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.

FTX Updates

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 himself precipitated the case when he spontaneously confessed to the scheme. Sam hasn't confessed, and equivalent Ponzis, like Enron and Theranos, resulted in indictments years after the bankruptcies of their associated companies.

It's intriguing how quickly the Bahamas have moved to distance themselves from FTX, where they'd had their headquarters:

Prime Minister Philip Davis said in a statement, "The Bahamas and the United States have a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law."

The statement added that while U.S. authorities pursue criminal charges, the Bahamas is continuing a regulatory and criminal investigation into the company's collapse.

Other developments, while less publicized, are even more intriguing. Although initial reports had been that after Paul, Weiss dropped Sam as a client, he was being represented by one of his father's colleagues at Stanford Law (which struck me as a clear conflict of interest), as of December 6,

Sam Bankman-Fried has retained high-profile defense attorney Mark Cohen, reported Reuters on Tuesday, citing confirmation from Bankman-Fried's spokesperson Mark Botnick.

A partner at Cohen & Gresser, Mark Cohen is a former federal prosecutor and recently represented Ghislaine Maxwell in her sex trafficking trial.

For whatever it's worth, Sam apparently did not change his policy of making lengthy statements to the press even with his new counsel.

A week ago, I reported that Caroline Ellison had been spotted in New York under circumstances that suggested she was working with an attorney. The New York Post provides an update, saying she

has hired Stephanie Avakian, a partner at white-shoe law firm Wilmer Hale who is the former enforcement division chief at the Securities and Exchange Commission[.]

Elsewhere, though, it's reported that neither Mark Cohen nor Wilmer Hale has made any public comment on representing either Sam or Caroline Ellison.

My own view continues to be that although the only question for either Sam or Caroline is how much time they'll spend in federal prison, a much better question is who else will go there with them. Some people are worried about how far the scandal extends. Dylan Mattews writing at Vox yesterday on the scandal revealed, well down in the story:

First, a disclosure: This August, Future Perfect — the section of Vox you’re currently reading — was awarded a $200,000 grant from Bankman-Fried’s family foundation. The grant was for a reporting project in 2023, which is now on pause. (I should be clear that, under the terms of the grant from SBF’s foundation, Future Perfect has ownership of its content and retains editorial independence, as is standard practice for all of our grants.)

. . . Obviously, knowing what we know now, I wish we hadn’t taken the money. It proved the worst of both worlds: It didn’t actually help our reporting at all, and it put our reputation at risk.

What I noticed here was that the money didn't come from FTX, or even from Sam himself, it came from "Bankman-Fried’s family foundation". And Mattews himself elsewhere in the piece stressed that

SBF was an inexperienced 25-year-old hedge fund founder who wound up, unsurprisingly, hurting millions of people due to his profound failures of judgment when that hedge fund grew into something enormous[.]

But naive and inexperiecned 25-year-old SBF who played video games and popped prescription pep pills had a family foundation? This is what Fords and Rockefellers do. And Clintons. Not 25-year-old naifs. Somebody else was behind the scenes managing this sudden wealth like a Lay or a Madoff. If it was a family foundation, might that not be a clue?

Bankman-Fried’s parents have reportedly been (figuratively) struck by the collateral damage of their son’s reckless exploits. Bankman-Fried’s father, Joseph Bankman, has canceled the one law class he was scheduled to teach at Stanford early next year, according to the Stanford Daily. Bankman-Fried’s mother, Barbara Fried, also isn’t teaching any classes next quarter.

. . . Bankman hasn’t commented on why he’s not teaching any courses next year; Fried told the Stanford Daily that her absence was simply due to a “long-planned” decision to retire and has “nothing to do with anything else going on,” presumably referencing the downfall of her son’s fake crypto empire. She added that she would like to make a return to teaching in the future, which somewhat refutes her earlier statement. If she does teach again someday, it’ll certainly make for an interesting first lecture.

I might surmise that Stanford has suggested to the pair that given the circumstances, it might be best for them to maintain a very low profile vis-a-vis the institution, but I would also think that if both are law professors, they may well be anticipating that their time and energy will no doubt be directed to their own defense. (In any case, a felony conviction, if not an arrest, would end their tenured professorships. Stanford is thinking toward the future here as well.)

Sam ran FTX like the guy in the Mickey Mouse costume at Disneyland runs Disney.

Elon Musk vs Yoel Roth

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. In September, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Extremism said that “the result of this widespread hateful rhetoric has been a spike in harassment, threats and violence targeting the LGBTQ+ community.”

