In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...

There's been a small but steady trickle of news since my last post on this subject, punctuated by this morning's notice of Sam Bankman-Fried's arrest in the Bahamas at the request of the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Charges are to be unsealed later today. "Earlier this evening, Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the U.S. Government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the SDNY," Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Souther District of New York said in a statement. "We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time." There is actually little new here. It appears Sam was under some sort of house detention in the Bahamas pending this development, and the only surprise is how quickly the actual US arrest was made -- as I've pointed out, the single recent equivalent has been the Madoff indictment, which took place so quickly because Madoff himse...

Forget Sam Brinton, the big news Saturday night was Yoel Roth, Twitter's former Trust & Safety head, who is shown at left above with his husband after their San Francisco wedding in August 2019. Roth was initially kept on at Twitter by its new owner Elon Musk despite presenting himself as the public face of its controversial censorship and banning policies, but as of November 10, he had resigned . I have yet to endorse Musk as some sort of cultural caudillo , but I can grant that as of late Saturday, he'd at least done homework he should have been doing over a month ago: Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis: pic.twitter.com/1NiBohjhMQ — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2022 A Bloomberg story that covered this tweet commented with the standard line: Far-right and extremist voices have long pushed a false claim that LGBTQ+ people are sexual predators who are “grooming” children to abuse them....