A friend sent me this on Facebook, it is amazing!
So does that mean that AI is more ethical than the humans running the program?
What got me is the very last sentence. That the data to bomb the school was a decade out of date! WTF!
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
"Say It Ain’t So, Joe!”
Those famous lines were uttered by a kid about Shoeless Joe Jackson after the Black Sox Scandal, but that could very easily be said of the Trump's family latest sandal, no not the war, not the Epstein Files but rather it is insider trading!
Now with Trump is anyone surprised that insider trading has become out in the open! (Note: when they say betting, they mean selling short or long depending on how you think the market will move. so if they are selling short (thinking that the price will drop) or going long (thinking that the price it will rise)),
April 20, 2026Throughout US President Donald Trump's second term in office, traders have been betting millions of dollars just before he makes major announcements.
The BBC has examined trade volume data on several financial markets and matched them to some of the president's most significant market-moving statements.
It found a consistent pattern of spikes just hours, or sometimes minutes, before a social media post or media interview was made public.
Some analysts say it bears the hallmarks of illegal insider trading, whereby bets are made by people based on information that is not available to the general public.
Others say the picture is more complicated and that some traders have become more adept at anticipating the president's interventions.
This is the perfect war for insider trading! With the on again/off again opening of the Strait of Hormuz the commodities markets bouncing up and down with each iteration of the strait.
Nine days into the US-Israel war with Iran, Trump told CBS News in a phone interview that the conflict was "very complete, pretty much".
18:29 GMT: Oil bets surge
These photos are from newspapers from the 1890s,
the era of the Robber Barrons
19:16 GMT: Trump says war is nearly complete
19:17 GMT: Oil drops by 25%
The first time the public would have known about the interview was at 15:16 Eastern Time (19:16 GMT) when the reporter posted about it on X.
Oil traders reacted to this news that the conflict could end much sooner than expected by selling oil, with the price plunging by around 25%.
However, market data shows a huge surge of bets were placed on the price of oil falling at 18:29 GMT - a full 47 minutes before the reporter's post.
The traders who placed those bets will have made millions of dollars from the movement in oil prices.
But remember, Trump stripped the agency in charge of policing Commodity market. He replace the chair with Michael Selig and many of the positions remain open on the Board.
US probes suspicious oil trades made before Trump Iran pivots, source says
Reuters
By Anirban Sen, Chris Prentice and Anushadevan Shah
April 15, 2026Summary
- Lawmakers raise concerns over potential insider trading
- Senator Warren urges deeper probe of administration officials
- CME Group says it monitors trading and urges scrutiny
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission is examining a series of trades in oil futures placed shortly before major shifts in President Donald Trump's Iran war policy, a person familiar with the matter said on Wednesday.
CFTC Chairman Michael Selig said in remarks prepared for delivery to Congress on Thursday that the agency will go after wrongdoers, but nothing in the testimony addressed any specific investigation and an agency spokesperson declined to comment.The CFTC probe is focused on trading of oil futures contracts on platforms belonging to CME Group (CME.O), opens new tab and Intercontinental Exchange (ICE.N), opens new tab, with investigators examining at least two instances of oil trades made on March 23 and April 7, the source said.
Well‑timed trades may have generated millions of dollars in profits, drawing concern from lawmakers and legal experts that decisions around war and diplomacy can create opportunities for abuse in volatile and opaque derivatives markets.
It is not just these trades that have raised eyebrows but also Congress.
The Christian Science MonitorBy Linda FeldmannApril 01, 2026Reports of big payouts from market trades that appeared to foresee major actions by the Trump administration – potentially with insider information – are becoming increasingly common.
Last week, the oil futures market saw a spike in trades about 15 minutes before President Donald Trump announced a pause in plans to attack Iranian power plants. The unidentified trader or traders had placed more than $500 million in trades, according to calculations by the Financial Times.
Similarly, the prediction market Polymarket saw a sharp increase in bets that proved lucrative right before the United States went to war against Iran and, earlier, invaded Venezuela.[...]“This is just astounding corruption,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said in a social media video. “There are a bunch of millionaires and billionaires in this country who are making money off of their inside information, their access to what President Trump is going to do or what he is going to say.”
The White House denies any wrongdoing by administration officials.[...]Suspicions of impropriety have sparked a wave of legislation, some of it bipartisan, in both houses of Congress. Senator Murphy, along with Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, another Democrat, has introduced a bill aimed at banning prediction markets from “wagering on government actions, terrorism, war, assassination, and events where an individual knows or controls the outcome.”
