@Aestheticsn1 You are in a room, together with 100 other people: 71.
You are in a room that contains 100 people: 70.
Just another version of «divide X by half, add Y etc.»
@dhh Quoting Lomborg is not a the way to go. He frequently cherry picks data to support his anti-anthropogenic climate change views. Anything he posts on climate needs to at least be checked thoroughly before reposting, as he’s very good at it. And who’s got time for that? ;)
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.
He’s relentless about quality in the long term, but obviously willing to sell some utter garbage along the way. I love my Tesla, but I know of too many cases where they sold cars that never should have even left the factory for the stats on that to be anywhere close to acceptable or even understandable.
I see this kind of asinine straw man shit all the time on here. NOBODY except the most extreme of the most extreme on the left want socialism. What people are referring to, 99.999999999999% of the time, are concepts from social democracies, which are CAPITALIST societies that haven’t succumbed to psychopathy.
The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE.....
«You did not plan this war with your allies. You did not consult them. You did not build a coalition. You started a conflict, watched it go sideways, and then got on your knees asking for help from people you spent fourteen months calling weak, corrupt and irrelevant.»
That’s the relevant point in this context. NATO is a *defense* alliance. The U.S. was the one doing the attacking here (and Israel). Them complaining about the alliance not joining in on the attacking side is absurd.
100,000 American troops in Europe = a free ride for Europeans?
Let's check the facts.
🔹 American military bases are not free
Germany, Italy, Spain, and Romania pay for the infrastructure, land, utilities, and civilian personnel of US bases. Germany alone contributes over $1 billion annually to support the American military presence on its soil.
🔹 Europe is the largest customer of the American defense industry
F-35s, Patriot missiles, HIMARS, Apaches — all purchased by Europeans with real money. Every security alarm in Europe translates into contracts for Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing.
🔹 American bases in Europe don't only protect Europe
Ramstein in Germany coordinates operations across Africa and the Middle East. Sigonella in Italy covers the Mediterranean and North Africa. Romania secures the eastern flank and the Black Sea. These are global American strategic assets — not neighborhood security for Europeans.
🔹 Command is American, not European
NATO is always led by an American Supreme Commander (SACEUR). Europe contributes troops, bases, and money — but America holds the controls. Those who control the structure are not the ones getting a free ride.
🔹 The nuclear umbrella is not altruism
American nuclear deterrence in Europe keeps the dollar as the world's reserve currency, keeps European markets open to US corporations, and legitimizes American hegemony against Russia and China.
But what would actually happen if America withdrew its troops from Europe?
🔹 For America — immediate strategic losses
Without bases in Europe, American response time to any crisis in Europe, Africa, or the Middle East grows from hours to days. Ramstein, Sigonella, and Incirlik cannot be replaced by aircraft carriers. Infrastructure built over decades disappears overnight.
🔹 The American defense industry loses its biggest customer
A Europe without the US umbrella will build its own defense industry — and fast. Airbus Military, KNDS, Leonardo, and Rheinmetall will take the contracts that Lockheed and Raytheon currently win. Billions of dollars shift from America to Europe.
🔹 The dollar weakens
Dollar hegemony is partly sustained by American global military credibility. A withdrawal from Europe signals to the world that America no longer guarantees the postwar order. Alternatives — the euro, the yuan — become more attractive as global reserve options.
🔹 Russia wins without firing a single shot
Not necessarily through immediate invasion — but through political influence, energy pressure, and the gradual destabilization of countries on the eastern frontier. The Baltic states, Poland, and Romania enter a security grey zone that no one can guarantee quickly.
🔹 China watches and draws conclusions about Taiwan
A precedent of withdrawal from Europe sends a direct signal to Beijing: American commitments are negotiable. The cost of deterrence in the Pacific rises exponentially.
Withdrawal is not isolationism. It is strategic abdication.
America would not be leaving Europe because it no longer has interests there.
It would be leaving while ignoring that those very interests are what make it a superpower.
The "free ride" narrative doesn't describe Europe.
It describes exactly what America has in Europe.
@BernieSanders Dear Bernie, you have a lot of good ideals. But why do you have to continually post moronic and intentionally misleading crap like this? You’re not actually that stupid. This pandering to the ignorant far far left should be beneath you.