More Thoughts On The Ordinariates' Limited Appeal

As I said yesterday, something struck me about Mr Paul Roland's essay at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society site explaining his very hesitant journey to the North American ordinariate, about which he concludes,

It was recommended to me by a Catholic friend that I join the Ordinariate because of how homeless I felt in the Catholic Church. I did not seriously consider it initially because there were no Ordinariate parishes near me, but after giving it more thought, I decided that I would join. I made that decision because I believed in the Ordinariate’s mission, in the hopes that one day I would be able to have a Catholic community or parish that I could call home, and, if nothing else, as an excuse to let myself be a little different from other Catholics in the meantime.

It isn't entirely clear what sort of Catholic he is now. He says he hopes "that one day I would be able to have a Catholic community or parish that I could call home" -- but is he attending any nearby Catholic parish now? CCC 2179 says,

"A parish is a definite community of the Christian faithful established on a stable basis within a particular church; the pastoral care of the parish is entrusted to a pastor as its own shepherd under the authority of the diocesan bishop." It is the place where all the faithful can be gathered together for the Sunday celebration of the Eucharist. The parish initiates the Christian people into the ordinary expression of the liturgical life: it gathers them together in this celebration; it teaches Christ's saving doctrine; it practices the charity of the Lord in good works and brotherly love:

You cannot pray at home as at church, where there is a great multitude, where exclamations are cried out to God as from one great heart, and where there is something more: the union of minds, the accord of souls, the bond of charity, the prayers of the priests.

Every indication in Mr Roland's essay is that he finds Catholic parish life unfulfilling, and in fact he says he much prefers his earlier background in Methodism and Pentecostalism. As I quoted him yesterday,

I made escapes to my family’s Pentecostal church, to Methodist churches, and to Catholic Charismatic Renewal services to try to get my fix of something missing.

I'm told that some North American ordinariate parishes experienced a certain amount of growth during the COVID epidemic, when they continued to celebrate public masses while the local diocesan parishes remained closed, and apparently some diocesan Catholics who went to them for mass found something they liked there and stayed. However, ordinariate policy at the time was for parishes to observe the practice of the local Catholic diocese regarding whether and how to open for public mass, so I'm not sure how this discrepancy could have occurred -- one would have to conclude that ordinariate policy was actually to look the other way about being "a little different" (as indeed it has in certain notorious cases).

I'm not sure if Mr Roland will ever see this, but if he does, I would be very interested in his explanation of how he deals with being Catholic if he finds so much missing in normal parish life. His implication is that before he found the ordinariate, he needed to escape to Methodist, Pentecostal, or Catholic Charismatic services -- has the ordinariate replaced this need? If so, how, if as he acknowledges, there is no ordinariate parish near him? If he watches web broadcasts of the Divine Worship liturgy, how does he receive the sacraments?

And this leads to another question that he doesn't cover in his essay, how many Catholic parishes has he visited? He mentions in his thumbnail that he writes from Oklahoma. There are two Catholic dioceses in that state; the Diocese of Tulsa alone has 78 parishes (I haven't found the equivalent number for the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City). I've found that Catholic parishes differ widely in character and celebration. I've also found that there are enough of them that if you don't like one, there's likely another nearby that will suit you better. How many did Mr Roland visit before he found a need to escape?

I get a sense that either there was something missing in his RCIA class, if that's what he attended to come into the Church, or he possibly wasn't listening closely. On one hand, the Anglican parish with which I originally planned to join the ordinariate had a streamlined catechism that assumed that Anglicans already knew most of this stuff, but when that didn't work out, I started over with RCIA at a diocesan parish. They gave us copies of the CCC, and we covered a great deal of it in one way or another.

There's a great deal Protestants have to relearn or acknowledge fresh when they become Catholic, starting with the authority of the Holy See and working on down to things like the number, nature, and efficacy of the sacraments. I don't have any sense from Mr Roland's essay that he saw any importance to this. Instead, he's disappointed that it isn't more like his own background:

Once, I was having dinner with a group of Catholics that included several Protestant converts. As they were sharing things they fell in love with about Catholicism, they asked me what I fell in love with that converted me. The question rather shocked me and I had to admit disappointingly, “nothing… I just felt like there was nowhere else I could go.”

