Paul Butler

Palaeo climate using annual bands in long-lived marine bivalves.

AFC Bournemouth supporter.

[Paul Butler @PaulButler999]

Why did we leave #afcb

[Liam @lharrison0801]

Lerma looks like he's genuinely about to hurt Dango for ruining our day #afcb

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

It's early yet, but for the Greens to be beating Labour in the popular vote in places like Reading is remarkable!

We've gained seats across the country and an increase in our vote share almost everywhere we've stood.

All over the UK people are voting to end Rip Off Britain.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

The system is rigged.

An illegal war hikes bills for stuggling families - meanwhile energy giants rake in profits.

We don't have to live like this any more. Vote Green on May 7th.

[JF Cudennec @LimpetNerd]

1/2 When I say science is a creative act, just like any other art form, this is what I mean:

In the 60s a paleontologist asked himself: what if I modeled every mathematically possible coiled shell? He did, and realised nature only uses a tiny corner of that space.

[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.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

This is all far from guaranteed.

We still need to be out speaking to people everywhere in our communities.

We're taking on powerful vested interests in both Reform and Labour.

We can only get these sorts of results with your help:

https://t.co/0qbagSvIYp

[marqix ☆ @fwmarqix]

I lived in Japan for a year. Most of my experiences were exhausting in ways I’d rather not get into, but this one still makes me laugh.

I was on the train in Osaka, minding my own business, when I noticed a group of school kids a few seats down. They were whispering, glancing at me, then whispering again. They kept passing a folded piece of paper between them as if they were planning something top secret.

I watched this go on for two stops.

Finally, one of the kids was pushed forward by the others. He walked over to me slowly, like he was approaching a wild animal that might bite. He stopped right in front of me, bowed politely, and held out the folded paper with both hands.

I opened it.

Inside was a handwritten note in careful English: “Hello. We think you are a very cool person. We are practicing our English. We hope this note is correct. Please give us a score.”

At the bottom, they had drawn a literal grading box, out of ten.

I looked up. Seven pairs of eyes were staring at me as if their entire semester depended on my response.
I pulled out a pen, wrote “10/10” in the box, and added a note: “Perfect English. Well done.”

The boy carried it back to the group. They read it together… and absolutely lost their minds. High-fives, jumping, and one kid even pumped his fist in the air.

Their teacher, who had been pretending not to watch from the end of the car, was biting her lip, trying hard not to smile.

I rode the rest of the journey grinning to myself.

That’s the Japan I always remember.

[Paul Butler @PaulButler999]

@SamInbound But errr errr ….

[Vix @lillai23]

Fun fact: I qualify for UC on a nurse‘s fulltime salary in London

Maybe tough love the super wealthy & tax them more to pay the rest of us better wages

[Rutger Bregman @rcbregman]

1/ Less than 24 hours before broadcast, the BBC called me and said: we're editing a line out of your lecture. The line? That Donald Trump is the most openly corrupt president in American history.

[Paul Butler @PaulButler999]

#afcb Tyler Adams mentioned on 2026 BBC2

[Paul Butler @PaulButler999]

Cornwall Council: Reconsider plan to resume widespread use of glyphosate - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/omccbuDoFc via @UKChange

[Dr. Robert Rohde @RARohde]

We need to talk a bit about how utterly absurd the March heatwave was in the USA.

This heatwave would have been impossible without a boost from climate change, but even with climate change it remains a deeply unlikely event.

A thread looking at some of the numbers.

🧵

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

If your curious about the source of this story - they quote a tweet from 2018!

And yes like the majority of Brits have huge concern about horses welfare and the Grand National.

Our campaign launch was about housing & rent controls. Can't imagine why the Sun won't report that.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Every day I'm setting out my plan to end rip-off Britain and take back our power and wealth from those who have stolen it.

Here's today's Sun front page.

The Murdoch empire is terrified.

[Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 @rahmstorf]

New study finds "canary in the coal mine" for the #AMOC: a consistent decline of the western overturning circulation, down from 20 to 15 Sv during 2004-2023 at 26° N.
AMOC "could be at or near a critical tipping point, potentially leading to its collapse". https://t.co/p0Et40Uwro

[JanieHasSomeGum @fleatamer]

@JamesTate121 @goodedonnae And let's not forget him about this!⬇️ How we got F🦊 News

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

I’ve never forgotten this, or trickle down economics. He and the GOP set us back generations.

[Zoe Gardner @ZoeJardiniere]

It is blowing my mind how many people don’t seem able to grasp that oil & gas in the North Sea is not “ours” but was sold off to private companies who will trade it on the international market like any other fuel.

We don’t get any kind of privileged access to this fuel.