest Airlines employee requested for an officer to escort passengers from the C Concourse to the pre-security ticket counter.

According to the NBC Today show,

A TikTok video shared by passenger and Nashville resident Amani Robinson, 20, shows an officer telling her mother and a fellow group of passengers standing in line on Christmas that they need to leave "or you will be arrested for trespassing."

I think it's safe to say that phones with video cameras have transformed policing. The Nashville airport police officer did not come off well in this encounter, although it's worth pointing out that in many jurisdictions, airport police are a separate agency from the main police department, and potentially they have lower standards for hiring and training. But as a regular On Patrol: Live fan, I see even more trespass complaints than car chases, and one thing I note is that officers called to a trespass situation by procedure separate the parties and get both sides.

In a normal trespass case, it's someone acting crazy at a retail or fast food establishment, the officers try to get the violator's side and get craziness, while the store manager is reasonable with a clear problem. But in any situation that's not clear cut, the respondiing officer calls in a supervisor, who makes any needed policy call. In the Nashville case at hand, the person who recorded the video and her mother weren't acting crazy, they and the numerous passengers around them were peacefully trying to get information from Southwest on their flights, and they had no indication this was out of line until a patrol officer threatened them with arrest.

I think if the officer was of the caliber we normally see on On Patrol: Live, he would see two issues: one would be the size of the crowd, and he would call for backup (later videos suggest he did this), but once he got both sides, this would also raise an immediate question of policy: these are people who are trying to get home on Christmas, they aren't disruptive, and the airline can't handle them. I've seen commentators ask if the officer had discretion to handle the case, but this is the wrong question, he should have called the shift supervisor for guidance. In fact, the shift supervisor should have rousted the chief at home.

In an ideal world, the lieutenant and the chief would quickly work out a temporaary solution where the crowd could be courteously shephereded to a different area while they conferred with Southwest on a better way to handle the situation. The difficulty would arise when it become clear that the Southwest people on site were completely overwhelmed. Nevertheless, the video was close to the worst possible outcome for the airport police, the airport management, and Southwest. The only thing worse would be people being tased.

According to the NBC link,

Southwest Airlines did not comment to NBC News, saying in a statement that they did not have any information to authenticate the encounter with the officer.

Of course there's information to authenticate the encounter, there's a viral video. I have the impression that Southwest is hoping they can just keep quiet, get things together by this weekend, and it'll all fade away.

Hundreds of thousands of travelers continued to bear the brunt of the airline's challenges on Thursday, with Southwest again canceling over half of its flights.

Ahead of the New Year's weekend, Southwest now says a recovery is in sight.

"We are encouraged by the progress we've made to realign Crew, their schedules, and our fleet," the company said in a statement. "With another holiday weekend full of important connections for our valued Customers and Employees, we are eager to return to a state of normalcy."

According to the link.

In an apology statement late Wednesday — and again on a media briefing call on Thursday — Southwest said passengers can apply online for baggage returns, flight refunds and travel expenses from this week's disruption.

. . . "If Southwest fails to cover these costs, let us know and we will investigate and enforce," [Transportation Secretary] Buttigieg said Thursday. "Anyone facing denied or delayed compensation can file a complaint with us and we'll follow up."

Right. They'll get it all fixed right away. I have a feeling this isn't over, and even Democrats may want Buttigieg's head. But that leaves aside Southwest's problem, this is turning into a textbook corporate crisis that threatens both the company's bottom line and potentially its ability to stay in business. Still, maybe their board can get Elon Musk to buy them out with a generous offer. Then he can fix everything.

Elon Can Do What He Wants, But

Let's parse out an article at Red State this morning: What Is a Woman? Elon Shows Pendulum May Be Swinging Back to Reality With Hilarious Babylon Bee Video. Let's just start with some context -- what does the great man himself think of women? As best we can determine, at least some of his numerous offspring were conceived in vitro and sublet out to surrogates, which suggests to me that he himself is a hard Hefnerian who sees women as commodities whose bodily functions can be bought and sold. But at Red State, he's swinging us back to reality. Mister, we could use a man like Hugh Hefner again.

Let's look farther down in rhe piece. It discusses the retweet from Musk of a Babylon Bee video below and how it represents Musk's motivation to buy Twitter:

Spelling Bee Contestant Asks The Definition of “Woman” pic.twitter.com/gOgDj9Oxsg

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) December 28, 2022

The article says,

The video was from June, but they were suspended from Twitter in March over calling Rachel Levine a man, so they posted the video again on Wednesday. But under Twitter 1.0, you weren’t [sic] have been allowed to see that kind of humor or that speech skewering the present problem with the left. Now you can again, and that’s positive movement. Indeed, it was the Babylon Bee suspension that got Musk interested in buying Twitter, to begin with, because of his belief in free speech.

Let's look at a hypothetical. Let's say Warren Buffett goes to the movies and sees a film that he finds offensive. In fact, he thinks it's so offensive and culturally destructive that it's the figurative straw that breaks the camel's back. Someone says to him after the show, "Mr Buffett, look at the wonderful thing Elon Musk has done in buying Twitter. Why don't you do the same thing for our country and buy a Hollywood studio that will now make the right kind of films?"

Now, I'm no Warren Buffett scholar. But listening to his homespun explanations of investing, I think he'd simply reply, "But I don't know anything about Hollywood. I'd probably lose everything I put into buying a studio," and that would be the end of it.

We might try to parse this out a little farther. Buffett isn't actually investing his own money. He's investing the money of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, as well as the profits from businesses he understands, like insurance. The shareholders trust his business judgment, and if he were suddenly to buy a Hollywood studio, they'd wonder why he'd do this, notwithstanding his idealistic motives, and unless his strategy showed sudden success, they'd likely begin to disinvest from Berkshire Hathaway.

Not only that, but if Buffet bought a studio, laid off half its employees, and simply dithered in public about just what kind of movies he was going to make, displaying in the process how little he actually understood about principles like natural law or classical virtues, he'd wind up doing actual harm to the causes he ostensibly supported.

This is what makes the right's tendency to think the best of Musk so puzzling. There seems to be an instinctive trust that Musk's heart is in the right place, so what could go wrong? But we have the problem of figs from thistles, his business judgment isn't all that good to start with. There was public information in the form of the whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko's allegations that Twitter's internal controls were so poor that repeated data center calamities threatened its continued existence, yet Musk seens to have understood so little about corporate controls and data security that he didn't follow up and instead on impulse made an overgenerous offer for a company that had little actual value.

Musk may now see himself as some sort of John the Baptist making straight the way, or maybe he thinks he's swinging some sort of pendulum, but the problem for him is that the job of prophet doesn't pay very well, and his lifestyle is expensive. And the people who invested in companies like Tesla were expecting to see well-run businesses, but the whole Twitter drama is suggesting that's not what they've got. Soon enough, Musk is going to have to decide whether he's cut out to be a Warren Buffett or a John the Baptist, but I have a feeling he's neither.

The Wall Stret Journal Wonders If Musk Has Lost The Bubble

Just to establish some context, I'm posting a YouTube copy of the famous TikTok video in which a new Twitter employee led us through her typical day. As it happened, this was only weeks before Musk's late October takeover, following which in a very short time he reduced the workforce from about 10,000 to about 2,500. In the process, he transformed that same headquarters environment from what was shown in the video to what a visitor said "looks like a five-star hotel that's been abandoned".

