To remind, Hormuz was open before Trump launched his war against Iran. Reopening the strait is not a war victory.

Of all the things that never were real, this is the never realest

NYT Connections: If 59% of players get the purple category first, it’s not the hardest category!

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.

Less than 50% of the popular vote is hardly “overwhelmingly.”

“Well I was excited for Hopkins or MIT but The Citadel and Liberty University will be just as good!” Said no one serious about their education, ever

We had two 20 year wars and learned how to keep people alive after a gunshot wounds. There are more disabled vets because there are fewer gold star families. Worthy trade.

Lord God in Heaven we may have the greatest #CatturdVersusCatturd entry to date

The only two white actors in Black Panther are Martin Freeman, who played Bilbo Baggins, and Andy Serkis, who played Gollum... They're the Tolkien white guys.

99% audience score is IMPRESSIVE! Also incredible that every single 5 star reviewer decided this would be the first movie they ever review on rotten tomatoes. It’s almost as if 1000s of accounts just magically appeared to review ONLY this movie. Must be GREAT!!

The #nytconnections AI couldn’t figure out the connection between my wrong answers - client, partner, rainmaker. Hello - John Grisham novels, anyone? We have been oversold on the value of AI.

Pass it on. ✊🏽

People keep saying how dangerous the job is for ICE. ICE agents killed in the line of duty in 2025: 0. It is more dangerous to be a child at school in America than to be an ICE agent.

A reminder that Capitol Police are, in fact, also federal officers

"I doubt NATO would be there for us if we really needed them." FUCK YOU.

Today’s NYT Connections was total BS. The Wordle wasn’t much better.

It seems obvious from this video that the administration worked with big U.S. oil companies before the attack to line up billions of dollars in capital for developing Venezuela’s oil reserves, yet they couldn’t be bothered to consult Congress.

The ignorance is astounding. Your statement is a false equivalency, because it treats fundamentally different things as if they are the same simply because they all involve the use of military force. The 20 year war you and your buddies and I fought was authorized by Congress, funded year after year by Congress, sustained by formal alliances, and governed by rules of occupation, counterinsurgency, nation building, and international agreements. What happened in Afghanistan and Iraq was not a failure to “get something done,” it was a series of deliberate political choices to occupy, stabilize, and rebuild states, whether those choices were wise or not. Those wars existed because Congress repeatedly chose to keep them going, and because the missions themselves were designed to be long term. What the convicted felon claims to have done in Venezuela is not the same category of action. A short term strike or seizure, even if dramatic, is not equivalent to ending a war, winning a war, or accomplishing the same objectives. Capturing or killing a leader, or launching a brief operation, does not resolve insurgency, governance, legitimacy, security, or regional stability. The reason Afghanistan took twenty years is not because presidents were too timid, it is because dismantling armed movements and building a functioning state is orders of magnitude harder than launching an attack. There is also a legal and factual mismatch. The wars after 9/11 were conducted under explicit congressional authorization, massive troop deployments, and sustained public funding. What the convicted felon describes is unilateral action claimed under executive authority, with no authorization to occupy, govern, or extract resources, and no legal framework for what comes next. Saying “this took four hours” is not proof of success, it is evidence that the objective was narrower and completely different. Most importantly, equating the two erases what service members actually endured. You were not fighting because presidents failed to pull a trigger hard enough or fast enough. You were fighting because the mission Congress approved required holding territory, protecting civilians, training local forces, and trying to create a durable political outcome. A quick strike does not substitute for that, and it never has. So the comparison fails on mission, scale, legality, and reality. Ending a war and launching a short term operation are not the same thing, and pretending they are cheapens both the sacrifice of those who served and the seriousness of what war actually is.

If this action were constitutionally sound, the Attorney General wouldn’t be tweeting that they’ve arrested the President of a sovereign country and his wife for possessing guns in violation of a 1934 U.S. firearm law.