Cottmeister

You know what the CRAZIEST thing about the Hantavirus is? The Epstein Files are still largely unreleased, heavily redacted and no one has been arrested over them.

When you put the black guy who grew up in segregated Savannah GA under Jim Crow laws into a Klan robe, did you have any thoughts about that, or did you just send it ?

This is remarkable and you should watch this entire video. The House was going to pass a 45 day extension of FISA 702 (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act), BY VOICE WITHOUT VOTING, and Thomas Massie courageously forced a debate and demanded a recorded vote. Jim Jordan who has fought FOR warrants for FISA for years ironically led the debate AGAINST warrants and urged a YES vote for a clean extension WITHOUT warrants, which is what Trump is demanding even after FISA was used against him by the Democrats to spy on him and his campaign. Trump literally says give up your rights and just pass it and Jordan won’t go against Trump even though he wants warrant requirements. Chip Roy, Warren Davidson, and Keith Self joined Thomas Massie and made strong cases as to why Congress must add warrant requirements to FISA 702 and why a Central Bank Digital Currency must be banned and how both are powerful tools of control and surveillance and violation of your privacy and liberties. And Jamie Raskin (D) gave compelling arguments as to why bipartisanship is needed in the House to make reforms to FISA 702 yet after doing so he voted YES to a clean 45 day extension of FISA 702 without warrant requirements, which makes no sense. Why demand change and then literally vote for what you just argued against? However never forget under Biden and Democrats FISA 702 was used to spy on hundreds of thousands of Americans. Also, the Republican controlled Senate and its leader John Thune will not vote for a ban on Central Bank Digital Currency, saying it’s dead on arrival in the Senate. And neither will the Democrats. To sum it up, Americans are literally losing our precious privacy and freedoms right now under Trump and Republicans, yet Democrats are no better and have made no major policy changes that caused them to lose in 2024. They are only winning because Trump and Republicans have betrayed the most important campaign promises. 111 members of Congress voted NAY (NO) to the 45 day FISA 702 extension without warrant requirements for Americans so that your government can spy on you. Some voted NO in a partisan manner and because they hate Trump and some voted NO because they truly want change. Either way, those who voted NO should be recognized. Out of 111 ONLY 26 Republicans bravely voted NO. Here is the list of GOP NOs and pictured is the full list of both D’s and R’s who voted NO. Republican NO votes: Begich, Biggs (SC), Boebert, Brecheen, Burchett, Cammack, Cloud, Collins, Crane, Davidson, Downing, Fry, Fulcher, Gosar, Hageman, Harshbarger, Higgins (LA), Kennedy (UT), Luttrell, Massie, Miller (IL), Ogles, Perry, Roy, Self, and Tiffany. But after all this, the House passed the clean 45 day extension of FISA 702. After years of Trump and Republicans campaigning and demanding on Fox News that warrant requirements must be added to FISA, nothing changed. The promises they made to you are broken. The only thing that matters is voting records, none of their words. Words are meaningless puffs of air. If your Representative is not on this list, who voted NO, then you should tell them you are withdrawing your support and not voting for them. On both sides of the aisle. It doesn’t matter anymore whether you vote Republican or Democrat. Behind the veil, they are one and the same. Lastly, KY-4 your Representative Thomas Massie is a giant among men in Congress and fights for you harder than the entire House and Senate combined. Don’t be fools, vote for Thomas Massie!!!

@Archwinger1 @julesnonumbers1 @pearlythingz They literally test for it every single time

@julesnonumbers1 @pearlythingz If she is, she's sure as heck not going to tell the doctor. Especially if you might catch wind of it. That's why every single baby gets heb b shots. And anti gonorrhea eye drops. Because everyone knows mom will lie

Attention Internet: The Hep B vaccine is given to every single baby because we can't trust mothers to disclose accurate embarrassing or unsavory information about themselves to doctors (especially if Dad is in the picture and might find out) even when the baby's life is at stake

Operation Epic Fury failed successfully

The national debt just exceeded 100% of GDP and literally nobody cares. Politicians are going to keep spending. It’s like giving a drug addict unlimited access to cocaine. Giving the government unlimited access to other people’s money. It’s so over.

