badgercap

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.

🤷🏻‍♂️

Really dislike the most popular brand of sketch comedy being “it’s cringe when people express any genuine sentiment, because someone else before may have experienced the same thing.” Might be more socially toxic than Woke ever was. The premise is that enjoying things for their own sake is shameful because it might define you as a Type of Guy, so in order to have any genuine emotion you have to couch it in irony to avoid the vulnerability of existing in a continuous sense. Instead of liking a song and thus worrying about how that reflects on you, you inhabit a character that’s The Type of Guy Who Likes That Song for a few minutes. It’s not you, it’s someone else. You’ve never experienced an emotion, except for irreverence and computer-mediated reflexive derision for those who do. We should throw rotting fruit at “sketch comedians” (who do nothing but iterate out the last few cracks of real human experience) in the streets, as the Romans once did to actors and other undesirables

On Friday, I presented a risk assessment briefing re the Iran war to my team on an internal call. We thought it was worth sharing the notes (which were AI-transcribed & summarized), so here goes. Posting without much editing to save time.

Israel continues to destroy southern Lebanon.

I don't think people understand the gravity of the situation as the UN is preparing for possible nuclear weapon use in Iran. This is a picture of Tehran. For you uneducated, untraveled, never-served, warhawks licking your chops at the thought of bombing it. It's not some low population desert. There are families, children, family pets. Regular working class people with dreams. You're sick to want war. Tehran is a city of nearly 10,000,000 people. Imagine nuking Washington, Berlin, Paris, London, or beyond, bombed with nuclear weapons. I gave up my diplomatic career to leak this information. I suspended my duties so as not to be part of or a witness to this crime against humanity, in an attempt to prevent a nuclear winter before it is too late. Yesterday, nearly ten million people protested “No Kings” in the United States. The possibility of the use of nuclear weapons must be taken very seriously. It's dangerous. Act now. Spread this message worldwide. Take the streets. Protest for our humanity and future. Only the people can stop it. History will remember us.

Tucked away on pages 744-746 of the Farm Bill is language that will allow corporations to continue confining mother pigs to gestation crates. These 2.5' x 7' stalls restrain sows for 114 days of their pregnancy. They can only walk a few steps forward and a few steps backward. It's called the 'Save Our Bacon Act' even though the legislation it would overturn does not address bacon. It would overturn legislation that prevents the sale of whole-pig meat that comes from pigs whose mothers were confined to gestation crates in jurisdictions that voted to ban such products. This is not just an animal welfare issue. It's a public health threat. Research shows that 92.6% of crated sows exhibit abnormal, repetitive behaviors—known as stereotypies—within just one hour of observation. This is a coping mechanisms triggered by stress. Crated sows have markedly higher levels of stress hormones like adrenaline and noradrenaline compared to group-housed sows. This stress response weakens their immune systems and promotes the growth and virulence of foodborne pathogens such as Salmonella, Campylobacter, and Staphylococcus aureus. These pathogens often infect their piglets—who are born immunosuppressed and frequently remain infected until slaughter. These infections frequently go undetected during inspections. When infected pigs are slaughtered, the resulting pork can transmit disease to consumers. This isn’t hypothetical—it’s happening now. Piglets of group-housed sows show better resistance and resilience and are exposed to fewer pathogens. Pork is a leading source of foodborne illness in the U.S., responsible for an estimated 787,000 illnesses annually. Salmonella alone is responsible for $1.9 billion in annual public health costs, and 60% of sows test positive for it. Ten percent of these strains are multidrug-resistant. Campylobacter from pork causes 37,000 infections in the U.S. annually, and 83% of Campylobacter found on commercial pork chops is resistant to at least one medically important antibiotic. The overuse of antibiotics in pork production worsens this crisis. According to 2022 data from the FDA: -89% of pork producers administer antibiotics through feed or water. -27.1% of all medically important antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used in pork production. -This contributes directly to the rise of antimicrobial resistance—a threat the World Health Organization estimates is responsible for 700,000 deaths each year. The language in the Farm Bill says: SEC. 12006. Ensuring the Free Movement of Livestock-Derived Products in Interstate Commerce. (a) Purpose.— The purpose of this section is to— (1) protect the free movement in interstate commerce of products derived from covered livestock; (2) encourage a national market of such products; (3) ensure that producers of covered livestock are not subject to a patchwork of State laws restricting access to a national market; and (4) ensure that the United States continues to uphold its international trade obligations. (b) In General.— Producers of covered livestock have a Federal right to raise and market their covered livestock in interstate commerce and therefore no State or subdivision thereof may enact or enforce, directly or indirectly, a condition or standard on the production of covered livestock other than for covered livestock physically raised in such State or subdivision. (c) Protecting Interstate Commerce.— Producers of covered livestock have a Federal right to raise and market their covered livestock in interstate commerce and therefore no State or subdivision thereof may enact or enforce, directly or indirectly, as a condition for sale or consumption, any condition or standard of production on products derived from covered livestock not physically raised in such State or subdivision that is in addition to, or different from, the conditions or standards of production in the State in which the production occurs. (d) Definitions.— In this section: (1) Covered Livestock.— The term “covered livestock” (A) means any domestic animal raised for the purpose of— (i) slaughter for human consumption; or (ii) producing products manufactured for human consumption which are derived from the processing of milk, including fluid milk products; and (B) does not include domestic animals raised for the primary purpose of egg production. (2) Production.— The term “production”— (A) means the raising (including breeding) of covered livestock; and (B) does not include the movement, harvesting, or further processing of covered livestock. Photo courtesy of @WeAnimals.

