This is how a caste system works. People is not judged based on their actions but their relationship to power.

The word "power" is so ironic in human cultures:

It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.

The aristocrats' "power" is make-believe like the rest of their papers and numbers: The various psychological barriers which dissuade the gun-bearers from ever reaching the "want to" part.

Not at all. In a caste system a lower caste person will get attacked if he (or especially she) has any success at all. Whether or not what they did was legal or not does not factor into the equation. First priority is that the highest up dalit is lower than the worst drunkard brahmin, even if they have to kill them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

The cause of this riot was not Tulsa. It might have happened anywhere for the Negro is not the same man he was thirty years ago when he was content to plod along his own road accepting the white man as his benefactor. But the years have passed and the Negro has been educated and the race papers have spread the thought of race equality.

What part of this paragpraph are you having a hard time with?

"The massacre began during Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white 21-year-old elevator operator in the nearby Drexel Building.[25] He was arrested and rumors spread that he was to be lynched. Several hundred white residents assembled outside the courthouse, appearing to have the makings of a lynch mob. A group of approximately 50–60 black men, armed with rifles and shotguns, arrived at the jail to support the sheriff and his deputies in defending Rowland from the mob. Having seen the armed black men, some of the whites who had been at the courthouse went home for their own guns. There are conflicting reports about the exact time and nature of the incident, or incidents, that immediately precipitated the massacre.

According to the 2001 Commission, "As the black men were leaving, a white man attempted to disarm a tall, African American World War I veteran. A struggle ensued, and a shot rang out." Then, according to the sheriff, "all hell broke loose."[26] The two groups shot at each other until midnight when the group of black men was greatly outnumbered and forced to retreat to Greenwood."

Instead, you assert it was a mob that assembled to lynch a young man who was arrested for assault after he stepped on the foot of or grabbed the arm of a white female elevator operator when he tripped in the elevator. I guess they got out of hand when there was resistance to their murdering the kid.

Why is that distinction so important to you?

I already specified:

There were too many successful black men

As my concern, because you made up this reason. How does your paste show this as the reason? Why are you ignoring the reasons in the Wikipedia article, which are clearly listed, including a timeline, and just making a reason up?

The sad part is, there is no need to embellish or make up things here. The event was series of excessive, horrible escalations, nothing Wikipedia says indicates it was planned, or that your made up reason was why. There is no need to falsify reasons.

Why are you presenting your imagined reasons as fact?

EDIT: I just don't think people get it.

Stating a presumption as fact, turns in-the-moment into premeditation. It also means something else, which needs to be considered.

By trying to tie this event to "wealthy black men", it seems as if simple, general racism wasn't the cause alone. That somehow, black people had to be wealthy to receive this sort of treatment. Here's another parallel:

"A woman entered a bar and was raped"

vs

"A woman in a short skirt entered a rough bar and was raped"

It adds a layer of "victim blaming". These black men weren't slaughtered because they were black, no, that could never happen! It was instead because they were wealthy, that's why!

By trying to tie this to the fact they were wealthy, you diminish the case over overall racism as a motivator for these sorts of act.

The black community resisted the lynching and stood up for the poor bastard they wanted to murder. Their prosperity as a community and individually gave them the fortitude to fight back.

It wasn’t “because they were rich”. It was because they had agency and dared to stand for their rights as a community. For a person who believes that the color of your skin makes you an inferior or superior human, that is an unforgivable affront.

In the history of revolution, there is never (except in elementary school) all that much weight put on the singular act which instigated the final result. The conditions in place (Jim Crow laws, Southern pride, etc.) lead up to a final moment which our monkey brains like to point to as the cause but in reality there is a simmering cultural froth which could boil over in any number of ways: it just happens that one of the ways is what's described in the Wikipedia article, but it could have started many other ways. All of our understanding about the experience of being Black in the US during that time helps to contextualize the extreme and disproportionate outburst of violence by the White population as racially motivated, serving under an ideology best described as ur-"Great Replacement Theory".