You have lost a quarter of your purchasing power in 4 years and no one is rioting. You literally were made 25% poorer so the government could spend more money to hand out to their friends.

Red Sox Nation, Thank you. For the love, support, and loyalty you’ve shown to my husband for the past 3 decades. Forever grateful ❤️

I have two stacks on my desk. The left stack is financial disclosure forms from members of Congress. The right stack is waivers for members who filed their financial disclosures late. The right stack is always taller. On Wednesday morning, I watched a soldier get arrested on CNN. I am a Disclosure Analyst for the House Ethics Committee. I have held this position for eleven years. My job is to receive the forms, verify their completeness, and file them. I do not investigate. I do not flag. I do not refer. I file. I have a lanyard. The lanyard says ETHICS. The soldier's name is Gannon Ken Van Dyke. He is thirty-eight years old. He was stationed at Fort Bragg. He was Special Forces. In December, he created an account on a prediction market called Polymarket. On January 2nd, he bet $32,500 that the president of Venezuela would be removed from power. On January 3rd, he helped remove the president of Venezuela from power. He collected $409,881. He has been charged with five federal crimes. Commodities fraud. Wire fraud. Unlawful use of confidential government information. Theft of nonpublic government information. Unlawful monetary transaction. The Department of Justice called it "the first-ever insider trading prosecution on event contracts." I watched this on the television in our break room. Then I walked back to my desk and processed a late financial disclosure from a member of the House Financial Services Committee who purchased $250,000 in bank stocks eleven days before his subcommittee held a closed-door hearing on proposed capital reserve changes. The filing was forty-seven days late. The STOCK Act requires disclosure within forty-five days. The penalty for late filing is $200. I waived it. I waive most of them. In 2021, fifty-four members of Congress and senior staff violated the reporting rules. The fines were minimal. Most were waived. I have a form for the waiver. The form has a box that says "Reason." I write "administrative delay." In ethics, "administrative delay" means the member's office forgot and then remembered when a reporter called. My approval rate is one hundred percent. In any other field, that number would trigger an audit. In mine, it is called thoroughness. Let me show you what I processed this year. January. A senator on the Armed Services Committee sold defense contractor shares worth $1.2 million. Three days later, his committee received a classified briefing that the Iran campaign had exceeded its projected cost by 340%. The stock dropped 8%. He filed the disclosure sixty-one days late. I calculated the fine. $200. His chief of staff asked if it could be waived. He did not ask what the senator traded on. Nobody asks that. The form does not have a field for it. I waived the fine. The senator's portfolio returned 23.4% in 2025. The S&P 500 returned 16.8%. February. A representative on the Energy and Commerce Committee bought pharmaceutical stocks worth $400,000. Two weeks later, her committee advanced a bill that would extend patent exclusivity for the exact drug class she purchased. The stocks rose 14%. She filed on time. There was no fine. There was no investigation. There was nothing to investigate because buying stocks in companies regulated by your own committee is not illegal. It is legal. The STOCK Act made it legal by making it disclosed. In Congress, disclosed means legal. In my office, legal means filed. March. A member whose spouse manages a portfolio worth $9.2 million reported forty-three separate transactions in a single quarter. Twelve of them were in sectors directly affected by legislation the member co-sponsored. The timing on eight of those twelve was within a two-week window of committee action. I logged all forty-three. None were flagged. We do not flag. We file. I asked my supervisor once what would happen if I flagged a filing. She said we do not have a form for that. I never asked again. In 2020, I processed 847 disclosures. In 2023, 1,211. In 2025, 1,614. The number of enforcement actions in each of those years was zero. The numerator changes. The denominator does not. I want to tell you about the soldier again. He made $409,881. He tried to delete his Polymarket account by calling customer service and saying he lost access to his email. He moved his profits into a foreign cryptocurrency vault and then into a new brokerage account. He used his real identity. He placed thirteen bets. Every single one was connected to an operation he personally participated in. In my eleven years, I have processed disclosures from members of Congress who traded on: Pending FDA approvals they learned about in committee. Defense appropriations they voted on. Trade policy they negotiated. Pandemic