In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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 w...

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 tra...

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 suspende...

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 o...

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 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 bu...

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...

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 Ger...

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 regi...

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 ov...

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 substant...

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 Joyl...

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 im...

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 Baham...

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 w...

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...