But the problem isn't that people on the far right falsely claim that LGBTQ+ people are all groomers, the problem is that Roth as Twitter's Trust & Safety head himself had a creepy fascination with porn that's reflected, of all things, in his own tweets:

I enjoy having the kinds of meetings where googling “gay bareback porn” is considered academic work.

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) September 25, 2012

or

I'm persistently freaked out by the youth-centric direction my research interests are headed in, given I, you know, hate children.

— Yoel Roth (@yoyoel) August 24, 2011

or indeed, a secret dirty Twitter account of his own:

Apparently former head of Trust & Safety at Twitter had a “secret dirty twitter account” which has since been scrubbed.

Read this tweet that was tweeted from @yoyoel’s secret dirty account:

Everything is starting to make sense. pic.twitter.com/YpJiX8ckIW

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 12, 2022

One problem with social media is indeed that there's porn all over. I'm not on Twitter at all, but I'm on Facebook primarily for railroad hobby interests that ought to be entirely G-rated. But even there, you can't avoid clickbait porn, including gay images. OK, if you're someone who likes to join railfan groups on Facebook and download incidental porn off them, well, OK, but how is it that the guy on Twitter who was supposed to be controlling this is into gay porn himself and thinks this is all copacetic?

Isn't there a basic problem with public discourse here? Remember that the intent of the 1960s MPAA movie ratings was to replace overall censorship with the idea that people could choose the sexuality of their environment. G was family entertainment, X was under 16 not allowed, and so forth. It's increasingly plain that on social media, this has been replaced, and there's effectively no censorship on highly controversial sexual matters, but there's up to now been heavy-handed censorship of fairly uncontroversial political views.

I'm skeptical that Musk is the guy to fix this -- I'm not sure if even a month ago he had an inkling that it needed fixing. And indeed, maybe all that needed to be done was to fire Roth and hire the right guy to replace him. (How, by the way, did Roth rise to that position in the first place? Should we be asking Mr Dorsey, who is sometimes thought to be gay but claims he isn't?)

But at least, if inadvertently, Musk is raising important questions.

More On Sam Brinton

I did a quick web search on Sam Brinton in preparing yesterday's post, especially in the context of his felony charges for stealing designer luggage and the doubts the gay community has aired about him since that scandal broke. Wikipedia provides a somewhat more complete account of his career, but as far as I can tell, it still omits critical issues. Using his preferred they/them pronouns, it says

Brinton graduated from Kansas State University with a Bachelor of Science in nuclear engineering and vocal music. While attending the university, they organized its first Pride march in 2010. They have a dual Master of Science degree in nuclear science and engineering (technology and policy program) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

. . ., In 2016, Brinton was a senior policy analyst for the Bipartisan Policy Center, lobbying for updated regulations so nuclear waste can be used to power advanced nuclear reactors. In February 2020, the website of Deep Isolation, a Berkeley, California, nuclear waste storage and disposal company, listed them as its Director of Legislative Affairs and in May 2022 they were its Director of Global Strategy. In 2022, Brinton's profile at the Department of Energy indicated their previous work with the Breakthrough Institute, the Clean Air Task Force, and Third Way.

Yahoo! Lifestyle noted that Brinton "may be the first openly gender-fluid person in federal government leadership" after they were selected by the Biden administration to be the deputy assistant secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy in January 2022. In July 2022, South Florida Gay News reported that, according to Brinton, while they were "welcomed with open arms" at all levels of the organization, others reacted to their appointment with hatred and disgust, some making death threats against the self-described "Nuclear Nerd".

In February 2022, an unidentified Department of Energy employee filed allegations of hiring malpractice with the Office of the Inspector General due to concern regarding Brinton's qualifications for a Senior Executive Service (SES) level position, i.e. "the class of federal career officials who rank just below top presidential appointees in seniority".

In any case, the hiring malpractice case is currently moot, since they (the Brintons?) have been placed on leave by DOE due to their felony charges. However, the Wikipedia entry also goes into more detail on questions from the gay community itself on the Sam Brintons' record of prior mendacity:

Brinton was raised in Perry, Iowa and is the child of two Southern Baptist missionaries. Brinton came out as bisexual to their parents in the early 2000s. According to Brinton, Brinton's parents disapproved of Brinton's attraction to a male friend from school, and put the then-middle school student in conversion therapy, an experience Brinton later described as "barbaric" and "painful" in a New York Times op-ed. In the most extreme session, Brinton has stated that a conversion therapist bound them to a table while ice, heat, and electricity was applied to their body, all while being forced to watch clips of gay intimacy.

