cold open a bearded bobby is running through sewer tunnels frantically looking over his shoulder every few seconds on account of being Chased by government agents he comes to a ladder climbs up it and bursts out into daylight dramatically shielding his eyes because God when was the last time he saw real actual daylight Then car horns start going off because we discover as the camera pans out that he's.... in the middle of a road.... in the middle of downtown la.... title rolls 9-1-1 and then. One Year Earlier. and we go back to bobby's time in the Lab. hire me abc
You know what? Fuck it I'm adding more context. Sesame Street has talked about the topic of death more than once and it's done with such gentle carefulness without watering down or censoring the heaviness of the situations. It treats heavy subject matter with respect and dignity and has been for DECADES.
From the early 1980s:
To 2025:
Hell, they even cover the devastating heaviness of MASS SHOOTINGS without censoring or watering anything down.
They've been doing this for YEARS, and it's ALWAYS handled with dignity, respect, seriousness, understanding, and love.
Whenever I see people censoring words because it "might offend" someone or the big ad companies that are currently trying to run everything? I just want to say to them: "What? Is Sesame Street too mature for you?" Because really...what the hell are we doing.
I'm back with even more examples! Sesame Street once again to this day is out here handling extremely difficult subject matter with incredible care and respect. "We can't let kids learn about uncomfortable things!" Oh, really now? Even though they're things that happen in everyday life that they'll face one day at some point anyway? Interesting. Let's see what else this show has covered that people (for some reason) think should be avoided and hidden. Here's more on death of loved ones and greif:
Or how about when someone is put into the foster care system because their home isn't safe anymore and their needs aren't being met?
Maybe some discussions about group therapy/getting help and support?
Hey look! Here's a segment about gender expression vs taught expectation, including unlearning harmful biases and what to do when you hurt someone on accident because you didn't know it was wrong!
Look! The topic of race and diversity! The importance of unity and equity!
They even also have a more allegorical take on discrimination and being looked down on for who you are, featuring Big Bird. The conflict is about how he's not being let into a club because the one bird running the club personally decided he didn't want someone like Big Bird there.
Big Bird goes out of his way to keep changing parts of himself in order to "prove" he can fit into this club if he just changed enough. The truth comes out though, and there's nothing he can do to gain the approval of that bird. He will never be good enough in his eyes, and Big Bird starts to hate himself. His real friends see this finally put their feet down, emphasizing that you should never change yourself just to fit into one singular narrow idea someone else has.
There's A LOT of different situations this can be an allegory for. Racism, sexism, homophobia, basically ANY form of exclusion is put on full blast in this 15 minute clip. Sesame Street can be both blunt and allegorical when approaching difficult topics, and it NEVER misses or looses the point.
It does an exceptional job in both styles of representation WITHOUT watering anything down. The more sanitized everything gets, the more radical Sesame Street is suddenly considered, hence why so many "particular groups" want it gone. Hmmm! I can only imagine why that could be, in this current political climate! (I'm being sarcastic)
When Sesame Street is suddenly labeled as "questionable" or "politically/agenda motivated" content...it says A LOT about where we currently are and who gets to decide what's "best" for kids or not. Don't fall for the censorship and topic-dodging excuses that are covered by the "But think of the children!!!" movement. Never fall for it, because you know which side you're on if you do.
Sesame Street proves kids can be taught and trusted with learning about these topics when it's handled with the right amount of understanding and care. It shows what all this "controversy" is all really about. What it's always been about, actually.
Don't fall for it, always side with Sesame Street.
They kept cutting Nichelle Nichols' lines on Star Trek and telling her the part was small. Then she turned around and helped staff the United States space program. The first American woman in space and the first Black man in space both came up through the recruitment drive she ran after the show ended.
Small part, they said.
On the set of Star Trek, somebody kept cutting her lines.
Nichelle Nichols would get the week's script and watch Uhura shrink. A full page on Monday, a few words by the time the cameras rolled.
She was the communications officer of a starship. Some weeks the communications officer had almost nothing to communicate.
The people who ran the studio had a word for what they thought the part was worth. The word was small.
It did not seem to matter to them that Uhura was unlike almost anything Black audiences had ever seen on a screen. A Black woman in a position of skill and rank, treated by her crew as an equal, never once handed a tray or a mop.
