Jeff Jennings

Lawyer, 3 time Malibu mayor, trainer of horses, cowboy manque

[Christopher Rufo @christopherrufo]

EXCLUSIVE: California's ten largest public-sector unions are harvesting more than $1 billion in membership dues per year—mostly from taxpayers. Then they spend it on lobbying, luxury travel, and an army of political activists.

We have the receipts.
https://t.co/6Ju7XcTpwl

[لُجين @Atmayn_]

بنتي أرسلت لي رسالة من حفلة بالليل:

«ماما.. للحين نستخدم الشاحن اللي بالبيت؟»

إحنا أصلًا ما نستخدمه.

لأن «الشاحن» بيني وبينها له معنى ثاني:

الشاحن = تعالي خذيني الحين.
و«السماعات» معناها: اتصلي عليّ بعد 5 دقايق.
و«قارورة الموية» معناها: أنا بخير، كل شيء تمام.

لكن الليلة…

قالت: «الشاحن».

ما سألتها ليه.
ولا أرسلت لها رسالة ثانية.

بس أخذت مفاتيحي وطلعت لها.

لما ركبت السيارة، قالت لي بصوت واطي:

[mike bski @BskiMike22802]

Bernie. Bernie, Bernie, Bernie.

Let me get this straight, because I want to make sure I am reading your economics homework correctly, and I did not eat a bowl of alphabet soup this morning so bear with me. You just listed UnitedHealth's $5.48 billion quarterly profit as proof of corporate greed. Cute. Except that profit happened WHILE the Affordable Care Act — the law that guarantees these insurers a captive, subsidized, taxpayer-fed customer base — has been the law of the land for fifteen years. You are not exposing corporate greed, Senator. You are reading me the receipt for your own bill. The ACA did not shrink the insurance industry. It turned it into a government-guaranteed cash cow, and now you are shocked, SHOCKED, that the cow got fat. Eats soup with a fork, this one.

And here is the part that should really sting. Your own party just finished a 43-day shutdown demanding MORE money be poured into that exact system, because the temporary COVID subsidies YOUR PARTY wrote into the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 — zero Republican votes on either bill, by the way — expired right on schedule, exactly as YOU designed them to. Not a single Republican voted to end those subsidies. You did. Then you shut down the government to admit, out loud, on the record, that a law literally named the AFFORDABLE Care Act cannot survive without emergency pandemic cash. That is not an insult from me. That is a confession from you.

So now the solution is Medicare for All. Naturally. Because when a fifteen-year-old government program made the insurance companies richer, the answer is obviously MORE government program, just bigger. If ignorance is bliss you must be the happiest man in the Senate. Independent estimates put full single-payer implementation at somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the ENTIRE federal budget. Forty to sixty percent, Senator. Larger than Social Security. Larger than defense. You want me to hand over half the country's checkbook to the same apparatus that just admitted its last healthcare experiment doesn't work without a subsidy IV drip.

Let's talk about who's asking. You have served in the United States government for something like forty years between the House and Senate, and by my count the bills you personally got across the finish line as lead sponsor could be counted on one hand, mostly involving the naming of federal buildings. Somewhere out there is a tree tirelessly producing oxygen for you, Senator, and it owes itself an apology for the return on investment. This is also the same man who, as a young idealist, tried out communal living on a hippie commune and did not exactly stick around long enough to collect a pension from it. Now you want the reins to fifty percent of the national budget. I keep hearing "tax the rich" out of a man worth several million dollars who charters private jets on his "Fighting Oligarchy" tour because, in his own words, he isn't waiting in line at United with the rest of us peasants. Bless your heart. That is rich even by Congressional standards. Couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions on the heel, but sure, hand him the checkbook.

And before you tell me capitalism failed and it's finally socialism's turn — how's that working out for your ideological younger brother in New York? Zohran Mamdani just announced a THIRTY MILLION DOLLAR government grocery store in a city his own comptroller says is worse than broke. Kansas City tried this. Erie, Kansas tried this. That is not a hunch, Senator, that is a lab result, and I am a science teacher, so let me walk you through the peer review.

An experiment only counts as science if it has been REPLICATED. Not run once. Run again. And again. Under different conditions, different continents, different decades, different "well THIS time we'll do it right" true believers standing at the podium. So let's replicate it together, shall we, because apparently nobody handed you the lab notes.

Trial one: the USSR, 1920s and 1930s. Stalin seized the farms, collectivized the kulaks, and centrally planned the harvest. Result: the Holodomor, a man-made famine in Ukraine that starved somewhere between five and ten million people to death while grain was actively being EXPORTED past their starving bodies. That is not a rounding error. That is a control group that died.

