Rafael Mejia

chillin

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Private equity executive David Gentile served less than two weeks of a seven-year sentence after being convicted of a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded mostly mom and pop investors (with some losing their retirement savings), thanks to Trump granting him clemency.

An investigation into his commutation found Gentile discussed paying at least $2.5 million to people or companies that could help facilitate his clemency, including to a retired NYC priest with close ties to Trump.

The Trump administration just killed that investigation.

[fearthecow @Fearthecow93]

@CoopTory 1, i dont trust a company to accurately report on their stolen merchandise. They benefit from lying. And 2, i dont care about shoplifting while these companies steal more from wage theft. They are the bigger thieves

[Co-op Tory 🍁 @CoopTory]

One of the costs of not wanting to employ workers or provide competitive pay.

[Everything Price Sufferer (but especially eggs) @agraybee]

From 1966 to 2025 we dropped sterile flies over South America that ate screwworm and thus prevented them from spreading, but the le epic efficient cracked coders at DOGE thought this was a silly waste of the ~0 dollars it cost us.

[Noah Verrier @NoahVerrier]

My oil painting of an Uncrustable

[Vic Vaiana @vicvaiana]

All this in just 4 years.

Remember when they insisted it was impossible to build green infrastructure quickly enough

[davey @jerseyh0mo]

The United States doesn’t even believe teeth should be part of a health plan lmao

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

Maryland homeowners will pay an extra $1.6 billion on their electric bills over the next decade to subsidize grid costs to feed data centers, according to a state agency

[Azat @AzatAlsalim]

🇹🇷 A rapist got 20 years but was freed after 20 months due to amnesty. The victim found a gun, shot him dead in the street. At trial, the judge asked why.

She replied: “He raped **me**, not the state. Who gave you the right to pardon him without asking me?”

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

A massive, hyperscale data center project in Utah, funded by Kevin O'Leary, is expected to generate and consume more power than the entire state it's in.

The project's final vote has been delayed due to major local pushback.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

Colorado could become the first state in the nation to ban surveillance pricing and surveillance wage-setting.

The state Senate could vote as early as today to outlaw practices where corporations feed consumer and worker data into algorithms and then change prices, or wages, based on your specific information.

This would be a huge win in the fight against Big Tech, and for working people up against the cost of living crisis.

https://t.co/fRHIhh0AAu

[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.

[Jamie Dupree @jamiedupree]

I wrote about this in my newsletter. The Weather Service didn't launch balloons recently and got surprised by tornadoes in Kansas. DOGE cuts at NWS cut out weather balloon launches which gather data for storm prediction. You are less safe because of that choice.

[Mel @Villgecrazylady]

Here’s what I know:

1. Luigi had no history of violence at all. No criminal record at all. Not even a misdemeanor.

2. Luigi had mild depression but other than that he had no mental health problems at all.

So the official story is that a well educated rich kid, with no history of violence, no criminal record, no serious mental health issues, left his high rise apartment in Honolulu and traveled all the way across the country to NYC where he somehow obtained a “partially 3-D printed” gun and then carried out a perfectly targeted assassination on a healthcare CEO who was traveling and just happened to be outside his hotel at 5:30 in the morning.

Then, according to the Feds, this well educated rich kid, with no history of violence, no criminal record, no serious mental health issues, fled across the city back to his hostel where he collected his belongings, always keeping his face carefully covered (except the one time he tried to flirt with the clerk on check-in).

He then went south to BFE Pennsylvania where he was arrested 5 days later after a worker at a McDonalds called the cops claiming a customer was “being weird” despite the bodycams showing him just sitting in a booth minding his own business on his computer.

Those same cops who captured him on their body cams then did a preliminary search of his backpack where they report finding a “gun magazine” inside.

These same cops then load the backpack into their vehicle, *turn off their body cams* and then miraculously find the “partially 3-D printed gun” and a notebook containing the “manifesto.”

Then a transcript of that manifesto is “leaked” to Ken Klippenstein, the EXACT same guy who also got the big leak on the Tyler Robinson Discord chats.

The cops then completely fabricated a conversation with Luigi’s mom, and claimed she said “I could see him doing this” when she literally never said that and they were forced to admit so in court.

————

Those are the things I know. So yes, I’m comfortable giving Luigi the presumption of innocence until trial.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

BREAKING: The Senate just passed the legislation allowing the devastation of the Boundary Waters.

The motion passed 50-49, and now goes to Donald Trump’s desk.

The way Republicans passed this bill that prevents future administrations from issuing protections for Superior National Forest, so this pristine land will be exploited in perpetuity unless Congress intervenes to reverse this decision.

The state of Minnesota can still block the Chilean mining corporation from operating in Superior National Forest and protect the Boundary Waters from pollution.

[BuBBliK @k1rallik]

🚨do you understand what just happened with America's biggest corporations..

Disney made $8.3 BILLION in profit last year.
Federal taxes paid: $0

CVS made $6.57 BILLION.
Federal taxes paid: $0

Tesla made $5.7 BILLION.
Federal taxes paid: $0

Meanwhile Tesla paid China $1 BILLION+ in taxes the same year.

88 corporations. $105 BILLION in US profits. Zero to the IRS.
Instead? The government PAID THEM $4.7 billion in rebates.

You paid more in federal taxes than Walt Disney.
Let that sink in.

> 1950s: corporations funded 1/3 of the federal budget
> 2025: corporations fund 8.6%

It's not illegal. It's not a loophole.
It's the system working exactly as designed.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

BREAKING: A jury has found Live Nation and Ticketmaster to be an illegal monopoly that overcharges fans.

After the federal government settled the case, 34 states kept pursuing the giant ticket and concert company.

Now, the states have won.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

BREAKING: Maryland is about to become the first state in the nation to ban the use of surveillance data and dynamic pricing at grocery stores.

The Maryland House has just passed the Protection from Predatory Pricing Act.

Governor Wes Moore plans to sign the bill.

[BuBBliK @k1rallik]

> Netflix raised prices
> Disney+ raised prices
> HBO Max raised prices
> Amazon just removed 4K from standard plan
> YouTube Premium now $15.99/month
> Family plan hit $26.99
> Average American spends ~$828/year on streaming

We are paying MORE, getting LESS, and watching ads anyway.
They didn't kill cable. They became it.

[matrixbot @thematrixb0t]

Rep. Tim Burchett drops a bombshehll on insider trading by stating:

"Washington isn't just a swamp, it's a sewer of corruption enriching from taxpayers' money and it needs to stop. Everybody wants to knock Pelosi; she's not even in the top 10."