Monkeytime

5 minutes before Trump’s announcement: * $1.5B notional worth of S&P500 (ES) futures are bought in a single clip. * $192M notional of oil futures (CL) sold. More than 4x-6x any other trade size during the market close. Insiders profited from his lies in broad daylight!

The SEC blocked a member of the enforcement division from investigating Trump’s family over insider trading. They’ve resigned in protest.

9/ Simple volume was never Iran's comparative advantage. Disruption was. And on the metric that matters (cost imposed per missile fired )Iran may actually be getting more effective as the war goes on, not less.

8/ Bottom Line: A degraded Iran firing fewer, better-aimed missiles at softer targets may be more effective at imposing civilian and economic costs than the mass salvos of Feb 28.

lol robots

Baltimore needs a cycling network not random unprotected lanes that begin and end without a plan for how to get around safely. @BmoreCityDOT Annapolis Rd bike lanes are a fail, he intersection at Waterview is a fail either way the right turn lane rendered unusable.

A group of Israeli soldiers filmed themselves looting homes in Lebanon – like they did in Gaza. Israel’s assault on Lebanon has forcibly displaced over 1 million Lebanese people in less than 3 weeks.

No Kings is planning 3000-events on 3/28 and its 1700-word press release makes zero mention of Iran, only opaque mentions of “illegal wars” (which ones?) I like many of the orgs involved but what’s the utility of these generic “anti-authoritarian” word salads at this moment

PinkNews is shit and has been for a while; remove it from your reading list.

So…outmigration was happening before the millionaire tax and then proceeded at essentially the same level after the tax. You see how that implies the tax made no difference, right?

Ticketmaster/LiveNation sucks, they're practically a *textbook* case of abusing monopoly power, this case was as open-and-shut as it could possibly be. They should have been broken up, but Trump got a call from a friend so instead Ticketmaster will get to keep screwing you.

Honestly disgraceful the way these extrajudicial killings are still going on but have faded into the background.

It is so dangerous every time in history when only strictly extreme right-wing figures say some basic things that no one else in power or the media will, and which the overwhelming majority of the public knows to be true. Liberals and centrists will never, ever learn.

How much the MA Millionaire Tax raised vs the most generous possible assumption of how much combined revenue was lost from millionaire movers.

The AI billionaires trying to buy this election have a lot of opinions. I figured, why not read some of them? These are the Trump megadonors behind the negative ads in your mailboxes and on your screens.

Let me explain exactly why every new subdivision in America looks like the top photo, because the math is wild. A mature tree increases a home's value by 7 to 19 percent. On a $400,000 house, that's $28,000 to $76,000. A single shade tree produces the cooling equivalent of ten room-size air conditioners running 20 hours a day. One tree on the west side of a house cuts energy bills by 12 percent within 15 years. The bottom photo is worth more, costs less to live in, and sells faster. This has been documented by the University of Washington, Clemson, Michigan State, and the USDA. The data is not in dispute. Removing those trees saves the builder roughly $5,000 per lot. Concrete trucks need twice the dripline radius of every standing tree. Utility trenches need flat ground. A bulldozer flattens 200 lots in an afternoon. Preserving trees adds weeks and thousands per home. So the developer pockets $5,000 in savings and the buyer eats $50,000 in lost value for the next two decades. The person making the decision and the person paying for it have never been in the same room. The Woodlands, Texas is the proof of what happens when they are. George Mitchell bought 28,000 acres of Houston timberland in 1974 and preserved 28% as permanent green space. He forced McDonald's to build behind the tree canopy. That McDonald's became one of the highest-volume locations in Texas. The first office building, designed to reflect the surrounding forest so you couldn't see it from the street, leased completely. The Woodlands median home price today: $615,000. Katy, a comparable Houston suburb that clear-cut: $375,000. Named #1 community to live in America two years running. Fifty years of data. The trees are worth more than removing them saves. Developers clear-cut anyway because they sell the house once and leave. You live in it for 30 years.

“They say that Spain is alone. They said the same when we recognized the State of Palestine, and then others followed. We are not alone. We are the first. Those defending the indefensible will be the ones left alone.” (Sánchez, March 9)

The proposed Joliet data center would cover 795 acres, about the size of 2.5 Grant Parks. At full buildout, it would consume 1.8 gigawatts of electricity. For reference, the entire City of Chicago uses about 3.45 gigawatts. One facility. More than half of Chicago's power.

Blue and Red MAGA are losing their minds over the Scientific American report that found that COVID deaths were underreported by ~150,000 in the first two years Those numbers happen to match my numbers very closely In 2020 & 2021 there were a total of 937,953 more deaths from disease than expected In 2020 & 2021 there were 846,721 total reported COVID deaths A difference of 91,232 representing a COVID undercount of almost 100K In other words, the numbers are solid @RadCentrism @sciam @DKThomp @RichardLWeiss

Let me get this straight. The federal government held a legal auction for the right to build offshore wind farms. A company won those auctions fair and square, paying nearly a billion dollars into the U.S. Treasury. The projects went through years of review. Courts repeatedly upheld their legality. Everything was above board. Then the Trump administration tried five separate times to kill other wind projects in federal court and lost every single time. Judges reviewed the administration’s supposed “national security” justification and weren’t persuaded.  So now they’ve landed on a new plan: pay the company nearly ONE BILLION DOLLARS of your tax money to just walk away. Because, and I am not making this up, the president thinks offshore wind turbines are ugly and claims without evidence that they “drive whales crazy.”  He’s been nursing this petty grudge since 2012, when he tried to block a wind farm visible from his golf course in Scotland. Fourteen years later, American taxpayers are footing the bill for it. This is stupid policy. It’s fiscally reckless, strategically blind, and driven entirely by a personal vendetta rather than any coherent vision for American energy or competitiveness. Meanwhile, China is racing ahead, building offshore wind at a staggering pace and positioning itself to dominate the global clean energy economy for decades to come. None of this is America First. nytimes.com/2026/03/17/cli…