Trial two: Cuba, 1959 onward. Castro nationalized every business, every farm, every bank on the island. Sugar production, once the envy of the hemisphere, collapsed. The economy shrank thirty-five percent in a single decade when the Soviet training wheels came off. Extreme poverty today sits near eighty-eight percent. Same experiment. Same result.

Trial three: Venezuela, sitting on some of the largest oil reserves on the PLANET, nationalized its oil industry and ran the socialist playbook to the letter. Production collapsed from three and a half million barrels a day to under one million. Hyperinflation peaked past sixty-three THOUSAND percent. Nine million people fled. You cannot bribe your way out of the results with oil money. We tried. It's in the data.

Trial four, and this one should make every teacher in America wince: China's Great Leap Forward, 1958 to 1962. Mao abolished private farming, herded peasants into communes, melted down their pots and pans for backyard steel that was too low-grade to use for anything. Somewhere between fifteen and forty-five million people starved. Some regions saw cannibalism. That is not a typo. That is what happens when central planners replace the price system with a five-year plan and a slogan.

Trial five: North Korea, present day, running the same command economy with the Juche twist. Famine in the 1990s killed hundreds of thousands to over a million. Markets are technically illegal and thrive anyway in the shadows, because human beings will trade even when their government threatens to shoot them for it.

Trial six is my personal favorite because it is the cleanest natural experiment in the history of economics: East versus West Germany. Same people. Same language. Same culture. Same starting point in 1945. One half got markets, one half got the Stasi and collectivized industry. East German productivity settled at roughly thirty to seventy-five percent of the West's, and the population had to build a WALL to stop its own citizens from swimming, tunneling, and hot-air-ballooning their way out. Nobody builds a wall to keep people from fleeing prosperity, Senator.

Trial seven: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975 to 1979. They abolished money entirely. No markets. No private property. Total state control, straight out of the textbook you apparently keep on your nightstand. One point seven to three million people, roughly a quarter of the country, died of starvation, overwork, and execution in FOUR YEARS.

And for the extra credit column: Ethiopia's Derg collectivization, Tanzania's Ujamaa villages, Yugoslavia's market-socialism ceiling, Vietnam before it finally abandoned the model, India's decades of License Raj stagnation, and Poland and the rest of the Eastern Bloc running factories that burned three times the steel per unit of output compared to the free market next door. Every single trial, same hypothesis, same result. I have seen middle schoolers design better controlled experiments during a volcano science fair.

That is not one anecdote, Bernie. That is a stack of peer-reviewed, historically documented, independently verified trials spanning four continents and a full century, and the conclusion section reads the same every time: shortages, queues, corruption, and a body count north of a hundred million people once you tally every collectivized farm, every purged kulak, and every commune that ran out of rice. If an experiment fails this many times in this many labs, a real scientist stops blaming the equipment and starts questioning the hypothesis. You, apparently, would rather run trial number eight on 340 million Americans and call it "finally getting it right." Trying to reason with some folks really is like trying to baptize a cat.

Quinn's First Law of Liberalism: liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent. You want cheaper healthcare, you get record insurer profits. You want affordable food, you get a thirty-million-dollar failed grocery store. You want to fight the oligarchy, you fly private. Every single time. Set your watch by it.

I keep asking Democrats this question and I never get an answer: what have YOU actually done to help people, versus just handing out someone else's money? Because handouts without a ladder out is not compassion. It is a leash. And I think deep down you know that, Senator, or you wouldn't need the private jet to get away from the people you claim to be fighting for. You're about as useful as a screen door on a submarine when it comes to actually running anything, but boy can you point fingers.

You are the human version of period cramps on this topic, Bernie, and I mean that with the utmost respect for a man who has spent forty years discovering new ways to spend money he didn't earn. Has a leak in the think tank if he genuinely believes THIS is the moment socialism finally works. Unless your name is Google, Senator, you need to stop acting like you know everything about running an economy you have personally never had to run.

But what do I know. I am only a medically retired Army combat medic and a science teacher who actually reads the Congressional Budget Office numbers before I open my mouth about a trillion-dollar healthcare takeover.

@JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @TheYoungTurks #MAGA #Veterans #Trump

[@amuse @amuse]

https://t.co/k6xbvllUkW

[Sensurround @ShamashAran]

https://t.co/iT7eNP2hog

[a16z Frontier @a16zfrontier]

https://t.co/5HWCyID7R0

[Jeff Jennings @malibu]

@shellshockkk Consider that the only common denominator of all your bad experiences is you

[CFTC @CFTC]

@CFTC and @SECGov Announce Historic Memorandum of Understanding Between Agencies: https://t.co/Ir3tNVPvZm

[Walter Curt @wcdispatch]

https://t.co/3GGge57bAy

[a16z Frontier @a16zfrontier]

Today we're talking about the passage of the GENIUS Act.

