Joe Barwell

There were no elves at Helms Deep

[B'Tselem בצלם بتسيلم @btselem]

In 2025, Israel killed 54 Palestinian children and teens in the West Bank. in B’Tselem’s latest report, we bring you the story of each and every one.

Since 7 October 2023, Israel has killed 1,086 Palestinians in the West Bank; 241 of them were children or teens, including Sam Abu Haikal, a seven-month-old baby .

The violence did not stop with the act of injuring or killing. In many cases, the forces held up medical teams trying to access the child, without offering first aid themselves. Israel is still holding 18 of the bodies, a practice it frequently employs, which amplifies the families’ suffering.

Under the Israeli regime, no Palestinian is safe, while any Israeli who harms them enjoys close to full impunity.

Read our latest report, which presents the stories of all 54 children and teens killed last year>> https://t.co/sjFNY5Xd7y

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

Anyone wondering why I'm criticizing Israel a lot today...

Your Defense Minister just said this:

"We have flattened the entire first line of villages in southern Lebanon, all the houses have been destroyed. The residents will never see them standing ever again. The 200,000 Lebanese residents who were in the 'security zone' are never returning again. Not one of them will ever return to southern Lebanon"

Your Minister of National Security said this:

"For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn."

And that's just today. You think this is normal?

[Lizzie Dearden @lizziedearden]

The average terror suspect arrested in England and Wales is now a white woman in her 50s as a result of the Palestine Action ban

2,800 arrests were made for supporting the group in 6 months -surpassing number of terror suspects detained in previous decade
https://t.co/cVBT83S6Ae

[Drop Site @DropSiteNews]

💢 Israel killed the 133rd healthcare worker since March 2nd in Lebanon today, with a strike in the southern town of Ansar.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

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.

[TFG87 @TFG870]

Put it in the Louvre

[Saul Staniforth @SaulStaniforth]

#C4News last night reported on the wholesale targeting of ambulances & paramedics in Lebanon by Israel, including the recent 'triple hit', when Israel attacked an ambulance, then attacked paramedics who went to help, and then attacked further paramedics also trying to help.

[Truthstream Media @truthstreamnews]

“We stole all your knowledge and art, and now we’re gonna put a meter on it and sell it back to you. You’re welcome.”

[BBC News (World) @BBCWorld]

Israeli soldiers shot a Palestinian boy and stood around as he bled to death, video shows https://t.co/JoQtQbaDIL

[Ken O'Keefe @RealKenOKeefe]

>there is no genocide

>anyway here’s a satellite view of the genocide we committed

[Adam Johnson @adamjohnsonCHI]

There’s a frog in boiling water element to this too. On polymarket you can bet on whether Gaza will be ethnically cleansed. On Kalshi you can bet on whether they’ll be famine in Gaza (that one paid out for ‘yes’ btw) This is objectively depraved and should not be legal but 1/2

[Eye on Palestine @EyeonPalestine]

Civil defense teams and residents rescue members of a family after the occupation bombed their home in Khan Younis.

[Haaretz.com @haaretzcom]

In Gaza, human shields are used by Israeli soldiers at least six times a day. I served in Gaza for nine months, and first came across these procedures in December 2023, writes an anonymous senior officer in a non-reservist brigade
https://t.co/XKuIjzxMkc

[michael wave @michael___wave]

everyone who has ever committed, abetted or supported genocide thinks they’ve stumbled upon the exception to humanity, that they alone have found the people-who-aren’t-people, that those they kill are more dangerous than their killers. it’s inherent to genocide to think like this

[Samira Mohyeddin سمیرا @SMohyeddin]

They’re not dying from the cold. They’re dying because Israel refuses them fuel. They’re dying because Israel reduced their homes to rubble. They’re dying because they’re malnourished. They’re dying because they live in tattered rain soaked tents. They’re dying because of Israel.

[Spongus @_spongus]

the most insane thing i have ever seen in my entire life please god watch this

[Joe Barwell @MediocreInBed]

@NFT_Taraa Nah I didn't realise, thanks Tara

[Ken Klippenstein @kenklippenstein]

Today we remember the legacy of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson

[Joe Barwell @MediocreInBed]

@garymann4 @OasisArchives @oasis @liamgallagher @NoelGallagher Ha. Seeing as I don't have a ticket, I hope they do. And then play Dig Out Your Soul front to back

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

Excellent piece by @christinalamb on Israeli settlers running amok in the West Bank, accelerating their murder and dispossession of the indigenous Palestinians

https://t.co/CpOtHtyDfo