If I were teaching in business school, I would use this as an example of Stein's Law, that which cannot continue must stop. If people are giving Elon Musk credit for it, that's a mistake. All Musk did was relieve Jack Dorsey and the former board of blame for what someone was going to have to do very soon no matter who was in charge.

In fact, as some commentators have pointed out, it's almost as though Twitter's advertisers and investors felt some sort of obligation to maintain Twitter in the style it had become accustomed, when there was less and less justification for doing this. Musk allowed himself to become the scapegoat for the inevitable, something he didn't need to do.

I've already noted that Tesla shareholders are starting to wonder if Musk is still minding that store. Now, according to Breitbart, The Wall Street Journal is asking a bigger question:

The Wall Street Journal reports that Elon Musk is facing financial pressure as Tesla stocks continue a downward trajectory and his $44 billion investment in Twitter has yet to pay off. The WSJ states that Musk’s ability to use his Tesla shares to raise money by selling or borrowing against them is being complicated by their rapid loss in value in recent months.

The WSJ notes that Musk has largely been a cash-poor billionaire for most of his career, depending upon margin loans — borrowing backed by his Tesla shares — for personal expenses and business investments while retaining his shares. But as Tesla’s market value has fallen by approximately $700 billion this year, Musk’s personal wealth has declined.

Tesla shares have fallen by around 65 percent in 2022 and Tesla investors have grown concerned by Musk’s focus on Twitter following his takeover of the company in October.

I can't disagree, although Warren Buffett said long ago, around the time he said he wouldn't invest in bitcoin, that he also wouldn't buy shares in Tesla. I doubut if he'd even waste his time commenting on Twitter. And Musk, rather than, say, recruiting someone who can actually salvage Twitter, is instead basking in his role as cultural hero:

I’m not brainwashed!! pic.twitter.com/4kx61uu4yy

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 28, 2022

Well and good, but Musk is neither a Buckley nor a Limbaugh. He's been thought to be a corporate innovator, and if that's in fact his calling, he should go back and focus on it. But even if he doesn't, we'll get along just fine. Our current problem is that Tucker Carlson is another one who's neither a Buckley nor a Limbaugh, and that's a much bigger loss.

Southwest Airlines Meltdown

In the 1990s, I did a lot of work-related flying, much of it on Southwest. This wasn't because I preferred it, but because the corporate travel departments put me on discount carriers. At the time, though, its corporate attitude was fun, a lot like the famous Volkswagen ad campaigns of the 1960s. For instance,

While peanuts are now a snack, they once stood for how frugal the airline was: other airlines served meals while Southwest served just peanuts. Some Southwest executives felt they would need to increase their investment in inflight food. Then-CEO Herb Kelleher shot that down, “Do you know what the difference in cost is between peanuts and Snickers?”

For several years, I commuted to various job assignments in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Sacramento via Southwest and even became familiar with a few of the crews. One flight attendant, who simply followed then-corporate policy of encouraging individual expression, would sing on the PA a ditty whose first line was, "I wish I was a Southwest Airlines Peanut". Those days are gone. As of 2018, even the peanuts were gone. According to the link,

Southwest Airlines will stop serving peanuts August 1 citing passenger allergies. That’s really notable because of the history of ‘peanuts’ intertwined with the airline since its founding.

By then, any policies encouraging freelance expression by flight attendants were also long gone:

In March 2017, Charlene Carter was fired by all Boeing 737 carrier Southwest Airlines. Carter claims that the airline and Transport Workers Union Local 556 violated her rights by firing her. Carter was fired for sending confrontational anti-abortion messages to the former president of the union, Audrey Stone. According to documents from the lawsuit, Carter called Stone “despicable” for attending a march in Washington DC earlier that year.

. . . Carter added that the union should not support events that included groups like Planned Parenthood. Stone never replied to Carter’s messages, but Carter was summoned by Southwest management for a mandatory meeting about her messages. Eventually, the issue led to a lawsuit, and a judge has just ruled that Carter should be reinstated by the airline.

I liked Southwest so much in the 1990s that I bought shares, but they never did as well as I expected, and the airline gradually became corporate-conventional and boring. By now, it seems to have lost control over both its operations and its once-;refreshing public image:

The U.S. Transportation Department slammed Southwest and pledged to review the airline after thousands of flights were canceled due following days of severe winter weather.

"USDOT is concerned by Southwest’s unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays & reports of lack of prompt customer service. The Department will examine whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan," the Transportation Department tweeted late Monday evening.

Southwest canceled 71% of its flights on Monday and at least 62% of its flights so far on Tuesday, equaling more than 5,400 flights over the past two days, according to FlightAware.

The problem is especially bad in Southern California, one of its major markets:

What began as a crisis for Southwest Airlines amid a crippling winter storm turned to paralysis Monday evening when the budget carrier apparently canceled all departing flights from Los Angeles area airports until Dec. 31.

Thousands of flights have been canceled nationwide.

The airline’s website lists all departures out of LAX, Hollywood Burbank Airport, Ontario International Airport and the John Wayne Airport as “unavailable” until New Year’s Eve.

A few posters on Reddit and elsewhere tried to clarify that the flights were "unavailable" on the reservation system, not "canceled", and that probably reflected people who'd already rescheduled from canceled flights, but even if that's the case, the distinction is entirely academic for people who still can't fly out, and worse, it reflects that the public relations problem is entirely out of control, since Southwest has clearly been unable even to get Los Angeles media to clarify the situation, for whatever slight advantage that might give them.

It's sad to see them playing corporate catch-up:

Southwest admitted anticipating "additional challenges with an already reduced level of flights as we approach the coming New Year's holiday travel period, and we are working to reach out to customers whose travel plans will change with specific information and their available options."

Southwest added its employees and crews "are showing up in every single way. We are beyond grateful for that. Our shared goal is to take care of every single customer with the hospitality and heart for which we are known. On the other side of this, we will work to make things right for those we have let down, including our employees."

So they've suddently decided to rely on " the hospitality and heart for which we are known". Those days are 30 years in the past, and Southwest has been squandering passenger good will ever since. I hate to say I'm looking forward to a certain amount of Schadenfreude.

UFOs And The Right

I think the US right has lost the ability to think about UFOs, and that'a a problem. The History Channel has made a lot of money off them with Ancient Aliens, Project Blue Book, UFO Hunters, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, and more, but they're entertainment. I like Fringe and zombie apocalypses, too. The problem starts when people take them seriously.

The fact is that there's just too much in the way of seriously believing in space aliens, starting with Fermi's Paradox, that if extraterrestrial life is so likely, we must have seen evidence of it by now.

But just the other day, I ran into a piece by Jazz Shaw at Hot Air, One WSJ editor's war on UFOs. Note the subdivision we're beginning to see on the right: The Wall Street Journal was the intellectual sponsor of supply-side economics and neoconservative foreign policy that underpinned Reaganism, while more recently it's been never-Trump. Hot Air, on the other hand, has been both never-Trump but anti-establishment Republican as well, which means it's anti-Wall Street Journal. And now it's pro-UFOs, which the WSJ is anti:

A reader pointed me to one of the stranger articles to ever grace the pages of the Wall Street Journal last night. Holman W. Jenkins Jr. is a member of the WSJ’s editorial board who reports on business and financial matters. But the subject he weighed in on yesterday had little to do with those matters. The title was, “The UFO Crowd Wants an Alien Invasion for Christmas.” The even more curious subtitle reads, “The Pentagon discovers it’s not the flying saucers but their admirers who may be the real security threat.”