Journalist Wayne Besen, writing in LGBTQ Nation in December 2022, cast doubt on Brinton's description of their childhood, noting inconsistencies in Brinton's retelling of events, such as the occupation and location of the conversion therapist; as well as Brinton's claim that they could not remember the therapist's name (which would be necessary to corroborate the story), despite having had two years of sessions with him. Besen also stated that the type of severe conversion therapy Brinton stated they underwent had become "exceedingly rare" by the late 1990s. Online magazine Queerty wrote about Brinton in 2011, including Brinton's description of how their own parents "punched, burned, electrocuted and stabbed him to make him straight." Queerty reported that LGBT publication Towleroad had contacted Wayne Besen and that Besen hadn't been able to verify Brinton's story. Queerty described separate allegations, via Towleroad, that "Brinton's Facebook page “has a picture of the entire happy family at his college graduation ceremony, May 31, 2011,” even though Brinton's father reportedly threatened to shoot his son in the head if [they] ever came around again.

What's somewhat puzzling is that Brinton has had a high-profile career as a gay activist that parllels his positions as a nuclear waste lobbyist and government official. Again per Wikipedia:

Calling themself a "survivor" of conversion therapy, Brinton was the first such individual to testify before the United Nations Convention against Torture regarding their experience in November 2014, as the advisory committee cochair of the National Center for Lesbian Rights' #BornPerfect campaign. Brinton held the position until at least September 2015.

Brinton, in December 2016, founded the #50Bills50States campaign with the goal of prohibiting the pseudoscientific practice of conversion therapy throughout the U.S.

In 2016 and 2018, Brinton was the principal officer for the Washington DC chapter of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an LGBTQ charity and human rights group. At events, such as the organization's 40th anniversary, they performed in drag under the name "Sister Ray Dee O'Active".

From 2017 to 2019, Brinton was the head of advocacy and government affairs at the non-profit LGBTQ youth suicide prevention organization The Trevor Project. In 2020, Brinton coordinated with three of Anchorage's openly gay city council members to draft the city's conversion therapy ban on minors, which became law in August. Anchorage joined twenty states and dozens of cities that had enacted laws banning the practice.

What appears to be a reprint of the Wayne Besen LGBTQ Nation piece mentioned above appears in the Los Angeles Blade for December 9, where Besen dates the start of Brinton's personal legend:

Sam Brinton burst on the scene on October 1, 2010. In a riveting two-part interview with I’m from Driftwood, they revealed the most shocking conversion story activists had heard since the 1960’s. It involved Brinton coming out to their parents at age 11, and their father reacting with a swift punch to their face.

So far, I haven't been able to find dates for either Brinton's graduation from Kansas State or his Master's from MIT, but if he was at Kansas State when he started the Pride march there, his high-profile gay activism even predates his work in the nuclear waste field. Not mentioned at all in the Wikipedia profile, though, is their equally visible and active career as a presenter at kink conferences:

Sam Brinton, who was placed on leave at the Department of Energy after stealing a suitcase full of women’s clothes, last weekend delivered a seminar on the science of spanking and "turning butts red" at a Los Angeles kink conference. Speaking under the pseudonym "NuclearNerd," Brinton delivered the hands-on "Spanking: From Calculus To Chemistry" seminar at the Leather Getaway conference, the Daily Mail reported.

The Daily Mail story links to his conference thumbnail:

Nerdy at heart, NuclearNerd finds that the best kinks are the one centered in the brain. As a graduate of MIT, NuclearNerd has been teaching their "Physics of Kink" class in universities and community events across the country for years. They have been active in the kink world since 2013, host monthly kink parties in their dungeon in Washington, DC, and estimate they have spanked over 2,000 cute butts.

Soon after his appointment to his DOE post, the Washington Examiner reported,

Brinton has a history of promoting sexual fetishes and kinks related to animal role-playing. A post in the student newspaper at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 2017 says the nuclear waste expert held a discussion on kinks and sex education at the campus.

“Throughout the entire talk, Brinton was open about his experiences, the kinks he partakes in, and the nature of his relationships,” the article reads. “He left us with countless anecdotes, like how he enjoys tying up his significant other like a table, and eating his dinner on him while he watches Star Trek.”

Whew. At 35, he's had a triple-whammy career as a nuclear waste lobbyist and policymaker, an outspoken gay activist, and a noted authority on the theory and practice of kink.

Just for starters, I have two questions. Anything related to nuclear at the Department of Energy requires major, major background checks. I've been there. Even to go to the lunchroom, even to go to the men's room, at a DOE nuclear facility requires weeks of background checks. In fact, even if you've had a Defense Department secret clearance, you have to get a whole separate DOE clearance, just to set foot in the cafeteria. At least back in the day, a record like the Brintons would be a deal killer. How on earth did he get hired for that position?

