Silicon Valley

More Questions for Zuckerberg

Featured image Scott is all over the Zuckerberg letter about the Facebook boss fessing up to service as a government censor. According to the New York Post, Zuckerberg still has a lot of questions to answer about suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Answers also await to questions Zuckerberg raised during testimony in 2018. As he confirmed, Facebook was cooperating with the investigation of Donald Trump by Robert Mueller. The former »

SBF, Leftist Fraud

Featured image I never paid a single moment of attention to FTX or Sam Bankman-Fraud when they were riding high, partly because I don’t understand the whole crypto world, and partly because of my growing and well-founded contempt for the presumptions of Silicon Valley. I can’t figure out if Bitcoin and other blockchain-based products are really a potential rival currency to the world’s unstable fiat money system, or merely a high tech »

AI—Threat or Next Great Thing?

Featured image I don’t know enough yet to have a firm opinion about whether AI (artificial intelligence) is the next big thing that will change the world for the better, or a menace that will further dumb us down and become a tool of control if not Big Brother oppression (not to mention Skynet and the Terminator). One thing I suspect is true, however, is that it will not be a net »

Annnnnnd . . . It’s a Bailout

Featured image The pixels from my previous post had hardly hit the ether before news broke that the Federal government is going to bail out all Silicon Valley Bank depositors in total, which means Harry and Meghan (apparently large depositors) and all the Silicon Valley start-up companies who had their money in SVB will get it all back. So the billionaire venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road won’t have to re-capitalize their »

A Wake-Up for Woke Banks?

Featured image As if this writing (Sunday afternoon), there is high uncertainty about whether the failure of Silicon Valley Bank will spread to other banks this week. There are good reasons to think SVB’s failure was peculiar to Silicon Valley and atypical of most banks. A senior bank analyst of my acquaintance pointed out to me that over 80% of SVB deposits were over the $250,000 limit for deposit insurance (I have separately »

Twitter Busted Wide Open

Featured image Twitter asserted unequivocally back in 2018 that they did not shadow ban anyone: But today the latest traunch of internal Twitter documents was released (on Twitter—a condition Musk laid out for initial disclosure) by Bari Weiss. And it reveals Twitter to have brazenly lied: Read the whole thing, but here are a couple highlights: »

How to Land in Facebook Jail

Featured image Cast your mind back to Thanksgiving in 2020 and 2021, when J. Edgar Fauci was telling us that we could only have something like six people over for dinner, preferably eating outside, and all socially-distanced by at least twelve turkey-lengths, or 0.2 furlongs or something. Someone promptly produced a meme of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer saying, “No one is going to tell me how many people I can have for »

The Bee Stings Twitter

Featured image Watching the left lose their you-know-what over Elon Musk’s hostile takeover bid for Twitter was one of the sublime pleasures of the last week. And thus leave it to the Babylon Bee, whose Twitter feed keeps getting suspended because of their irreverent humor, to provide the suitable (and accurate) mockery of in this three-minute sketch: »

Musk Makes His Move (Updated)

Featured image I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Twitter headquarters today (or a lurker on their Zoom group therapy sessions no doubt taking place all day today), as the fallout from Musk’s hostile takeover bid rivals the upset of Trump’s election victory in 2016. In the meantime, I offer one of my own original memes for the effort: UPDATE—The Twitterati are not taking it well: This is highly »

The Miserable Life in Woke Silicon Valley

Featured image A reader directed me to this Twitter thread from someone who goes by the name Hazard Harrington, who works in Silicon Valley. I have no way of verifying the truth of the person or his position, but it certainly squares with a lot of other accounts of how woefully woke Silicon Valley has become—the more so in the time of COVID—so I am reasonably confident it is authentic: I work »

Conservatives turn to bias-free alternative to Twitter [With Comment by John]

Featured image Given the anti-Trump and anti-conservative bias of Twitter, it seemed likely that an alternative platform would come to the fore. Now, it looks like one has. According to this report by CNBC (which can’t be happy about it), a social medium platform called Parler is suddenly making huge strides. After a Wall Street Journal story reported that Team Trump is looking for alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, and mentioned Parler »

The Power Line Show, Ep 192: “The Coming of Neo-Feudalism,” with Joel Kotkin

Featured image Joel Kotkin is one of America’s premier analysts of city life, urban economics, demographic change, and social trends. His brand new book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, turns upside down the conventional liberal narrative about why the middle and working classes are under pressure. It’s not capitalism and markets, but their perversions, especially in the hands of the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley and »

Breaking: Google Censors the Claremont Institute

Featured image Last week Facebook kicked Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan and Paul Watson off of their platform because of their extremism. While I have no brief for any of these individuals, I agreed with the critics who said “don’t think it will just stop with them.” Sure enough, it appears Google is censoring the Claremont Institute. Claremont president Ryan Williams explained in a Twitter thread Sunday evening, which I have »

Luckey & unlucky at Facebook

Featured image On Monday the Wall Street Journal reported that Oculus VR co-founder Palmer Luckey — Facebook bought his company and made him an executive — had been fired by Facebook for his heterodoxy. The story is by Kirsten Grind and Keach Hagey under the plot-spoiling headline “Why Did Facebook Fire a Top Executive? Hint: It Had Something to Do With Trump” (accessible here on Outline). Subhead: “Palmer Luckey, co-founder of virtual-reality »

Zuckerberg Speaks

Featured image Today Mark Zuckerberg testified before a joint session of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce Committees. Hanging over his appearance was the question whether Congress will enact new regulations on companies like Facebook. Zuckerberg was entirely open to the concept; if you are a monopolist, submitting to regulation simply cements your position. What is striking to me is the childlike faith that so many have in “regulation.” What regulation seems almost »

Digitalships and Double-Standards

Featured image I don’t know if anyone has yet used the term “digitalship” to describe the rising “dictatorship of the digerati”—perhaps both the term and phrase are too ungainly—but if not I’ll lay claim to it as a literary device (hat tip to Jeane Kirkpatrick, too) for pointing out the massive hypocrisy of the left over Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data on behalf of the Trump campaign. Because as near as »

Facebook Censorship of Conservatives (Updated)

Featured image Last week’s Saturday picture gallery included this pointed but by no means outrageous or beyond the pale meme about Tide Pods: Well, guess what? Facebook has slapped the creator of this meme with a 30-day suspension because of it. Reason has the details: Tom Champlin, who owns the libertarian news aggregator The Liberty Review and runs its associated Facebook page, was slapped with a 30-day Facebook ban for posting a »