The "Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act" — which provides clear rules of the road for stablecoins in the U.S. We cover the law's implications, the recent high-stakes vote in the House of Representatives, and the bipartisan efforts to pass this groundbreaking bill.

We also touch on the CLARITY Act — a major new “market structure” bill that would establish a clear regulatory framework for digital asset markets — which the House also passed with bipartisan support and which is now headed to the Senate.

Here to separate the signal from the noise are members of the a16z crypto team who had a front-row seat to the action. We've got @milesjennings, a16z crypto's General Counsel and Head of Policy, plus a16z Government Affairs Partners @BenNapier and Michael Reed, who are responsible for liaising with House Republicans and House Democrats, respectively. They share the inside scoop.

Timestamps:
(0:00) Introduction
(1:01) Understanding the GENIUS Act
(3:56) News Summary: What Happened in the House
(5:45) Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Contention
(7:01) House Vote Drama: Republicans
(9:31) House Vote Drama: Democrats
(14:28) Winners and Losers
(16:01) Decentralized Stablecoins and SEC Involvement
(17:49) CLARITY Act and Future Legislation
(21:47) Looking Ahead

w/ our host @rhackett 🎙️

[Jeff Jennings @malibu]

@BasedMikeLee @glennbeck To every human problem there’s a simple solution: neat, plausible and wrong.

[Jeff Jennings @malibu]

@ProfMJCleveland “Fair proceedings free from any suggestion of impartiality…”. There are typos. This is a thinking

[Rohin Dhar @rohindhar]

The San Francisco housing cycle (a cautionary tale):

Prevent new construction of homes in effort to maintain neighborhood character

Prices go up since supply of homes is now fixed

Add rent control to combat rising prices

No incentive to fix up dilapidated buildings since can’t increase rents so buildings start falling apart

Now you have a rental housing stock that is expensive for new tenants and falling apart for everyone

Blame the developers and landlords and create further penalties and disincentives to build housing

Add more regulations because the buildings are really falling apart at this point

Building owners find it’s not really worth being in the landlord business. Wait for buildings to become vacant so they can exit

Developers see there is lower demand for being a landlord so stop jumping through the hoops to build new apartments

Build a few affordable housing units but find it’s costing you a million+ per unit and not making a dent. Some good press at the ribbon cutting ceremony though!

Now when you realize you need more apartments, find that no one trusts you enough to build them bc you’ve been implementing punitive policies for decades

Not sure exactly how you escape this cycle

[Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger]

For more than a decade, the media, Democrats, and Hollywood have told us that Western civilization in general and the United States in particular are white supremacist, genocidal, and unsustainable. The founding of America occurred not in 1776 but rather in 1619 with the beginning of slavery, whose effects are felt more strongly than ever. The original colonies and the expansion of the Western frontier depended on the extermination of indigenous people and theft of their lands. And our crimes against nature have resulted in apocalyptic climate change, which requires radical changes to the way we live our lives.

The consequences of this self-hating Woke ideology can be seen today in catastrophic fires, mass evacuations, and burned rubble of Los Angeles. So-called progressives finally achieved what they supposedly warned of but in truth wished for: the eviction of the affluent descendants of colonizers, the incineration of their homes, and the destruction of a city that, more than any other, represents our bloody history of white supremacy and conquest.

I’m not suggesting that Democrats consciously sought to destroy Los Angeles. The entertainment industry professionals in Malibu, Topanga Canyon, and Pacific Palisades, who voted overwhelmingly for California’s progressive Governor, Gavin Newsom, and LA’s radical Left mayor, Karen Bass, thought they were voting for social justice and sustainability. They didn’t imagine their vote would result in their homes burning down.

And yet that’s what their votes resulted in. Over the last 24 hours, the evidence of gross mismanagement and incompetence by Newsom and Bass has only grown more overwhelming. On January 2nd, a full eight days ago, the National Weather Service urgently warned of extreme fire conditions. To drive home the point, the National Weather Service’s Los Angeles office held a press briefing warning of impending catastrophe.

On that day, Newsom and Bass should have called out the National Guard. They should have had planes and helicopters circling over Los Angeles spotting fires and putting them out immediately upon detecting them. They should have issued emergency warnings to residents. And they should have used various methods to spray water, including mobile sprinkler units alongside normal firefighter hoses, to wet down vulnerable areas.

Instead, the following day, Karen Bass flew to Ghana on a frivolous junket. And Gavin Newsom only called out the National Guard yesterday, seven days later than he should have.