There was something worse than the cut lines, and Nichols did not find out about it until later.
Letters were coming in for her. Bags of mail, from people all over the country who had never once watched a Black woman on television hold a job with that kind of steadiness and command.
She was not receiving them. Someone at the studio had quietly decided that Uhura's mail did not need to reach Uhura.
So at the end of the first season, Nichols made up her mind to leave.
Broadway was her first love. She had come up in musical theater, had shared a stage with Duke Ellington, and now a Broadway role was sitting in front of her.
She went to Gene Roddenberry, the man who created the show, and told him she was done. He was shaken, and he asked her to take the weekend and think it over.
That weekend there was an NAACP fundraiser, and Nichols went.
An organizer found her somewhere in the crowd. He told her one of her biggest fans was in the room and was asking to meet her.
She turned around expecting some Star Trek enthusiast. She found herself looking at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
For a moment she could not speak. She had grown up admiring this man, and here he was telling her that he admired her.
King said he was a fan of the show. He said it was the one program he and Coretta let their children stay up past bedtime to watch.
Then Nichols told him her news. She told him she was leaving the series.
She always remembered the way his face changed when the words landed. The warmth dropped away, and something very serious moved in behind it.
"You cannot and you must not," she recalled him saying.
He told her she had already done something that could not be undone. She held onto his exact words for the rest of her life.
"You've changed the face of television," he told her. "You've opened a door that can never be closed again."
He told her Uhura was not a small role at all. He told her that up on that bridge, in that chair, she stood ten feet tall.
Nichols tried to explain herself. She said she wished she could be out marching with him instead of pretending to fly a spaceship.
She never forgot his answer.
"You don't understand," he told her. "We don't need you on the front lines."
"You are marching. You are reflecting what we are fighting for."
She went back to the set that Monday. She stayed.
Star Trek ran three seasons and ended in 1969. The bridge of the Enterprise was plywood, paint, and colored lights, and once the show was canceled, the crew took the set apart and hauled it off.
The show was over. Nichelle Nichols was not.
By the middle of the 1970s, NASA was building the Space Shuttle and needed a new generation of astronauts to fly it.
Nichols looked hard at who NASA had been sending up until then. Every single American who had been to space was a white man.
She put it plainly when she talked about it years later. "There were no women, and there were no minorities in the space program, and that's supposed to represent the whole country?"
She had spent three years playing an officer on a fictional crew that the entire nation was supposed to look at and see itself in. The real crew, the one that actually left the ground, looked like none of that.
So she went to NASA. Not in a Starfleet uniform, and not as Lieutenant Uhura.
She went as Nichelle Nichols, running a consulting company of her own called Women in Motion. And she made the agency a deal with teeth in it.
"I am going to bring you so many qualified women and minority astronaut applicants," she told them, "that if you don't choose one, everybody in the newspapers across the country will know about it."
That was not a polite request. That was a promise with a consequence attached to it.
Then she went to work, and the work was relentless.
In 1977 she made a recruitment film for NASA. She walked the floor of the Johnson Space Center, looked straight down the camera lens, and called on women and people of color to apply.
"I still feel a little bit like Lieutenant Uhura on the starship Enterprise," she said at the top of that film.
Then she traveled. She stood in front of crowds at colleges, at Black sororities, at engineering schools, anywhere she could reach the people who had been raised to assume space simply was not meant for them.
She told them, to their faces, that it was.
She did it for months. Campus after campus, auditorium after auditorium, a famous face spending its fame on a government recruiting drive that most stars of her standing would never have bothered to touch.
The applications came back changed. Far more women, far more people of color, more than NASA had ever drawn before.
The astronaut class NASA selected in 1978 did not look like any class the agency had picked in its history.
It included Sally Ride, a physicist. It included Guion Bluford, an Air Force pilot, along with Judith Resnik, an electrical engineer, and Ronald McNair, a laser physicist out of small-town South Carolina.
Women on the list, Black Americans on the list. In the training, in the simulators, on the flight rotations.
In June 1983, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space.
That August, Guion Bluford became the first Black American in space.