In simpler words, the destruction of Black Wall Street is not without precedent, indeed this was merely one of the more famous and complete examples of destroying the wealth that Black people enjoyed, if only briefly due to the hate of those visiting violence upon them.

Most Americans share a delusion of perpetual glory days like a former star high school football quarterback with the refusal to accept factual reality that their country isn't uniformly excellent and is terrible in many ways including being extremely superficial, corrupt, dangerous, unhealthy, unhappy, paranoid, over-reacting, immature, selfish, unfair, disinformed, and unequal.

https://anacyclosis.info

Then ENFORCE EXISTING LAWS. That solves good part of it.

Talking about any other solutions will have to wait for govt that's not crooked. It doesn't need revolution, it needs to not have criminals at helm

I’d argue that the level of corruption we’re seeing, not just in the USA but all over the Western world, hasn’t risen to a level that warrants revolutionary action.

> nobody seems to care

And it would seem that the masses tend to agree.

We are much much better off tolerating this level of corruption than we would be attempting a revolution.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how fat the fat cats are so long as the general population’s standard of living doesn't go backwards too far too fast.

Just look at something like Office Space. Just twenty seven years ago, it was a satire of the indignities and disrespect of work life. Today, the movie's work environment would be incredibly cushy.

A certain amount of corruption is normal - as Doctorow pointed out, all complex ecosystems evolve parasites. It's much better to have a democracy with some corruption than a police state that enforces its laws perfectly.

Now, when people realise the current state of their democracy and how it reflects the needs of the people, then they'll start considering bringing out the guillotines.

There is no we to prevent any revolution occurring once corruption or "mere" wealth distribution unsustainable discrepancy are passing some thresholds, after which it simply will feedbackloop exponentially.

Pauperization that allows some party to have chip exploitable labour too frightened to have strong collective claims is also building the social structure of bloody revolution as masses feel like rushing into brutality is the only viable left option.

The police and intelligence are well paid to keep an eye on all kinds of signals. Unless the situation reaches a point they cant pay the cops any voilence will be shut down fast, because over time they have become quite good at it. Just like we have become good at running gigantic boilers without them exploding. Even poor states are good at it. Because anyone running a farm, factory, depending on banks, telcos, ports, power grid etc are all very dependent on the state to keep the lights on. More efficent they get the more dependent they are on external structures staying in tact to stay afloat.

The world today is a much more complicated place, full of interdependcies(as covid showed us), than what it was when revolutions were seen as the solution to anything.

So Organizing and Voting still remains the easier way to cause change as tempratures rise. Thats the control and feedback mech.

To say nothing of the processed food and automobile industries.

takes notes

Nah, life would be better if a cleptocrat couldn’t find his way into power.

I'd say that either way the population will not rebel. If the government is smart they'll just pay for the populations Netflix, burgers and beer. It's enough to keep people passive.

We, today, are better not attempting revolution because revolutions are painful. But we are also on a downward slope which will eventually reach below a threshold where 2 things happen: their* life will be much worse off than any revolution, but also they will no longer be able to mount a revolution.

I've lived through a violent revolution. Not knowing what's happening, not knowing what tomorrow brings, while getting shot at are all terrifying. I can genuinely say that most of what came after was better. A few paid a high price for the several generations that came after to mostly have it better.

I am not advocating revolution, just doing what it takes to change course. Even voting appropriately could do it.

*I say they because it might not happen in our lifetime. But we are selling our kids' futures for our current comfort. They'll be the ones really paying our debt.

Worker's compensation in real terms has been almost flat for the last 50 years, 50 years which have seen the largest increase in productivity in recorded history by far. I'm surprised this is still not enough to you.

Well, given that people are behaving more and more violently towards said fat cats I think it's clear we're starting to reach a breaking point and people are caring. It wasn't too long ago that I saw people cheering on LinkedIn when that healthcare CEO got got, so if people are willing to put their professional profiles at risk you have to imagine it's far worse behind closed doors.

Personally I really dislike living in interesting times and greatly prefer advocating against corruption rather than letting things slide until they get a lot worse.

