leigh as in free

Retired Educator and stuff like that…

[Vince Langman @LangmanVince]

Someone fixed it!

[GBC @GBC_Press]

🚨 BREAKING:

​The United Nations has officially declared Gaza a genocide zone, stating that Israel is deliberately targeting children and infants.

​It took them three full years to reach this conclusion.

[Attorney General Nick Brown @AGOWA]

“The Postal Service has no authority to undermine free and fair elections, and it’s a disgrace that they’d even suggest it. We strongly condemn any effort to deny voters their rights, and we are already in court challenging the executive order this rule intends to implement.” -NB
https://t.co/ytheZQb1Mb

[leigh as in free @leighbach]

@LangmanVince Hope they don’t end up in the ER and realize they have to pay for their care…

[leigh as in free @leighbach]

@farman4x 5

[leigh as in free @leighbach]

@farman4x 33

[leigh as in free @leighbach]

@Mimix1907 5

[Jedi @dhe3g]

Seven hours. All children.

[Jamie Bonkiewicz @JamieBonkiewicz]

Mike Johnson thinks $174,000 isn’t enough to survive without insider trading, but $15/hour is too much for everyone else.

Every single fucking day these people prove how disconnected they are from normal Americans.

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Breaking News: The FDA has blocked publication of research that found widely used Covid-19 and shingles vaccines were safe. https://t.co/P4ZNeIfvPV

[Senator Patty Murray @PattyMurray]

The Fifth Circuit just told millions of women that three judges know better than the FDA, their doctors, and 25 years of evidence. They don't.

This restriction on medication abortion is a nationwide abortion restriction, full stop.

I have no intention of letting this stand.

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

Last night, Israeli forces intercepted and boarded a humanitarian aid flotilla bound for Gaza in international waters off the coast of Greece — unlawfully detaining more than 175 people, including several New Yorkers.

My team has been in direct contact with State and Federal partners as we work to confirm the whereabouts and conditions of these New Yorkers.

This is a brazen violation of international law. Those detained must be released.

[leigh as in free @leighbach]

@atrupar Hahahaha! Born and raised in North Dakota…the wind blows CONSTANTLY!!!!

[Senator Patty Murray @PattyMurray]

Every Republican who voted YES to another $70 billion ICE slush fund at 3 AM last night said NO to child care.

Republicans said NO to health care. NO to helping working Americans in any way at all.

I'll be making sure everyone knows it.

[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.

[Andy Kim @AndyKimNJ]

I’m leaving the Capitol at 4am after Republicans rammed through a vote paving a path for $70B to fund ICE for years without any reforms/accountability. They rejected all Dem proposals to lower your healthcare costs, housing, and gas prices. Spread the word. We need to stop this.

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

It's not just Gaza, Iran and Lebanon.

In the West Bank since October 2023, Israeli soldiers and settlers have:

Killed 1,071 Palestinians
Demolished 6,000+ homes
Built 200+ illegal outposts

No more U.S. military aid to Israel.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

In a world wounded by arrogance, people hunger and thirst for justice. We must encourage those who believe in peace and dare to engage in “countercurrent” politics, which focus on the common good. What is urgently needed is the courage of new visions and an educational pact that gives young people space and trust. #ApostolicJourney #EquatorialGuinea https://t.co/81zzJos7Ij

[Sandeep Kaushik @skaushik100]

Maddening story in the Seattle Times today that plans to put a Winco grocery at a former big box store site on Aurora that has been vacant for nearly a decade have been delayed and perhaps killed outright by an environmental impact challenge from a mysterious "neighborhood group" which "has no website and is not registered with the state" and whose lawyer will only say is "made up of King County residents."

Hmmm... the same "neighborhood group" also unsuccessfully tried to block the opening of a Winco out in Renton. Winco is a majority employee-owned discount grocery chain know for providing competitive wages and good benefits, but they're not union. Hmmm...

[Suzie rizzio @Suzierizzo1]

The Florida Grand Jury is not releasing its findings on the Alleged $10 million dollars in Medicaid fraud by Governor DeSantis & his wife Casey that was allegedly diverted into her charity Hope Florida. What makes this worse is that Rick Scott appointed the Judge!