There are investigations being opened in Congress...
Ranking Member Raskin Opens Sweeping Investigation into “U.S. Special Envoy for Peace” Jared Kushner’s Foreign Entanglements and Staggering Conflicts of Interest
April 17, 2026
Press ReleaseIn Letter, Raskin Warns Kushner’s Dual Role as U.S. Negotiator in the Middle East and Financier Funded by Middle Eastern Governments Poses Grave National Security Risks and Likely Violates Federal Law
Washington, D.C. (April 17, 2026)—Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, opened a sweeping investigation into Jared Kushner’s financial conflicts of interest, demanding documents and communications related to his foreign-funded private investment firm and his simultaneous government service as the so-called “Special Envoy for Peace.” The inquiry comes amid mounting reports that Mr. Kushner is wielding diplomatic powers in the Middle East while fundraising billions of dollars in capital from foreign powers, whose interests diverge sharply from those of the American people.
“From the standpoint of the American people, your decision to act in these two roles—one public for the government and one private for personal profit—creates a glaring and incurable conflict of interest. Your clients Saudi Arabia and the Royal Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman have unique and significant strategic, economic and political interests that are certain to diverge sharply from the strategic, economic and political interests of the American people,” wrote Ranking Member Raskin.
Mr. Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, has amassed approximately $6.16 billion in assets under management—including $1.2 billion in the past year alone—with an extraordinary 99 percent of its funding derived from foreign nationals. These include sovereign wealth funds operated by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. At the same time, Mr. Kushner has assumed a central role in sensitive geopolitical negotiations across the Middle East and beyond.
With Trump we have the best government money can buy! Will the Trump administration end up rivaling "Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall" or the "Teapot Dome Scandal"? Trump likes to keep it in the family, so to him the family that steals together, stays together in prison!
So tune in next week when Diana’s Little Corner in the Nutmeg State brings you another exciting episode in the adventures of the wheelings and dealings Trump family!
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
They Always Hated The Truth
To paraphrase Jim Croce...
You don't tug on Superman's capeYou don't spit in the windYou don't pull the mask off the old Lone RangerAnd you don't mess around with Trump.
Trump and the Southern Poverty Law Center never got along... they exposed Trump's lies!
Vengeance is mine saith Trump!
AP NewsBy COLLIN BINKLEY, ALANNA DURKIN RICHER and REBECCA BOONEApril 21, 2026The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to secretly pay leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups for inside information, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with more than $3 million paid to informants through a now-defunct program to infiltrate white supremacist and other extremist groups. Prosecutors allege some of the money was used by extremists to carry out other crimes, but court papers did not include specific examples.“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said.
Having a paid informant in the meetings is not a crime!
The indictment came shortly after the SPLC revealed the existence of a criminal investigation into its disbanded informant program to gather intelligence on extremist group activities. The group said the program was used to monitor threats of violence and the information was often shared with local and federal law enforcement.
That also is not a crime!
Charges alleged the center paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups without disclosing payments to donorsThe GuardianAssociated PressTue 21 Apr 2026The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted on Tuesday on federal fraud charges, alleging it improperly paid informants to infiltrate extremist groups without disclosing the payments to donors, acting attorney general Todd Blanche said.[...]The indictment says the center told donors the money would be used to help dismantle violent extremist groups, but did not disclose that some of the funds would actually be used to pay members of those groups. Some legal experts say it’s an unusual legal approach.“That’s a new way of going after a charity – I’m somewhat surprised,” said Phil Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Typically, when a non-profit group is charged with fraud, it’s because someone is accused of pilfering donated funds to line their own pockets, Hackney said.But in this case, the government is targeting the method and intent in which a nonprofit used its money, he said.The government is looking at the informant payments “as an intent to further hate – and I doubt Southern Poverty Law Center had that intent”, Hackney said.
Okay, they are not required to do the things the government said they didn't do!
The law has never required non-profit groups to hand donors a line-item receipt for every sensitive operation, said Todd Spodek, a federal criminal defense attorney with Spodek Law Group PC in Manhattan.
Um... Um... Um... Where's the beef?
“From a defense perspective, this isn’t a fraud case. It is a political attack on standard investigative tradecraft,” said Spodek. “We are talking about high stakes intelligence work where discretion isn’t a form of deception, it is a matter of survival.”