The reason for those price increases is those countries don't have massive fuel stockpiles. The west does have big stockpiles, and they're artificially suppressing the price of fuel by releasing those stockpiles and hoping the special operation is over before their stockpiles run out. Because if prices shoot up now, people will realize just how truly disastrous it all is and actual consequences for various governments may be had, so the only option is to kick the can down the road and hope it somehow resolves itself.

Asia is in a particularly bad situation, because even for countries that do have stockpiles, they get basically all of their oil from Iran, the UAE, east coast of Saudi Arabia, etc. Now they have no oil. America can pretend it's a 4D chess move and now those countries will buy American oil and make their economy great again. But the thing is America isn't selling any additional oil to Asia. But America is 100% dependent on cheap things made in Asia, things that are built with plastic made from middle eastern oil and powered by electricity generated from middle eastern oil and shipped on boats running on middle eastern oil. All these things take months to show any effects to Americans and Europeans, so until then, it's just a game of burying heads in the sand until the situation suddenly explodes.

We’re looking at fuel shocks, downstream the agricultural, fertilizer, and food shocks are gonna cost untold anguish and many lives. Farmer suicides and famines, as the start of a destabilizing wave.

1) for the second time in my adult life I have to ask aloud how shit Dick Cheney was saying on 60 minutes ca 1993 escaped the notice of the entire US military and its commander in chief

2) the obvious lack of a post-strike plan and confusion about how mountains and waterways work make it hard to pin down how elementary and remedial the eff-ups here really are, so incompetent and indifferent

Very few people feel impacted by that. If you consider bombing Iran was going to happen anyway because distractions are needed, the money made by the whale that consistently predicts the movements of the current administration is a relatively small thing compared to starting a war for no good reason.

One possible solution is to make all trades public and traceable to the person who made the decision and the people who benefit from that.

If the laws are not enforced or selectively enforced you live in a nascent fascist state, not a democracy, what you need is a return to the rule of law, not the abolition of it.

It's just that the problem is not the trading or betting side, the problem is the information producing side.

E.g. imagine he placed a bet that Maduro would get shot in is left eye and die.

Same goes for the congress. Them making money is by far a smaller issue compared to the havoc they can cause trying to make a few bucks on their crazy bets.

The main difference between the two is that betting on the date of a classified op indirectly reveals classified data that can tip off an adversary and cost lives.

Ignoring the moral argument, it isn’t all that clear to me that this would actually be a crime for a legislator under US securities law. It may be that new laws would be required to be able to punish legislators for this kind of behaviour.

Senate and congress are both elected. Their re-election is effectively jury nullification.

The people do not care about the crimes.

The 10 best performing historical congress people stocks are all republican,a ll men, all funded by lobbys like heritage foundation...

But the face of insider trading becomes a democrat and a woman

Its sooo diffcult to guess why it happened

Nowadays super riches run the show and even the illusion of democracy is gone.

Another thought: many political elites are probably waiting and pushing for Trump to fail to take over. It is us who are going to suffer.

It’s that there isn’t an Attorney General who would dare attempt raise a case against the hand that feeds them.

At the moment the US is just Big Poland (PiS era).

"Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi" [1]

[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...

That's not to say the behavior isn't extremely slimey but they are acting within the law. Your comment doesn't mention the executive branch and the various crypto "ventures" going on, like the Whitehouse dinner for investors of $TRUMP coin of which we have no idea who invested or what they got from it.

When the people feel everyone is corrupt without any evidence then the next step is getting actual corrupt leaders like Trump's government and soldiers like this that feel corruption is standard behavior

Count 1 - Unlawful Use of Confidential Government Information for Personal Gain

Count 2 - Theft of Nonpublic Government Information

Count 3 - Commodities Fraud

Count 4 - Wire Fraud

Count 5 - Engaging in a Monetary Transaction in Property Derived from Specified Unlawful Activity

For a moment there I read this as the unlawful activity was Maduro's arrest, and someone made money on that fact.

Who? Because if you have evidence of military secrets being leaked through prediction markets, we actually need that journalistic record maintained.

The suspect hasn't been charged with insider trading. (OP said those "in DC seem to be able to do everything listed.")