While I disagree with the idea that you need to "fall in love" with Catholicism -- its appeal is to reason -- I'm puzzled that he's found so little positive about it overall. Indeed, the one appealing thing is the ordinariate, of which he seems to have had no concrete experience. I'd be interested to know if he's ever attended a Divine Worship mass in person, for instance; it certainly sounds as if he's never attended an ordinariate group or parish with any regularity. How can he be so sure it's what he wants if so little else in Catholicism has turned out that way for him?

Unless you're on a desert island, this is simply not how you practice Catholicism. At best, he goes to Sunday mass at a local diocesan parish with a sense of distaste, feeling it's not Methodist enough to suit him. If someone were to ask him why he bothered to become Catholic, his answer would have to be that if the UMC was going over to the gays, he had nowhere else to go. But even that is hard to follow, the UMC has a "continuing" spinoff in the form of the Global Methodist Church, which seems to be pretty close to the UMC-without-the-gays that he wants.

Indeed, I see that at least one Oklahoma UMC church is in the process of disaffiliating. Surely there must be others. Why not seek out one of those? Instead, he seems to have a fantasy that one day, there will be an ordinariate parish in Oklahoma that he can attend, and it will be exactly what he has in mind -- and meanwhile, he can dream.

As I say, the Catholic appeal is to reason. I can't help but think that so far, Mr Roland has missed the point.

The United Methodist Schism And Anglicanorum coetibus

The United Methodist Church is belatedly coming to the same crisis of division that most mainline Protestant denominations have already met, the question of same-sex marriage and ordaining actively and avowedly same-sex-attracted clergy, although this has never been the exclusive issue dividing any of the denominations. In recent weeks, legacy media have begun to notice, and The Week, for example, explains,

United Methodists have been more-or-less civilly disagreeing about gay rights since the 1970s, but the issue came to a head in 2019. At a UMC General Conference that year, the theologically conservative camp, aided by socially conservative United Methodists from Africa, outflanked the moderates and liberals and pushed through a resolution affirming existing UMC bans on same-sex weddings and the ordination of "self-avowed practicing homosexuals" as clergy.

The UMC conservatives appear to have drawn lessons from the experience of Episcopalians in particular, recognizing that disagreements will likely manifest themselves in parishes attempting to disaffiliate as bodies and take their property, which results in lengthy and unpredictable legal action.

The General Conference also approved a new church law, Paragraph 2553 of the Book of Discipline, offering UMC churches a path out of the United Methodist Church with their church buildings and property — if they get approval from two-thirds of their congregation, sign-off from their regional governing body, and pay their fair share of clergy pension liabilities and two years of "apportionments" for the larger denomination. That temporary exit strategy expires at the end of 2023.

This YouTube presentation outlines the strategy of the liberals, who want to retain a majority in the next General Conference by claiming that the currently scheduled 2024 conference is actually just the one postponed due to COVID in 2020, and the representatives to the 2024 meeting will remain those who'd been designated to attend in 2020 -- this despite the thousands of parishes that had disaffiliated from the UMC since 2019.

As someone who's lived through and studied the recombinant schisms within Episcopalianism and Anglicanism since the 1970s, I can empathize. But as someone who, in response to my own experience with those schisms, was at first optimistic about Pope Benedict's constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, I have questions. The Methodists are going to have to work out their own destiny, but if only as a footnote, it's worth pointing out that Methodists are included in the definition of Anglican for the purposes of Anglicanorum coetibus. Wikipedia cites an archived entry on the US ordinariate website:

A person is eligible for membership if they, their spouse, or any member of their family is or ever has been Anglican, Episcopalian, Methodist, or AME. This applies even if the person or their spouse has already become a Roman Catholic.