In order to win a conviction, the government will have to prove the center engaged in a deliberate scheme to lie, Spodek said.
“They simply cannot. Silence of tactical details is not a crime, and you don’t get to call it fraud just because the government dislikes the methods used to get results,” he said. He later continued: “The prosecution is trying to turn operational discretion into a felony, which is a massive overreach.”
Um.. Yep.
The SPLC did a series of articles about the 2016 elections and how Trump caused the violence and that put them on Trump's hit list of those who were naughty and nice...
The SPLC today released two reports documenting how President-elect Donald Trump’s own words have sparked hate incidents across the country and had a profoundly negative effect on the nation’s schools.Joined by human rights and education leaders at a press conference in Washington, D.C., the SPLC called on Trump to take responsibility for his actions and to repair the damage he had caused.“Mr. Trump claims he’s surprised his election has unleashed a barrage of hate across the country,” said SPLC President Richard Cohen. “But he shouldn’t be. It’s the predictable result of the campaign he waged. Rather than feign surprise, Mr. Trump should take responsibility for what’s occurring, forcefully reject hate and bigotry, reach out to the communities he’s injured, and follow his words with actions to heal the wounds his words have opened.”In Ten Days After, the SPLC documents 867 bias-related incidents in the 10 days following the presidential election. Among them: multiple reports of black children being told to ride in the back of school buses; the words “Trump Nation” and “Whites Only” being painted on a church with a large immigrant population; and a gay man being pulled from his car and beaten by an assailant who said the “president says we can kill all you f—— now.”
That put then on Trump's list,
It Is About The Children
That has always been the rallying of the Republicans, way back with Anita Bryant and the "Save Our Children" campaign. And Harvey Milk standing up to their tyranny and now once again we are fighting against the bigotry.
America First Policy Institute, which boasts close ties to president, discussed transgender policy ‘reform’ at DC eventThe GuardianPhoebe PetrovicFri 17 Apr 2026Children are the “low-hanging fruit” in a longer effort to end gender-affirming care for all Americans, an official at a Trump administration-aligned thinktank recently said.Bans on medical transition comprise just one part of the larger, unprecedented assault on transgender rights mounted by a coordinated campaign of mostly conservative activists and policymakers in the US in recent years. So far, these restrictions have primarily affected minors. But leaders in the emboldened movement have begun to more openly admit their desire to attempt to end gender-affirming care for adults, too.
But a judge the other day said that it was all based on junk medical research...
JD SupraApril 20, 2026On April 18, 2026, the United States District Court for the District of Oregon issued a sweeping opinion vacating the “Kennedy Declaration,” a directive issued by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in December 2025 without notice-and-comment rulemaking. The Kennedy Declaration purported to establish that transgender healthcare for minors falls below professionally recognized standards of health care and threatened providers with exclusion from Medicare and Medicaid. Opinion and Order, State of Oregon, et al. v. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., et al., No. 6:25-cv-02409-MTK (D. Oregon Apr. 18, 2026) (ECF 93).The court granted summary judgment for the 22 Plaintiff States, vacated the Kennedy Declaration in its entirety, declared that HHS lacks authority to unilaterally establish standards of care superseding state-recognized standards, and permanently enjoined HHS and its Office of Inspector General (OIG) from implementing the Kennedy Declaration or any materially similar policy against any provider in the Plaintiff States.This ruling delivers immediate, concrete protection to healthcare providers in Oregon, Washington, New York, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawai’i, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin. The court’s opinion—notable for its extraordinarily pointed criticism of the administration’s conduct as causing “very real harm to very real people”—found the Kennedy Declaration unlawful on multiple grounds.
This is a big win... but you know darn well it will be appealed.
The court’s opinion is notable for its pointed criticism of this administration. The court was particularly scathing in addressing the administration’s claim that finding the Kennedy Declaration unlawful would infringe Secretary Kennedy’s First Amendment rights, stating that it would not allow defendants to “bully or gaslight this Court into ignoring the many procedural and legal flaws of the Kennedy Declaration by invoking one of the most sacred principles of our constitutional democracy—the freedom of speech—when that principle comes nowhere close to being implicated.” The court found that the actual principles offended were “the rule of law and state sovereignty.”
This is a very far reaching ruling... hopefully it will stand with appeals.