Second, just out of curiosity, on whose dime was he flying when he stole the designer bags? Was he traveling on DOE business? Was he traveling to a conference? Was it on gay advocacy business?

Just wondering. Maybe somebody needs to do an investigation.

Right After The Election

The poster above is is from just one recent controversy involving school curricula that effectively groom children for all the variants of pansexualism. In this particular case,

New Jersey mother Angela Reading revealed she was told she was being 'monitored' by local law enforcement, after airing concerns about posters hanging at the entrance of her seven-year-old's school in North Hanover Township.

Reportedly part of an assignment to create a 'safe space' for students, the colorful art installations contain language that tout different sorts of sexuality, including the virtues of being both 'poly-' and 'pansexual' - all scrawled in children's handwriting.

The added wrinkle is the woman "revealed cops became privy to her since-deleted Facebook post after being tipped [off] by a lieutenant colonel at nearby military base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, who took issue with the post."

The military official - a senior staffer at the New Jersey military base - said that staffers were working with local police to 'monitor the situation' while ensuring 'the continued safety of the entire community.'

In the Chicago area, the private Parker School became immersed in controversy when a Project Veritas reporter posing as a conference attendee interviewed a school administrator:

The video captures the dean talking last week about a visit to Francis W. Parker School by an LGBTQ health organization to discuss queer sexual health with high schoolers.

. . . Parker leaders sent a letter to the school community late Wednesday saying “we are heartbroken that one of our colleague’s words have been severely misrepresented for a malicious purpose.” The letter offered strong support for their faculty and staff and for the school’s “inclusive, LGBTQ+ affirming, and comprehensive approach to sex education.”

The school said the local alderman helped it expand the police presence around its Lincoln Park campus, and it has implemented higher security measures. At least one person marched in front of the school on Thursday to protest the school’s sex ed curriculum.

I was immediately curious to see whether any Parker School parents objected to the LGBTQ visit, which as portrayed in the Project Veritas video didn't say anything about "queer sexual health" but did involve distributing dildos and butt plugs to the students. Apparently there was no mass withdrawal of students by irate parents, and the Parker School website suggests why:

Francis W. Parker School educates students to think and act with empathy, courage and clarity as responsible citizens and leaders in a diverse democratic society and global community.

So the parents are spending as much as $42,300 per year for just the sort of queer sex ed the school provides, and they feel good about it. In fact, per the link above,

Parker leaders sent a letter to the school community late Wednesday saying “we are heartbroken that one of our colleague’s words have been severely misrepresented for a malicious purpose.” The letter offered strong support for their faculty and staff and for the school’s “inclusive, LGBTQ+ affirming, and comprehensive approach to sex education.”

The school said the local alderman helped it expand the police presence around its Lincoln Park campus, and it has implemented higher security measures. At least one person marched in front of the school on Thursday to protest the school’s sex ed curriculum.

As with the Hanover Township controversy, the fact that a school would be grooming pre-teens and teens for pansexualism is represented as a public safety issue, with the groomers portrayed as potential victims who must be protected from concerned parents, who must in turn be monitored by law enforcement.

Again, Admiral Levine themselves weighs in:

Dr. Rachel Levine, a man who identifies as a woman, tried to enlist children’s doctors and nurses into the transgender activist movement, urging them to become evangelists and preach the gospel of transgenderism. Anything less would be a betrayal of their profession and science itself, he argued.

Levine, assistant secretary of health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, claimed that there is a large population of biological males who are really female and vice versa, and these people are likely to commit suicide unless doctors pump them with drugs to delay puberty, introduce a hormone disease into their bodies, and perhaps even remove healthy body parts.

. . . He championed “acceptance” as a life-saving message; painted opponents of his ideology as driven by an “agenda” that has “nothing to do with warmth, empathy, compassion, or understanding”; and sent forth the doctors as his new apostles.

. . . Levine painted a dire picture of an oppressed people, citing high rates of suicidal thoughts and attempted suicides. He blamed this predicament on a demonic society, dismissing any notion that transgender identity may contribute to mental health struggles.

It's unfortunate, though, that current controversies over grooming minor children have emerged at the same time as the controversy over Admiral Levine's other high-profile government colleague, Sam Brinton, who is currently sought on two felony warrants for stealing designer luggage from airport baggage carousels. It's worth noting, though, that Brinton, prior to his career as a serial felon, had actually been a high-profile advocate for just the sort of empathetic grooming advocated by Admiral Levine and woke school curricula:

Sam is one of the world’s leading advocates for LGBTQ youth. They are the founder of the 50 Bill 50 States campaign at The Trevor Project to end the dangerous and discredited practice of conversion therapy, first in the United States and then around the globe.