. . . It appears that Mr. Jenkins was upset about an email he received from a reader named Lex Fridman. Fridman apparently sent an insulting note criticizing a recent column that Jenkins had published, also on the subject of UFOs. It quickly became obvious that the WSJ editor is very much a skeptic (to put it mildly) when it comes to the idea that some UFOs may be of nonhuman or extraterrestrial origin.

It's hard to outline exactly what Jazz Shaw is for, but if the WSJ is agin' it, he's at least an agnostic:

Just as with the rest of us, Holman Jenkins is welcome to his own opinions and most of us have no way of proving him wrong. If anyone deep inside the government or the military-industrial complex actually does know the full truth behind the UFOs, they’re not bringing that information out for public consumption… at least not yet. I have no idea who, if anyone, is inside of those craft. And I say that as someone who has seen five of them myself over the past two years.

Well, maybe not even an agnostic if he's seen five of them in the last two years, huh?

[M]aybe it really is aliens from elsewhere. We just don’t know yet, but I’m not writing off the idea. When Jenkins speaks of the vastness of space being too great to cross, I agree that it’s too great for us to cross, at least for now. But if there’s a civilization out there that had a million-year head start on us, who knows what they might have cooked up?

But if nothing else, aren't we back to Fermi's Paradox? If we postulate there's a civilization out there with a million-year head start, then let's postualte they've come up with warp drives as well as light sabers and death stars, and flying across the width of the universe at warp speed is no more challenging than flying a B-52 to Guam. But if so, why haven't we seen them?

And this leaves aside the question Holman Jenkins himself raises, which is that even if such a civilization with a million-year head start exists, if it's more than a million light years away, there's no way we can know about it, and if Jazz Shaw objects that maybe they've found something faster than the speed of light, we've still got the retort that if so, why haven't we already heard from them, then?

To which Jazz Show can still answer he's seen five of them just within the last two years. How can anyone argue with that?

This is the US right in the wake of Ronald Reagan, William Buckley, and Rush Limbaugh (who we must recognize was a Buckley protégé). We've got to come up with people smarter than Jazz Shaw or Ben Shapiro, but the Wall Street Journal isn't what it used to be, either.

Exactly!

Pretty much at random, I ran into this video, in which Vivek Ramaswamy says pretty much what I've been saying about Elon Musk, that the US right sees him as something between a messiah and a caudillo who's going to fix everything that's wrong by fixing Twitter, which in my view can't be fixed. At about 10:30, he says "On the right, there's something about the new hunger for a Christ-like figure, and Elon Musk is the latest Christ-like savior figure for the day. I guess when you don't believe in actual Christ, you start looking for Christ substitutes instead."

Jiust the other day, The New Yorker called Ramaswamy The CEO of Anti-Woke, Inc:

The term “woke,” which dates back nearly a century, was initially used in Black communities to describe a raising of consciousness and has since become a catchall denoting awareness of a range of social-justice issues. In recent years, “wokeness” has also become, in conservative circles, a subject of suspicion and ridicule: shorthand for performative righteousness, like “political correctness” before it. Opposition to woke principles has become a business opportunity, too.

The article suggests Ramaswamy is in fact pushing his own investment fund on the basis that it specifically doesn't do woke investing. Certainly there's no shortage of opinion leaders on the right who've deliberately built corporate careers at Fox and elsewhere by selling their political views, but that doesn't automatically make them wrong. Asked by his interiewer in the video to outline his position on the corporate woke, he says, beginning about about 3:00, that the current situation can be traced to the 2008 financial crisis:

What happened in '08 was that capitalists went from being viewed as the good guys, the heroes in the pre-2008 era, to being viewed as the bad guys by the old left afterwards, especially on the heels of receiving the government bailouts, what happend was that [the capitalists] said, "Instead of the Old Left coming after us and doing the things that Occupy Wall Street wanted us to do, we'll make a bargain: we'll use our corporate power to advance the objectives of a new left that had slightly different concerns than the old left." The old left was about economic redistribution, take money from those wealthy corporate fat cats and give it to poor people. This new sort of, we'll call it the woke left, that emerged around the same time, around the time of Barack Obama's election as President of the United States, was what [the woke left] said was actually the theory of the case was slightly different. We care more about systemic racism and misogyny and bigotry and climate change and the racially disparate impact of climate change and so on. And so what they said was, "Look. If you advance out objectives, we'll look the other way to leave your power structure intact."

The transition of capital from good guys to bad guys in 2008 is well illustrated in the film The Big Short, and I can't discount Ramaswamy's point. Nevertheless, I've also thought that the fall of the Soviet Union removed the threat of proletarian revolution from the political agenda of First World capitalism, which in turn took away the basis for Fabian socialism in the Western democracies. This has left progresssivism without a clear direction.

Whether this can be traced to the 2008 crisis or the end of the Soviet Union, the immediate effect has been the same. A less visible side effect on the right appears to be that if history ended with the demise of Soviet Russia, then Russia has otherwise ceased to be an existential threat to the West. This seems to be at the root of the current (and growing) view on the right that supporting Ukraine isn't necessary, the US investment in the war is misdirected, and Zelensky is a scammer.

I would add, whatever Mr Ramaswamy may view as the resolution for the corporate woke problem, the woke platform simply isn't stable. Marx had nothing to say about gender dysphoria, climate change, or systemic racism, and he specifically abjured any alliance of the working class with the petty criminal underclass. Marxism, though, was stable enough to drive certain political theory for much of the 20th century. The woke substitute isn't even that stable.

I think Ramaswamy is correct insofar as he recognizes the woke left is not the old left. Commentators like Mark Levin who insist this is still Marxism should know better. But Musk is the guy who sued Amber Heard to retrieve the fozen embryos he made with her. Definitely he's not the guy to fix anyhing.

Musk Pushback

I'm still trying to think through just what Twitter is -- it's not so much a product as a figment. To the left, it's a sort of totemic representation of civic harmony and correct opinion that's now under threat as Elon Musk eliminates moderation. To the right, it's a representation of everything that's wrong with the polity, which Elon Musk will correct in a grand gesture of civic good will.

To shareholders of Musk's companies, this is all beside the point, except that Musk's excursion into Twitter has turned into a tar-baby distraction.

CNBC reports that as Tesla shares sank eight percent on Tuesday to a new 52-week low, CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to argue with investors and blame the stock downturn on macroeconomic factors rather than his focus on Twitter in recent months.

Tesla shares closed on Tuesday around $138 per share, eight percent lower for the day which was largely mixed for other stocks. Long-time Tesla bull Ross Gerber tweeted that the stock price was being affected by the company having “no CEO” implying Musk was distracted with Twitter.

Clearly Musk is being forced into doing something about that Twitter distraction, which he brought on himself largely by drinking his own Kool-Aid. According to the New York Post,

A report from CNBC claims that Musk is “actively looking” for a new CEO to replace him. How long that search could take remains unknown at this time. But if and when he does “step aside,” he won’t be gone from the scene. Even if he’s not technically the CEO anymore, Musk will reportedly still be directing software development, security, or other functions, so he won’t disappear entirely.

. . . “The question is not finding a CEO, the question is finding a CEO who can keep Twitter alive,” Musk tweeted Sunday.

The Post has reached out to Twitter for comment. Musk eliminated the company’s communications team last month.

Other tweets from Musk suggest nobody so far has been interested in the job. Again, my view continues to be that Twitter is less a product than a figment that provides something of little actual value. Musk has simply been proving this in allowing himself to be backed into buying the company. The Post noted,

Musk has yet to publicly indicate whether he has developed a short list of candidates. But some of Musk’s top advisers who have been active at Twitter since his acquisition are potential options, according to Bloomberg.