Although the current leadership of the ordinariate has effectively dropped the original intent of Anglicanorum coetibus to receive whole parishes from former Anglican denominations with their clergy in a body, that original intent certainly would have included Methodist parishes as well. However, as might be predicted, of the thousands of Methodist parishes currently disaffiliating from UMC, the overwhelming majority are simply moving to newly constituted but nominal Methodist denominations. As far as I'm aware, no UMC parish has proposed joining the ordinariate as a body with its property and clergy, although the mechanisms are in place, both within the UMC Paragraph 2553 and within the ordinariate, for them to do this.

In fact, the number of priests or laity who've entered the North American ordinariate from the UMC approaches zero. Fr Robert Kirk, who had been pastor of a UMC parish in the San Francisco Bay area, was ordained a Catholic priest in the ordinariate and now works as an associate at two ordinariate parishes in the Baltimore area. Mr Paul Roland, a layman who by his account at the link was raised Methodist but became Roman Catholic outside the ordinariate out of frustration with UMC policy on gays, joined the ordinariate looking for a congenial environment even though, in Oklahoma, he has no ordinariate community nearby.

As he put it, "Thanks primarily to Word on Fire and then Fr. (now Bishop) Robert Barron, I began to accept Catholic theology as sound and consistent." Now we're coming to the point here, I think. Almost no Methodists, and indeed, very few Anglicans of any sort, have been drawn to the Church by Anglicanorum coetibus. But by Bp Barron's own account, many thousands have come in via Word on Fire and related ministries like Ascension Presents.

In fact, Mr Roland's story of his path to the ordinariate is oddly equivocal:

However, I was not particularly drawn to Catholicism in such a way that I felt like I had to leave the UMC and my local community.

. . . The reality was that I struggled with Catholicism and all that I felt forced to leave behind. I left a small community for a large parish, left behind Sunday School and fellowship, good music that spoke to me, biblical literacy, and traditional language like that of the King James Version. I had to leave behind more than that too, but it was all enough to leave me still feeling homeless in the Catholic Church. I made escapes to my family’s Pentecostal church, to Methodist churches, and to Catholic Charismatic Renewal services to try to get my fix of something missing.

My experience of leaving mainline Protestantism and becoming Catholic has been in many ways the opposite. In a "continuing Anglican" parish that proposed to follow the prescribed path into the ordinariate, I saw that path disintegrate amid broken promises from both the Anglican denomination and the ordinariate. Forced to fall back on Plan B and enter via diocesan RCIA, amid fears that I'd be forced to make do with beige Catholicism, wishy-washy liturgy, and bad music, I discovered the opposite, a large, prosperous, spiritually vibrant, welcoming diocesan parish that I continue to find with some astonishment does a better job at being Episcopalian than any Episcopal parish I ever attended.

I'm still ruminating on why my experience has been near opposite Mr Roland's. But one factor may well be that he left the UMC in disagreement over its policy on gays, when let's face it, gay policy is just a couple of paragraphs in the CCC -- being Catholic involves a lifetime of formation in a much, much broader set of criteria. A strategy of Catholic evangelization that seeks to present Catholicism as UMC-without-the-gays won't work. The Anglicanism-without-the-gays doesn't seem to be working, either. I don't have answers, but I'm wondering if the idea of evangelizing Protestants by offering them a just-without-the-gays alternative isn't the way to go.

Some Confirmation Of My View On Twitter And More

Elon Musk gave Alex Berenson, a gadfly journalist and COVID skeptic, access to Twitter's files last week. Berenson had been banned from Twitter in 2021, but he successfully sued for reinstatement in an action separate from Musk's takeover before that took place.

What Musk is really offering is the chance to search Twitter’s systems seeking information about specific topics, in a process akin to discovery in civil lawsuits. Reporters ask for searches. Twitter turns over what it finds to be read or screenshotted at Twitter headquarters but retains the original documents.

. . . Musk is making available an unprecedented trove of evidence about government and private efforts to suppress free speech on the most important global platform for journalism. Musk’s decision is not risk-free and has little or no appreciable benefit for him. Everyone - Democrat, Republican, or independent - should thank him for doing it.

