TACO for Profit

Is this the best timed trade of 2026?

At 6:50 AM ET today, $1.5 BILLION in notional value worth of S&P 500 futures contracts were bought.

This trade was so large it sent the entire index +0.3% higher that minute.

Then, 14 minutes later at 7:04 AM ET, President Trump announced… pic.twitter.com/zFdZ1sQxeq

— The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) March 23, 2026

Roll Tape!

So, Donald Trump announced a unilateral suspension of some strikes on Iran, because Trump Always Chickens Out.

I do not expect Iran to reciprocate, because they (IMHO correctly) believe that this is merely a ploy by the Americans to time for the next round of attacks.

I think that Trump's announcement on social media that there have been, "Very good and productive conversations," probably has another motivation, personal profit.

You see, minutes before he posted it, someone made billions of dollars in futures trades, on the S&P 500 going up and oil prices falling.

It seems that someone was trading on this information, and my guess is that their name rhymes with Ronald Lon Rump. 

Unusually large futures trades placed minutes before a major geopolitical announcement have sparked allegations of potential insider trading, after market participants pointed to timing and scale that appeared closely aligned with U.S. policy developments.

According to data shared by the market-tracking account unusual_whales, approximately $1.5 billion in S&P 500 futures contracts were purchased while roughly $192 million in oil futures were sold just five minutes before President Donald Trump announced a halt to attacks on Iran.

The trades were reportedly four to six times larger than typical order sizes observed at that time.

The sequence of events has raised questions over whether the trades were informed by non-public information, given the immediate market reaction that followed.

What will the SEC do about these suspicious trades? 

I think that they will take a cue from Inspector Renault.

One of these days,  I need to watch Casablanca in one sitting.

I've seen all of it, but not all at once. 

Trump Lied? Pshaw!

I am not at all surprised that the snollygoster of snollygosters Donald Trump lied when he claimed that a former President told him privately that they approved the war.

After Donald Trump claimed twice on Monday that he had spoken to a former US president who told him that he approved of his attack on Iran, all four living former presidents denied having spoken with Trump about Iran in statements from aides to CNN and other outlets.

Donald Trump is to honesty what Ebola is to French kissing. 

Well, This Is a First

In Oregon, Federal Judge Mustafa Kasubhai threw out a lawsuit by the Federal government demanding that Oregon turn over their voter roles.

At the core of his reasoning is that the DoJ no longer has the, "Presumption of regularity,"which is another way of saying that they are lying through their teeth.

A federal judge in Oregon issued a sweeping rebuke of the Justice Department’s nationwide push to seize state voter rolls, ruling that the department can no longer be presumed to be acting in good faith and warning that its conduct threatens voters and states’ rights.

And the judge cited a recent letter sent by Attorney General Pam Bondi linking the voter roll crusade to the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minnesota as one reason to doubt the department’s truthfulness.

In a sharply worded opinion released Thursday, U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai concluded that the department’s public statements and actions stripped it of the trust courts typically afford federal law enforcement agencies.

Kasubhai had already announced from the bench — on two separate occasions — that the DOJ’s lawsuit seeking Oregon’s unredacted voter registration data would be dismissed.

“The presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to Plaintiff that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds,” Kasubhai wrote. “When Plaintiff, in this case, conveys assurances that any private and sensitive data will remain private and used only for a declared and limited purpose, it must be thoroughly scrutinized and squared with its open and public statements to the contrary.”

The short version is that Attorney General Bondi's letter to Minnesota demanding complete voter rolls in exchange for ICE thugs standing down shows them to be dishonest.

………

Kasubhai pointed specifically to the letter to Minnesota from Bondi that tied federal immigration enforcement to demands for voter data as the smoking gun, saying it cast doubt on the DOJ’s stated motives.

“The context of this demand within a letter about immigration enforcement casts serious doubt as to the true purposes for which Plaintiff is seeking voter registration lists in this and other cases, and what it intends to do with that data,” he wrote.

While the judge was explicit that the case could be dismissed on the law alone and had already planned to dismiss the case before the Minnesota letter was drafted, he went out of his way to say DOJ’s public conduct now undermines the “presumption of regularity” it has long enjoyed.

