Alan Eargle

Storyteller for Driven by Safety, believer in a better and different tomorrow...let's change the way we approach drunk driving. Opinions are my own.

[Alan Eargle @AlanEargle]

The amount of money spent on this mandate is truly staggering. For nearly 3 years we have tried to engage with .@Pete and others to create a simple, voluntary and affordable solution, but the @USDOT showed no interest in exploring multiple solutions for impaired driving technology, focusing on one technology despite its challenges and high costs. Our technology has been used voluntarily by drivers in vehicles for the past two years.

This situation highlights a broader issue where innovation from diverse businesses is sidelined, at the cost of taxpayer money.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

The federal automobile kill switch mandate is Orwellian and threatens civil liberties. When your car shuts down because it doesn’t approve of your driving, how will you appeal your roadside conviction?

The technology needed for this doesn't even exist. Repeal this mandate.

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

It would be nice if there were a major American political party that understood how markets work.

[Justine Bateman @JustineBateman]

When one has a track record to run upon, one does not have to fight anyone or anything.

[Rand Paul @RandPaul]

COVID didn't just expose a virus. It exposed how quickly Washington will strip away your basic freedoms the moment it's given an excuse.

Lockdowns that closed churches while liquor stores stayed open. Mandates that cost people their jobs. Restrictions with no science behind them, just fear and control. We cannot treat that as normal. Liberty doesn't survive if we forget how easily it was taken.

[nick kokonas @nickkokonas]

so naturally one asks -- why would they *want* to build crappy grocery stores that have conflicting goals and will be mismanaged? Because either that's the goal... or else they have no idea how to actually craft an RFP or run a business.

[Julie Watts @juliewattsTV]

https://t.co/Stz5yZsMUE

[Alan Eargle @AlanEargle]

Traves-sham-mockery!!

[NHL Forum @NHLxForum]

Thoughts on Jack Hughes’ Golden Goal not winning best play at the #ESPYS

A tip-in to win just game 4 by OG Anunoby won best play, not the goal that ended a 46 year drought…🤔

[Rock Chartrand @RockChartrand]

The socialist regards society much as a child regards supper: he notices with great precision who received the largest slice, while remaining curiously uninterested in who rose at dawn to bake the thing.

Socialists always imagine themselves at the table, never in the kitchen.

[Alan Eargle @AlanEargle]

@micsolana I am fine with base, but these positions desperately need variable comp - big bonus for a balanced budget, big bonus for outcome based initiatives, bonus for constituent satisfaction

[alexlindsay @alexlindsay]

If you want to understand American optimism…

We celebrate the date that we declared independence, not the date that we achieved it.

[Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi]

I was never taught America is great because it’s richer/bigger. I heard about the light bulb,airplanes, movies, the telephone, rock, jazz, basketball, the Internet, nuclear power, Ali-Frazier, Thoreau, King, Lincoln, Twain, Chandler, the Hoover Dam and the Fender Stratocaster…

[Alan Eargle @AlanEargle]

“Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.”

— Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Today, it is important to remember that America was founded to limit government interference so freedoms could survive and thrive without becoming tools of political power.

That’s an America worth celebrating

[Andrew Kerr @AndrewKerrNC]

Membership initiation fees at the golf courses owned by Ro Khanna’s young children run upwards of $45,000

The golf courses paid his kids up to $2 million in 2024

Khanna says he has a “moral” duty to fight the ultra-rich who "hoard wealth and engage in financial speculation."

[Leah Ray @LeahRay44]

As a non-American, the 2026 World Cup seems to be the best thing that the USA has ever done for its reputation 🇺🇸

News commentators in our countries were literally telling us not to go because of how unsafe it is. Millions of us came anyway and have had the times of our lives.

[Alan Eargle @AlanEargle]

@HHorsley 🎯

[Legal Phil @Legal_Fil]

“Why is the Court interpreting the laws as written, as opposed to what I want them to say?”