On his Substack, Berenson outlines one particular episode of censorship that reveals the underside of the whole official COVID narrative:

On August 27, 2021, Dr. Scott Gottlieb - a Pfizer director with over 550,000 Twitter followers - saw a tweet he didn’t like, a tweet that might hurt sales of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines.

The tweet explained correctly that natural immunity after Covid infection was superior to vaccine protection. It called on the White House to “follow the science” and exempt people with natural immunity from upcoming vaccine mandates.

. . . By suggesting some people might not need Covid vaccinations, the tweet could raise questions about the shots. Besides being former FDA commissioner, a CNBC contributor, and a prominent voice on Covid public policy, Gottlieb was a senior board member at Pfizer, which depended on mRNA jabs for almost half its $81 billion in sales in 2021. Pfizer paid Gottlieb $365,000 for his work that year.

Gottlieb stepped in, emailing Todd O’Boyle, a top lobbyist in Twitter’s Washington office who was also Twitter’s point of contact with the White House.

The post was “corrosive,” Gottlieb wrote. He worried it would “end up going viral and driving news coverage.”

The tweet, from Dr Brett Giroir, also, like Dr Gottlieb a former FDA head, is below:

You can see from the screenshot that Twitter labeled Dr Giroir's tweet as "misleading". Berensn outlines the background:

Through Jira, an internal system Twitter used for managing complaints, O’Boyle forwarded Gottlieb’s email to the Twitter “Strategic Response” team. That group was responsible for handling concerns from the company’s most important employees and users.

“Please see this report from the former FDA commissioner,” O’Boyle wrote - failing to mention that Gottlieb was a Pfizer board member with a financial interest in pushing mRNA shots.

A Strategic Response analyst quickly found the tweet did not violate any of the company’s misinformation rules.

Yet Twitter wound up flagging Giroir’s tweet anyway, putting a misleading tag on it and preventing almost anyone from seeing it. It remains tagged even though several large studies have confirmed the truth of Giroir’s words.

At the time, Pfizer was a major advertiser on Twitter, and in fact, it very visibly withdrew its advertising when Musk took over:

Food company General Mills Inc., GIS -0.24% decrease; Oreo maker Mondelez International Inc., MDLZ -0.04%decrease; Pfizer Inc. PFE -0.53%decrease; red down pointing triangle and Volkswagen AG’s VOW -0.16%decrease; Audi are among a growing list of brands that have temporarily paused their Twitter advertising in the wake of the takeover of the company by Elon Musk, according to people familiar with the matter.

Some advertisers are concerned that Mr. Musk could scale back content moderation, which they worry would lead to an increase in objectionable content on the platform.

Under normal journalistic disclosure standards, a newspaper or TV broadcast that covered the story would need to mention that Pfizer is an advertiser, which could affect coverage. Apparently there's no equivalent requirement for Twitter to disclose this. If there were, Twitter would presumably need to disclose that Pfizer was an advertiser immediately after labeling the Giroir tweet "misleading".

On one hand, this confirms my view that Twitter advertisers and blue-check users viewed Twitter as a kind of ultra-respectable guardian of the Overton window comparable to PBS. On the other, it's now clearer that advertising on the platform, as well as potentially investment in Twitter, was a form of protection money -- if Big Pharma objected to COVID skepticism of any sort, it could summon moderation. Once there was any suggestion that advertiser-friendly moderation policies would be withdrawn, the advertisers left. This wasn't groupthink, it was financial punishment.

But Big Pharma worked through the government and the public health bureaucracies as well:

The files so far have not turned up much evidence of FBI interest in censoring discussion around the coronavirus or the Covid vaccines.

The Department of Homeland Security, the public health bureaucracies, and the Biden Administration itself seem to have led that effort, which accelerated dramatically in early 2021, after the vaccines became widely available and Biden took over.