So basically, he said that they could not be trusted, and also noted that even if they did, their case was complete bullsh%$.

His ruling is already being cited in other jurisdictions. 

 

Headline of the Day

ChatGPT is Bullsh%$

—Ethics and Information Technology (%$# mine)

Normally, this would not be a particularly notable headline, but Ethics and Information Technology is a prestigious peer reviewed journal.

One does not expect this in an academic publication. 

Interestingly there is a fairly substantive as to whether ChatGPT "Hard" (deliberate) or "Soft" (negligent) bullsh%$.

Their conclusion, both:

………

The structure of the paper is as follows: in the first section, we outline how ChatGPT and similar LLMs operate. Next, we consider the view that when they make factual errors, they are lying or hallucinating: that is, deliberately uttering falsehoods, or blamelessly uttering them on the basis of misleading input information. We argue that neither of these ways of thinking are accurate, insofar as both lying and hallucinating require some concern with the truth of their statements, whereas LLMs are simply not designed to accurately represent the way the world is, but rather to give the impression that this is what they’re doing. This, we suggest, is very close to at least one way that Frankfurt talks about bullsh%$. We draw a distinction between two sorts of bullsh%$, which we call ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ bullsh%$, where the former requires an active attempt to deceive the reader or listener as to the nature of the enterprise, and the latter only requires a lack of concern for truth. We argue that at minimum, the outputs of LLMs like ChatGPT are soft bullsh%$: bullsh%$–that is, speech or text produced without concern for its truth–that is produced without any intent to mislead the audience about the utterer’s attitude towards truth. We also suggest, more controversially, that ChatGPT may indeed produce hard bullsh%$: if we view it as having intentions (for example, in virtue of how it is designed), then the fact that it is designed to give the impression of concern for truth qualifies it as attempting to mislead the audience about its aims, goals, or agenda. So, with the caveat that the particular kind of bullsh%$ ChatGPT outputs is dependent on particular views of mind or meaning, we conclude that it is appropriate to talk about ChatGPT-generated text as bullsh%$, and flag up why it matters that – rather than thinking of its untrue claims as lies or hallucinations – we call bullsh%$ on ChatGPT.

(%$# mine)

There is no "There" there.

The Headline is Very Revealing

There are now reports that Elon Musk's company Neuralink has been granted approval for clinical studies of its brain implants in human beings.

The interesting thing is that when I searched the news about this, all the headlines were the same.

Not one said that the FDA granted approval, they all said something like, "Neuralink claims," or "Neuralink says," that it has FDA approval for human trials.

This is an odd, and rather contrived, way of stating this.

It's almost as if no one believes a word that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ says.

It's not like he did any of the following:

• Falsified self driving demonstrations.
• Falsified solar shingles.
• Misstated sales and production number of Tesla cars.
• Resold returned lemons.
• Lied about recalls to customers.
• Lied about a battery swap program.
• Required customers with defective cars to sign non-disclosure agreements in order to get service.
• Lied about accident rates at the factories.
• Overstated Starlink speed and latency.
• Overstated Starlink coverage.
• Claimed regulatory approval for an east coast hyperlink loop.
• Lied about his dad having an ownership interest in an emerald mine, after telling the truth about it 5 years earlier.

Oh, wait, he DID do all of those things.

Maybe Elon is just a lying sack of sh%$.

How Many More of Them Are There?

See the AR-15 pin?

As I mentioned yesterday, we have another George Santos in Congress, Anna Paulina Luna, whose purported life story is as full of hoses as the entire output of a Swiss Cheese factory.

Short version: 

• She has in the past, "Described herself as alternately Middle Eastern, Jewish or Eastern European. Known then by her given last name of Mayerhofer, Luna sported designer clothing and expressed support for then-President Barack Obama." (She changed her name to run for Congress)
• Maintained that her father was in and out of prison in her youth. (No records exist of George Mayerhofer ever being incarcerated nor of any felony convictions)
• That she was the victim of a home invasion.  (Her roommate at the time notes that it was a burglary that occurred when no one was at home, and police reports confirm her roommate's account)
• That her extended family deserted her and her mom.  (Disputed by her rather extensive extended family)
• That multiple members of her family had died of HIV/AIDS contracted through heroine use.
• "When Luna first registered to vote in Okaloosa County, Fla., in 2015, she identified herself as “White, not of Hispanic origin.” But she marked her ethnicity as Hispanic when she updated her registration in 2019."
• Stated that her father was a Messianic Jew (Like Jew for Jesus, only funded by different people), despite the fact that her paternal grandfather (pictured) identified as Catholic upon emigrating to Canada, and served with the Wehrmacht in World War II.