response measures they drafted. Interest rate decisions they were briefed on before the public. None of them have been charged. None of them have been investigated by the Department of Justice. None of them have been referred to the SEC. The STOCK Act has produced zero prosecutions since it was signed on April 4th, 2012. Fourteen years. Five hundred and thirty-five members. $635 million in trades last year alone. Zero cases. My daughter asked me once what happens when someone breaks the rules. I told her we write it down. She asked what happens after that. I said it depends. She was nine. She is twenty now. It does not depend. Nothing happens after that. The soldier made $409,881 and faces decades in prison. Nancy Pelosi entered Congress in 1987 with a portfolio worth approximately $785,000. It is now worth $133.7 million. That is a return of 16,930%. The Dow Jones returned 2,300% over the same period. Professional fund managers who beat the market for three consecutive years are considered exceptional. She has beaten it for thirty-seven. If a hedge fund produced those returns, the SEC would subpoena the records on a Thursday. She produced them from a building with a chapel and a gift shop. She announced her retirement last year. No investigation was opened. No disclosure was flagged. Her filings were on time. In my office, on time means compliant. Compliant means closed. I want to tell you about the fine. $200. That is the maximum penalty for violating the STOCK Act's disclosure requirements. $200 for a member of Congress whose portfolio gained $4.7 million in a single quarter. I calculated what $200 represents as a percentage of $4.7 million. It is 0.004%. I could not find a comparison that made it meaningful. It is less than the price of the parking pass in the Rayburn garage. It is less than lunch at the members' dining room if you order the crab cakes, which I am told are excellent though I eat at my desk. Since 2012, thirty-one bills have been introduced to restrict congressional trading. I keep a list. The list is longer than the STOCK Act itself. On March 5th, 2026, a representative from Michigan introduced the thirty-second. He called it the "No Getting Rich in Congress Act." The bill would prohibit the President, Vice President, members of Congress, and their spouses from trading individual stocks, cryptocurrency, futures, and commodities while in office. The bill was referred to committee. The committee has not scheduled a hearing. The committee is chaired by a member whose spouse executed $2.1 million in trades last year. The bill will be reviewed. In my office, reviewed means read. Read means acknowledged. Acknowledged means a status has been assigned. A status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one. The soldier used classified information to make $409,881 on a prediction market. He has been charged with five federal crimes. The Department of Justice announced the case on the same day I processed three disclosures from members who traded on committee knowledge worth a combined $3.8 million. The difference between the soldier and the members is not what they did. It is the building they did it in. He did it from Fort Bragg. They did it from the Capitol. He used a prediction market. They used the New York Stock Exchange. He bet on a military operation. They bet on the legislation they write. He did not write the law. They did. They wrote the STOCK Act. Then they funded its enforcement at zero dollars. Then they set its maximum penalty at $200. Then they gave my office the authority to waive it. Then they traded $635 million. The soldier flew to Caracas. He breached a compound. He put his body between a mission and a bullet. The people who ordered the operation were in a building with a credenza and sparkling water. They did not go to Caracas. They went to their brokerage accounts. The soldier made $409,881 and is now in federal custody. The people who knew what he was going to do before he did it made more and filed less. His prosecution is not a failure of the system. It is the system. One conviction per decade, at the lowest level, so the briefing slides can say enforcement exists. The $409,881 is not the crime. It is the cost of making $635 million look supervised. In my field, we call this self-regulation. The soldier's Polymarket account has been frozen. His military career is over. He will spend years in federal prison. My office will process every congressional disclosure filed this year. Every trade logged. Every $200 fine calculated and waived. The system is immaculate. Fourteen years. Zero prosecutions. $635 million a year. A 16,930% return. I have not leaked a document. I have not filed a complaint. I have not deviated from the process one single time. The process was written by the people whose forms I process. As long as the disclosures go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations. My lanyard still says ETHICS. In eleven years, nobody has asked me to define the word.

