IN THE DEEP FREEZE

Still has fantastic knees and ankles and nose and a face and breathes silently and her legs are under her body and I bet that, because she's about to be spayed due to her heart murmur, she has no hemivertebrae just to continue to make her otherwise the most physically sound frenchie I've ever seen. And her owner isn't letting her get fat.

but if you're like "this is relevant to your own current behavior" with the implication that the intracommunity thing they're currently big mad about is actually not as important and righteous as they're casting it in their head, it's like "no no. not MY behavior. mine is rational and I am correct. the issue I am fighting with other queer people about like rats in a sack IS actually the most important issue to be addressing right now"

and like

this is stuff I have to constantly watch out for in my own behavior! it is absolutely absolutely a thing, and absolutely something we ALL deal with and are capable of engaging in. it's ramped up in intensity the last year or two and I don't think that is a coincidence. I wish we were more capable of this level of analysis of this stuff without getting defensive.

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.

even if it sucks, even if they're saying things you want to refute, even if you think refuting will help things because Everyone Will Understand if You Just Speak Clearly Enough. even if you want to vent publicly because you think you deserve that much, acknowledging them is almost always the wrong move. you're just pouring gas and making sure that those couple little sparks turn into a fire. and all of them love to see you upset, not just the nazis threatening rape. sucks when it's your own, but hey, hurt people hurt people!

engaging is bad for a few different reasons. the first is that these people feed on attention. reply publicly, and that will give someone enough juice to make a new account every few days for a year plus, sending you paragraphs of insults mixed with strange accusations. whereas if you'd ignored them, maybe that obsessive phase would've only lasted a couple weeks. genuinely, you can create your own stalkers by reacting.

the second is that by engaging publicly, you're platforming them. even if you just post literal puppies and rainbows, there will be people hate-following who are pissed off about how many notes your latest puppies and rainbows photo got (because if you got more notes than them, it's punching up). they will see you engaging with harassment and go, hey, I can do that too! and that's how you get harasser mitosis.

platforming also has another problem. most people are good, but by the sheer quantity of people you'll be exposed to online, some will be malicious. if you are refuting something incorrect ("I never killed that man because I wasn't even in Florida on that day!") they will go right to the original slander ("they killed that man in Florida"), copy/paste, and spread it. or they will forgo the copy/pasting and just let it mutate in their memory so that it's a whole new thing by the time they spread it ("they killed several men and women in Florida, and also California").

currently, I'm in the 'block everyone who could potentially hate-follow and harass me' phase, but there is also some danger to that, because people see blocking as you acknowledging them, which (depending on the person) might be enough gasoline to rev them up. but it does at least provide some barrier, because making new accounts to block evade takes a modicum of energy, and if they're continually starved of further interactions, that energy will eventually fade.

I am separating them because historically, in the United States, when the damage done by conservatism and white supremacy is rightfully brought up and there is a desire to address the structural and social aspects that cause said harm, those in power try to get out of actual progressive action by being like "don't we need to heal? Why do we need to be divisive? we need to move on" every. time. (We see this a lot with Covid and during the Biden era for example. Despite the fact that immune compromised people are still at huge risk and we don't yet understand the consequences of long Covid or repeated infections, a majority of the nation has decided to just 'live their lives').

Those that benefit from the imperial machine do not want to hear that they've caused damage even if they are aware of it peripherally. They'll claim that 'they can't take the blame for their ancestors' while sitting prettily in the privilege afforded them by those same ancestors (I'm saying this as a white person myself, doesn't matter which way you slice it, even my Spanish-Argentine ancestors are colonists).

The continuation of this nation, founded on genocide, relies on white people putting their heads in the sand. White supremacy does not consider reparations "healing". White supremacy in its most mild form is uncomfortable talking about privilege. White supremacy in a more extreme form considers reparations (and Land Back for that matter) violence against 'them'. So many of the issues in this country, such as our lack of healthcare or our car dependent suburbia is because white people can not stand the idea of Black and Indigenous people having wealth or benefit.

TNR= the Trap Neuter and Release of feral cats.

Eradication = the mass euthanasia of feral cats. )

Something that irks me is when people are like "wow so and so supports TNR yikes" on a post from someone who rescues cats or works with cats. LIke what are you doing personally to help the feral cat problem that puts you in the position to be on that high horse? Are you putting in the time euthanizing or finding community cats homes?

TNR has its problems and honestly I dont agree with it personally but that doesnt mean I would shame or unfollow people who are doing rescue because of it. TNR people are pretty much the ONLY lay people who are boots on the ground working with feral cat populations spending their own time and money getting these cats help. If those cats have to be outside because euthanizing them would upset the community then its better for them to sterilized, vaccinated, and wormed then for them to just not be because it hurts your feelings. Yeah it sucks these cats are decimating native animals it sucks they lead such short lives but unless a lot of stuff changes fundamentally for how we treat cats TNR is currently a necessary evil especially in areas with dense feral populations where eradication would encourage more breeding and disease spread.

...

There's one person working at the CDC right now with clinical experience with rabies. One.