Hidden on page 744 of the farm bill the House Agriculture Committee passed Thursday is a provision that would condemn millions of pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates. Rebranded the 'Save Our Bacon Act,' it's a pork-industry play to wipe out every state law banning the sale of pork from crated pigs — laws the conservative Supreme Court upheld in 2023. Over 85% of Democrats and Republicans oppose these crates. Voters have backed ballot measures to ban them in state after state. The pork industry knows it can't win a straight vote on this. So it's burying the provision in an 800-page bill and hoping no one notices. Contact your senators and representative today and tell them: oppose the farm bill unless the Save Our Bacon Act is stripped out. You can reach them at senate.gov and house.gov — it takes two minutes and it matters.

If Trump wants Zelenskyy’s help against drones, I think JD Vance to have to fly to Kiev, and sit in the Ukrainian equivalent of the Oval Office and say, “Thank you.”

No comment necessary.

I just got off a call with a friend in minneapolis I didn’t understand how bad the situation is right now, I don’t think any of us outside MSP do they were patrolling outside her window as I was talking to her there are thousands of them she (a white woman) now carries her passport with her when she leaves the house our call was interrupted by helicopters last year the ICE budget was $10B it’s now $85B this is coming to your doorstep soon the silence of CEOs and even Democratic leaders right now is shameful. if you don’t understand how 1930s Germany happened, this is how it happened. there’s nothing more unamerican. my grandpa manned a machine gun in the south pacific to fight this ideology. our constitutional rights are being shredded to pieces, and the powerful are bending their knee to it. i don’t care about your stance on immigration, if you support masked thugs terrorizing american communities, pointing guns at citizens and demanding papers, entering homes without warrants— please, take a hard look in the mirror and reevaluate the dissonance with your american values and the freedom your ancestors fought to give you.

Congratulations to the President on playing hardball to twist the Danes' arms and get them to agree to the things they already agreed to in a 1951 treaty.

Incredible, insane, unprecedented corruption

A lot of people are playing a character they don't enjoy, and they think they're stuck that way forever because switching characters would be out of character

This is the best speech by a world leader that I have read in a very long time. More later, but for now, just read what @MarkJCarney has to say. Rhetorically, at least, he has met the geopolitical moment. paulwells.substack.com/p/the-carney-d…

CARNEY: "The middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu."

Will the purchase of Greenland also be subject to a 10% tariff then?

Only two people have ever accepted a second-hand Nobel Prize as a gift. One of them was Joseph Goebbels.

@bkclaims Interested