The outlet noted that investor Jason Calacanis, former PayPal executive David Sacks and Andreessen Horowitz partner Sriram Krishnan have all played an active role in Musk’s Twitter takeover.

Well, if these were the guys who advised him to buy Twitter for $44 billion, why should he trust them now? Elsewhere, he's characterized Twitter as a plane crash:

Elon Musk compared Twitter to a plane crash, as he explained his rationale for cutting costs at the company by enacting mass layoffs in the weeks after he bought it.

"This company is like you're in a plane that's headed towards the ground at high speed, with the engines on fire, and the controls don't work," Musk said in a Twitter Space late Tuesday evening.

. . . Staff numbers have fallen from 7,000 to roughly 2,300 since Musk took over, per Insider's Kali Hays. The New York Times also reported that Twitter has stopped paying rent on its offices, and has refused to pay $200,000 in costs for private jet flights.

During the Twitter Space, Musk also spoke about his meetings with advertisers, explaining that they asked "hard questions" about their return on investment because of the declining macroeconomic situation.

"When you do not have a clear answer, then advertisers don't want to advertise because they're being sane," he added.

So the bottom line is that Musk allowed himself to be pushed into buying Twitter when he apparently had no notion about the company's basically nonexistent business model. Within weeks of his arrival, he discovered too late what he presumably should have learned earlier through due diligence, except he apparently boxed himself in with the terms of his $44 billion offer. No wonder the Twitter board sued him to go through with the deal, he bailed them out and will take the blame for the disaster they brought on.

I assume the investors he convinced to go in with him on the Twitter deal are unhappy, but now he's also got the Tesla shareholders on his case.

Would you rather be Elon Musk or Vladimir Putin?

WWED: What Would Elon Do?

Here we are in Advent, waiting for the messiah, and some people think his name is Elon. Except that the poll he ran about whether he should step down would make even John the Baptist wonder whether he is the one. The puzzle for me contnues to be the sinecure problem: Twitter pre-Elon is said to have hired some dozens of ex-FBI agents into sinecures, except their job at Twitter was to control the narrative. But if a sinecure is a do-nothing job, how were they expected to contol the narrative?

Other accounts suggest that much of the roughly 10,000 workforce pre-Musk got free meals, free red wine on tap, yoga rooms, work-from-home, pet insurance, and much more. Yet Musk laid at least half of them off, and Twitter stayed up. That says to me that it wasn't just the former G-men who got sinecures. In the video below, Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford Medical School professor and prominent COVID skeptic who was shadowbanned from Twitter for "misinformation" under the old regime, recounts a personal tour he was given of Twitter headquarters that Musk gave him after taking over.

He spends most of the time outlining the specifics of his trendlisting, but I found other details of Twitter's current state more interesting. At about 7:00, he speaks incidentally of the tech people currently at Twitter, who he says are primarily engineers brought over from Tesla who are "still trying to figure out the system". At about 11:00, he says,

You walk into Twitter headquarters, it looks like a five-star hotel that's been abandoned. There's a very fancy restaurant-looking thing, there's all kinds of -- the decorations, the artwork, it all looks like a five-star hotel. But nobody's there. Almost nobody's there. Except . . . that, when you go into the engineering area, with all of the cubicles, it's filled with lots and lots of people trying very hard to make sure Twitter doesn't explode or something. It's Saturday, during the day, and they're working hard. I meet with Elon briefly, he sends me to an engineer. He introduces me to an engineer who was assigned to help me. So I learned a few things.

But at that point his interlocutor steers him back to what Elon told him, not the engineer, but I was much more interested in the engineer. What I gather from Dr Bhattacharya's account of the current Twitter work environment is that, having fired or encouraged the resignations of Twitter's own engineers, he's brought a bunch of "engineers" over from Tesla. Now, "engineer" is a difficult term. At various times, I've been called an "engineer" although I never had the title on a business card, in part because I've been told that in some states you can't call yourself an engineer unless you have a degree or a certification in it. My degrees are in Eng Lit, and I worked with software, not strength of materials or something. So Dr Bhattacharya's use of the term is at best imprecise, although it's not his fault.

But there's still a problem. As far as I can tell, nobody at Tesla worked with the specific circumstances of social media that Twitter has. They did internal network, they did payroll, they did inventory, they did data base. It doesn't matter how many dozens Musk brought over, even if they were his best guys at assembly line automation, they wouldn't know a thing about Twitter. It doesn't matter if they were working their little heads off all day Saturday, it wouldn't help.

This is one of my main takeaways from my career in tech, that if people are working all day Saturday, as Dr Bhattacharya relates, if they're working all night, working all weekend, it's a key sign they don't know what they're doing. That's because they, or at least the people they're replacing in Twitter's case, had months, probably years, to do the work they were supposed to be doing, and they didn't do it (we're back to the meaning of "sinecure"). A few frenzied all-nighters aren't going to make up for years of free red wine and yoga rooms.

This is part of Musk's problem and why he's now toying with stepping down. But the overall conundrum is bigger. Twitter had a product of sorts, although it lost $1.4 billion in 2020, somewhat less in 2021, but is projected to lose far more this year. In other words, it sustained the free red wine and pet insurance for 10,000 employees for a while, but even after laying half of them off, that's not going to fix it. Nor is a big show of we're-working-all-weekend gonna help a thing. But even with a team of "engineers" with no social media experience trying to keep Twitter from exploding, its silly rinky-dink product just keeps on keepin' on, which itself is probably a misleading indicator.

Still, the right-wing organs think Elon has something up his sleeve. Matt Margolis at PJ Media:

[I]n response to a tweet suggesting that Musk already has a successor picked out, Musk tweeted, “No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.”

Does this sound like someone who’s about to step down? It sure doesn’t sound that way to me. The fine print of the poll is that anyone who would take over as CEO of Twitter would need to have the same vision for the platform as Musk does, and that’s a rather significant caveat.

A new CEO would need to have the same vision for Twitter as Musk? Pray tell, what on earth is Musk's vision? Nick Arama at Red State:

He tweeted on Sunday that there was “no successor” because “no one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive.” So it sounds like he was feeling out folks but hadn’t had luck yet.

According to CNBC’s David Faber, sources told him that Musk had been looking for a CEO since before the poll. As we’ve said, he always intended to put a CEO in charge which was why the left cheering and trying to bomb the poll was funny because having a different CEO didn’t mean that Musk was going away, just that he wasn’t going to be the day-to-day head of operations.

. . . But it doesn’t sound like he has the person yet, so don’t count on him leaving immediately. Sounds like it’s going to take a while yet. This isn’t going to make those on the left happy.

Just you wait! Elon's still going to fix Twitter, and that's going to fix everything. Oh come, divine messiah!

Really? Elon Musk??

So, Why Were All The Ex FBI Agents At Twitter?

Every indication I've seen from the whole Twitter saga is that the company was some sort of hybrid between a boondoggle and a bubble. Its product isn't something easily explainable; it started with a 140 character limit that was raised to 280, which simply privileged the inarticulate and turned the whole exercise into something between a video game and Scrabble. It wasn't useful as a communications tool, because it left little room for any capable rhetoric and none at all for exposition or argument.

So we have the question, "Why was Twitter filled with retired FBI guys?" The piece tries to answser,

Twitter, as a company whose product is social influence more than software or stuff, has less money to throw around, but they have something that is perhaps even more valuable to the Elite™: it is a chokepoint through which most information flows, and hence is a place where The Narrative™ is fleshed out.