Seriously, this is some seriously f%$#ed up sh%$.

That last bit is like the joke about the man whose grandfather died at Treblinka when he got drunk and fell out of his guard tower.

Seriously, these people lie with more facility than they breath.

I'm beginning to wonder if this is some sort of massive effort to punk the Republican party.

Focusing on the Throw-Away Lines

John Oliver was on this fire this week, and mostly, he was lambasting the press, particularly the local press, over the deference shown by the press, particularly at the local level. 

This is something that needs to be said, but I want to focus on something that he used as supporting data which he tossed out as self evident, and universally accepted truth, specifically that police departments are habitual liars.

I have the quotes below, and the full video at the end, and it reflects a very real change to John Oliver's, and one would help the general public's view of police.

This is a good thing.

Money quotes:

8:40:	It is why if you watch the TV news for any length of time you will undoubtedly hear one particular phrase ……… Yeah, "Police say," it's a phrase that you constantly hear from the mouths of news reporters it's right up there with this just in or back to you or I apologize for the accent I did on Cinco de Mayo.
14:50:	And this speaks to one of the major problems of deferring to police ……… Police, and they lie a lot as you've seen on this show.  They've lied to get search warrants to conduct raids and to get confessions uring interrogations and they even lie under oath so often in fact here in New York it came to be known as testi-lying.  All of which should be more than enough for the word of the police to be treated with immense skepticism rather than repeated verbatim.
15:25:	Take the notorious press release the Minneapolis Police put out following the murder of George Floyd titled, "Man dies after medical incident during police interaction."  What you may not know is it was picked up almost word for word by local news the next morning. ……… Now obviously, that is a hugely self-serving statement from the police because by saying George Floyd died because of medical distress their role was completely erased.  His medical distress, and I'm using the biggest air quotes humanly possible here was the result of an officer pressing his knee into his neck for nine minutes. Repeating that claim by the police is an act of malpractice against a Walter Cronkite saying, "JFK died of a headache today.   Sure, it's not technically wrong but it's the understatement of the f%$#ing century.

If juries start to take a realistic view of the testimony of law enforcement, prosecutors would not be able to convict John Dillinger of robbing banks.

The solution here is very simple though:  Just start prosecuting testa-liars for perjury.

Once there is a realistic fear of consequences for lying, cops will stop lying.

Tru Dat

Manchin’s go-to method for killing things is to act like a stone-cold moron and pretend he’s gonna find 10 Republicans to vote for something. https://t.co/oDYQEhyvqv

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) April 26, 2022

I know that Joe Manchin is probably the only "Democrat" out there who can win a statewide race in West Virginia, but that does not require Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) to treat him as trustworthy partner with which to develop policy.

There is a difference between a conservative Democrat and a disloyal one, and folks like Manchin, and Joe Leiberman, and Kyrsten Sinema are not helping the party.

They are, to paraphrase LBJ, inside the tent pissing in.

Without Racism, the Right is Nothing

WaPo writer Phillip Bump defends Joe Biden from accusations that targeting racism is in fact an attack on the whole right wing movement in an essay titled, "Biden’s targeting of racist extremism is being portrayed as an attack on the right itself."

The ever-racist Rand Paul has accused Biden's of, "Calling us white supremacists, calling us racists, calling us every name in the book."

Paul is saying that, "Biden thinks Republicans are racist liars."

I think that Joe Biden's entire political career shows that he is willing to work with Republicans, and he does not think that they are [all] racists liars.

This is complete bullshit.  It is clear that Biden's efforts and  pronouncements are a NOT apart of deliberate effort to demonize and perhaps prosecute the his political opposition.

His entire career mitigates against this accusation.  Biden has always gone along to get along with the most contemptible people in politics.