However, even among the gay community there were doubts about the guy:

The criminal case against the activist is damning. Brinton had no checked luggage, precluding this being a case of accidentally taking the wrong bag. Video surveillance captured Brinton removing the suitcase from the carousel and putting the bag’s tag in their handbag before leaving “at a quick pace,” the police complaint read.

While this is a personal calamity for Brinton, the fallout faced by the LGBTQ community could have easily been avoided. The red flags regarding Brinton were overwhelming and obvious to all who cared to see them. Unfortunately, some of America’s top LGBTQ activists and organizations were willfully blind to Brinton’s shortcomings.

This is all a developing story. What I see right now, though, is a misplaced opportunism and premature triumphalism for the current Democrat agenda, which may be misreading the significance of its narrow escape from defeat in the midterms. Clearly pansexualism has become a major part of its current agenda, which has largely departed from traditional leftism centered on the working class. Right now, the focus of the Democrat and never-Trump establishment is driving a stake through Donald Trump's heart, when Trump himself is making this completely unnecessary and a wasted effort.

The problem is that at least as of now, the Republican who looks better for the 2024 nomination is Gov DeSantis, who has already recognized and built a solid record on the grooming issue -- and in fact, this record was part of his convincing November win in Florida. And grooming is a class-based issue, as we see with instances like the support for it at the expensive Parker School. Latins and African-Americans are not on board.

Two Spiritedness And The New American Upper Class

The photo above has caused a stir this morning on several right-wing platforms. "Bonchie" at Red State has the conventonal take:

Notice anything? If you are politically astute and have paid attention to leftwing rhetoric over the last decade or so, what’s wrong with the picture will jump out immediately: Everyone is white.

Well, to be fair, there does appear to be one woman of Asian ancestry, but regardless, I’ve been assured that this ratio of whiteness is proof of systemic racism.

They're represented as the female Capitol press corps, surrounding outgoing Speaker Pelosi. Almost all of them have the exact same hairstyle, the 1960s Joan Baez that Ted Bundy is said to have favored, in which Ms Baez herself is seen at left, altthough what's puzzling is that Ms Baez has moved on, as shown below right. Indeed, they all have somewhat dull facial expressions with phony smiles, and they're all dressed in something like the minimalist upper-class style one might find at a Georgetown soirée, although from their faces, I would think they might be a little dull for that. But then, as an Ivy undergraduate back in the day, I sometimes went to Georgetown soirées, and come to think of it, they'd actually fit just fine.

Anyhow, here's Ms Baez, as the Germans would put it, aktuell. My wife tells me this hairstyle is practical now, and it's favored by the more down-to-earth reality show stars like Minnie Beets on Gold Rush. (On the other hand, we would not find Minnie Beets at a Georgetown soirée, even though Ms Baez attends such things with the likes of Dr Fauci.) Another conundrum as far as I can see is that Speaker Pelosi is anything but minimalist; she's shrill and histrionic, and in fact, her own hairstyle, like her face, is high-maintenance, as we saw when she got a special hair appointment for herself during the COVID lockdowns, when every other barber shop and hair salon was closed.

In fact, I've often wondered if Speaker Pelosi is actually a drag queen, an over-the-top antifeminist caricature, and this goes to another part of the two-spiritedness of the current American upper class. Drag queens are in. They mimic women, but their style is anything but minmalist. Take the case of Sam Brinton, one of the federal government’s first gender non-binary officials, currently sought by authorities on a felony warrant for a second instance of stealing designer luggage from an airport baggage carousel. Would we see Mx Brinton at a Georgetown soirée? As far as I can see, whether the answer is yes or no, there's a contradiction, or as it might be put, a two-spiritdness:

If the answer is yes, he'd be welcome, including in the outfit at left, then why were no gender-non-binary reporters included in the photo with the Speaker? If gender is just a social construct, why exclude biological men who identify as women from the photo? If it's claimed that there are none such in the Capitol press corps, my answer would be you've got to be kidding. They're just in the closet. Why not coax them out? Why the discrimination?

If the answer is no, the invitation lists for Georgetown soirées somehow always inadvertently leave out drag queens, then why the discrimination? And why, if they don't welcome drag queens, do they nevertheless favor shrill and histrionic figures like Speaker Pelosi and Congresswoman Waters?

This is not a stable or sustainable state of affairs.