I think that was the point GP was making.

There is circumstantial evidence. We need to collate that. But nothing trumps direct evidence. If someone has that I will bend over backwards to find a way to securely connect them with, at the very least, a reporter who can document it so it shows up in an internet search when an empowered staffer starts down this path.

Count 1, 4, and 5 are the crime of committing a crime. Crime 1 is commiting a crime for personal reasons. 4 is commiting a crime over the wire. 5 is commiting a crime using money.

The only real crime is Count 2: Theft of info.

Damon Jones didn't work for the NBA and basically just told some people the status of an injury to LeBron because he hangs out with him (in exchange for money). His crime I guess is gambling illegally? But wire fraud (I think they even say "creating a fraudulent market") was thrown in there.

Seemed inevitable they were going to start charging prediction market insiders the same way.

I almost always see this charge. Seems too strong as law

"Pentagon planning a military operation" is not exactly classified information as it is safe to assume that Pentagon is always planning a military operation.

IIRC, the bet was on "Nicolas Maduro out?":

> If Nicolás Maduro leaves office before February 1, 2026, then the market resolves to Yes.

So the bet wasn't specifically "Nicolas Maduro kidnapped?" or even "Nicolas Maduro out by January 3rd?" And IIRC there was a lot of Trump saber rattling about Venezuela in the days before, hence the creation of the bet. I could absolutely see a plausible way to link these publicly-available pieces of information into a winning bet:

* Trump talking tough about Venezuela

* Spike in DC pizza activity on January 2nd

“Our Office will continue to hold accountable those who misuse confidential or classified information in a way that undermines and exploits our national security.”

But isn’t wire fraud harder to prove than leaking classified facts?

I can't shake the feeling that there may be political reasons to not even attempt that angle. What legal precedent would it set if a judge actually ruled on that and the prosecution won? Which entities within the government would be financially inconvenienced?

Is it true with these markets the more people bet on a specific day and time, the value will increase more, increasing the overall payout? If that is true, I wonder if they're looking at anybody else helping place the bets or a group of people trying to wager a higher amount of money to increase the return?

Think about it: you have N market makers offering both sides of the trade with a spread between them. When there is no other meaningful activity, the best prices are more or less stable. Now someone comes in and buys one side of the trade. Each marker maker will, individually, make the same two decisions:

    1. "If you bought at that price, I should raise my price and charge you more"
    2. "Since you bought at that price, I must assume you have more information and I should get out the way to avoid an expensive mistake"

On the flip side: who if not me and my precision guided munitions, will protect America (and freedom) from the clear and present danger of 8 year old iranian girls.

I wonder who the american sniper of iran will be

And those prediction markets will have derivative markets to predict if an insider in the prosecutor's office bet on that contract.

And those prediction markets will have derivative markets to predict if a special prosecutor will prosecute the other prosecutor.

And those prediction markets will have derivative markets to predict if an insider in the special prosecutor's office bet on the other contract.

(additional derivative markets will exist up to the divine wrath of god).

We already know that Jesus will come back in an election year

We already bet on the weather.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...

Shahed is very primitive in general and not hard to shot down but because its extremely cheap it can be used to overwhelm any type of air defenses. Wasting $4 million to destroy a $50k drone doesn't scale at all.

    > Imagine doing an easy tour in your air conditioned Kuwaiti logistics office and then getting blown to bits by a ballistic missile because no one bothered to tell you about the war that was being initiated which would cause such missiles in retaliation.

A ballistic missile is easily detected by a network of outer space satellites owned and operated by the US Space Force. Whether or not you can defend against it is a different question. There is sufficient time from the detected of ballistic missile launch to move to a hardened underground bunker. All US bases in the Middle East will have these. Soldiers will regularly train for incoming ballistic missile attacks and when/how to move to underground bunkers. As a result, it is very unlikely that soldiers in an "air conditioned Kuwaiti logistics office" would be killed by an incoming ballistic missile.