An ongoing series by Elizabeth Warren.

[Alan Eargle @AlanEargle]

@drewdyck This is a perfect distillation

[Walter Kirn @walterkirn]

Why did the press act as cheerleaders & mass behavioral guides rather than investigators or principled skeptics - their traditional roles - during COVID?

How was this transformation effected?

I'm tired of hearing only abt Fauci etc.

I want to know abt the media orchestration.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

When I was a kid, the Bronx was burning. My dad was a fireman who happened to be an Ivy League graduate.

He told me it wasn’t the crackheads torching the city, whatever the news said. It was fraud.

Let me explain how it worked…. John Doe buys a rundown apartment building for $100k. He pockets the redevelopment tax break, then sells it to Joe Doe for $250k. Joe pockets the tax break, then sells it to Jerry Doe for $500k. Rinse and repeat until the building is worth $5 million.

The tax breaks are real. The money is not.

Because the buyers are all family, the cash flows out of Swiss bank account 27852 and right back into 27852 after every sale. There’s a transaction cost, sure, but the tax breaks more than cover it.

Then comes the payoff: they insure the building for $5 million and burn it down.

The name for this was “Jewish Lightning.” The phrase stuck around not because the landlords were all Jewish, but because the stereotype hit a nerve in a city run by Jewish mayors from 1974 to 1989, the peak of the burning. Fair or not, the term stuck.

So why was none of this investigated? NGO funding, of course.

The NYPD union was powerful, and NYC detectives had sweeping investigative authority over almost everything. Except arson. Arson belonged to FDNY detectives. NGOs, routing money through union donations, stoked the rivalry between cops and firemen.

Long story short, arson investigators got no funding and zero cooperation from the NYPD.

No money for investigations means no arrests.

Eventually the Bronx ran out of buildings to burn, and Giuliani drove the final nail into arson fraud’s coffin.

But the lesson survived, and it’s the foundation of today’s fraud. The lesson was this: the actual value of the asset doesn’t matter.

👉What matters is the movement of money.

Destruction is still very profitable. When the Baltimore bridge collapsed, the cleanup and rebuild were estimated at $1.7 billion, with the bridge reopening in 2028. The cost has since ballooned to $5.2 billion, and the wreckage still isn’t fully cleared.

Money pours into demolition,, engineering, environmental review, project management, waste removal.

But if the work doesn’t actually get done, the real expenses stay low. The money moves; the bridge doesn’t.

And here’s the leap: you don’t have to destroy anything at all. You just have to not build it.

Democrats allocate money to a government body, which hands it to a project manager, who hires consultants, who hire subcontractors, who hire more subcontractors, who funnel it back to Democrats, who allocate more money.

The fewer the actual costs (labor, materials, equipment) the more of the flow you can capture.

And if a taxpayer complains, you hire a PR firm and a few consultants to explain why costs keep exploding while nothing gets built. The easiest thing to blame is red tape.

So why does red tape exist?

Because destroying valuable property, while profitable, is too obviously unethical.

Burning buildings gets you arrested, eventually. Not building gets you a ribbon-cutting and a press release.

Here’s the deeper trap. Because our most valuable assets are fixed (houses, cars, index funds) we think of money as static. You have what you have. It grows over time, but it doesn’t flow.

That’s exactly where the fraud lives: in the flow.

The light bulb moment was realizing you don’t need to destroy physical property. You only need to destroy productivity.

If labor and materials are never purchased while money pours in, the fraud works.

You don’t have to build or destroy anything of value, just productivity. You just announce a project and start writing checks while throwing up enough red tape to block any real spending on labor and materials.

This is basically why Congress handed @PeteButtigieg $1.2 trillion and our roads and bridges still suck five years later. They put up signs, traffic cones, and red tape, and little else.

But there are a few residual problems. 1/2

[Alan Eargle @AlanEargle]

@RoKhanna Radical idea, just let people keep their money

[Alan Eargle @AlanEargle]

@tombogert