I'll also admit I've never liked gambling (or fraud) so it's really hard for me to understand what is so appealing about something like polymarket or kalshi. (I have the same gaps with regard to casinos, they just seem like hell on earth -- not a positive aspect to them whatsoever) At least from my outsider's perspective it seems clear that these sorts of gambling are not good for society whatsoever.
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.”
Watch: Wilholt's essay consists of exactly and only one indefensible, rhetorical sleight of hand. Consequently, no one can honestly defend it.
Yeah right.
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
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.
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.
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.
“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...
1. Apply for a presidential pardon.
2. Get it.
If small potatoes are getting sued while the sharks swim freely. I don’t know what’s going to happen to the moral.
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
Morally it's ok to steal crypto from these types of markets, everybody is crooked there, client and market makers.
USA is a rogue state at this point. NATO is at risk because of that.
I wonder when someone figures out vote-buying-as-service
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...
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.
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?
But it seems to me that the closer to the frontline you go, the betrayal is even worse; if the story is true, then these are his friends and comrades he is endangering for financial gain - its not just an abstract risk argued away by simple high-level corruption.
Donald Trump Jr. serves as an advisor to both Kalshi and Polymarket...it's just comical
For a moment there I read this as the unlawful activity was Maduro's arrest, and someone made money on that fact.
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.
I almost always see this charge. Seems too strong as law
This is how a caste system works. People is not judged based on their actions but their relationship to power.
"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."
I keep remembering this sketch each time I read about the differences in prosecution in the US between social classes.
"Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi" [1]
[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quod_licet_Iovi,_non_licet_bov...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who? Because if you have evidence of military secrets being leaked through prediction markets, we actually need that journalistic record maintained.
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.
Is it helping sick citizens? No. Is it feeding the hungry? No. Free education, housing the un housed or protecting the environment? No, no , no.
To be perfectly clear, it’s not giving vets the benefits they deserve or keeping soldiers safe either.
Money. The priority is money.
Getting it. And making sure those that don’t have it don’t get it.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
unlawful use of confidential government information for personal gain, theft of nonpublic government information, commodities fraud, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction.
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.
So, two things. First, she's made quite a bit more than a few million dollars. Second, she's been an example of being a "suspiciously good trader" for years and years and years. Has anything happened to her? Republicans talk about her and do nothing about it. Democrats say it's a conspiracy theory. The behavior has quite clearly been normalized.
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2026/01/05/bbc-maduro-v...
> “Kidnapping” is an uncomfortable word. It suggests force, illegality and wrongdoing. “Captured” sounds more respectable. It belongs to the language of war. “Seized” sounds calmer still — almost administrative, like someone found it on a supermarket shelf.
It’s that there isn’t an Attorney General who would dare attempt raise a case against the hand that feeds them.
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.
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.
What matters is not raw power, it’s balance. The power of one guy with guns is kept in check by the power of other guys with guns who stand to benefit from the status quo. The aristocracy’s game is to play with this balance to make sure that no other rival force emerges. They do not need any actual physical power themselves to play it.
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.
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
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.
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.
if rules dont apply universally, then screw these rules altogether
[0] https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/acs-5...
Insider trading and outcome manipulation seems to be the norm on unregulated markets anyway. Whats the crime?
"Pentagon planning a military operation" is not exactly classified information as it is safe to assume that Pentagon is always planning a military operation.
Similarly over the last few decades the number of medical doctors who have immediate family who are also doctors has grown.
Social and economic class in the US is increasingly set in stone and hereditary.
"‘Absurd Corruption’: Disgust as Eric Trump Brags About Scoring $24 Million Pentagon Deal" - https://www.commondreams.org/news/eric-trump-pentagon-contra...
What level of corruption would warrant revolutionary action? How much more corrupt can you get than sending forces into combat in a war of choice that disrupts the global economy and kills thousands to win a bet on a crypto platform and shift the news cycle away from accusations of rampant pedophilia among the elite and the lack of prosecution thereof?
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.
Nah, life would be better if a cleptocrat couldn’t find his way into power.
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).
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.
Which is ridiculous because the entire thing was largely fabricated by the media for those juicy clicks. It was a "half truth" story that hinged on the public's general ignorance of derivatives trading.
While she acquired Nvdia shares days before the bill passed, it was entirely coincidental, because she had put in for those shares over a year prior. Craziest of all, which the media would never fucking say, is that she lost money on the trade.
Nancy Pelosi's most infamous insider trade is one she lost money on. It's one of the core stories I use as an example of how shamelessly misleading the media is. Destroying the country for ad views.
Saying anything at all on a speculation platform, especially if others don't even know your identity (or you have no reason to believe they do), can only be treated as speculative intent, not intent to disclose classified information.
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
Until the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, Collateral Debt Obligations were regulated differently in different states. Some said it was insurance, and thus regulated it like insurance. Some said it was gambling and banned it outright. Instead, regulation was handed to a toothless new agency who got little funding for enforcement and the rest of the world got the 2008 financial crisis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_Futures_Modernizatio...
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
The suspect hasn't been charged with insider trading. (OP said those "in DC seem to be able to do everything listed.")