On the other hand, a Shahed-type drone (similar to a cruise missile) is much harder to detect because they fly very low and difficult to catch on rader until close to base. As a result, soldiers on base will have much less time to move to underground bunkers.

if rules dont apply universally, then screw these rules altogether

I think the worse aspect is if the news of an attack being leaked to the defender and you are being blown to bits as their ballistic missiles are not decimated in their preemptive strike.

Not knowing in advance was an important factor

Those people should quit. Sour grapes isn’t an excuse for putting others’ lives at risk.

Why? The enlisted military has never had any issue with similar double standards in the past. George 'AWOL' Bush handily swept the military vote, as did Donald 'Bone Spurs' Trump.

Likewise, veterans routinely and overwhelmingly vote for people who cut veteran support and benefits, over people who don't.

If they think those people are fit to lead them, who are we to tell them they aren't?

If he'd stuck to $500 - $1000 bets, he could have stayed under the radar. And, over the period of his career, earned well north of $400k.

They are just ordinary gambling unless you allow insider trading and manipulation, because that’s the only way the market can acquire and represent novel useful information.

But if you allow those things, you run into a host of well-documented problems which are the reason why those things are forbidden in other markets.

As it stands, prediction markets seem like a tech-aligned rebranding of age-old rigged gambling products.

Representing only public information without agenda is useful in itself. Words are cheap, and which words you get to see and which words you don't get to see is according to some non-truth incentive. Prediction markets say "you get to make money if you know what the truth actually is". Media says "you get to make money if you entertain people".

It's unfortunate there's also significant negative side effects to financialized prediction markets. I'm more favorable to non-financial prediction markets like Manifold, which say "you get to have social status if you know what the truth is". Seems as though that's the right balance, although you could see how such non-financial prediction markets can be more easily defeated by dedicated non-truth actors if it became prominent in the public conversation.

I think this is visible in sports betting markets. Unless all games are rigged, games outcomes are fairly random events, and betting markets are pretty good at assessing the probabilities of a team winning. Same thing happens in finance. Option markets are really good at assessing the probabilities of asset movements.

The thing though is that these markets are only good in predicting recurring events like game results or financial asset movements. They are good _overall_, as in, if you take 100,000 sport games, the bettings odds are going to be overall in line with what actually happens.

Hence some people deduced that crowds with skin in the game were wise in predicting random stuff. And what happened then is that some of them thought this kind of predictive power could apply to any kind of event, and then predictive markets were created, with the idea that crowds could magically come up with odds for anything, and that would be fairly correct. But what works for recurring events don't hold for single events like Maduro's capture or the end of the Iran war. So the odds in these market is only the result of influence and insider information.

The result is that the odds are generally completely off, unless there is insider information. That's kind of what happened in the 2008 financial crisis. The bets there were on loans defaulting. These events are rare enough that it's impossible to assess their probability easily. And so banks relied on rating agencies (influence), to price the odds of these events happening. Rating agencies were wrong on a lot of these bets, meaning all the bets were placed at very very wrong prices, resulting in the crisis we saw.

The weird outcome of it all, is that those prediction markets have become insider information detectors. That's how they caught the guy. Whoever is winning big on these markets is necessarily cheating.

But I guess the main takeaway for me is that society is in such a state that a lot of people actually bet big on these things. Probably a combination of being fed dreams of fortune since childhood and the american dream not delivering. It's all very sad.

However I am convinced that forcing people to keep their shares for even just one week would stabilize the markets enough to make insider trading much more obvious (and easier to prosecute). It would also force a shift on perspectives more on the long run, instead of focusing on immediate speculation.

This was a prediction market, not a proper market trade, and I am glad I live in a country where that is outlawed. This is untaxed, unregulated gambling.

Someone more cynical can say that this is about protecting Thiel’s investment(if people think it’s rigged may stop playing) or making sure that only big G makes money with classified information.

unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A654vzQTGbQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN4njIQcSR4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymarket

USA is a rogue state at this point. NATO is at risk because of that.

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Albeit wrongly attributed. [1]

[1]: https://slate.com/business/2022/06/wilhoits-law-conservative...