Both of them had come into NASA through the recruitment drive Nichelle Nichols built with her own hands. The actress whose television lines kept getting crossed out had just helped send the first American woman and the first Black man past the edge of the sky.
Then came January 1986.
The Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off the pad on a cold Florida morning and broke apart a little over a minute into the flight. Everyone on board was lost.
Two of the seven were Judith Resnik and Ronald McNair.
Resnik, the engineer. McNair, the physicist who had come all the way up from a small town in South Carolina to a seat on a spacecraft.
Both of them had come out of that 1978 class. Both of them were people Nichelle Nichols had gone looking for.
She had stood in front of rooms full of young engineers and pilots and promised them the sky was theirs to claim. Resnik and McNair were exactly the kind of people she had been speaking to.
They believed her. They trained for years for it.
They climbed aboard on a cold morning in January, and they did not come home.
For Nichols this was personal in a way most grief is not. The faces in those recruiting rooms had been her whole argument, living proof that the space program could be made to look like the country it flew for.
Two of the people who carried that proof were gone seventy three seconds after liftoff.
Nichols did not stop the work after that. She believed the door she had pried open had to stay open, no matter what it had cost to hold it.
In September 1992, six years after the Challenger, the Space Shuttle Endeavour carried Dr. Mae Jemison into orbit.
Jemison became the first Black woman in space. She had grown up in Chicago, watching Star Trek, watching Uhura work that communications board, learning from a television screen that a Black woman could belong on the bridge of a ship.
Years later, at a birthday celebration for Nichols, Jemison spoke about what that picture had done for her as a girl. She said Uhura had shown her there was a place at the table, and that she had gone and taken one.
Nichelle Nichols died in July 2022, at eighty nine years old, in Silver City, New Mexico.
NASA released a statement when she passed. The agency's administrator called her a trailblazer and a friend, and said her Uhura had held a mirror up to America.
Think about where the whole thing started.
A young actress on a soundstage in the 1960s, watching a man with a pencil shorten her lines, being told by the people in charge that the part was small.
Sally Ride rose off a launch pad on a column of real fire in June 1983, because a recruiter named Nichelle Nichols had gone looking for her. Guion Bluford rose the same way that August, and Mae Jemison followed them both up in 1992.
They told her the communications officer did not have much to say. The communications officer got through.
Hi Cait 🥰 number 22 from the prompts list if it inspires you!!
thank you my sweet char! 🫶
22. “I’ve seen the way you look at me when you think I don’t notice”
Eddie presses his forehead against the rough wood of Buck’s front door, groaning quietly in frustration. There’s probably paint chips stuck to his skin by now, maybe a splinter too, but he doesn’t care.
“Buck,” he calls again, knocking without lifting his head. “I know you’re home. I followed you here.”
“Go away,” Buck’s voice filters through the door, quiet and humiliated.
“No,” Eddie says. He knocks again and hopes Theo isn’t asleep. Doubtful, given the rushed way Buck scooped him up and bolted from Eddie’s house. “C’mon Buck, talk to me.”
“Did enough of that to last a lifetime,” Buck replies sullenly, and Eddie can’t help but laugh.
“Well then it’s my turn,” Eddie counters, and he hears Buck’s head thunk against the door on the other side. Their foreheads would be pressed together if the door wasn’t between them, and Eddie bites back a grin. “I’m going to say what I want to say anyway, Buck. I’d rather not give your neighbors a show.”
Buck sighs loud enough for Eddie to hear. “Do we have to?”
“Buck. Please.”
Another sigh and some commotion, and then Eddie nearly falls on his face when the door is ripped open.
“Shit,” Buck swears when Eddie stumbles, catching him at the elbows. He lets go as soon as Eddie’s upright, looking just as pale as he did when he fled Eddie’s house thirty minutes ago. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Eddie says. He steps into the foyer and closes the door behind him. Buck is standing very still apart from his wringing hands; Eddie wants to still them with his own, but one wrong move might have Buck fleeing the state if he’s not careful. “Where’s Theo?”
“Watching cartoons,” Buck says. Eddie can hear the muted sounds of it from the living room. He opens his mouth to speak, but Buck cuts him off at the knees.