But let's still keep in mind that the COVID narrative collapsed notwitstanding all the efforts to control it via Twitter. The sub rosa debate between Gottlieb, who insisted that everyone needed the vax to be immune, and Giroir, who insisted that those who'd had COVID didn't need the vax, was overtaken by events when it became clear that anyone, vaxed or not, could get COVID again, and it's never been completely clear whether the vax was as safe as either claimed.

Pfizer could have withdrawn its advertising on Twitter due to the potential for less moderation -- but they could just as easily have decided it simply wasn't worth the money to try to control the debate that way. This is a big problem with the whole Twitter business model.

What Is Twitter's Product?

I'm still thinking about various remarks by observers, especially David Sacks in Saturday's post, that Elon Musk and his staff at Twitter are working on ways to improve the Twitter product, although Sacks makes the point that the product "simply hasn't changed that much in the last 10 years". So my first question is what is the product?

I think the answer to that one is simple, it's an online forum or community. It's also a type of social media. That's a problem in itself, because social media is generally thought to be something unhealthy, especially if used in excess. Things that make it unhealthy include the ability to be obnoxious while concealing one's identity and the ability to portray onesself in highly favorable terms -- and especially in light of the latter, social media can be depressing when people look at their own lives and worry they don't measure up to the happy lives other users represent themselves as living.

On one hand, Twitter's format, unlike Facebook, limits factors like conspicuous consumption or completely fake profiles by people who post photos of supermodels as themselves. On the other hand, there's the same pressure anyone else has to conform to the perceived values of the group and avoid controversy. In Twitter's case, celebrities, politicians, and pop culture figures tend to set the tone, and there's inevitable social pressure to avoid unpoularity. The "like" function for tweets reinforces this, although Twitter doesn't currently have a "dislike" function.

Another factor is that, like most online communities, Twitter is "free", although you need some type of computer and an internet connection to use it (it's possible to get no-charge access via a public library). Thus it operates via the 20th-century broadcast model, there's no specific charge to watch or listen to a show or read or post a tweet, and the cost to produce the platform is covered by advertising. While this model has been modified for broadcast media like cable TV or satellite radio, there's currently less use of a subscription model for online social media, which continues to be "free".

This is a big part of Musk's problem. He seems to be mulling ways to monetize a service that's normally "free", like charging a monthly fee to have a blue checkmark, but this changes the value to the customer for having a blue checkmark. Under the pre-Musk regime, the Twitter staff was seen, at least by conventional opinion, as altruistic and authoritative. If they issued a blue checkmark, it was a sign of particular favor independent of someone's ability to pay. Musk upended this dynamic.

In fact, if Twitter didn't make money, notwithstanding it was a capital corporation intended to make a profit for its investors, that would have been a plus in the minds of its customers. They paid nothing, but they got a perception of quality irrespective of money or profit, in effect the PBS variant of the broadcast model, with financial angels making up the difference. Advertisers and investors could support this as a type of virtue signal. This was probably also a major factor in the corporate culture, which we saw in the "My Day at Work" TikTok video, where the narrator saw an undemanding but five-star luxury environment as a validation of her own merit, irrespective of any particular contribution she may or may not make.

Any attempt by Musk to make people pay for something they'd been getting for free contradicts this overall sense of natural validation that both Twitter users and Twitter employees shared, and it's reflected in the bitterness that the overall Twitter community now feels toward Musk. The whole culture was based on people getting something for nothing and feeling good about it because they deserved it. The problem was that the perceived something they were getting was actually worthless, not too much different from FTX's crypto currency. It was just another social media platform with all the unhealthy features of any other. But the workers prospered, while the investors and advertisers felt good about themselves. Twitter was a close cousin of PBS. It catered to the gentry, while it cost nothing.

I don't think Musk is any sort of hero in this saga, any more than the child who blurts out that the emperor has no clothes. The problem there is the child invested no money in blurting it out, while Musk spent $44 billion to prove the same thing. Unless he's a lot smarter than I think he is, he isn't going to be able to remake the social media business model to recoup any of that investment. But then, Warren Buffett has already said he wouldn't invest in Tesla. Nothing really new here.