"Catering to the lowest common denominator"
"The implication is usually negative: it suggests lowering quality, depth, or standards so that everyone can understand or accept it, rather than aiming for something more thoughtful, complex, or refined."
Trump and the conservative attack on us is gear toward his MAGA base, it is designed to get them mad and out to vote. But they are only a small fraction of the voters, what does the rest of the voters think?
PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute)March 19, 2026A new national survey released today by PRRI profiles LGBTQ Americans and tracks Americans’ views on LGBTQ rights across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Based on interviews with more than 22,000 adults throughout 2025, this new data from the 2025 PRRI American Values Atlas measures public opinion on LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections, religiously based service refusals, and same-sex marriage. It also asks Americans if they agree that transgender Americans deserve the same rights and protections as other Americans.The survey finds that strong majorities of Americans support nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ individuals (72%) and favor same-sex marriage (65%), although support for both measures has decreased slightly over the past three years (down from 80% and 69% in 2022, respectively). Roughly 6 in 10 Americans oppose allowing businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ people on religious grounds (59%, down from 65% in 2022).Majorities of all major religious groups, except for Jehovah’s Witnesses, support nondiscrimination protections. Support ranges from 54% of white evangelical Protestants to 92% of Unitarian Universalists.“Support for nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ Americans and same-sex marriage remains high, including among most people of faith,” said Melissa Deckman, Ph.D., CEO of PRRI. “At the same time, there have been slight declines in support for LGBTQ rights over the past few years, largely reflecting growing party polarization.”
Then why are the Republicans attacking us? Why do they want to criminalize us? Because for the voters it is not a make or break issue, while for the MAGA it is. And they know our Achilles heel is bathrooms.
While most Americans agree that transgender people deserve the same rights and protections as other Americans, the majority of Americans (56%) also favor laws that require transgender individuals to use bathrooms that correspond to their sex at birth, with 40% opposing such laws.“We see a disconnect among many Americans between broadly opposing discrimination against transgender Americans and growing support for bathroom bills,” said Deckman. “Yet this increase in support for bathroom bills nationally is largely a function of strong movement among Republicans, whose support has nearly doubled in the past decade, from 44% in 2016 to 81% today.”
Where we need to do work?
In the past integration in schools helped us, when we were learning along side other it brought acceptance but now... the Trump adminstration now stopped enforcing the discrimination laws against us.
Support among young Americans ages 18-29 for nondiscrimination protections has decreased from 80% in 2015 to 70% in 2025, largely driven by a 24-point drop among young Republicans during this time (74% v. 50%). Support among older groups of Americans has stayed at similar rates over the past decade (among Americans aged 30-49) or increased among Americans aged 50 or older.
We need to turn that around, we need the support of our cis-gender peers!
A negative trend. I am on a LGBTQ+ speaker bureau and I have noticed that their engagement have dropped almost to zero. There are no laws here in Connecticut like in Florida that bans speaking on LGBTQ+ issues... it is only fear of complaints and it becoming a rallying point for local conservatives.
Monday, April 20, 2026
A Blue Heaven
We tend to think of the northeast as a liberal heaven but we are not homogenous there are pockets of conservatives here. Here in Connecticut it is the northeast corner of the state that sticks up it's red neck, So it should comes as no surprise that...
WHAMby Daniel FinkelsteinFri,April 17, 2026Pittsford Village Mayor Alysa Plummer is asking for people to come forward with information about 63 ribbons, bearing the colors of the transgender pride flag, that were taken off of poles in the village, calling the act "mean-spirited" and "deliberate."The nonprofit organization that put them there, Pittsford CommUNITY, raised concerns, saying they were supposed to remain until April 4."We put up ribbons for Transgender Day of Visibility," said Tharaha Thavakumar, president of Pittsford CommUNITY. "We received a permit. We applied for a permit in the village."When volunteers returned to take them down, they were already gone."We found out that nobody in our group had taken them down, (and) we then went to the mayor and asked if she knew of any staff the village staff had taken it down," Thavakumar said. "They said no. And so that's when we decided to file a police report."
They have surveillance video of the culprit in a green hoodie and the town is asking for its citizens to check their video on the night in question.
"It's a sign of belonging," Thavakumar added. "When something like ribbons get taken down, it just tells people that we're not welcome here, which, you know, it's not just the transgender community, but anybody that's marginalized who feels like they don't belong."
And when the town backs us up... it makes us feel welcomed.
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