Their protection money, so to speak, was handing over at least partial control to the powers-that-be of the information flow.

That’s why, over the past few years, Twitter has become a home-away-from-home for FBI retirees.

. . . Twitter had little money to give, but they could offer sinecures for clients of the powerful, and the ability to control the flow of information. And that is what they did.

Tiny slices of language at 140 or 280 characters per post are information? I can get more information from a skin cream commercial. Our cat conveys more information by mewing and tilting his head. Twitter is not much more than a certain kind of noise. We might get a little farther if we allow that the retired FBI guys were in sinecures, "a position requiring little or no work", but that's just another way of saying they weren't doing anything, and that conflicts with the assertion that they were controlling the information flow.

So the retired FBI agents were pretending to control something that a certain class of consumers chose to call "information". In the most critical case at hand, they sought to limit a certain level of superficial noise over Hunter Biden's laptop. Now, I simply don't understand how you can explain "Hunter Biden's laptop" in 280 characters. At best, you can post a link to a story that gives an outline of the case in maybe 2000 words. Twitter is thought to have controlled the case by banning the New York Post, but how did that stop Hunter Biden from becoming a meme? I, or indeed anyone, can post the photo at right, and a huge segment of the population will not only recognize it as the First Cokehead, but will chuckle yet once more at the whole narrative. How did all those retired FBI agents stop a single thing?

I think the answer is that Twitter did little to control the Hunter laptop story, and the biggest beneficiary of Twitter banning the New York Post was the Post itself, as its own headlines reflect. They used to sell books by saying they were banned in Boston, after all.

I think the main issue with Twitter is that it was somehow able to convince a lot of people, certainly much of David Brooks's New American Upper Class, who could flatter themselves with blue checkmarks, that influential people hung out there. And a bunch of Inspector Clouseau wannabes from the FBI convinced people at Twitter that they needed to be put in do-nothng jobs that allegedly "controlled information" from people who convinced themselves and their peers that they had important things to say. In 240 characters.

And Elon Musk decided he was gonna fix this, and a lot of influencers didn't want him to. And in the process, a whole bubble is bursting. So far, we've been mostly getting information about Elon Musk's actual business judgment. But how did Twitter manage to convince anyone that it mattered in the first place?

Here's Another I-Told-You-So

No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 19, 2022

The reaction to last night's poll from Elon Musk on whether he should step down as CEO of Twitter has mostly provoked amusement, but his subsequent tweets suggest he's belatedly coming to recognize what I've been pointing out for the last several weeks, that Twitter is in such bad shape that in fact its auditors should have issued a statement that there is substantial doubt about the entity's ability to continue as a going concern. The link explains an auditor's responsibility in reviewing this circumstance:

Continuation of an entity as a going concern is assumed in financial reporting in the absence of significant information to the contrary. Ordinarily, information that significantly contradicts the going concern assumption relates to the entity's inability to continue to meet its obligations as they become due without substantial disposition of assets outside the ordinary course of business, restructuring of debt, externally forced revisions of its operations, or similar actions.

I've had a fair amount of experience working with both internal and outside auditors as a representative of several corporations' data security and contingency planning programs. This was fairly routine for me, in some part because when I was directly implementing those programs, there were few problems, and the auditors didn't need to spend much time on them. On the other hand, as an active participant in the industry, I was aware of the constant threat that auditors could in fact report that either the data security or contingency planning programs at a company were so deficient that the auditor could issue an opinion that the company cannot continue as a going concern. (On the other hand, I've never heard of such an opinion actually being issued on that basis.)

But on Saturday, I quoted a whistleblower report by Twitter's former data security head, Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, that alleged

[A] series of cascading datacenter problems did put Twitter at risk of “permanent irreparable failure,” and was only prevented by the herculean efforts of a team of Twitter engineers. Every account, every bit of code, every tweet, like, retweet, quote-tweet, DM—everything that constitutes the company, platform, and community known as Twitter—was nearly lost forever during this incident. A key piece of the global information system, poof, gone, and with no way to bring it back. A multibillion-dollar company obliterated in an instant, the biggest 404 error in history, caused not by hackers, but by incredible negligence.

In effect, the company's entire product, its platform, its archive of all past tweets, its valuable user data, its reputation and good will, were at risk of simply disappearing. The equivalent might be roughly characterized as every Ford car, every dealership, every parts inventory, all the company's engineering and research, all its plants, all its user data, and all its credit accounts simply disappearing one day in a puff of smoke. This would include every driver and passenger in a Ford car suddenly dumped in the middle of the street or freeway with no way to continue the journey.

It sounds to me as though Twitter's auditors should have been aware of this and should have been investigating it. Certainly my interviews with outside auditors, as well as bank examiners in some cases, involved them assuring themselves that there was no equivalent threat in the cases of the companies where I worked. It sounds as though there was major negligence in Twitter's case, not just within the company, but from its auditors,who should have actually issued a going concern statement in their prior audits.

The Enron failure also led to the failure of Arthur Andersen.

In 2002, just nine months after the [Enron] scandal broke, the firm was found guilty of crimes in the auditing of Enron. By that time, Arthur Andersen had lost most of its business and two-thirds of its 28,000 employees, and was facing multi-million dollar lawsuits. On August 31, 2002, the company surrendered its licenses to practice as certified public accountants in the United States, effectively putting the company out of business. In 2005, the United States Supreme Court unanimously reversed Arthur Andersen's conviction due to errors in the trial judge's instructions to the jury that convicted the firm. Despite this, the damage to Andersen's reputation was so great that it has never returned as a viable auditor even on a limited scale.

The Hot Air commentator in the first link above concludes,

If [Musk] honestly believes that the company is heading for bankruptcy and nobody could “keep Twitter alive,” might he actually be thinking about pulling the plug? If so, this would wind up being the most expensive “experiment” in the history of global business. Musk spent $44 billion of his own money to purchase the company and take it private. If he shuts down the platform entirely, the value of the company will be fairly close to zero.

I've kept saying here that Twitter is a lot closer to FTX than anyone thinks, and a lot more will collapse with Twitter. Instead, we get this:

Fun suggestion @elonmusk:
Let me run Twitter for a bit. No salary. All in. Focus on great engineering and increasing the amount of love in the world.

Just offering my help in the unlikely case it's useful.

— Lex Fridman (@lexfridman) December 18, 2022

This is the state of David Brooks's meritocratic New American Upper Class. Just focus on great engineering and increasing the amount of love in the world. Hey, wasn't that Sam Bankman-Fried's formula?

The Puzzling Thing About Tucker Carlson

Nobody so far has taken over Rush Limbaugh's mantle as the most influential voice of the American right. At his best, although I think he'd been declining since the late Obama years, he had a combination of perceptiveness and wit that matched William Buckley. The problem is that so far, we haven't seen an equivalent figure step in -- as in fact Limbaugh stepped in to replace Buckley during Buckley's own extended decline.

One possibility was Tucker Carlson, although I was always skeptical due to Carlson's wannabe upper-class background, opportunism, and careerism. His best moment, as far as I can see, came when he debunked Sidney Powell's threat to "release the kraken" in the controversy following the 2020 election. But since then, he's been a leader of the inexplicable anti-Ukraine campaign on the US right, and now he's alleging a coverup of CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination.