In truth, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Newsom and Bass should have constructed two to three times more water reservoirs than Los Angeles has in order to deal with fires of that magnitude. Newsom and Bass should have not only built water recycling and desalination plants, like they have in Israel, they should have built them with excess capacity so that, in an emergency, those plants could have pumped fresh water to supplement the water in the reservoirs.

And instead of emptying the prisons and jails, subsidizing rampant homelessness, eliminating penalties for breaking the law, and allowing addicts the mentally ill to camp everywhere and start fires, Newsom and Bass should have cracked down on the rampant disorder and violent crime, all of which has skyrocketed under their misrule.

It now appears that at least one of the fires was started by a homeless man. Whether or not that’s the case, over half of all fires put out by the Los Angeles Fire Department are started by the homeless, which has diverted the agency from doing what it should have been doing, which was preventing catastrophic fires, including by putting them out as soon as they started.

Why didn’t they? Why did Newsom and Bass make so many catastrophic errors?

Part of the reason is that they are self-centered and craven politicians, typical of the people who hold office in California. They claim to care about society’s victims; in truth, they care only about themselves and their self-image. Newsom, Bass, and other California politicians are uninterested in doing a good job and instead obsessed with their own personal promotion. For that reason, they have long been focused like a laser on playing politics rather than governing effectively.

Another reason is that they are beholden to affluent, radical Left environmentalist and social justice donors who live in places like Marin County and Hollywood. These are the same people who bankroll radical Left groups like the Sierra Club and Natural Resources Defense Council, who have successfully blocked desalination and water storage plants, the proper clearing of flammable debris in forests, and effective management of landscapes around housing development, for over 45 years.

Before that, the same groups and financial interests halted the expansion of nuclear power, which is the perfect energy source for desalination.

And these are the same people who demanded that homeless encampments be allowed to spread throughout the city and that addicts and the mentally ill be given free housing with no strings attached.

All of these things were done in the name of saving the environment, social justice, and saving black lives. The result of them was the destruction of the environment, grotesque injustice, and the disproportionate loss of black lives, including from violent crime, which increased 15% since Newsom took office and grew to be 31% higher than the national average.

For decades, Hollywood cranked out movies and TV depicting the exhaustion of natural resources and climate as causing the apocalypse. Yesterday, some reporters and scientists blamed climate change for the lack of rain in LA. That’s ridiculous. There's no trend in annual rainfall from 1877 to 2024. We have wet years and dry years.

Destroying civilization turned out to be expensive, not cheap. Californians pay the highest taxes for the most expensive gasoline, electricity, and water in the nation. Under Newsom, we spent $24 billion to increase homelessness by 40%.

Both ancient wisdom and modern psychology teach us that one can understand a person’s motivation by the consequences of their actions.

California’s Democrats, progressives, and politicians lied when they said their highest priority was protecting the people of California. They lied when they said they cared about social justice. And they lied when they said they cared about protecting the environment.

Instead, what they cared about was destroying the civilization they had long ago decided was evil. All civilizations require a story. The story that built Los Angeles and California was one of human progress. The story that destroyed it was of human sin. For decades, progressives, Democrats, and the news and entertainment media preached that civilization was evil and doomed. Slavery, indigenous genocide, and climate change were proof.

And now, as the city of angels smolders, it’s clear that progressives reaped what they sowed.

[a16z Frontier @a16zfrontier]

Debanking (and "de-risking") has been happening behind the scenes for years but is back in the public conversation, with many individuals, policymakers, companies, and — most importantly for U.S. innovation — entrepreneurs coming forward on the issue.

Since the crypto industry and specific agencies have come up, here’s a quick explainer to help separate the signal from the noise:

- What is debanking
- Why does it matter
- Reasons why and effects
- Where Operation Choke Point(s) comes in
- Which agencies are involved?
- Scope of the issue for the crypto industry

Check out the post: https://t.co/a98vkl79kR

[miles jennings @milesjennings]

Looking to get caught up on the debanking controversy?

We got you covered (link in next tweet):

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Election Officials Assure Everybody Things Are Looking Good And You Can Go To Sleep And They'll Take Care Of The Rest Of The Counting Overnight
https://t.co/973JGezd5K

[George @BehizyTweets]

Dear Democrats,

After Trump wins, by the grace of God, I promise to advocate for a complete audit of the results to ensure he didn't cheat.

I just need you guys to stop pretending like our elections are suddenly safe when you used to say the exact same things we say now.

Madam Corruption, aka Hillary Clinton, used to say the exact same things we say now. This compilation from @KanekoaTheGreat documents almost every time Democrats have questioned the fraudchines.