🇺🇦🇲🇽🇨🇦Tempus fugit 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇦

Lived in Asia for 25 years

[🇺🇦🇲🇽🇨🇦Tempus fugit 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇦 @wbrownkl]

Real ways you can help Ukraine as a foreigner https://t.co/OR8h9dZnKC

[Jeremy @Jeremybtc]

A man with no working truck convinced Wall Street he had built the next Tesla. His company hit $30 BILLION. All he did was push it down a hill with no engine.

> Trevor Milton founded Nikola in 2014, named after the same inventor as Tesla.

> The goal was to build hydrogen powered trucks that would make diesel obsolete. He had no trucks.

> In 2018 he released a promotional video called Nikola One In Motion. It showed a sleek semi truck accelerating smoothly down an open highway.
Investors went wild.

> What nobody knew was that the truck had no engine, no fuel cell, and no propulsion system of any kind.

> Milton's team towed it to the top of a hill, tilted the camera to hide the slope, and let it roll.

> He spent the next four years doing the same thing with words. On podcasts, television and social media.

> Investors were told Nikola could produce its own hydrogen. It could not. They were told the trucks were ready for production. They were not. They were told orders were flooding in. They weren't.

> In June 2020 Nikola went public. Within days the company was worth $30 BILLION, more than Ford.

> Milton's personal stake hit $7.3 BILLION overnight.

> A $32.5 MILLION ranch in Utah followed. A record for the state at the time.

> In September 2020 Hindenburg Research published a report calling Nikola "an intricate fraud" built on "an ocean of lies." Milton resigned within ten days.

> A federal jury convicted him of securities fraud and wire fraud in 2022. Sentenced to four years in prison the following year.

> He never went. He was free on $100 MILLION bail pending appeal.

> He and his wife donated $3.2 MILLION to Donald Trump's 2024 campaign.

> In March 2025 Trump gave him a full pardon. The pardon erased $168 MILLION in restitution to defrauded shareholders.

> Nikola filed for bankruptcy the following month, leaving thousands of investors with nothing.

The company never had a product. The only thing that was real was the $30 BILLION valuation, the $7 BILLION that landed in his pocket and the pardon that made sure none of it had to be returned.

[Beefeater @Beefeater_Fella]

Spreading the Russian germs globally:

A 6-day cruise on the luxurious liner Spectrum of the Seas costs just 60,000 rubles per person. The price includes a cabin, meals, swimming pools, a gym, surfing, archery, shows, and other onboard entertainment.

During the route, the liner stops in the Japanese cities of Kumamoto and Kagoshima, where passengers can spend a day onshore.

Note from Beefy:

Spectrum of the Seas is owned and operated by Royal Caribbean International, a subsidiary of the @RoyalCaribbean Group.

Based in Asia and designed for that market, the ship attracts Russian guests through strategic partnerships with Russian travel agencies (e.g., Inflot) and by serving Russian tourists with regional, Asian itineraries that offer specialized service and amenities.

Normalising genocide and Russian access to the civilised world - remember this when cancelling your Royal Caribbean cruise.

[🇺🇦🇲🇽🇨🇦Tempus fugit 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇦 @wbrownkl]

20

[𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐭 𝐏𝐢𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐫 @Matt_Pinner]

I got only 3 point. You?

[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.

[🇺🇦🇲🇽🇨🇦Tempus fugit 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇦 @wbrownkl]

@Wrexham_AFC

[🇺🇦🇲🇽🇨🇦Tempus fugit 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇦 @wbrownkl]

@Wrexham_AFC @united Toronto 🇨🇦

[Not Your Average Liberal @NotAvgLiberal]

Just read it.

Spot On -

An Aussie reply to Trump’s rant about ‘NATO not being there for us’:

“Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.

You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.

Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.

Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.

And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.

And you're calling Greenland poorly run?

Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.

"NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.

And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.

So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your fucking mouth.”

[The Shallow State @OurShallowState]

This morning, Canadian PM Mark Carney sat in a living room, looked into a camera and delivered a message which is summarized thusly: The United States — our neighbor, our largest trading partner, the country whose economy has been braided into ours for the better part of two centuries — is no longer an ally we can count on. They are compromised by a conman. America is breaking, and yes, that special relationship isn’t just over; it’s a liability. The ties that made us strong have become the ties that make us vulnerable because America is a non-functional, malevolent nation.

Well said, sadly. Credit to Dean Blundell's Substack.

[🇺🇦🇲🇽🇨🇦Tempus fugit 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇦 @wbrownkl]

@Wrexham_AFC Gained 2 points On Hull - keep going!

[🇺🇦🇲🇽🇨🇦Tempus fugit 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇦 @wbrownkl]

@Wrexham_AFC @united Toronto 🇨🇦

[Fearless In Devotion | WREXHAM AFC podcast @fearlessidzine]

Remember successive away wins at Millwall and Norwich.

Remember Kieffer's hat-trick inflicting a first league defeat of the season on champions-elect Coventry City.

Remember the 12 Points Of Christmas.

Remember dumping Forest out of the FA Cup.

Remember the last minute limbs at QPR.

Remember sticking five past top two contender Ipswich Town.

Remember gaining revenge over Swansea City.

Remember giving Chelsea a run for their money.

Remember to apply context to the season as a whole.

Remember where we came from.

Ymlaen Wrecsam.

[🇺🇦🇲🇽🇨🇦Tempus fugit 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇦 @wbrownkl]

@yu_1_linda99 トロントにお越しいただきありがとうございます！

[🇺🇦🇲🇽🇨🇦Tempus fugit 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇦 @wbrownkl]

@BlueJays @MLB @MLBJapan トロントにお越しいただきありがとうございます！

[🇺🇦🇲🇽🇨🇦Tempus fugit 🇨🇦🇲🇽🇺🇦 @wbrownkl]

@BlueJays @MLB トロントにお越しいただきありがとうございます！

[Dittie @DittiePE]

If you live in Nebraska, you need to pay attention to this.

Apparently the “Democrat“ candidate is not a Democrat at all, but a Trump supporting republican, who just a few months prior to registering to run, attended Republican-led training programs. https://t.co/vd5ZqJIvlj

[Adam Schiff @SenAdamSchiff]

If you’re wondering why Trump doesn’t care about our economy or bringing down costs - it’s because his personal economy is doing great. He’s making tons of money and so are the billionaires around him.

Let’s break down some ties between Trump officials and the money they’ve made while in office.

[Champagne Joshi @JoshWalkos]

This is incredibly well done.

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

It has been an honor serving under @POTUS and @DNIGabbard and leading the professionals at NCTC.

May God bless America.