In April of 1964, a psychiatrist called Louis Joylon West visited Jack Ruby in his isolation cell in a Dallas jail. According to West’s written assessment, he found that Jack Ruby was “technically insane” and in need of immediate psychiatric hospitalization. Those are conclusions that puzzlingly no one who had spoken to Jack Ruby previously had reached. Ruby had seemed perfectly sane to the people who knew him.

Well, he was an unsuccessful business owner, a small-time pimp and major attention-seeker who traded on the assumption he was tied in with the mob. Perfectly sane. Carlson goes on,

Except that he Louis Jolyon West pronounced him crazy. But what West did not say was that he was working for the CIA at the time. Louis Jolyon West was a contract psychiatrist for the spy agency. He was also an expert on mind control and a prominent player in the now infamous MKUltra program in which the CIA gave powerful psychiatric drugs to Americans without their knowledge. So of all the psychiatrists in the world, what in the world was this guy doing in Jack Ruby’s prison cell? The media did not seem interested in finding out. In fact, the New York Times, in an extensive 1999 obituary of West, never mentioned the fact that he had worked for the CIA, much less his time in Jack Ruby’s cell, which seems relevant.

However, the detailed research into Jack Ruby up to now has stressed only his low-level mafia ties and his possible role in gun-running to Castro, not CIA connections. Allegations from the time of Ruby's incarceration that he was insane appear to have been driven by a campaign to make hin ineligible for the death penalty, not to discredit him as some sort of knowledgeable witness. A news story at the time quotes Dr West in his capacity as a professior and chair of the University of Oklahoma's Department of Psychiatry and Neurology that Ruby was developing a paranoid state, and "The law says he has to be sane to be executed." In any case, Ruby's conviction for murder was overturned pending a new trial, but Ruby died of cancer before it could take place. On his deathbed, Ruby issued a statement that he alone had been responsible for the murder of Oswald.

Carlson uses this random and somewhat questionable data item to pivot to a completely different question, files on the Kennedy assassination that continue to be unreleased:

We spoke to someone who had access to these still hidden CIA documents, a person who was deeply familiar with what they contained. We asked this person directly, “Did the CIA have a hand in the murder of John F. Kennedy, an American President?["] And here’s the reply we received verbatim. Quote, “The answer is yes. I believe they were involved. It’s a whole different country from what we thought it was. It’s all fake.” It’s hard to imagine a more jarring response than that. Again, this is not a “conspiracy theorist” that we spoke to. Not even close. This is someone with direct knowledge of the information that once again is being withheld from the American public. And the answer we received was unequivocal. Yes, the CIA was involved in the assassination of the president. Now, some people will not be surprised to hear that they suspected it all along. But no matter how you feel about it or what you thought about the Kennedy assassination, pause to consider what this means. It means that within the US government, there are forces wholly beyond democratic control. These forces are more powerful than the elected officials that supposedly oversee them. These forces can affect election outcomes. They can even hide their complicity in the murder of an American president.

All Carlson can do is assure us that this anonymous guy is "not a 'conspiracy theorist'", but we can't learn his name. Isn't this actually pretty close to Sidney Powell's kraken? Just asking. For whatever reason, at what seems to be the peak of his media career, he seems to be coming apart. It's a sad thing to watch, but it's also worth noting that even while terminally ill, Limbaugh kept things together.

If something new and solid comes of all this, I'll reassess, but so far, I think this is trading on the continuing loss of FBI credibility from the Twitter files, and there's nothing new to learn about the Kennedy assassination.

More On The Twitter Whistleblower

On Thursday, I posted on the wide-ranging allegations by a Twitter whistleblower, its former head of security Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, that alleged numerous risks to the company's business continuity, as well as that CEO Parag Agrawal concealed these issues from the company's board, when current standards of corporate governance clearly establish that the board should have been notified of them. Via Instapundit, here's an update:

According to the whistleblower report, one consequence of these and many other poor practices was a nearly constant stream of security breaches, with serious incidents occurring almost weekly throughout 2020. One such breach made headlines when a group of teenagers hijacked several major accounts, including those of former President Barack Obama, future Twitter CEO Elon Musk, Apple, and Uber, and used them to solicit transfers of bitcoin. The teen hackers’ level of access was “enough to achieve 'God Mode,' where the teenagers could imposter-tweet from any account they wanted,” the report explains. “Twitter's solution was to impose a system-wide shutdown of system access to all of its employees, lasting days. For about a month, hiring was paused and the company essentially shut down many basic operations to diagnose the symptoms, not the causes, of the hack.”

Elsewhere,

As one report to Twitter’s Board of Directors put it: “Every new employee has access to data they do not need to have access to.” Presumably that included employees known by Twitter to be agents of the Indian and Chinese governments, of which there were several.

. . . Mudge recalled one Twitter executive’s reaction to the discovery of a foreign agent: “Well since we have one, what does it matter if we have more?”

In my own experience, raising data security issues with managers can certainly result in grumbling and resistance, but eventually common sense wins out, even if the messenger isn't necessarily popular. The impression I have here is that the lunatics were running the asylum, and the issue isn't so much Schadenfreude as it is how this could have happened. And this in turn applies to two regimes, the one pre-Musk and the current one, in which Musk was forced to buy the company when he pretty clearly hadn't done due diligence.

As for Twitter pre-Musk, there's an intriguing reference in a mea culpa that Jack Dorsey released this past Monday:

I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe. . . . The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles. This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.

So it sounds like Jack Dorsey himself knew he was in the wrong job for maybe 18 months, but he did little or nothing to leave it until Musk broke in with a deal that was so insanely generous to Twitter shareholders that they had absolutely no choice but to accept it. Who was the "activist" who "entered our stock in 2020" and somehow changed everything? Sounds like there's a story here, huh? But whoever was running things on the board after that, and it wasn't Dorsey, clearly set up an environment where he or she didn't want any bad news, and the managers, including Dorsey himself, obliged. The takeover by Musk was clearly the best of a whole range of horrible outcomes, good for the board but bad for Musk.

Here's the sort of problem that Musk inherited:

[A] series of cascading datacenter problems did put Twitter at risk of “permanent irreparable failure,” and was only prevented by the herculean efforts of a team of Twitter engineers. Every account, every bit of code, every tweet, like, retweet, quote-tweet, DM—everything that constitutes the company, platform, and community known as Twitter—was nearly lost forever during this incident. A key piece of the global information system, poof, gone, and with no way to bring it back. A multibillion-dollar company obliterated in an instant, the biggest 404 error in history, caused not by hackers, but by incredible negligence.

. . . After Agrawal took over as CEO in November 2021, Mudge alleges that prior to his first Board meeting as company chief, Agrawal planned to mislead the Board on a number of security and compliance issues, and required convincing not to do so. And in advance of a meeting with the Board’s Risk Committee, Agrawal announced his plans to present misleading data yet again. This time neither Mudge nor other concerned employees were able to stop him, but after Mudge noted that the events of the meeting could constitute fraud, Twitter’s Audit Committee investigated and ultimately agreed. Mudge began working on a report to correct the record with the Board, but Agrawal fired him the next day.

In other words, although Musk, having neglected due diligence at the time of his April offer to buy Twitter, tried to backtrack on it throughout the spring and summer over ostensible concerns about which accounts were bots, there were in fact clear instances of fraud in the company's operation already recognized by the board's audit committee. It appears that not only had Mudge written a whistleblower report that should have been avilable to Musk's staff, but he'd publicly testified about these issues before Congress. Where were Musk's legal and financial advisers? Not much smarter than the Twits, it would seem.