“Eddie, I’m sorry,” Buck interrupts, and again Eddie has to hold back a laugh. For all Buck’s protests against talking about it, he can’t help rushing in headfirst anyway. “I’m—you weren’t supposed to hear that, obviously, I mean—I mean it was your house, you had every right to-to—”
“Buck, no. I should have left when I heard you guys.”
“But still,” Buck continues, stricken. “I wasn’t thinking, we shouldn’t have even been talking about it, I—I never would have said that, I never wanted to-to make it weird. I’m sorry.”
Eddie nods and says nothing. Buck looks terrified, the same way he looked this morning over coffee when Eddie calmly regaled what he’d overheard. Not that he can exactly blame him. Eddie spent the night staring at the ceiling, recontextualizing his entire life and repeating Buck’s words back to himself, overanalyzing the heartache in his voice and Maddie’s calm, measured assurances until he gave himself a headache.
It was a just small party celebrating the end of the school year for the kids. Eddie offered to host this year, with Buck’s enthusiastic help, and it had been in full swing when Eddie realized he hadn’t seen Buck in forty-five minutes. Everyone was outside, enjoying the weather and homemade lemonade, kids playing in the sprinkler or gossiping in the shade. He eventually found Buck with Maddie, nursing their drinks on the floor of Chris’ room and watching Theo nap on his bed. Eddie hesitated just outside the door, struck by the sight—he’d never seen Theo so still. Maddie and Buck couldn’t see him, their heads leaned close together as they talked quietly. He was just about to leave them to it when he heard his own name and let curiosity get the best of him.
“Eddie wouldn’t do that,” Maddie said softly. “You can’t really believe he’d let this come between you.”
“It’s not worth the risk,” Buck had replied.
“But what if it is?” Maddie said. Eddie saw her reach for Buck’s wrist, circling it gently and rubbing her thumb across his hand. “What if he feels the same?”
Eddie’s heart stuttered to a halt. He should’ve walked away then, but his feet were like lead.
“He doesn’t, Mads. He can’t.”
“Buck—”
“No, seriously, it’s fine Maddie. Really. I’ll—I have so much going on with Theo and everything, and I just… I’ll get over it.”
“Will you?” Maddie asked. Buck was silent for a long moment.
“No,” Buck admitted quietly. Maddie laid her head on his shoulder, and Eddie had to leave then, padding quietly away before his pounding heart alerted them to his presence.
Eddie has no idea how the rest of the night went. He’d spent twenty minutes in the bathroom, hiding, staring blankly at a water spot on the mirror before he felt sane enough to rejoin the party. He was mentally checked out, barely able to hold a conversation, something buzzing violently in his stomach every time he laid eyes on Buck for the rest of the evening. It felt suspiciously like butterflies, and though he’d tried to drown them in lemonade and denial, they persisted all through the night as Buck stayed to help clean.
It was late by the time they finished. Eddie suggested they spend the night when Theo curled himself back on Chris’ bed; Eddie’s heart doubled in size when he asked Chris to read him a bedtime story, and he pointedly did not look at Buck. He wasn’t sure what he would have done if their eyes had met while Theo picked a book from Chris’ old favorites.
Chris slept in Eddie’s bed so that Theo could have his. Buck crashed on the couch not long after the kids, giving Eddie plenty of time to have about eight different crises in a twelve hour span while his teenager snored softly in his ear.
Now, Buck is staring at him, still wringing his hands, still scared, unaware of how thoroughly he’s flipped Eddie’s world on its head, how badly Eddie wants him to do it again.
Eddie steps closer. Buck tracks the move with sharp eyes but doesn’t retreat.
“So you want me to just forget about it then?” Eddie asks, and Buck deflates, looking equal parts relieved and disappointed.
“I—I think that would be best.”
“Because you didn’t mean it?”
Buck swallows—Eddie hears his throat click with it.
“I—you weren’t supposed to find out,” Buck says miserably.
“That’s not what I asked,” Eddie says, stepping closer still. He could touch Buck now, has to fist his hands at his sides to stop himself.
“Eddie,” Buck says, voice ragged. “Don’t.”
“Buck, just—listen, okay? I spent all night thinking about you,” Eddie admits, and Buck goes still. “I thought about everything you mean to me, and Chris. I thought about how terrified I was in New Mexico, and after, and every other goddamn time I almost lost you.”