It goes from "taking out a hit" to "betting that someone will live to next Thursday". It's such an obvious outcome of these systems that I was operating on the assumption that it was the actual point.

So maybe the thing this guy did wrong was to be so face-palmingly pants-on-head obvious about it that they had to shut it down?

"Want something to happen? Bet a lot of money that it won't" goes both ways. "Want to make money and have power over missile systems? Bet, and then make something happen."

This is why welfare systems exist. Because otherwise the system will push people to crime, especially so in our current implementation of Capitalism where it is possible to become unemployed/unemployable through no fault of one's own.

When the history of this administration is written, provided that history itself has not been completely rewritten a la "1984," Goodfellas will be required reading/watching.

And the highly profitable daily mood-induced oil price bets will just be forgotten.

Wilhoit's Law:

Wilhoit's law.

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

https://pylimitics.net/wilhoits-law/

Politics aside, he isn't a "little guy". He apparently holds the rank of master sergeant. That's a senior battalion-level role and somewhat political.

This isn't some random E-4 getting dragged.

Yes, there are some hard working NCOs and junior Os out there that make shit happen, but they are not the decision makers and make for great fall guys when shit hits the fan.

Not that it’s defensible behavior.

To be fair, that bar is quite a bit lower these days, but still..

Pursuing this case doesn’t mean they’re excluding other cases. If you read the article this case was very clear because he made amateur moves and didn’t conceal his identity at all.

This was an easy nab. All leaks should be pursued regardless of who did it.

A 400 million plane "donation"

I am guessing that you would not actually go all-in against a penny, and I’m curious to know what implied probability you actually offer. I will see your bet amount as an expression of your confidence level. If you say that you don’t bet, I’ll take that as an indication that you have no confidence, and believe the probability to be something above 50%

His salary this year was probably about $118k on standard pay scales. I’m not sure what your definition of little guy is, but to me that qualifies

(Not trying to be condescending to anybody here, that’s not far off my salary and I’d definitely call myself the little guy)

This is absolutely a low level soldier getting dragged.

Yesterday, people could justifiably say that betting on polymarket had essentially no consequences.

Today, we learned there can be consequences.

If in a year’s time this is the only person to ever be charged, that’s a different story.

He also made it all very obvious and traceable for them through the email addresses he used. From the report it doesn’t appear that he made any effort to conceal his identity or hide his tracks until afterward, by which time it was too late.

He wasn't a "little guy" but apparently his only mistake was not being high enough.

I know you’re trying to make a separate point about Congress, but it’s silly to try to turn this into a class warfare thing. Congress didn’t even have this information at the time.

> Today’s announcement makes clear no one is above the law

What others are saying, IIUC, is that no reasonable person believes an enlisted soldier (even a senior one) is above the law and that in fact there is a history of them being used as fall guys or scapegoats for people who do enjoy protection on the basis of their social class or government position.

Without this specific statement from the FBI director, then it would be "soldier gets caught doing bad thing" and the other part would be off topic. But the article itself introduces the idea of class and impunity.

> ...but it’s silly to try to turn this into a class warfare thing.

You can ignore the class warfare but the class warfare isn't ignoring you/your country.

It’s a hot take. It’s also a one off. You don’t have to strategize building the case law to then enable further investigations and prosecutions, a process which takes year and is beyond the internet’s attention span. (Silver lining: these takes are also mostly meaningless. Gears will grind on.)

Rule of Law means no one is above the law. In practice this is an aspiration (in the U.S. and everywhere else) but giving up on that isn’t going to make the world better.

I often think about how much we can trust history 20-30 years from now. It is hard to trust history from hundreds of years ago, either because it was written by victors or because there just isn't enough material in the first place. I suppose we have the opposite problem now (and in the future) - too much noise and junk, whole bunch of it generated by AI slop - where does one even start?

Then clear the docket because you're going to need a lot of investigators to even begin on the Trump administration.

Here's a recent article from the American Bar Association on the rampant and on-going f*ckery.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/resources/human-righ...

None of this remotely has to do with 'Conservatism', it's certainly not ideological, and it's likely not political either.