One big problem with the whole Musk-Twitter story is that he conventional wisdom is focusing on a censorship-free speech issue, when the reality is that it looks like Musk walked into a corporate problem much closer to FTX, which he isn't competent to fix. Indeed, he's struggling with just the free speech problem:

The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem. I oppose it in both cases. And I think those journalists who were reporting on a story of public importance should be reinstated.

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 16, 2022

I think Bari Weiss gets to the heart of it: Musk is a creature of his own whims, and with Twitter, he's hit a major set of corporate problems he isn't remotely equipped to handle. Among other things, he might want to consider rehiring Mudge -- but of course, only after actually reviewing the circumstances and thinking things through.

A Couple Of I-Told-You-Sos

My wife and I have a soft spot for Dan Abrams. Although he appears to be quite wealthy and fully tied in to the Democrat-media establishment, he also hosted Live PD and appears to have invested a great deal of his credibility in restoring a clone of that show to the air after Live PD was canceled following the George Floyd riots. He also hosts the new show, On Patrol Live, where his persona is down-to-earth, sympathetic to the day-to-day jobs of uniformed police, and committed to maintaining public understanding of law enforcement.

Thus it wasn't a surprise to us that in a segment of another of his shows, Dan Abrams Live, he raises a question I've raised here, the potential liability of Sam Bankman-Fried's parents in the FTX scandal. Whether due to obtuseness or a wish to cover up for culpability within David Brooks's New American Upper Class, other media hasn't mentioned this issue, but now Abrams has. He notes that Sam himself is now in custody in the Bahamas,

but -- what about his parents?

I'm surprised so few are asking whether either of them could be in legal jeapordy. Fried's father, Joseph Bankman, works as a tax law professor at Stanford, though he's announced he won't be teaching at the university next year. The father Bankman worked for FTX for almost a year, deeply involved in the business in its early days, he helped the company recruit its first lawyers, last year he joined the FTX staff in meetings on Capitol Hill, he consulted FTX employees on tax matters, and he also had a large focus on FTX's charitable operations.

His mom, Barbara Fried, retired from teaching at Stanford, was head of a political advocacy network called Mind the Gap, which she helped start, to support Democratic campaigns and causes. Her son was among the donors for the network. Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried and his parents bought real estate together in the Bahamas worth $121 million.

Dan Abrams is neither QAnon nor Tucker Carlson. I think it's commendable that he's picking up this story when so many on all parts of the spectrum seem to think it's either too sensitive or too much work to cover.

But 0n the subject of Prof Bankman and his efforts on behalf of FTX, there was an intriguing data item in this week's House hearings on the case:

[Republican Representative] Huizenga turned then towards family involvement in the case, enquiring whether SBF’s father, Mr. Bankman received payment from FTX. Ray confirmed that “the family did receive payments.”

Huizenga met with SBF on Dec. 8, 2021, accompanied by his father, Mr. Bankman. Noting that SBF was 15 minutes late to that meeting, Huizenga said: “I asked and focused on what types of regulation he was under his engagemnet with regulators and how that affected FTX but it seems that there’s a lot more to uncover here.”

As we saw in the photo I ran here of Prof Bankman escorting Sam in a meeting with Congresswoman Waters, it appears that on matters of importance, like meetings with politicians, Prof Bankman seems to have been the prime mover and major negotiator; Sam was little more than a ventriloquist's dummy.

On a separate issue, days after I first raised the matter, a story appears in right-wing media, Questions Arise About How Disgraced ‘Non-Binary’ Biden Official Received Top Clearance.

Following the firing of Department of Energy (DOE) nuclear official Sam Brinton, critics have begun questioning as to how someone with a dodgy past and criminal tendencies managed to receive the highest level of security clearance in the federal government.

The whole question of security clearance has never been adequately investigated. The 1970s Falcon and the Snowman scandal involved a "connected" and privileged kid who got together with a drug-addled pal to pass US secrets to the Soviet Union. The whole plot was facilitated by the complacency and negligence of the corporate and government security system, within which I worked for much of my tech career. Problems in that story like someone lying dead drunk on the floor of a top-secret vault were the sort of thing I saw myself with some regularity.

Whatever comes of the Brinton fiasco, it will be nothing new, and it will result in no real reforms.

Twitter vs FTX

A past allegation against Twitter has resurfaced, and if it's correct, it raises questions about whether Twitter has been nearly as big a swindle as FTX. The questions involve areas that I worked on in my tech career, so they're particularly interesting to me, and based on my own experience, they at least appear credible.

This past September, during the period when Elon Musk was attempting to get out of his obligaation to buy Twitter, Musk

accused Twitter of fraud by concealing serious flaws in the social media company’s data security, which the entrepreneur said should allow him to end his $44 billion deal for the company, according to a Thursday court filing.

. . . Musk said the claims by the whistleblower, former head of Twitter security Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, amounted to fraud and breach of contract by Twitter.

I don't believe the maneuvers between Musk and Twitter following Musk's September allegations and his late October decision to proceed with the purchase have been made public, or if they have, I haven't seen them. In any case, his September allegation of fraud due to data security shortcomings wasn't sufficient to stop the deal. However, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko's claims have resurfaced in the wake of Musk's Twitter Files revelations.

The whistleblower report has emerged independently of Musk’s “Twitter Files” but was likely inspired by the exposés.

A Twitter user who published the report said: “The stuff uncovered in the Twitter whistleblower report is much crazier than anything in the ‘Twitter files’ but it’s much less politically/tribally salient so it got no attention.

. . . “Twitter didn’t monitor employee computers at all, it was not uncommon for employees to install spyware on work devices.

“Twitter does not have separate development, test, staging, and production environments.

“At least 5,000 employees had privileged access to production systems.

“In 2020, Twitter had security incidents serious enough they had to be reported to the federal government on an almost weekly basis.

The difference between "test" and "production" environments is particularly important, as is the related question of how many employees had privileged access to "production systems". In a programming environment, mistakes will inevitably be made in writing programs, especially given the tricky logical issues programmers have to deal with -- what you actually told the machine to do may not be quite what you meant for it to do; that's just how logic is. If I tell the driver of a car to "go ahead and back up", he'll know what I mean. A computer instead will either give me an error message or maybe move forward, not reverse.

As a result, programs must be tested exhaustively before they're approved and moved to "production" status, at which point they are basically the company product, and they can't be changed without a repeat of the testing and approval process. This means that it's important to get things right the first time, because fixing things afterward is expensive and time-consuming.

A key reason for the corporate data security function is to maintain these controls between "test" and "production" ("Mudge's" use of the term "staging" sounds more company-specific; the distinction between "test" and "production" is the important one).

If there is no enforceable distinction between the two, then there are two posssibilities. The most likely is that software with bugs will become in effect the company product, which at best will make the users angry, but if it results in incorrect account balances, it could be a major problem for the company. The less likely but more serious possibility is that a programmer will deliberately write a program that steals money from the company or its customers (for instance, by incorrectly rounding and putting a tiny percentage of the rounding into the programmer's own account). The absence of a rigorous testing and approval process for "production", or the ability to bypass the process, will make these possibilities much more likely.

That "Mudge" claims that 5,000 employees (in other words, half of Twitter pre-Musk) had privileged access to "production" indicates that there were no serious company controls over its tech environment -- this in a major tech company. This is equivalent to the alleged "back door" between FTX and Alameda that allowed the company to raid customer deposits to make up for investment losses, except that instead of a few FTX executives who could do this, half of Twitter could do that there.