So you’re telling me you’ve arrested more American soldiers involved in capturing Maduro than people on the Epstein list, or politicians who somehow magically became better investors than Warren Buffett the second they took office? Wild priorities.

The DOJ would rather arrest a US Special Forces soldier than a Congressional member for insider trading. Target the one that can’t foot the legal bills. What an absolute disgrace.

The organization is the Citizens Network for Foreign Affairs. Here's their 2024 expenses. $28 million on salary + benefits (for 100 employees) $12 million on subcontractors $3 million on travel $5 million on consultants $9 million on other Only $4 million on grants

So is the DOJ going to arrest members of congress for insider trading? Because if not this seems awfully hypocritical. Just saying.

Maybe not a popular take but I am calling for this guy to be pardoned. Unless the DOJ plans on going after all the crooks in congress currently insider trading, this is simply skewed justice. There is no “justice” when guys like this get the book thrown at him yet members are illegally profiting every day. I don’t agree with what he did and he should be required to disgorge all the profits however, unless the DOJ plans on doing Congress next, this is not justice.

@ItsJorlaz @HazelAppleyard No it’s because of the sizes of the shapes. C is the same size therefore equal. The others are not in fact equal in shaded area

@HazelAppleyard because they werent all circled... "which of the following..." pretty self explanatory that it means multiple answers if possible which its all

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.

Why on earth would ANYONE who’s running an extremely successful winery business, to the point it skyrocketed their net worth from negative broke to $30M+ in one short year, suddenly decide to DISSOLVE said company? Strange, right? Maybe the owner @Ilhan Omar can explain?

For the record: If someone dissolves an LLC days after their financial disclosures go public and their net worth magically plummets from $30 million to $95k, it’s most likely fraud.

Elon Musk just put the entire university system on trial. Not the curriculum. Not the professors. The premise. Musk: “You don’t need college to learn stuff. Everything is available basically for free. You can learn anything you want for free.” For a thousand years, universities held one monopoly. Access. You paid the toll or you stayed ignorant. The internet erased that in a decade. Every lecture. Every framework. Every textbook. Free. From any screen on Earth. The six-figure tuition is no longer buying knowledge. It is buying a signal. Musk: “There is a value that colleges have, which is seeing whether somebody can work hard at something, including a bunch of annoying homework assignments, and still do their homework assignments.” That is the product. Not intelligence. Not creativity. Not vision. Compliance. You are paying $200,000 to prove you can tolerate bureaucracy on a schedule. Musk: “Colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores. But they’re not for learning.” The entire system is a sorting machine for corporate HR. It does not measure what you can build. It measures whether you can sit still, follow directions, and deliver on command. Four years of obedience dressed as education. Musk: “If you’re trying to do something exceptional, you must have evidence of exceptional ability. I don’t consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability.” The system optimizes for average. It rewards the compliant. It certifies the patient. It quietly filters out everyone who refuses to wait for permission. The ones who reshaped the modern world never finished the test. Musk: “Gates is a pretty smart guy, he dropped out. Jobs is pretty smart, he dropped out. Larry Ellison, smart guy, he dropped out.” They did not drop out because it was too hard. They dropped out because the speed limit was too low. The most dangerous thing a university does is convince a generational talent that finishing the syllabus is the achievement. It is not. It is the floor. A degree is a receipt for compliance. The future has never belonged to people who finish their homework. It belongs to the ones who never needed the assignment.