Andrew Koch

Poet // Educator // Writing in @bennreview @pshares @aqreview

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

NASHVILLE: “Whoever gets through the process 1st wins— if the @DCBLOXinc data center finishes the permitting, it goes up. If legislation to regulate them finishes 1st, it does not.”

Public comment to block a data center next to @NashvilleZoo THURSDAY: https://t.co/YhN3N0J5Zx

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

PELLEY: “Paying the bribe to Trump broke our hearts, but they did it to get the sale through.”

GARCIA-NAVARRO: “Paramount denied those two things were linked.”

PELLEY: *laughs*

[Alex Daugherty @AlexDaugherty1]

Please join all of Nashville in saying hell no to this AI Data Center.

Maybe the easiest petition to sign I’ve ever come across.

[Andrew Koch @_AndrewKoch_]

Assault on Precinct 13
The Thing
They Live
The Fog
In the Mouth of Madness

[Issybeatz @Issybeatz_]

AI is so popular because it gives uncreative people the illusion that they are creative. It lets them skip right to the part where they get validation. It’s not only parasitic, but extremely narcissistic.

[Kenneth Roth @KenRoth]

A new analysis suggests that more than 100,000 children have been separated from their parents during the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. And roughly three-quarters of those children are likely U.S. citizens. https://t.co/t75jgmYhp9

[Jeff Yarbro @yarbro]

To give you a sense of how stupid this is, on the 20 minute drive between the Krispy Kreme on Thompson Lane in Nashville and the Krispy Kreme on Mallory Lane in Brentwood, you pass through five different congressional districts.

[Justice Democrats @justicedems]

Everyone needs to watch @Justinjpearson's floor speech from the TN State House.

"Today, you will take the only Black-majority district from us. But I want you to know: No matter what you do, no matter how much you try to break us & make us bend & quit — we will still be here."

[Phil Williams @PhilNvestigates]

BREAKING: The U.S. Department of Justice appears to be preparing to drop a nearly two-year criminal investigation of Tennessee Congressman Andy Ogles, agreeing to return or destroy evidence seized from the diehard MAGA Republican before the FBI ever got a chance to review it. 1/

[Tony Annett @tonyannett]

It comes from the murder of striking workers by the forces of the state in Chicago in 1886. It’s as American as it comes.

[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.

[Synekura Audio @synekura_audio]

Mahmoud Darwish recites 'Earth Poem', 1986

[Dittie @DittiePE]

ICE acting director Todd Lyons resigned yesterday.

The same day he testified before Congress requesting $8.2 billion more.

Today, AP revealed thousands of his 12,000 new hires weren’t fully vetted before hitting the streets.

What those hires looked like, per AP:

A deputy who falsified a police report to jail an innocent woman. A man with two bankruptcies and 6 law enforcement jobs in 3 years. Someone who washed out of the police academy.

DHS handed them badges before background checks cleared.
1/2

[Eric Lee @EricLeeAtty]

Very, very sad to report that Hayam El Gamal, mother of 5 kids detained at Dilley for 10+ months, has suffered a serious medical emergency due to systematic denial of medical attention by ICE.

We can now share the following:

For many weeks Ms. El Gamal has been concerned about a growth on her chest that has caused pain for many weeks. She has made complaints to Dilley staff and ICE repeatedly but has been denied a visit to an outside doctor. She had specifically made requests for a CT scan to identify the lump and the source of her pain.

On Thursday April 8, a doctor at Dilley told her that he had put in a request for a CT scan but "higher ups" in either ICE or CoreCivic overrode his request, and so no scan was conducted. Medical records show she had been demanding help since February, at which time she said her pain had been already worsening for 8 weeks. A doctor at Dilley said the lump in her chest was merely a bone.

Mid-morning on Friday April 9, Ms. El Gamal began experiencing excruciating pain which she rated an 11 out of 10. She described the pain as being stabbed through the back to the stomach. At about 11 AM central time she began pleading with officials for painkillers and medical attention. After two hours of asking for help (at around 1 PM central time) she was taken to an off-site emergency room. While there she received lab work and, finally, a CT scan. The CT scan confirmed that the lump was not a bone, but it did not reveal what the lump was.

The scan also showed she has "fluid around the heart." The ER doctor recommended an ultrasound to determine what was causing the pain, but this was denied. Ms. El Gamal was told she had to go back to Dilley and was not given the ultrasound. We do not know if the lump is cancerous, all we know is that the pain is increasing, the incidents are becoming worse and worse, and she is not receiving proper diagnosis that could lead to proper treatment.

After 10 months in detention, Ms. El Gamal remains in pain. We are concerned that the systematic denial of medical attention may result in her death. Her children are extremely worried about their mother, who is now their only guardian. Her five year old child has been denied the right to go to a dentist for 13 cavities. Her 16 year old son was told to take tylenol when he suffered from acute appendicitis. All of the children are suffering from depression.

Please join us in demanding the El Gamal's immediate release so that she can acquire the urgent medical attention she desperately needs. This family has suffered enough.

[Kylie Cheung @kylietcheung]

this is so unfathomably, inhumanly cruel and the world just keeps letting Israel get away with treating human beings this way, over and over

[🍂 @Lovandfear]

books are so cool because there are NO FUCKING ADS IN THEM

[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC]

This is a threat of genocide and merits removal from office. The President’s mental faculties are collapsing and cannot be trusted.

To every individual in the President’s chain of command: You have a duty to refuse illegal orders. That includes carrying out this threat.

[Joseph Bottum @JosephBottum]

There has never been a truly great movie made from a truly great novel.

[Joaquin Castro @JoaquinCastrotx]

Two-year-old Kaleth and his mom are home. During his time at the Dilley trailer prison, Kaleth was sick—he could not eat the food from CoreCivic, was vomiting, and ran a fever while detained. He had trouble sleeping and missed his Dad. He and his mother are asylum seekers and never missed an ICE check-in. They did everything right and they were still imprisoned. I am grateful Kaleth is back home but this trauma cannot be undone. Keep using your voices so more children can be free and safe. We won’t stop until we shut down Dilley and #FreeOurChildren.

[Rep. Pramila Jayapal @RepJayapal]

Kids should be focused on going to school and playing with their friends, not living in fear that their parents will be kidnapped by ICE.

Listen to Nicole Isern’s heartbreaking testimony about how Trump’s cruelty has impacted the kids and families she works with.