This indictment is going to cause a massive headache for White House as they have likely been involved in 'insider trading'.

This is actually regular Justice, finally seeing some movement, to cynically characterize it as otherwise, totally against common sense (aka it's bad for the WH) is just unsound. I think it demonstrates the kind of bubble a lot of people live in, which is maybe understandable in the current climate, where horrible behaviours have gone unpunished. But still. This is the story of a state doj doing their job.

This is a hugely negative thing for the Administration, as District Attorneys, SEC staff, etc. are going to be actively seeking how this could parlay into investigations and indictments of the people in the White House making Polymarket and other speculative bets just before government actions.

There are 100's lawyers reading that right now getting inspired on how they can take action to turn their investigative powers onto whoever those actors are aka family members or associates of those in the White House / Cabinet.

An investigation could be done at the State Level, away from the control of the DoJ, and, if it yields evidence, it wouldn't have to even make it's way through the courts in order to be political destructive.

The suggestion by the OP this has anything to do with ideology or the ruling power throwing one under the bus is ridiculous. Note that the ruling regime isn't above such a thing, but that's not what is happening here because it definitely does not serve their interests - it's the total opposite.

This could turn into a political nightmare that crashes the party.

Edit: if we want to be 'hopefully cynical' - recognize that this could absolutely be the vector that takes the man down, or even many of them. Imagine how many WH, Cabinet Members, family members could get investigated for this and under purvue of state investigators where the investigation can't get shut down.

Watch: Wilholt's essay consists of exactly and only one indefensible, rhetorical sleight of hand. Consequently, no one can honestly defend it. Attempts to do so are undeserving of serious scrutiny.

After tearing down a strawman, he claims high ground:

> The law cannot protect anyone unless it binds everyone; and it cannot bind anyone unless it protects everyone.

But you'll get a fair bit of support for Wilholt's so-called anti-conservative principle from a fair number of prominent conservative thinkers.

Many prominent conservative thinkers are not particularly big fans of Trump. They like portions of his initiatives and policies but not him as a standard bearer, because he does dumb, ill-principled stuff at odds with conservatism.

Peggy Noonan of the WSJ can't write two sentences without letting you know how much she disdains Trump, e.g.

Are people allowed to be self-made anymore?

For me personally, after years of planning and hard work, I once managed to secure myself about $40k of passive income from a blockchain in crypto; this lasted a few years but eventually the founders suspiciously abandoned the entire tech stack (for no reason) and switched to Ethereum; this destroyed the opportunity for me; literally lost that stream entirely. Now, recently, I was able to re-establish a passive income stream of about $10k per year from a non-crypto source; this is from an opportunity I took over 10 years ago... I'm worried about that being taken away somehow.

This isn't joe schlub making side bets here. This is a senior late-career enlisted in an extremely sensitive position violating all of their trust and authority to cash out big.

If small potatoes are getting sued while the sharks swim freely. I don’t know what’s going to happen to the moral.

Donald Trump Jr. serves as an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket...it's just comical

1. Apply for a presidential pardon.

2. Get it.

Nobody should be surprised.

Hegseth thinks loyalists + AI as brains can replace decades of actual real-world experience and keeping the highest ethics and morality standards with a bunch of AI-driven baboons with stars on their shoulders.

Paul Krugman wrote a good piece about exactly this. https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/cultifying-the-us-militar...

Everyone can already feel the ripples of what he is doing. There is an exodus in excellence in the upper echelons of the us military never seen before.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/22/navy-secreta...

The US is getting less safe by the day. You can also see it on tourism data and forecasts. A lot of people don’t feel safe to travel to the US any longer.

Soccer World Cup in the US and 250th anniversary of the USA would have caused a tourism boom with past administrations. But people rather go to China instead.

https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/tourist...

Pelosi has made many suspicious trades: https://insider-trading.org/the-nancy-pelosi-insider-trading...

Suspicious trades before Trump's Iran announcements: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge0grppe3po

Isn't it better that I don't vote?