“Language,” Buck says weakly, a habit formed since he became Theo’s guardian, though he’s well out of earshot right now. Eddie smiles, stupidly smitten, and it emboldens him to continue.
“I thought about how I’ve folded you into my life in every way, since the day we met. And how I depend on you, and trust you, more than I’ve ever trusted anyone. How strangers have always been able to see what you are to me before I knew myself. And mostly, I thought—about what it could be like, if we were. If we tried. And I want to try, Buck. I want—everything with you.” Eddie takes a deep breath and adds, “Forever.”
Buck inhales sharply, jaw slack with surprise, and Eddie closes the distance, finally taking Buck's hands between his. They’re clenched into tight fists, and Eddie loosens Buck’s iron grip one finger at a time. He slides his hands up Buck's arms then back down, feels the way Buck slowly relaxes under his touch. It's a heady feeling, having that kind of power, and he's instantly addicted. Buck's eyelids flutter when Eddie's hands find his hips, gently coaxing him backwards until Buck's back hits the wall.
"I thought about this too," Eddie says softly, letting his hands wander, fitting his fingers in the grooves between Buck's ribs. Buck’s pulse thumps in his throat—Eddie wants to taste it. "And the way you look at me when you think I can't see you."
"Eddie," Buck breathes. His eyes flick to Eddie's lips, and that's a rush too, one that goes through him like lightning, makes his stomach clench pleasantly.
"Yeah. Like that," Eddie says with a grin.
Buck's love-drunk expression cracks at last and he laughs. "Wow that was—did you practice that?"
"I did say I was up all night," Eddie admits, cheeks hot, smile too big and revealing.
Buck matches it, of course, and tentatively holds Eddie's waist at last. "God, Eddie, you—I—"
"I know," Eddie says, brushing a thumb across Buck’s jaw. "Me too."
Buck smiles again, almost shy, and leans his forehead against Eddie's. They smile at each other, cross-eyed and stupid with it.
"So, um," Buck says, leaning back a bit so he can hold Eddie's face in his hand. His thumb swipes across Eddie's warm cheek, then his lips, and Eddie shivers. "What, uh. What else did you think about?" he asks cheekily.
"This and that," Eddie teases, swaying closer when Buck's eyes land on his mouth again. "It was a long night. Probably easier if I show you."
Eddie goes easily when Buck tilts his chin up, and smiles into the kiss.
The FBI cut the phone lines during the 1977 disability rights sit-in. Then they turned off the hot water.
They locked the doors from the outside. One hundred and fifty people were trapped on the fourth floor. Half of them used wheelchairs. The government assumed they would leave.
Kitty Cone was thirty-three. She had muscular dystrophy. Her muscles were failing, but her logistics were flawless. She knew how to organize people.
The federal government had promised to sign regulations protecting disabled Americans from discrimination. The policy was known as Section 504. They printed the promise on paper. Then they stalled. Without a signature, it was just typography.
The protesters entered the regional Health, Education, and Welfare building in San Francisco on a Tuesday morning. They took the elevators to the director's office. They brought sleeping bags and catheters. They informed the staff they were not leaving until the law was signed.
By sunset, the police surrounded the exits. Kitty sat near the windows. She organized the floor plan. She assigned committees for security and sanitation. She kept her medication in a small cooler.
According to federal memorandums released decades later, the strategy to end the occupation relied on medical attrition. The building was not equipped for long-term habitation. The FBI calculated that a population requiring ventilators, specialized diets, and daily medical aides would voluntarily evacuate if the environment became sufficiently hostile. They instituted a blockade.
The blockade went into effect immediately. No food deliveries allowed. No medical supplies permitted through the lobby. Guards stood at the main doors checking identification.
Kitty's muscles deteriorated faster under the physical strain. She couldn't walk. When the phone lines went dead, the fourth floor lost contact with the press. The government waited for the quiet.
Kitty dropped to the floor. She realized the barricades were designed for standing adults. The police had blocked the hallways at waist height. They hadn't blocked the linoleum.
The floors were covered in cigarette ash and spilled coffee. She dragged her body through it. She crawled under the barricades to reach the restricted elevator shafts and unguarded offices.
