In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

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...