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.
It's set up heavily tilted so you have to be rich, or dirt poor enough for a sob story, or a desired minority. Even if you do volunteer a lot and are middle class, you probably didnt know anyone that could help you into the most prestigious positions. A middle class person of equal aptitude would likely go into something like engineering or law which have fewer class-signalling non-academic purity tests.
That's absolutely not what Wikipedia says. There was indeed a horrible massacre, but why do you feel the need to falsify the reasons?
“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?
See, e.g., Iran's IGRC. Counterexamples: China, Russia — and the U.S.?
Trump has gotten shot once, almost twice.
Shinzo Abe got murked by some pipes from the hardware store.
Age limits (for Congress/Judiciary/Presidency) would be a much more targeted fix. Past ~75 you just don't have enough years left to be at risk of being affected by the things you're implementing. Dying in office of old age should be a deeply shameful way to go.
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.
I wonder who the american sniper of iran will be
I'm simplifying things quite a bit, but almost all military contracts are 8-year (typically split into a 4-year active and 4-year reserve period). If you leave on your own volition during this period, you typically have to repay the cost to the government to train you. And any contract that you're on where you received a signing bonus you have to pay back.
The actual mechanism for doing this is a different between officers and enlisted and they're some paperwork but functionally you can leave if you're really motivated to and for the most part people won't stop you (outside of a few conversations where people advise you against it).
The type of discharge you receive depends on the circumstances but generally there's a way to still get an honorable discharge (hardship, education, family, conscientious objector).
There's also the more practical quitting special forces vs leaving the military entirely. Tier 1 units only want people who want to be there and if you don't you can get transferred to some other job in the military in like a day if you really wanted to.
We already know that Jesus will come back in an election year
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.
We already bet on the weather.
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.
Not knowing in advance was an important factor
It’s hardly her face. After so much plastic surgery, it’s arguable it’s not even her own anymore.
At the moment the US is just Big Poland (PiS era).
I think that was the point GP was making.
But...why? Why not just let in the applicants that have the best grades?
And just generally, socioeconomic mobility has decreased in the US across the population.
No, he staged those demonstrations to win the election.
There is absolutely no picture evidence of any damage to his ear.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/23/hairdryer-or-l...
> 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.
The purpose of my response wasn't about cost effectiveness; rather, it was about the lethality of a ballistic missile vs Shahed-type drone.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.
That's why I am having great difficulty following that argument
Putin did it better; he kept the military weak and aggressively managed the risk via the FSB.
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?
What part of this paragpraph are you having a hard time with?
To say nothing of the processed food and automobile industries.
((military) citizens)
The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.
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?
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 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."
Still, as I bet you could agree when not aguing semantics, its inexusable for people to declare we should accept corruption
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"
The magnitude of the decisions made depends on various factors, but as a short-hand the size of the made trades in respect to the overall liquidity available near the midpoint directs how strongly the market makers react. A tiny trickle of insignificant trades does not move the price in any meaningful way (unless the sizes are so small that the execution commission starts to make a difference). A sustained directional flood of trades will cause the midpoint (and volume) to move to the direction where the market makers can sell at higher prices and avoid accumulating any further losses.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.
takes notes
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?
Racism is a complex phenomenon not limited to the simplistic view "they don't like black people". This representation is doing a disservice when some truly racist people are then justifying their actions and beliefs by saying "I cannot be racist, I'm friend with the garbage man who is black: he is a good black man, is polite to me and stay at his place. So, if I'm not racist, what I'm doing is just legitimate".
In the context of Tulsa, it is difficult to believe that the frustration of racist people seeing black people more successful than them has not contributed to the situation. It seems very natural and logical (and that's even the core of "white supremacy": it clearly states that white people deserve a better position in the social hierarchy than black people: white supremacy framing is all about how some classes are reserved to white people and not black people), and if you are claiming that it is not the case, you are the one with the burden of the proof.
While you have a point on raising that racism should not be reduced to only a class issue, you should have raised that as a precision around the discussion instead of presenting it as if racism has absolutely nothing to do with class and class sentiment.
To take back your parallel, what you do can be seen as: "A person entered a bar and was raped" (what you say) vs "A woman entered a bar and was raped". While nobody here claims that men cannot be raped, there is social phenomenon that create a gender imbalance, and it is important to not reduce the situation to "it has nothing to do with gender and the social norms around it".
In the rest of your comment, you, yourself, are doing a lot of interpretations. The fact that someone noticed that a class factor may have had an impact does not mean that they or all readers will conclude that it is the only way racism can happen (that is a huge stretch: if they know what happened at Tulsa, they very probably know a lot of other cases where the "only due to class" theory does not hold up). Same for "victim blaming": the fact that they were successful were obviously not used to excuse the massacre or pretend that somehow it was the black people's fault, the context is clearly to condemn the white racist people (and the success of the black people seems to be presented as an obvious additional factor on the racists, as it is obviously unfair to pretend that some people don't have the right to be successful).
I think the first comment was not totally perfect and would have been 100% fine if they would have simply added "class was one of the factor". But I think your reaction has way more problems and does a bigger disservice by reducing racism to a framework that can easily be instrumentalised by real racist people.
