Dave Daffin

A retired United States Major General reacts to Pete Hegseth's dangerous ignorance and blithering idiocy. 🎯🎯🎯👇

@@lisanandy There is a hue and cry about Mason at the BBC!

how much is @ChrisMasonBBC being paid to attack Starmer every single day? No balance at all. WTF is @lisanandy doing?

Please watch and retweet. Seemingly the BBC and ITV don’t want you to see it because it is a verbatim repeat of the many controversial statements made by Reform politicians. Can’t think why as it is enlightening rather than offensive.

The BBC currently has as its lead news article a piece by Chris Mason- guess what - attacking Starmer. It's not even news, it's opinion. Chris Mason and Robbie Gibb should be sacked. #SackChrisMason

A grim week for @ChrisMasonBBC but things could be about to get worse when the new DG finally kicks out all the Tory/Reform cheerleaders that have ruined the BBC’s reputation for impartiality.

'How far and how fast the United States has fallen!' As Trump considers 'reviewing the UK's claim to the Falklands', and suspending Spain from NATO, James O'Brien reacts.

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.

The great thing about bringing my American friends news from across the pond, is that there is no Trump sane washing involved in the process. My thanks to James O’ Brien for the clip from his LBC morning show. 🎥 TikTok - vm.tiktok.com/ZNRqg8X7N/

Top journalists from across the political spectrum have all reached the exact same conclusion. James O'Brien points out that Alan Rusbridger and Matthew Parris now agree that Donald Trump is not just erratic, he has completely lost his mind. The decline is undeniable.

I’ve been contacted by THREE Labour Party whistleblowers, inc. a former frontbencher, + been passed a sensitive Excel spreadsheet by a senior politician in Scotland. The evidence is clear: Mandelson + McSweeney built a covert network of Labour MPs. Here’s what they’re hiding:🧵

Ossoff: How much do you guys know about Jared Kushner—Ivanka’s husband? He’s on the Saudi payroll for $2 billion. And now he’s leading American diplomacy in the Middle East, apparently, while at the very same time asking princes and sheikhs to give him billions more. Can you imagine a normal sitting U.S. ambassador just hitting MBS for billions? But he’s a Trump, a royal, a princeling. The rules are for us, not for them. And it’s not just Jared. Never before have we seen so little effort to hide so much corruption. The Mar-a-Lago mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights.

'To support Trump, you need to accept falsehoods as facts.' Simon Marks likens the US president's leadership style to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Comedians on the BBC's Have I Got News For You Spend 4 minutes mocking President Trump For posting an image of himself as Jesus #HIGNFY

🇺🇸 Trump before starting the war : Didn't consult with 🇪🇸 Spain Didn't consult with 🇬🇧 UK Didn't consult with 🇮🇹 Italy Didn't consult with 🇦🇺 Australia Didn't consult with 🇫🇷 France Didn't consult with 🇮🇪 Ireland Didn't consult with 🇨🇦 Canada 🇺🇸 Trump after losing the war : Blaming 🇪🇸 Spain for not helping Blaming 🇬🇧 UK for not helping Blaming 🇮🇹 Italy for not helping Blaming 🇦🇺 Australia for not helping Blaming 🇫🇷 France for not helping Blaming 🇮🇪 Ireland for not helping Blaming 🇨🇦 Canada for not helping This man's politics is 100% based on lies, manipulation and u-turns No wonder a country like 🇮🇷 Iran with no nukes literally made him lose his mind in just few weeks

BROWDER: We're at war with Russia. If they want to sever internet cables coming into UK, it will cause catastrophic economic collapse. We can't allow that to happen. If that includes boarding Russian ships that are trolling around the waters surveying our internet cables, then so be it. We should be boarding those ships, arresting those sailors, and impounding those ships. We should do everything possible to protect the nation. All this tiptoeing around doesn't appreciate the gravity and severity of the situation. Putin wants to destabilize us, and it may not be a hot war, but this is war, and we need to act accordingly.

‘Why has he been in secret negotiations with them?!' Even James O’Brien, the ‘veteran chronicler of Farage's hideousness’, is surprised by who the Reform leader is willing to strike a deal with.

There is a particular kind of American politician who, upon achieving high office, feels compelled to announce publicly the things he is most proud of. It is, when you think about it, a remarkable instinct – the urge to share, unprompted, the moments you consider your finest hours. JD Vance has decided that one of his proudest achievements is cutting off military aid to Ukraine. Not, you understand, brokering a ceasefire. Not negotiating anything at all, really. Simply stopping the flow of weapons to a country that has been defending itself, with considerable tenacity and very little outside help, against the largest land invasion in Europe since 1945. That is the thing that makes him proud. It is worth pausing on the word “proudest” for a moment, because it does a great deal of work in that sentence. Previous generations of American leadership had, by most accounts, a somewhat different set of things to be proud of. George Marshall, who served as Secretary of State after World War Two, oversaw the reconstruction of an entire continent. He didn’t do it because Europe asked nicely. He did it because he understood, with the particular clarity that comes from having watched the alternative, that democracies left to collapse tend to produce outcomes nobody enjoys. Dwight Eisenhower, who had seen rather more of war than most people ever will, spent the rest of his life trying to prevent the next one through alliances, commitments and the steady accumulation of trust between nations. These were not perfect men. But they grasped something that appears to have been entirely lost in the current administration – that American credibility is not a renewable resource. You spend it once. You don’t get it back. Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and JD Vance have, between them, the collective historical memory of a particularly inattentive golden retriever. They have confused loudness with strength, grievance with principle, and the act of abandoning allies with something they have inexplicably decided to call realism. Vance flew to Budapest recently, had what was described as a warm meeting with Viktor Orbán, and returned apparently satisfied that something useful had occurred. Vance flew to Budapest, embraced Orbán warmly, and flew home. Three weeks later, Orbán lost the Hungarian election in the most decisive repudiation of his rule in twenty years. The Midas touch, in reverse. The men who planned the Normandy landings – who coordinated seventeen Allied nations, crossed the most heavily defended coastline in history, and did it in bad weather with inadequate maps – would have found the current American foreign policy apparatus quite difficult to explain to their grandchildren. Proudest, he said. There it is, I suppose. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1