Maybe. I'm not actually that invested in people voting. But that doesn't negate the hypocrisy of complaining when you're, through inaction, endorsing the status quo.

And your choices are evidently you're completely okay with the current situation as well.

Its valid to be more annoyed by the ways that they’re the same

your cause is not my cause, its better for the viability of your preferred party if you remember that

You are what you'll accept, and you looked at the choices given and said "I'm okay with either one".

Because the consequences of whatever mutual dissatisfaction you had still means one of them gained power and implemented their agenda anyway. And you were okay with that.

You don't get to not make a decision and then pretend you aren't culpable for your inaction.

good luck out there

what to remember: the goal of the parties are to win friends and influence people, it's a weird meme that you aren't doing that and neither is the other party. time to re-evaluate the communication style yeah? proselytizing isn't working

Have you considered the possibility that the meme might be false? That would explain neatly why it's so weird.

parties are losing members and partisan’s methods are not effective

there is a big lane of persuasion that isn’t being filled

Who is the "we" in this sentence?

Yes, insider knowledge makes the prediction market more accurate (albeit at the cost of being less "fair"). However US government doesn't want prediction markets to accurately predict the timing of their secret military operations. Hence the arrest.

It's not so much insider knowledge that's a problem, but insider influence. You're paying people to make bad decisions.

Although, it would be amusing to create a sports league where the athletes are expressly permitted to wager on the outcome of their games.

It's not so much insider knowledge that's a problem, but insider influence. You're paying people to make bad decisions.

Morally it's ok to steal crypto from these types of markets, everybody is crooked there, client and market makers.

Have any other whatabout-its?

He should have just cashed out and donated 20% of it to Mar-a-Lago saying exactly what he did and a thank you. It's a little too low for a club membership but since the President's family is a shareholder of Polymarket I think it would have been seen as attracting liquidity

AG would have been instructed to stamp out the investigation, no charges would have been filed

Yet prediction market fraud is made an enforcement priority, except to say that nobody close to Trump's own cabinet will be prosecuted - the little guys will be made an example of to make it seem like those at the top are taking the moral high-ground. "Every accusation is a confession."

I think we all can guess at the truth here.

I wonder when someone figures out vote-buying-as-service

Just as Smedley D. Butler once stated, many many years ago: "War is a racket"

Obama called this out explicitly after the ruling and his analysis has been more or less accurate.

The canadians have the info. He was special forces. He was enlisted (not an officer). He was involved, or at least privy to, the planning of the Venezuela thing.

https://globalnews.ca/news/11814801/maduro-capture-polymarke...

Epstein said the same, and yet nobody went out to protest.

This is why no-one at the top institutions, politicians (Pelosi), presidents (Trump) and everyone else in proximity gets arrested or charged for insider trading in all forms. It doesn't apply to them.

This is a reminder that the rule makers are allowed to grift and break their own rules, but will arrest you for copying them or doing the same thing because this soldier was not part of their club.

He wasn't invited to their private insider group chat. So this solider was arrested and charged instead.

The suspect didn't trade securities. SEC doesn't have jurisdiction. The curiosity–to me as a layman–is that this is being prosecuted by the DoJ versus under the UCMJ.

"Van Dyke was indicted on charges that included unlawful use of confidential information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, and wire fraud."

End result is you place bets against things you want to happen. eg. USA invading Iran. If you win the bet, you make money. If you lose the bet, you still win because the USA invaded Iran. And maybe that happened because people in power took your bet and influenced the odds in their favor. A fully deniable market for bribes. Same reason you can't bet on unnatural death, because it crowdsources assassination.

Different people and organizations in this world have different goals. More news 10.

Not my downvote btw, corrective upvote now applied.

* Unlawful Use of Confidential Government Information for Personal Gain

* Theft of Nonpublic Government Information

* Commodities Fraud

* Wire Fraud

* Engaging in a Monetary Transaction in Property Derived from Specified Unlawful Activity

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/media/1437781/dl

If you're the Trump hand-picked Secretary of the War Department then it is not illegal and will never be punished.

Always remember which tier of justice you are on prior to committing a crime!