50% of revolutions in the past 200 years have been non-violent, and the non-violent ones have a much higher success rate. Even for violent revolutions, most aren't brutal. When there is brutality, it's usually because the pre-existing conditions were already brutal.
It is very simple.
Go read a book about it, and then if you still want to, you can tell us why this interpretation is wrong.
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.
"Don't feed the trolls". They absolutely do know what they're doing.
A US special forces soldier involved in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was arrested and charged for allegedly betting on that operation, netting him $400,000 in profits.
According to an indictment unsealed Thursday, Master Sgt. Gannon Ken Van Dyke opened an account in late December on Polymarket, one of the best-known prediction markets. He wagered about $32,000 that Maduro would be “out” by January. The bet was a long-shot.
But Van Dyke was involved in the planning and execution of Operation Absolute Resolve, prosecutors allege, and had access to classified information before he placed the bet. His winnings, though anonymous, caught the attention of law enforcement almost immediately.
Van Dyke, an active duty soldier stationed at Fort Bragg, faces five criminal charges for stealing and misusing confidential government information, theft and fraud. He will make his first court appearance in North Carolina. No attorney has been listed for him on the court docket.
He allegedly made 13 bets from December 27 to January 2, the last being hours before the overnight capture. Prosecutors said Van Dyke sent his more than $400,000 in profits to a foreign cryptocurrency vault before he deposited them in an online brokerage account.
A master sergeant in the Army is a senior noncommissioned officer, considered a key tactical leader and technical expert and serving as the principal NCO typically at the Army battalion level. Senior NCOs are often looked to for setting and upholding the standard for more junior soldiers in the unit.

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US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400,000 on Maduro raid
0:40 • Source: CNN

US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400,000 on Maduro raid
0:40
“Those entrusted to safeguard our nation’s secrets have a duty to protect them and our armed service members, and not to use that information for personal financial gain,” said Jay Clayton, US attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Van Dyke was photographed just after the operation – and from when he placed his final bet – on “what appears to be the deck of a ship at sea, at sunrise wearing U.S. military fatigues, and carrying a rifle, standing alongside three other individuals wearing U.S. military fatigues,” court documents say.
Van Dyke profited more than $400,000, prosecutors say. He then allegedly moved those winnings to a foreign cryptocurrency vault before he deposited them in an online brokerage account in what prosecutors called an attempt to conceal their origin.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a related complaint against Van Dyke on Thursday, seeking restitution, disgorgement and civil monetary penalties.
CNN reported last month that federal prosecutors were investigating the Maduro trade, according to a person familiar with the matter. The chiefs of the securities and commodity fraud unit at the US attorney’s office in Manhattan met with representatives at Polymarket last month.
After the bets were placed, the US military launched a covert operation that extradited Maduro from the presidential palace in Caracas in an overnight capture while coming under heavy fire. Maduro was transported to New York to face federal drug-trafficking related charges. He has pleaded not guilty.
Polymarket in a post on X said, “When we identified a user trading on classified government information, we referred the matter to the DOJ & cooperated with their investigation. Insider trading has no place on Polymarket. Today’s arrest is proof the system works.”
ABC News first reported Thursday’s arrest.
Trading on prediction markets has exploded the past year, with users now spending a few billion dollars each week on such sites.
Lawmakers in Congress have introduced more than a dozen new bills this year to further regulate prediction markets. Some of the bills, which gained bipartisan support, would stiffen penalties against government officials who engage in insider trading.
Trump told reporters Thursday he is concerned about the growing trend of betting on geopolitical events. Asked about the charges against the US soldier, the president said he was not familiar with the specifics of the incident but compared it to baseball’s all-time hit leader Pete Rose.
“That’s like Pete Rose betting on his own team,” Trump said, referring to the late baseball player who was banned from baseball for gambling.
Pressed on whether he is concerned about betting tied to the war with Iran, Trump said it’s a global issue.
“Well I think that the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino,” Trump said, adding that such betting is happening “all over the world, and every place they’re doing these betting things.”
“Now, I think that I’m not happy with it,” he concluded.
The Trump administration approved Polymarket last year to start offering trades for American customers, but its US-facing site isn’t fully operational yet. The Maduro-related trades occurred on Polymarket’s highly popular international site.
That site operates out of the reach of US regulations – which is how it’s able to offer markets related to war, which is illegal under federal law. But experts say Americans can easily access the offshore site with a virtual private network, or VPN.
There is a debate in the prediction market industry over the role of insiders in prediction markets. Some experts see these markets as a vehicle for information to flow more freely from insiders to the general public.
Asked about insider trading risks, Polymarket’s CEO told Axios in November it was “super cool” that his platform “creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market,” including insiders.
Polymarket rolled out new rules in March, to “clarify three core categories of prohibited insider trading conduct.”
They banned trades based on information that users were legally required to keep confidential, and trades based on tips from someone with the same obligation. They also said people in “a position of authority or influence” to affect the outcome of an event cannot participate in any related markets.
This story has been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Marshall Cohen, Haley Britzky and Alejandria Jaramillo contributed to this report.