A Few Thoughts On The Speaker Vote

Coverage of the vote for US Speaker of the House has been remarkably shallow. Breitbart observes, "No speaker race had lasted 15 rounds or more in 163 years, according to House records." Simple arithmetic puts the last time that happened in 1860, which Breitbart's own crack writers failed to acknolwedge. Hmm. What happened the next year? Any students know?

Following the 2020 election, some commentators compared the debate over the outcome to 1876, which resulted in the Compromise of 1877, whereby Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was awarded the White House on the understanding that he would remove federal troops from South Carolina. This effectively ended Reconstruction, which was one of a series of events that bookended the US Civil War. My own view for a while has been that the US is approaching a need to resolve issues nearly comparable to those that caused the 1861-65 Civil War, although I don't think armed conflict will be involved.

If we look at events that led up to the Civil War, even leaving out those before 1850 like the Missouri Compromise, we find an intriguing list, including the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Pottawatomie Massacre, the Dred Scott decision, and John Brown's Raid, culminating in Lincoln's election as president in 1860. I think we've been seeing an equivalent series of unsuccessful attempts to reach equivalent unsuccessful compromises over key issues, leading up to a final confrontation that forces a resolution.

What that resolution may eventually be isn't clear, and what the key issues are is just as unclear, although they probably arise from some of the same issues that led to the Civil War, which aren't necessarily just the status of African-American slaves. One outcome of the war was emancipation of the slaves, but another, possibly more consequential, was the integration of the southern agrarian economy into the northern industrial economy and the elevation of the northern industrialist class, grown rich from the war, into a de facto aristocracy.

The key issue extending forward from the Civil War and Reconstruction isn't actually racial. It's a problem Marx saw at his particular stage of industrialization, the problem of the Lumpenproletariat, a highly visible petty criminal underclass that was separate from, and did not share interests with, the working class. In Europe, this wasn't a racial issue except that it did embrace some semi-racial groups like gypsies. In the US, there's been a tendency to assume that the petty criminal underclass is exclsively made up of racial or semi-racial minorites, which has resulted in the need to characterize some people who aren't petty criminals as "white Hispanics", while some African-Americans who sympathize with the underclass accuse others who don't of "acting white".

The problem is that this isn't a racial issue, and this is at the root of the present developing crisis, which is the rapid expansion of the urban petty criminal underclass. Subcategories of the problem include the homeless population and the uncontrolled influx of ever more powerful drugs. Occasional observers have remarked that the alliance of the Democrat party with the current African-American political grievance establishment has hurt the African-American population far more than the Ku Klux Klan could ever have imagined, and resolving the problem of the petty criminal underclass will probably require a depature from current racial political alignments. The US Republican Party is currently somewhat better aligned to pursue a solution, as in fact it was in 1860.

Right now, there seems to be a consensus that the group of 20 or so insurgent Republicans forced some sort of minimal compromise on the Republican political establishment, and that Donald Trump played some role in bringing it about. Whether this will be reflected in a further rehabilitation of Trump as a political force after a remarkably bad two years since his 2020 defeat remains to be seen. Indeed, it also remains to be seen whether the resolution of Repubican conflicts in this election for Speaker is anything but yet another in a series of unworkable efforts to avoid an inevitable confrontation.

More On What's Happening At Twitter

I found two items in yesterday's feed that, while there's some dissonance between them, provide additional insight into what Elon Musk dsicovered at Twitter. The first is the video above on the UK UnHerd YouTube channel, a follow-up in their developing series on Twitter that I first noted here on December 21. It features David Sacks, a venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal with Musk. I'll discuss this video after I talk about the other data point, a piece by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge, The Twitter Purge Continues: Musk Lays Off About 40 Data Scientists And Engineers Working On Ad Team. This simply confirms my surmise that at the time Musk decided to buy Twitter, there was simply no there there.

