Louis Dzierzak

writer,editor,author,voracious reader, camper, quietwater paddler, road biker, runner, Ironman triathlete.

[Jim Moss @RecreationLaw]

2026 NATIONAL OUTDOOR BOOK AWARD NOMINATIONS NOW OPEN

Nominations are now being accepted for the 2026 National Outdoor Book Awards. https://t.co/ickybSdMfX 
The deadline for entries is August 19, 2026.

[Louis Dzierzak @WriterLou]

@Jack_ElHai Congratulations. Great storytelling

[BaseballHistoryNut @nut_history]

Chris Coghlan races home on Kevin Pillar's triple, and scores by leaping over a crouching Yadier Molina. Coghlan should brag about this his entire life.He really pulled off a Superman on Yadier Molina

[Middle Age Riot @middleageriot]

Next time, if you want to fool anybody other than your idiot supporters, move the clouds.

[Peter Baker @peterbakernyt]

Acting CDC head cancels publication of a study showing Covid vaccine sharply cut odds of hospitalization and ER visits. Agency veterans say they've never seen an article pulled after being cleared by scientists and scheduled for publication. @apoorva_nyc https://t.co/vGKGOajbsH

[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.

[Dan WHENESOTA @WHENESOTA]

Also #OTD in #Minnesota Sports History (2005) #Vikings RB Onterrio Smith is caught at the MSP airport with a “Whizzinator” and a vial of dried urine. #SKOL #NFL #SOD
https://t.co/g851tB8nHl

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Amazon just got caught running a secret price manipulation operation with Levi's, Home Depot, Walmart, and many more.

Every time you "comparison shopped" online, you were looking at prices that were already rigged.

Here's what happened:

Amazon would monitor prices on Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Chewy in real time. The second a competitor listed a product cheaper than Amazon, they'd contact the brand directly and tell them to "fix it."

And the exact emails are now PUBLIC.

Amazon sent Levi's links to two Walmart listings with the subject line "styles of concern." They basically said the prices on Walmart are too low and we have a problem.

The next day, Levi's responded: "I talked to Walmart and they have partnered with us to take Easy Khaki Classic fit back up to ladder SPP price, $29.99 immediately."

Levi's literally called Walmart and told them to raise the price. Because Amazon told Levi's to make the call.

Walmart complied. Then Amazon matched the HIGHER price.

Both retailers ended up charging more. The customer paid extra. Nobody competed.

Same playbook with Hanes:

Amazon sent them links showing Target and Walmart prices were lower. Hanes confirmed they "reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased."

Target increased the prices. Walmart increased the prices. Amazon kept their margins.

But it gets even worse...

Amazon told Allergan (the company that makes eye drops) that their product was "suppressed" on Amazon because it was cheaper on another site.

Allergan responded: "Walmart got their price back up to $16.99." Amazon then unsuppressed the listing.

They did this with pet treats on Chewy. Furniture on Home Depot. Products across dozens of categories spanning YEARS.

The mechanism is simple but terrifying:

If you're a brand and you sell cheaper on Walmart than on Amazon, Amazon suppresses your product, removes you from the Buy Box, buries you in search results, and effectively makes you invisible to 300 million customers.

Brands can't afford that. So they call Walmart and Target and say "raise your prices or we'll lose our Amazon listings."

Walmart and Target comply because they need the brand's products.

Amazon captures 40 cents of every dollar spent online in America. That gives them the leverage to set prices across THE ENTIRE internet. Not just their own platform.

So turns out, you were never comparison shopping.

You were looking at a coordinated price floor set by Amazon through backroom phone calls between brands and their competitors.

"Amazon is working to make your life more unaffordable."

3 separate antitrust trials are now scheduled for 2027. The FTC has its own case. 18 states plus the DOJ are piling on.

This is literally happening during the WORST affordability crisis in a generation. Groceries up 25% since 2020. Housing unaffordable. Wages flat.

And the largest ecommerce company on Earth has been secretly coordinating with brands to make sure you can't find a cheaper price ANYWHERE.

"Competition" in retail is just a fantasy.

[Jack El-Hai @Jack_ElHai]

Almost everything in this short video about Walter Freeman and his (fictitious) lobotomobile is factually incorrect. https://t.co/T3QDJOVfMJ

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

WOW: A stunning new report in the WSJ reveals that military advisers intentionally excluded Donald Trump from the command room during the recent high-stakes operation to extract a downed U.S. airman in Iran, because they feared his erratic behavior could jeopardize the mission.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump was in such a volatile state after Iran shot down a U.S. jet that he spent hours screaming at aides in the West Wing, obsessing over the political fallout and invoking Jimmy Carter and the 1979 hostage crisis. Officials made the call to limit his access, only briefing him at “meaningful moments” instead of giving him real-time control.

Meanwhile, the operation itself nearly fell apart, with aircraft stuck in desert sand and U.S. forces scrambling to avoid Iranian detection. The airman was eventually rescued, but the chaos didn’t end there.

Just hours later, Trump woke up and fired off his profanity-laced threat online, warning Iran it would be left “living in Hell.”

[Molly Ploofkins @Mollyploofkins]

Shame on @DoorDash for participating in Trump’s “no taxes on tips” scam.

Aside from their D.C. DoorDash “Grandma” being a GOP operative from Arkansas, it’s mathematically impossible for her to have saved $11,000 in taxes this year as a result of Trump’s bullshit bill.

[Skim Milkey @SkimMilkey]

The women don’t get a One Shining Moment, so we took matters into our own hands.

Sights and sounds from the Women’s NCAA Tournament:

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

If anyone doubts the importance of copy editors!

[Chad Hartman @ChadHartmanShow]

We can end the debate, no one can ever top this in the category of, Don't you know who I am! It's over, it was a good run.

[David Axelrod @davidaxelrod]

Hooray for @RichardEngel, one of the greatest--and bravest--broadcast journalists of our time for responding to @POTUS's callous attack on people with learning disabilities by speaking so openlly about his own.
(Me too, Richard!)
I hope kids who are struggling hear his message!

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

The Washington Post is reportedly using readers' personal data to set subscription prices.

It's a tactic known as surveillance pricing.

Former FTC Chair Lina Khan explains.

[Earth Hippy 🌎🕊️💚 @hippyygoat]

Love this…
THESE SHOULD BE PUT ON EVERY PUMP!!!

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

This is absolutely fucking brilliant.

[Louis Dzierzak @WriterLou]

@kevinroose Agree. Great book. One that I've kept on my bookshelf

[Jack El-Hai @Jack_ElHai]

Netflix is now streaming Nuremberg, the movie recently adapted from my book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. If you haven't yet seen it, now's the time. https://t.co/spTKIuHXEf