However, there is a way that Rand Paul's accusation IS accurate.

Specifically, it should be noted that the modern conservative movement, at least back to the days of William F. Buckley's endorsements of segregation (And arguably as far back as the founding of the Republic), racism has been inseparable from the political right in the United States.

It is transparently obvious that meaningful sustained efforts to fight racism in will necessarily target the right wing.

Short version of this argument:  If Rand Paul is concerned that Joe Biden's fighting racism is an attack on him, then Rand Paul needs to stop being a racist dirt-bag.

Stating the Obvious

The folks at the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) are shocked to discover that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook will lie to the press without compunction.

Well, duh:

One day in July 2016, Casey Newton, a tech reporter for The Verge, sat down at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park for the biggest interview of his career. Across from him was Mark Zuckerberg. With his characteristic geeky excitement, Zuckerberg described the promising initial test flight of Aquila, a drone with a wingspan larger than a 737 jet that was part of his plan to provide internet connectivity all over the world.

Though Newton hadn’t witnessed the test flight in Yuma, Arizona—no members of the press were invited—he believed Zuckerberg’s account of it. When his article was published, it reported that Aquila “was so stable that they kept it in the air for 90 minutes before landing it safely.”

Months later, however, a Bloomberg story revealed that the flight hadn’t gone so smoothly after all—Aquila had crashed. While the craft had indeed stayed aloft for longer than intended, high winds tore a chunk out of a wing, leading to a crash landing.

………

Newton is still in touch with executives at Facebook—some of them are subscribers to his newsletter—but he’s since focused his attention on the company’s abuses of low-level employees and third-party contractors. He no longer trusts Facebook like he once did.

………

In conversations with more than fifteen journalists and industry observers, I tried to understand what it is like to cover Facebook. What I found was troublesome: operating with the secrecy of an intelligence agency and the authority of a state government, Facebook has arrogated to itself vast powers while enjoying, until recently, limited journalistic scrutiny. (Some journalists, like The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, have done important work linking Facebook data to political corruption in the UK and elsewhere.) Media organizations have stepped up their game, but they suffer from a lack of access, among other power asymmetries.

………

The 2016 presidential election changed everything. After Donald Trump’s ascent, greased by the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the embedding of Facebook staff in the Trump campaign’s digital operation, tech was seen as a political force unto itself. Journalists began digging into Facebook in a way few had before.

The company responded by closing itself off. “People have described it to me as a bunker mentality,” says Charlie Warzel, a New York Times opinion writer who covers technology, media, and politics. “The relationship is just naturally strained by the fact that they’re dealing with a crisis pretty much weekly, if not more frequently.”

………

………

Michael Nuñez, a technology journalist who has worked at Forbes and Gizmodo and has broken several notable stories on Facebook, is more blunt in his assessment of Facebook’s comms operation. In his experience, he says, Facebook has been “willing to lie on the record.” Nuñez recalled reporting on an internal poll in which Facebook employees asked Zuckerberg whether the company should do something to try to stop Donald Trump from becoming president. When he asked a Facebook flack about it, they denied the poll existed. “I remember begging this person: ‘I’m not asking you to confirm the validity of this,’ ” Nuñez said. “ ‘I’m looking at [a screenshot of] it. I’m just here asking you for a comment.’ ”

In Nuñez’s eyes, Facebook is not a trustworthy interlocutor. “The company seems to be pretty comfortable with obfuscating the truth, and that’s why people don’t trust Facebook anymore,” he says. “They’ve had the chance to be honest and transparent plenty of times, and time and time again, you see that the company has been misleading either by choice or by willful ignorance.”

………

Warzel compares the company’s mentality to that of an intelligence agency. “I have former Facebook sources who will tell me an interesting tip and then lament that they don’t know a single person who could possibly confirm this, even though these people would like to confirm this, because they don’t own a single device that Facebook couldn’t forensically tap into to figure out the source of a leak.”

Zuckerberg has been a liar since the early days of Facebook, which is why, unlike people like the founders of Google and Amazon, there have been repeated lawsuits claiming that he cheated them.

It should be no surprise that that Zuck and Facebook lie to the press, they lie to everyone, and they always have.