For years Twitter had operated less like a company and more like a cult compound for leftist ideologues, with free lunches, yoga rooms, smoothie, wine and espresso bars, and minimal work buffered by pointless meetings and near zero productivity.

Those days appear to be over. The latest proof? Twitter laid off "about 40 data scientists and engineers working on the advertising team" late on Wednesday night of this week, according to The Information.

A person with direct knowledge of the matter said that the layoffs now leave the company with "few engineers" working on “machine learning for ad optimization”.

These cuts come after additional reports this week that Elon Musk would be, among other things, downsizing the company's San Francisco headquarters from six floors to only two.

Earlier this week I noted a report that Musk had stopped paying rent on that headquarters. Durden concludes,

Interestingly, Twitter users have not noticed much of a difference in terms of functionality for the platform despite the mass layoffs.

We said it then and we'll say it again: the only difference has been the ability to speak more freely on the platform.

Let's move to the YouTube video with David Sacks. At about 1:43, he says,

The mood at Twitter, I think, they are kind of heads down now and working on product development. The things that people talk about outside the company, it's 95% about speech debates, that's about 5% of the conversation inaide the company. The other 95% is just building the product: how do we make this better? How do we ship more features? How do we get more efficient as a company?

Even so, Sacks continues to talk about the outside 95%, the revelations in the Twitter files involving coordination with the US government to censor the speech on the platform, and he goes so far as to say Musk's motive in buying Twitter was to end the censorship -- in other words, the irrelevant 95%. Wait a moment. What are the ideas the insiders are supposed to be floating, 95% by his account, on how to improve the product? Indeed, how did the additional layoffs of 40 more engineers affect this? He finally moves on at about 3:55:

. . . I think that Twitter can be a great business as well. In addition to fixing the censorship issues, I think it can also be a great business, because they simply haven't done much with that product. This product simply hasn't changed that much in the last 10 years, and already in the last month or so we've seen more improvements to the product than we have in the last number of years.

But as far as I can tell, for all that 95% of Twitter is now on improvements, there so far have been only two such improvements: monetizing the blue checkmark status and reducing the level of censorship. These have actually been minimal, while for good or ill, Musk has managed to damage the former prestige of the Twitter brand by doing just those things, while diminishing his own credibility as an entrepreneur by expending so much visible time and effort on Twitter, while investors are upset about the decline in Tesla's share value.

Prompted, Sacks turns to Musk's cost cuts at Twitter, but those aren't product improvements, and in effect, he acknowledges this at about 6:10:

The reality is, Twitter, like a lot of companies in Silicon Valley, was very bloated and overstaffed. It was possible to cut, call it, three quarters of the employees and actually improve the performance, because you didn't have a bunch of people working at cross purposes getting in each other's way. . .

But actually, the evidence we have from the "My Day at Work" TikTok video, which Tyler Durden inplicitly refers to at that link, was that employees at Twitter and elsewhere in Silicon Valley were, and often continue to be, occupied with "free lunches, yoga rooms, smoothie, wine and espresso bars, and minimal work buffered by pointless meetings". They weren't working at cross purposes; they weren't working at all. I'm not sure how much either Sacks or Musk understands the extent of this problem -- and both seem to be indulging in wishful thinking that there was ever value at Twitter.

Sacks seems to be a Musk ally and apologist here, but even in the course of making the best possible case for Musk's takeover of Twitter, he's basically acknowledging that Twitter never really had a product, and that by cutting the workforce 75%, he's been able to do nothing more than produce that same tired old non-product. But the information we have from accounts like Tyler Durden's is that anybody who might have been working on product improvements (if any of them actually was doing this) was laid off last Wednesday. In other words, there was never a there there, and there still isn't.

The question I continue to have is why Musk didn't understand this about Twitter before he made the offer to buy a company with an essentially worthless product. And yet again, why can't he recruit a CEO? No matter how Sacks tries to spin things, these questions keep coming back.