This isn't solely down to anti-vaxxer sentiment, though. This is the same type of intentional gutting of public health that this administration is famous for and that does end up endangering human health. Individual states and municipalities still require rabies vaccination for domestic animals and will issue fines if you don't get your pets vaccinated. But a pre-exposure rabies vaccine isn't typically given to human beings unless they are intentionally placing themselves in an environment where the risk of contracting rabies is higher (e.g., a scientist studying bats or a wildlife rehabilitation specialist).

Human rabies vaccination is typically post-exposure prophylaxis (a series of shots after suspected exposure to the virus). What pausing rabies surveillance does is blind us to current and future rabies outbreaks in animal populations, which then raises the likelihood of increased rabies exposure in humans.

It's the rabies vaccine legally required for dogs and cats? Yes.

Are there communities online that make fake rabies certificates that I've seen people admit to using? Yes.

Are some counties/cities so backed up and understaffed that there are people who have never received something telling them to license their dog and people use that as an excuse to not get the rabies vaccine? Yes.

Do people have outdoor cats that they simply never take to the vet? Yes.

Do many breeders tell people to delay or even avoid the rabies vaccine entirely? Yes.

An unvaccinated dog gets bit by something and owners don't notice and this dog, in the early stages, goes to... a dog park, or a family gathering and bites/licks people/dogs and now we've got mass rabies outbreaks.

Once, many years ago, a family member once was bitten by a local, usually-friendly indoor-outdoor cat, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that the owners had actually vaccinated him. Thankfully, this was years before the antivax rot got prevalent, because the family member in question of course took the proof of rabies vaccine as sufficient reason to not get the postexposure shots. Nowadays, I would be extremely wary of just trusting that, because it could have been faked (and you DON'T fuck around with rabies), but you'd probably run into your health insurance bitching about paying for the shots when you weren't electing to (posthumously!) test the animal.

Every animal that came in to my shelter was vaccinated on either intake day or the day after. If they were old enough, this included a rabies vaccine.

She is far more like Elon Musk. She is a radicalized person with an extreme amount of social and financial power, and for YEARS she has been using that power to try to influence her government into hurting vulnerable people, on purpose. And she has succeeded. THAT is the problem with her, and THAT is why spending money on her books is so dangerous, not because her books aged badly.

obviously we now live in an age where women don't have to be married to a man to have access to money, but the HEA expectation of romance novels is very much formed by this tie between romantic partnership and material wellbeing. no one ends a romance novel homeless, you know? the fantasy is that this institution can work. don't worry about patriarchy as a set of material and psychic conditions. this marriage is good and good marriage is possible.

with this repetition, the narrative fantasy (like gender, like genre) becomes a stable place you visit: sports is somewhere you can go where merit wins; romance is somewhere you can go where love saves somebody. what's striking about the rise of m/m sports romance in particular is that it raises the stakes of that fantasy even further--there is now somewhere you can go where THREE saw traps (marriage, violence, homophobia) become the conditions of happiness. i don't think it's a coincidence that as material conditions worsen, the escape fantasy becomes...more and more fantastic.

one more thing--much of sports romance's fantasy occurs via a specific elision of racism, particularly antiblackness. (sports in general does this much more transparently!) not a coincidence that hockey's the overwhelmingly white big 4 sport and also the locus of western** sports romance, particularly m/m sports romance. not a coincidence that the gays became repeatably consumable as desiring, deserving romantic subjects within the romance genre writ large before black people have. look at these goodreads shelf counts, and keep in mind that college-educated black women read more than everybody else, demographically:

romance as a genre is run by white women. consciously or not, the marriage fantasy these white women write over and over again protects whiteness more than it protects straightness. along this axis, the fantasy actually functions identically to the institution instead of transforming it. as the repetition of stories shows us, there's a hierarchy of which social conditions are onscreen, navigable such that 'marriage is good and a good marriage is possible', and which social conditions don't serve most creators' stakes in the marriage fantasy at all.

*for doing-my-real-job-today purposes i'm skipping some other very relevant overlaps between sports & romance--libidinal imaginaries, economies of ability and desirability, the temporal bound of a championship or a wedding, etc--but somebody else run w the ball pls

Apparently they are all available for free online. And not in the usual ahoy-there 🏴‍☠️ way things are available for free online, because apparently the author has given her blessing? Or she gave it her blessing several years ago during an AMA.

I’ve had a bit of a google and can’t find any statements contradicting that AMA.

This is the link to the reddit post I found with the books compiled into different formats - I use epub and so far the epub versions look great, but there are also pdf and mobi versions.

Striped Hyena (Hyaena hyaena), mother with pup, family Hyaenidae, Gujarat, India

Okay. So. You know how some people want to finish exterminating all large predatory mammals so they have less competition for deer and so they don't occasionally lose livestock? And you know how native deer species in North America have been hit increasingly hard with Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in the past couple of decades due to overpopulation thanks to the eradication of large predatory mammals that normally keep them in check?

We already have evidence that reintroducing predatory mammals to their native ranges not only knocks deer populations back to a healthier level, and now we've discovered that apparently the digestive systems of cougars and bobcats are lethal to CWD prions. Prions are among the most difficult pathogens* to eliminate; you have to heat them up to about 1,800 degrees F in order to thoroughly destroy them. And prion diseases like CWD are almost universally fatal.