She carried notes in her pockets. She found a single working payphone the FBI missed. She called the local news desks. She called the mayor's office.
She crawled back. When her arms failed, someone pulled her by her ankles. The Black Panthers heard the news reports. They crossed the police lines with hot meals. The FBI could not stop them without a riot.
They shut off the elevators, so she crawled.
The occupation lasted twenty-five days. It remains the longest non-violent occupation of a federal building in American history. On April 28, the Secretary of HEW signed the regulations without a single alteration.
The protesters left the building the next morning. They went back to their apartments. The Rehabilitation Act regulations laid the groundwork for every accessibility law that followed. The HEW building still stands on United Nations Plaza. The elevators run on a schedule. The doors are heavy glass.
Kitty Cone: the woman who crawled under the barricades.
One theme in DCC that I've been rolling around in my brain for weeks now is "If you were always doomed, does the love matter?"
Li Jun is one of the most obvious examples, he is saved by (and saves) Carl multiple times, and it doesn't matter because he dies on the ninth floor, right before the chance for freedom. What did it mean for Li Jun to struggle so much, only to die? Does the extra time with his sister and best friend outweigh all the pain and suffering he went through? Would it have been kinder to let him and his family die?
Annie's the other obvious one, the tragedy wasn't that Annie was sick and dying it's that she was denied the comfort of dying with someone who loved her! She was never going to live but the love that Katia gave her was real! Does it matter if it couldn't change anything? If Annie was only ever going to break Katia's heart should she have loved her in the first place?
The crawlers on the fifth floor as well, especially Langley and company, was it worth it to fight so hard to get off the fifth floor only to die early on the sixth? What does it mean if the second they gain confidence and purpose they just die? Was it worth it? Was it worth the struggle and pain?
If all of Signet's memories of her family are fake, if her whole family is fake, does her love still matter? Does her pain? Her hatred? Should she still fight for them?
Was Donut's love for Bea wasted? Do the moments of love and companionship between them mean nothing now because of Bea's betrayal? Were the moments between them fake even? If Bea had never taken Donut, Dount would never have met Carl, but is that they only thing she would lose?
What of Yvette? A girl born into a shitty family, who struggled and suffered to grow up only to die horribly and painfully and young. Would it have been kinder if she just died in the collapse?
Would it be better if Carl's mom never took him to the circus? Is it tarnished by the heartbreak that came after? Was suicide really the only way?
And the series over and over and over just goes: No! This is the only thing that matters! There will always, always, always be suffering and tragedy and heartbreak and death and you have to wrench joy and love and community from a world that wants to deny them to you! If you're doomed matter how hard you fight to survive then fight like hell anyway! Love even if it only leads to heartbreak! We can see these tragedies and call them unjust and fight for a better future but even if we never reach better the fight alone is worth it!
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.
Awkward confession time: whenever I feel like the world is shit and I can’t keep dealing with it, I watch this and/or read about cool science things to remind me that it’s not all bad.
i think the key difference between george lucas’s star wars and disney’s star wars is that lucas is a man with an ideology. someone with a point of view, and all that entails. which comes with ideas of revolution, anti-imperialism, challenging the status quo, cultural appropriation and racist stereotypes. complex and contradictory ideas because that’s how artists are: complex and complicated people. disney is not. disney is a corporation. a corporation can’t have ideology, because ideology defeats the purpose of profit. and when the only thing you do is to turn on the movie manufacturing machine before you sit down and plan what ideas are you trying to convey to the audience, then your results are going to be washed out corporate garbage. and because when you’re a giant corporation who only cares about selling to the widest audience possible, you can’t take sides. you can’t decide on an idea. because you want to sell your product to people who are on the entire political spectrum. which results in movies without ideology, without purpose, without soul.
I have been looking for this post for years after I came across it and it’s finally here and I need to reblog this because it is absolutely and entirely accurate.
#as I always say: lucas was making a samurai film and a ww2 flying ace film and a western film and adding laser swords#because he fundamentally LIKED samurai films and dambusters films and westerns and 40’s adventure serials#but disney are making a ‘star wars film’ and adding nothing because it already had laser swords and they have nothing else to say#xerox of a xerox baybeeeee (via harrietvane)
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