The Mystery Of Hunter's Finances

There's been a quasi-news story in the background for the past week that Hunter Biden has been trying to get a reduction in his child support payments to the Arkansas exotic dancer whose child he fathered. According to the New York Post,

In September 2022, Biden appealed to an Independence County, Ark., court for his IOUs to be reduced, claiming “a substantial material change” in his “financial circumstances.”

As the link indicates, the story has been around for some months. A story on the original filing from last summer quotes the dancer's attorney:

"Ultimately, this is going to require us to look deeply, more deeply, into Hunter's finances," Lancaster said. "I'm going to want to have a deposition with Mr. Biden. Like last time, I'm going to bring my forensic accountant to the deposition, unless the judge tells me I can't."

. . . In the past, Biden had presented himself as financially strapped, telling the court in a November 2019 affidavit, "I am unemployed and have had no monthly income since May 2019."

At the time, Biden said he also had "significant debts," due, in part, to obligations arising from a divorce.

A New York Times article shortly thereafter portrayed Biden as living in a $12,000-per-month Los Angeles rental with a swimming pool and a Porsche Panamera in the driveway.

The Post story from this past Wednesday at the first link refers to a filing made in the case on December 27:

“Even though the defendant has been the subject of articles by the New York Times regarding his ‘art,’ President Biden’s administration has taken measures to shield the White House from the buyers of the defendant’s ‘art,’ and the defendant was seen in New York City as recently as a few months ago showing and selling his ‘art,’ the defendant has refused to provide any information about his ‘art’ or the income derived from it,” Lancaster continued.

But there are mysteries beyond just the "art". As I noted here last summer, Hunter has been living in a Malibu, CA compound in a $20,000-a-month rental next to an adjoining luxury home that serves as a Secret Service detail headquarters for $30,000 per month. Access to Hunter's residence is closely controlled by the Secret Service, so that his conditions amount to house arrest. The $20,000 monthly rent on Hunter's house is reportedly paid by Hollywood lawyer Keven Morris, who reportedly underwrites other of Hunter's living expenses. According to that link, Morris also advises Hunter on his "art" sales. (The rental for the adjoining house for the Secret Service detail is paid by the taxpayer.)

Also according to that link, Morris also paid Hunter's $2 million tax bill, which was settled at the time his father became president. But this leaves aside the problem of Hunter's wife, Melissa Cohen, who has never had an income of her own but maintains a jet-set lifestyle. Can Hunter's art cover these expenses?

The younger Biden took an interest in art only recently, and although he had never sold a painting, his work was displayed at a Hollywood art show in 2021 with eye-popping prices as high as $500,000. He sold five prints for a total of $375,000 at the event[.]

One potential problem is that President Biden has had a history of subsidizing Hunter's lifestyle; for instance, he wired him a total of $100,000 to help pay his bills from December 2018 through January 2019. While the commingling of income among the Biden family is a potential tax issue, the question of Hunter's actual income for the purpose of calculating child support is entirely separate.

I'm not at all sure that the dancer's child support case will ever bring any of this to light, though. She and her attorney are likely using the threat of a deposition as a negotiating tactic, along with a separate petition to have her daughter by Hunter take the Biden family name:

Lunden Alexis Roberts, who reportedly worked as a stripper at a club in Washington, D.C., when she met Biden, has asked in a legal filing for her and Biden’s child to receive the Biden name.

According to the filing, the child — who reportedly does not receive Secret Service protection unlike other members of the Biden family — would “benefit from carrying the Biden family name.” It adds that the “Biden name is now synonymous with being well educated, successful, financially acute, and politically powerful.”

The suit also states that the Biden family remains “estranged from the child. To the extent this is misconduct or neglect, it can be rectified by changing her last name to Biden so that she may undeniably be known to the world as the child of the defendant and member of the prestigious Biden family.”

I've got to assume Hunter has been making his child support payments up to now -- if he didn't, it would certainly be news. If Kevin Morris, some other angel, or President Biden himself has been subsidizing the existing payments, it can only be in their interest to continue to pay the lady what she wants. The alternatives would be too delicious.