Politics & uhhhhh Stuff

FIRST:

The easiest way to get rid of the majority of the bullshit that Windows is forcing on us, as of October 2025, is this one-stop-one-click debloat solution from a modern day hero:

It's very easy, even if you're not tech savvy or get scared of pop up windows saying "ARE YOU SURE?" Yes, you are sure, I promise. This program takes maybe two minutes and will save you SO MUCH pain, time, and money (and exploitation).

Now that you've done that, here's the cleanup, to catch the little shit that the debloat might have missed (most of this will already be done by debloat, but hey, it's good to double check).

Even just reading about some of these features makes me angry. Fucking Copilot and "Discover" AI scrapers are in Notepad. NOTEPAD. And then there's this uncanny valley garbage:

No uncanny valley video calls for me, thanks! (Also, what else is it doing while it scans your face and listens to your calls? What else, microsoft? Because there was a lot of memory being assigned to this program for a simple "smooths your skin" add on).

The truly insane number of places they have stuck ads on your own home computer is sickening. Become Unmarketable.

Bonus:

Some background programs you probably don't need that are taking up space and how to remove them (Microsoft forums, 2024)

Your Samsung Galaxy Phone comes with 22 apps you don't need (Android Police, 2025)

it’s the same thing as what’s going on right now with people equating drag to some sort of child exploitation. “but the children!!” they wail, and people listen because oh, if drag is harming children, then drag MUST be BAD, so we HAVE TO BAN DRAG.

Do you they're going to like vote themselves out of jail? Vote to make murder legal? What exactly are you afraid of.

Realistically they'll just... vote just like anyone else. They'll help elect city councilmembers they think will better their hometowns, and presidents they think will best serve the country. They might even vote in their own interests! To reform prisons, fund rehabilitation programs, and outlaw predatory practices by telecoms. Are you saying you don't want any of those things?

And even if there were one of those super-duper-unambiguously-evil totally misanthropic death-row convicts, who's scheduled to be execute the very next day and just wants to sow chaos and watch the outside world burn however they can... what's the worst they could do, vote republican?

A local paper had some great photographs, all taken by Nicole Hester:

The day before, Rep. Justin Pearson tries to attend a Senate Committee meeting and is barred access by the Sergeant at Arms.

Lawmakers and protesters link arms as the descend the capitol steps.

Once inside the chamber, Democratic representatives continued to stand together with arms linked.

They continued standing together with arms linked as votes were cast.

Democratic representatives take a group photo protesting the redistricting.

Rep. Justin Jones burns a photo of the Confederate flag with the words, We will not go back.

And stomps the ashes.

KeShaun Pearson being escorted from the building by the Staties.

KeShaun Pearson (left) being taken into custody. Rep. Justin Pearson (right) showing his support of his brother.

Additional information: State lawmakers have been gunning for Pearson and Jones nearly their entire terms. Most notably, in 2023, the House expelled them for participating in a protest at the Capitol. Their districts had to have special elections to have them reinstated.

Pearson is one of the plaintiffs of a lawsuit seeking an injunction against the redistricting.

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.

That is not to say that other cultures did not have their own ideas about gender and what constitutes a man or a woman. Nor is it to deny these may have been oppressive in their own right. It is to say that the West imposed its own definitions as a uniform measure, and unsurprisingly, everyone else came up short...

White people set the standard for humanity by which they, and only they, could succeed. And this standard meant a strict hierarchy that placed white men at the top with white women just below them, followed by men of color, and then women of color occupying the lowest rung. I do not mean to say here that what all women of color experience is exactly the same or that there is not a discrepancy in privilege among them; only that whatever their race or ethnicity, women of color are always considered below both white people and men of color.

White women were the beneficiaries of a status higher than that of people of color but subordinate to white men, and it is this very status that enabled colonialism to succeed."

both function and feature of

white supremacy.

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.

In February, a user named EricKeller2 posted on Reddit. “I mapped every connection in the Epstein files,” he wrote. He had built a website and database of more than 1.5 million files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case. A giant interactive network graph showed the connections between 1,000-plus people in Epstein’s social world—through flight manifests, email exchanges, and other documents that connect them. The post included a link to the site: Epsteinexposed.com.

That post got 5.5 million views. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world visited the site in the days that followed. And EricKeller2 was busier than ever.

EricKeller2’s real name isn’t Eric Keller. He used a pseudonym to protect himself and his family from Jeffrey Epstein’s rich and powerful friends. A thirtysomething data engineer with a wife and kids, he’d been following the child sexual abuse case for years—reading court filings, depositions, materials from the Giuffre v. Maxwell case. But in the fall of 2025, as the initial deadline from the Epstein Files Transparency Act approached, he got more organized. And then he got obsessed.

Every day since then, Keller has been doggedly loading hundreds and hundreds of files into his database. Epstein Exposed contains material from many sources beyond the US Department of Justice’s file dump, including unsealed court records and FBI tips, and it focuses on exposing “the connective tissue,” as Keller put it, between the files. The site calls itself “the most comprehensive searchable database of every person, document, flight, and connection in the Epstein files.”

“There were nights I had to stop,” he tells me. “There are descriptions of things no human being should have experienced.” He remembers one 2017 email thread between Epstein and an intermediary, in which Epstein offers $300 to a girl for a topless massage. The intermediary tells him that the girl wasn’t available because she had school on Monday. Epstein then ups the offer to $400.

“You can build a mental wall between yourself and what you’re reading, but it doesn’t always hold up,” he adds. “Some nights it doesn’t hold at all.”

He has a personal reason for pouring himself into this project. “I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse,” he tells me. It’s why he can’t seem to look away from the horror inside those files. And so he builds.

Whistleblower on Reddit rage-blogs about how the food delivery company he worked for as a developer is ripping customers AND drivers off.

Main post screenshotted here in case it gets yanked; the whole thread is worth a read.

Quote by Samuel L. Jackson:

I'm 74. I don't know how much longer I am going to be around here raising hell or doing what I'm doing. But people need to start understanding that the economic gap is crazy. I pay an enormous amount in taxes, and it's fine because I know I should. But why can't we get billionaires to pay their fcking taxes? If those mother fckers paid their taxes we'd solve a whole bunch of sht. And they would still be richer than every mother fcker walking around them.

I was dumbstruck.

My parents had to go guarantors for the loan. My freaking parents.

I was in my mid-20s. I had a well-paying, secure job. I was single with zero intent to marry, and even if it had been on the cards it sure as fuck wouldn’t have been to the sort of person who would immediately insist I quit my job and stay at home.

But apparently, the fact that I was a woman overshadowed all of that stuff. That single factor meant I was a risky prospect and had to get my parents to back me.

go guarantors for the loan.

My freaking parents.