XLS 🇺🇸

@Wr3nthesongbird @WintersongGames @GunloverClub1 We're in a moral panic? Y'all are the ones who can't go anywhere without at least one firearm.

@WintersongGames @GunloverClub1 False. For lawful conceal carry use this could save someones life. Youre suffering from a moral panic.

This 12-gauge folding shotgun fits in a standard backpack and goes from stowed to 'send it' in 3 seconds.

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.

Mother in ICE custody asks to go to son's funeral—agents took her to a "punishment room" instead. "They took my clothes and left me all alone with a single blanket," she says. "That is how they punish me for having cried after telling me my son had died." Her 1-year-old baby was still breastfeeding—when ICE separated him from mother along with her other 3 children. She had already lost a son to cancer in 2020—and says the only immigration check-in she ever missed was to take care of him on his deathbed. María de la Luz Loredo is afraid to cry or show any emotion now that she is back in her regular cell—for fear of being punished again. She is locked up at the El Valle ICE Processing Center in Raymondville, Texas.

@CenTexLib That explains the areas that are surrounded by Columbus but aren't technically a part of Columbus.

That’s because Columbus’s size is due solely to the aggressive annexation policies of Columbus mayors from the 40s to the 70s. As unincorporated suburbs sprung up outside city limits, they required water access, and Columbus said if you want city water, you have to join the city. Thanks to this, Columbus gets to have bragging rights about being the “largest city in Ohio,” but at the cost of having terrible city borders, and, as the attached Reddit comment will attest, having large parts of the city that aren’t truly integrated into it — lacking sidewalks, streetlights, etc. because the city decided it was too much effort to install those things after annexing so much land.

This is loathsome: The Trump admin's 2027 budget would slash the fruit-and-vegetable portion of the nutrition program for Women, Infants, & Children (WIC) by as MUCH AS 75%. So that would mean $52 down to $13 for fully or mostly breastfeeding participants, and $26 down to $10 for young children. The Epstein class wants to balance our budget on the backs of poor American mothers and young American children, just to fund their wars. How can ANYONE support this? Proposing a budget with cuts like this would strip away access to fresh food for US families during CRITICAL STAGES of child development. This is proof that they despise us.

BREAKING: BBC has compiled evidence of more than 160 Palestinian children deliberately shot in the head by IDF soldiers and snipers in Gaza. They concluded the worst thing ever: "Israeli jews are hunting children for fun."

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn't invoke Weimar Germany as a rhetorical flourish. She cited a specific scholar by name in a footnote: Ernst Fraenkel, a Jewish labor lawyer who observed the Nazi legal system from the inside, smuggled his manuscript out of Berlin in 1938, and published "The Dual State" at the University of Chicago in 1941. Fraenkel's framework is precise. The Nazis didn't immediately collapse Germany's legal system. They left courts functioning - particularly in contracts and economic matters - while placing Jews and political enemies in a separate lawless zone where no legal protection applied. Most Germans lived in the law-bound "normative state." The targeted lived in the "prerogative state." The facade of normalcy was the mechanism of control. Jackson invoked Fraenkel to name what the court's Republican majority is doing in real time. In 21 consecutive shadow docket cases, the six conservative justices have let Trump opt out of the law - often with no explanation given at all. They blessed ICE racial profiling without citing a single legal justification. They allowed Trump to ignore $4 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign aid. They stripped lower courts of the ability to issue universal relief, meaning only those with resources to file individual lawsuits get protection from illegal presidential action. Constitutional law professor Evan Bernick put it plainly: "The court is adjusting the law to make place for arbitrary power." Jackson's dissent is not hyperbole. A footnote citing a 1941 manuscript about Nazi legal architecture is a Supreme Court justice blowing the cover on what her colleagues are building.

Israel’s bulldozers are wiping out civilian homes, tourist sites, and hotels in Naqoura, South Lebanon. Not military targets. South Lebanon is being erased — like Gaza before it. This is an American-backed, American-funded genocide.

Armed masked man starts fight at high school ICE protest—turns out to be off duty police sergeant. His plan was to trick students to "assault me"—then "arrest them all." Then called his buddies with rifles to "back him up." Sgt. Dusten Mullen makes $336,000 a year—making him a top 10 earner in the Phoenix Police Department. He is currently on administrative leave—which means he's reassigned to work from home. Incident occurred outside Hamilton High School in Chandler, Arizona.

Adults who don't drink tea or coffee are a strange breed. What do they drink in the mornings?

Rainbow Mountain has become Peru’s second-most popular destination after Machu Picchu. But most tourists are unaware of how the influx of tourism money brought violence and death to an indigenous community. Watch Bloomberg Investigates for more: bit.ly/40XUnri

@Forbes What are they going to do - bomb the Vatican? 🙄

Reports of a meeting between a Vatican representative and the Pentagon went viral, with allegations that the church had been warned to cease its criticism. go.forbes.com/MtcGke

Nevada's largest utility says it will need three times the electricity required to power Las Vegas just to handle proposed data centers — and it probably can't do that without fossil fuels. to.pbs.org/4c0Eh6n

The Trump administration on Thursday proposed weakening rules for the disposal of ash produced by burning coal that can contain hazardous heavy metals and contaminate groundwater. to.pbs.org/4tuWZc0

@axios Congress and conservators have never held him accountable for a damn thing before. Not sure why anyone thinks they'd start now.

How presidential removal under the 25th Amendment works and why it's a longshot trib.al/R1AgrM9

In December, Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon quietly changed how the draft works. Starting this December, every American male aged 18 to 25 will be automatically enrolled in the Selective Service database. No form. No signature. No consent. The government already has your Social Security number. Your DMV records. Your federal student loans. They’re pulling the data themselves. open.substack.com/pub/theallenan…

Exclusive: The acting director of the CDC has delayed publication of a report showing the covid-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of ER visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half, according to two scientists. wapo.st/4tFqKqY

The University of Missouri has stripped its historic Black student governing body, as well as at least four other minority affinity groups, of all annual designated funding starting in July "Mizzou has been the canary in the mine" insidehighered.com/news/diversity…

This is Jolteon. He was born with an eye disorder that causes fluid buildup and impairs his vision. Without treatment, he's at risk of developing painful blisters and ulcers that may ultimately require the removal of both eyes. You can help him below ❤️‍🩹 1510.fan/jolteon-xd

@DKThomp @NPRinskeep This isn't different from the past, it's just more easily quantified now. In the days of CDs, I bought maybe 3 new CDs per year. The rest of the time I listened to what I already had. I think it's normal to revisit things that already exist instead of constantly looking for new.

“Only three of the top ten songs in 2025 were released in 2025! It's brutal out there for new artists.”