shoman
22 posts




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.



How Libra Was Killed. I never shared this publicly before, but since @pmarca opened the floodgates on @joerogan’s pod, it feels appropriate to shed more light on this. As a reminder, Libra (then Diem) was an advanced, high-performance, payments-centric blockchain paired with a stablecoin that we built with my team at @Meta. It would’ve solved global payments at scale. Prior to announcing the project, we spent months briefing key regulators in DC and abroad. We then announced the project in June 2019 alongside 28 companies. Two weeks later, I was called to testify in front of both the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee, which was the starting point of two years of nonstop work and changes to appease lawmakers and regulators. By spring of 2021 (yes they slow played us at every step), we had addressed every last possible regulatory concern across financial crime, money laundering, consumer protection, reserve management, buffers, and so much more, and we were ready to launch. We had worked on a slow rollout of a limited pilot that some members of the Fed’s Board of Governors were supportive of. At last, Chair Jay Powell was ready to let us move forward in a limited way. The story, as I heard it, is that Jay Powell was told by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen at one of their biweekly meetings that allowing this project to move forward was “political suicide,” and she would not have his back if he let it happen. I wasn’t in the room when this conversation happened, so take these words with a grain of salt, but effectively this was the moment Libra was killed. Shortly thereafter, the Fed organized calls with all the participating banks, and the Fed’s general counsel read a prepared statement to each of them, saying: “We can’t stop you from moving forward and launching, but we are not comfortable with you doing so.” And just like that, it was over. One essential point is worth making here. There was no legal or regulatory angle left for the government or regulators to kill the project. It was 100% a political kill—one that was executed through intimidation of captive banking institutions. That was the hardest part of this story for me personally. Not that we had failed, but that America, this country I immigrated to and became a proud citizen of because of its rule of law and value system, behaved in such a way for political reasons. It was a very tough pill to swallow. The bright side of the story, though, was the many learnings from this wild ride. By the end of the project, we had made so many concessions to get a thumbs-up that the whole design of the network became a Frankenstein of our initial ambitions. We also learned the biggest lesson of all, which is that if you’re trying to build an open money grid for the world—eventually moving trillions of dollars a day, designed to be here 100 years from now—you have to build it on the most neutral, decentralized, unassailable network and asset, which, hands down, is Bitcoin. And now this is what many of us who went through this scarring journey are building together at @Lightspark. And this time, we won’t stop until we get it done!













