I lived in California for a couple of years, and I agree it's *very* annoying that the state takes so long to count ballots. But Spencer Pratt losing ground is not a conspiracy. It's totally predictable.
CA allows voters to *send* their ballots on Election Day. They have a week to get there, so some ballots that will still be counted have yet to even arrive. Left-leaning people are more likely to vote by mail. Right-leaning people—of which there are fewer in LA—are more skeptical of it, so it easily follows that more Pratt voters would vote at the actual ballot box. This is not rocket science.
Maybe California's laws should change. A week after an election is a very long time to still be accepting ballots, and it damages trust in the process. But a registered Republican heading for a loss in one of the most progressive cities in the world is not a shocker.
The Meat Industry doesn't want you to know that, as we speak, they're scheming behind closed doors to eliminate many of the few laws that protect #pigs from immense cruelty.
Excellent piece from @NickKristof. Please retweet far and wide to take a stand against the #SaveOurBaconScam.
https://t.co/e8P5j0fncB
Keep posting this so people don’t forget how truly bad this event was.
Don’t let people gaslight you into thinking it was peaceful and worthy of 1500+ pardons and slush fund payoffs.
Being 43 is wild. People your age are living completely different lives.
Some are grandparents. Some are raising toddlers. Some are newly divorced. Some are newly engaged. Some haven’t slept in three years. Some are in St. Tropez posting Aperol spritzes from a yacht.
Some look 25.
Some look like they personally remember the invention of Tupperware.
Nobody got the same assignment.
Maddow: So in January, Trump buys hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in Nvidia. Then a week later, his commerce department approves the sale of Nvidia chips to China.
Also in January, Trump buys between 50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in AMD. One week after he buys it, his commerce department approves AMD doing business in China as well.
The following month, in February, Trump buys millions of dollars worth of stock in Dell. Nine days after he buys millions of dollars worth of stock in Dell, Trump veers off script in a speech in Georgia to tell the crowd literally, quote, go out and buy a Dell computer.
Then in March, Judd Legum at Popular Information reports that Trump repeatedly buys up Thermo Fisher stock, and then he goes and visits Thermo Fisher on a presidential visit and praises the company.
That same day, Trump bought hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in Apple. And then that same day he bought the stock, he did another event where he singled out Apple and Apple CEO Tim cook for praise. Apple a great company.
Then after that, Trump buys Micron stock. The very next day, he calls into the Fox News channel and tells them Micron is one of the hottest companies.
CNBC reporting Trump makes seven separate purchases of Palantir stock. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Palantir stock. Then he gets on truth social and praises Palantir.
If you can’t budget $174K to feed your family while also having the best healthcare insurance in the country you have no business setting the budget for our country
Let me get this straight. Trump sued his own IRS for $10 billion. His own Justice Department is now considering settling that case. And one of the terms on the table is that the IRS drops all audits of Trump, his family, and his businesses PERMANENTLY.
He’s using the full weight of the federal government to protect himself and his family from accountability and potentially pay himself BILLIONS of your tax dollars.
https://t.co/TyfIGUFxqh
President Obama on Iran: “We pulled it off without firing a missile. We got 97% of their enriched uranium out. There’s no dispute that it worked and we didn’t have to kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz”
This is the question worth asking every time a story like this comes out: if there’s no money for your health care, your kids’ schools, or the programs your family depends on, where is it going?
The Trump Administration just paid $17.4 million to fix two decorative fountains outside the White House. Three years ago, the same job was estimated at $3.3 million.
And guess what? The construction company that got the contract is the same one building Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom, and they got it without any competitive bidding whatsoever. The contract wasn’t even posted publicly, as required by federal law.
So how do you get from $3.3 million to $17.4 million? They added 27% for inflation. Then they added another 24% for inflation again. Then they tacked on additional charges that federal contracting experts said they had never seen before in their careers.
And the justification for bypassing the normal bidding process entirely? The fountains needed to be ready for America’s 250th anniversary. It’s worth noting that these fountains haven’t worked for nearly a decade. If the repairs were truly that urgent, why are they only fixing them now, and why are taxpayers footing a surcharge for the rush?
You are paying for this.
https://t.co/ShQS13cJNt
Imagine getting in a time machine and going back to 1776 and telling the Founding Fathers that the King would one day be reminding America about the importance of democracy and our checks and balances. That is the timeline we’re living in.
Wow. The Pope was just asked his stance on migration. His answer is amazing:
“I would change the question: what is the global North doing to help the global South in its situation that forces them to migrate.”
I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.
On April 21st, the left screen moved first.
I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.
At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.
On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.
At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.
Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.
I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.
My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.
The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:
Reviewed.
That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.
Let me show you my flags.
March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.
March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.
April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.
April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.
April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.
That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.
The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.
Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.
Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.
Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.
The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.
I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.
The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.
One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.
One account is a coincidence. But there were six.
Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.
My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.
March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.
The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.
The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."
Then the White House sent the email again.
I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.
I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.
But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.
Zero prosecutions.
As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.
I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.
The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.
In my field, we call this price discovery.
When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.