Farther down in the same story,

Mudge realized that a data center failure could potentially cause the permanent loss of all of Twitter’s data.

He shared this fact with senior leadership, who instructed him not to put it in writing for the Board.

. . . After Agrawal became CEO, he wanted to present materially misleading information to the Board, overriding Mudge’s objections.

The question of data center failure is another basic task of data security. If, as relatively recent history demonstrates, corporate data centers can be rendered inoperable by fire, flood, hurricane, sabotage, terrorist act, earthquake, power failure, or any other of a wide range of interruptions, the company must have contingency plans to accommodate this. Clearly if a bank's data center burns down, there are repercussions; the ATMs won't work, payrolls won't be deposited, checks will bounce, and so forth. Banks have elaborate plans to recover operations within hours with full current data in such an event, but banks are just the most visible instance of an overall problem.

"Mudge's" point seems to be that Twitter had no viable plan in place to deal with, say, an 8.0 earthquake on the San Andreas Fault near its data center. If such an event took place, the implication is that Twitter would simply go down and never come up again; the company would no longer have a product to sell and no way to recover it. The effect would be the same as an FTX bankruptcy. This in fact is board-of-directors-level material; if Parag Agrawal concealed it from the board, which is "Mudge's" allegation, he should have been fired, and of course, he was. The story continues; when he learned of this,

Musk responded saying: “Wow.”

“Live & learn,” he added.

My view continues to be that Musk makes things up as he goes along, and he appears to work from instinct. He isn't a rationalist, policy-driven CEO along the lines of John Ray, instead, it's "Live & learn". Nevertheless, at this point, I think it's clear that in firing half or more of Twitter and starting over from scratch, he made the only possible move. In fact, if Twitter had continued under prior management, there would likely have been either a software failure or a data center disaster that would have put the company out of business and, if anything, thrown even more people out of work.

I certainly agree with the guy who said this is "much less politically/tribally salient", but it's actually more important. Musk has said he intends to hire a CEO for Twitter, but this needs to be a rationalist John Ray type, not a Steve Jobs style figurehead.

The Pedophile Problem Won't Go Away

Back in the day -- and that was actually pretty recently -- we were told that same-sex attraction and pedophilia were two different things. As of 2010, for instance, there was finger-wagging at the Vatican Secretary of State:

The sex abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church took yet another turn this week when statements by the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, second only to Pope Benedict, linked pedophilia to homosexuality.

Bertone said: "Many psychologists, many psychiatrists have demonstrated that there is no relationship between celibacy and pedophilia, but many others have demonstrated that there is a relationship between homosexuality and pedophilia."

. . . Other church and lay leaders similarly have called the remarks outrageous and ill-informed. While en route to the United States in 2008, Pope Benedict said he considered homosexuality and pedophilia to be separate matters. So why would Cardinal Bertone make his statements? And what is the real truth behind any association of pedophilia and homosexuality?

The piece concludes,

To link homosexuality and pedophilia (or ephebophilia) is obviously erroneous, uninformed and irresponsible. Homosexuality is a sexual orientation. Pedophilia and ephebophilia are sexual disorders that afflict both heterosexuals and homosexuals, and mostly heterosexuals.

Much more recently, I nevertheless read remarks by a Catholic bishop who pointed out that, first, all Catholic priests are male, and second, of child victims of abuse by priests, the overwhelming majority have been boys. (I've been looking for this, but haven't been able to find the exact quote. If anyone knows where it is, please let me know!) Nevertheless, even without a citation, this at least appears to match the anecdotal record.

The issue, thought to have been fully resolved at least within respectable opinion, has reemerged in the context of drag queen story hours, other prominent gays posting on Twiter, and Elon Musk. Alex Berenson on Substack, up to now a high-profile Musk supporter, has had to do a quick 180 in the wake of l'affaire Yoel Roth:

Musk has targeted Roth in a very dangerous way. For the last several days, Musk has repeatedly said that old Twitter didn’t do enough to end child pornography and sexual exploitation.

. . . [I]n the last 48 hours, he has helped cheerlead a campaign against Yoel Roth. The campaign has highlighted old and off-color tweets Roth made, as well as Roth’s University of Pennsylvania PhD thesis about Grindr, a gay sex and dating app.

. . . Musk’s fit this weekend has endangered Yoel Roth. If he has evidence that Roth or other Twitter employees supported child sexual abuse on Twitter, he should take it to an agency qualified to investigate. If not, he needs to leave Roth alone and stop inflaming passions around this issue before someone gets seriously hurt.

If blood flows, it will be on Elon Musk’s hands.

Berenson's argument here, as best I can parse it out, relies on premises he doesn't directly state. The first is the currently respectable view that same-sex attraction and pedophilia are two different things. However, unreconstructed opinion in places like the Vatican continues to link them, without foundation. This in turn encourages deplorables to commit violent acts against people who are same-sex attracted, or something like that. Thus, Elon Musk is inciting violence against Yoel Roth in particular and gays in general. When the next mass shooting at a gay club takes place, the blood will be on his hands, even though the motivation of such shooters has so far always turned out to be deeply ambivalent, and they haven't come out as conventionally deplorable.

But this is now the line:

Former Twitter “Truth and Safety” honcho, Yoel Roth, has allegedly fled his home in fear for his safety.

The problem continues to be that the public statements of figures like Roth, who is now portrayed as unfairly demonized and completely misunderstood, nevertheless indicate a sympathy for pedophilia, and even a leaning in that direction. On Monday, for instance, I linked a Tweet where he said, "I'm persistently freaked out by the youth-centric direction my research interests are headed in, given I, you know, hate children." Or the tweet he approvingly quoted, "Musclebear with beard: hot. Musclebear with beard holding a child: inexplicably hotter."

In another tweet, he said, "I enjoy having the kinds of meetings where googling 'gay bareback porn' is considered academic work." This strongly suggests that "research interests" in the tweet above is an arch reference to porn. But that's a problem in itself.

Berenson's complaint is basically that nobody's caught Roth in flagrante with a 12-year-old, or if they have, they should report it, not make idle accusations. But nobody needs to be caught in flagrante with a 12-year-old to go to federal prison.

Section 2256 of Title 18, United States Code, defines child pornography as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor (someone under 18 years of age). . . . Additionally, federal jurisdiction almost always applies when the Internet is used to commit a child pornography violation.

Just the tweets from Roth above, although these aren't unique, indicate at minimum a deep sympathy with people who view child pornography, as well as a definite leaning in that direction on his part. That he should ever have been "Trust & Safety Head" at Twitter is clearly problematic, and a decision, however hasty or poorly thought through, to fire the guy or accept his resignation should not have been controversial. In addition,

I haven’t been able to find any examples of evidence of direct communications with Roth that included threats, but such messages are never appropriate. Plenty of people have been complaining about Roth online (ironically on Twitter), but that’s hardly the same thing as death threats or bomb threats.

And this leaves aside an even more recent linking of same-sex attraction with pedophilia, the drag queens who went to the White House for the signing of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act:

Among those who attended the White House's ceremony for the signing of the legislation codifying same-sex marriage were two drag queens, one of whom once tweeted: 'The kids are out to sing and suck d!'

Another performed for a group of kids in a church in New York in August where 'social pressure' was put on students of Grace School to enjoy the show.

What do drag queens have to do with marriage, gay or straight? They weren't there to promote any form of marriage; they were there as "non-binary" people to normalize pedophilia. The same-sex pedophilia problem isn't going away.