@jaredskolnick FDT, but this isn't him doubling down, it's actually him ret-conning what he first said by now pretending he was painting a picture of them having nukes. He's now saying that he said "if you think its ok for them to have a nuke, let em hit LA and you'll feel otherwise."
@atrupar FDT, but this isn't him doubling down, it's actually him ret-conning what he first said by now pretending he was painting a picture of them having nukes. He's now saying that he said "if you think its ok for them to have a nuke, let em hit LA and you'll feel otherwise."
@HolidayKirk I grew up in numetal but still appreciate the added context from others who were there. Sometimes hyperbolic, sometimes I disagree, but still glad it's there
Starting in early 2025, Elon Musk and the Trump administration began terminating USAID's programs and firing its staff โ with Musk himself boasting about "feeding it into the woodchipper." One year ago today, USAID was officially dissolved, its remaining programs haphazardly folded into the State Department. Amid all the lies and misinformation that have followed, some facts about what has actually been lost:
โข USAID saved more than 3 million lives a year at a cost of less than $10/month per American. That is what was destroyed. On purpose.
โข According to Boston University's Global Impact Counter โ which tracked deaths attributable to the cuts until it stopped operations in February 2026 โ an estimated 781,000 people died preventable deaths in the first year, including 518,000 children.
โข Global child mortality (the number of children who die before their fifth birthday) rose in 2025 for the first time in 35+ years โ by 200,000 additional deaths.
โข USAID's 50-country disease surveillance network โ the system that cut outbreak response times from 2 weeks to 48 hours โ is gone. We are now watching an unprecedented Ebola outbreak unfold in real time โ with the highest first-month caseload and death rate in modern history.
โข Programs reaching 93 million women and children were cut 92%. TB programs cut 56%. Water and sanitation cut 86%. Over 2,000 health facilities permanently closed.
โข 25 million fewer people received humanitarian assistance in 2025. The overall humanitarian budget was slashed 74% โ from $14.1 billion to $3.7 billion.
โข 363 million people face acute hunger in 2026. The famine early-warning system that would have seen it coming went dark for five months.
โข $1.7 billion in democracy and governance funding (election monitoring, anti-corruption work, support for independent media and civil society) was terminated.
โข 360+ independent media outlets lost funding. Hundreds of legal clinics closed.
โข Far from saving money, the Trump administrationย itself has already said the dismantlement will cost taxpayers at least $19.2 billion in cancellation fees, severance, and penalties. That's more than half of USAID's annual budget โ spent on destruction and closeout, not support for vulnerable people.
โข American farmers, universities, and businesses are among the casualties too. USAID partnered with more than 3,500 U.S. companies and maintained 17 university-based research labs. Its work with U.S.-based contractors and the private sector generated hundreds of thousands of American jobs and multiplied the return on every dollar spent. Those markets and partnerships are gone.
We cannot consider #AI to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores, and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. Ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes. It must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it. #MagnificaHumanitas
WWII Veteran and Purple Heart recipient Robert Hilliard:
"Next week I'll be 101 years old. In February 1944 when I was 18 years old I was inducted into the army and what they taught me to do there was to kill people who set up detention camps. Can you imagine how I felt earlier this year when they announced that one of the future detention camps would be at that same camp landing in Florida? We have a fascist, a fascist government, that allows innocent people to be put in detention camps and incarcerated."
Source: @tomaskenn
@vod85@arielhelwani Joe smiled wide and shook his hand right after, he could have done anything else and it would have been better. No one said he could have stopped it.
@arielhelwani Most people loved the fights but condemn the political & social decline that brought us here, gave us Hokit etc. It's not hard to call out Ariel, you used to be better at it
This is so insanely corrupt, I canโt even believe it.
More than half the donors to Trumpโs $400 million White House ballroom just won over $50 billion in new federal contracts in six months.
And hereโs the part that should make your blood boil.
Sixteen of these 27 donors were facing federal enforcement actions, antitrust reviews, labor cases, securities charges. Many of those cases have been quietly dropped or scaled back since Trump took office. You write a check, your legal problems disappear. Thatโs not a coincidence.
The White House wonโt even release the full donor list. Theyโre hiding it on purpose, because daylight is the one thing pay-to-play canโt survive. A federal judge already ruled ballroom construction has to stop until Congress authorizes it.
Government is supposed to serve the people, not auction itself off to the highest bidder. When access goes to whoever pays the most, working families always end up paying the price.
We either end the corruption, or the corruption will end us.
https://t.co/4MGFzSseFl
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.
@DavidKastille@bitchdujour@SethAbramson Seth said that's what it will soon look like, meaning it's clearly an edit of a future version, not an edited photo of what it currently looks like, which is what you thought when you first reacted