ECP NetHappenings SCOTUS is afraid of Democracy

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Dan Rather Nails it. “We have a SCOTUS afraid of Democracy.”
It is no coincidence that the same people who overturn Roe-V-Wade also prevent voting rights and encourage partisan gerrymandering. They fear the will of the majority. In other words, democracy.
DAN RATHER

ECP NetHappenings Naked Short Sellers Are Criminals

$7 Billion In Perfectly Timed Oil Bets Sparks Insider Trading Fears
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/7-Billion-In-Perfectly-Timed-Oil-Bets-Sparks-Insider-Trading-Fears.html
By Alex Kimani – May 10, 2026, 6:00 PM CDT
Suspiciously well-timed oil and prediction market trades tied to the Iran-U.S. conflict totaled roughly $7 billion.
Traders executed massive sell orders in Brent, WTI, gasoline, and diesel
futures shortly before ceasefire announcements, strike delays, and Strait of
Hormuz reopening news, with some accounts reportedly achieving win rates as high as 93%.
Lawmakers and analysts suspect insider leaks, but investigations by the DOJ
and CFTC face challenges as prediction markets and digital betting platforms make detecting illegal trading activity increasingly difficult.
It would take the CFTC about 5 minutes to figure out who this was and whether there was any misconduct, assuming they want to.

Epstein on tape advising former Israeli PM Barak to approach Palantir founder Peter Thiel.

Brock Pierce is a “friend” of Jeffrey’s.

Why is Brock Pierce, who was allowed flee the country to escape charges of drugging & sexually abusing boys, and who’s name appears in the Epstein files DOZENS of times, front and center next to Trump’s “spiritual advisor” at the dedication of Trump’s “golden statue?”
The guy standing next to Trump’s pastor at the gold statue ribbon-cutting is billionaire Brock Pierce.
You may remember him from the documentary An Open Secret about pedophilia in Hollywood. He along with two others had to flee the country to avoid charges related to drugging & abusing boys.
More recently, you may have seen his e-mails with Epstein from the files, where he talks about gifting Epstein with 20 Ukrainian women.
It’s also possible you saw this other headline about Pierce’s friend being found dead after claiming that pedophile elites were trying to kill him via CIA and Mossad.
The Strange Saga of Jeffrey Epstein’s Link to a Child Star Turned Cryptocurrency Mogul

How Brock Pierce ended up as a Jeffrey Epstein guest along with a NASA computer engineer, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and a Nobel laureate in theoretical physics is bizarre tale involving Steve Bannon and an international man of mystery who may or may not be dead.

MAGA influencer Craig Long was arrested this week in Florida for his role in a sex trafficking ring. Long, who is a close friend of Donald Trump Jr. and strong supporter of Donald Trump, was caught in a sting operation in Polk County.
JD: 200+ ARRESTED IN OPERATION ‘POLK AROUND/
7:37 AM • May 2, 2026 • 55.6K Views

Florida is a mess. They just passed the death penalty for pedophilia!
Then put up a golden statue of a pedophile.

Over 10 years ago, a documentary called “An Open Secret” by Amy J. Berg was released and buried.
It’s all about how Hollywood child actors, especially on kids shows are groomed by pedophiles.
Trailer This documentary is a must see if you can still find it.
REVIEW https://variety.com/2014/film/reviews/film-review-an-open-secret-1201358006/
the most shocking aspect of Berg’s documentary is what it presents as the abusers’ utter lack of accountability.

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ECP NetHappenings Why did you just reach for your phone?

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HEALTH

ProPublica obtained 3,000 pages of emails sent last year by executives asking that their facilities be exempted from Clean Air Act requirements.
The White House approved more than 180 requests and is considering more.
https://www.propublica.org/article/clean-air-act-exemptions-trump-emails

The DOGE Files: How Elon Musk Got Access to the Government Machine Investigating His Empire
https://x.com/MastrXYZ/status/2053807830906360287
MAY. 2025 https://linktr.ee/askmastr.xyz
Q. Did you feel that at the time?
A. I thought there was a lot untapped potential.
Let me get this straight. Musk was paid $5 billion through the DOGE endeavor and the only thing DOGE
did was dismantle the entities that were investigating him for fraud.
Wow

ESSAY

©2026 Nav Toor @heynavtoor
You just unlocked your phone. You don’t remember why.

You opened it, your eyes scanned, nothing was there, and you locked it again. Less than four seconds. No memory of deciding to do it. By the time you finish reading this post, you will probably have done it once or twice more.

This is not a moral failing. It is not laziness. It is the most studied unconscious habit of the modern human body, and almost no one has explained it to you in plain language.

In 2015, a psychologist at Cal State Dominguez Hills named Larry Rosen ran an experiment on his own students. He had them install a tracking app for a full week. The app logged every unlock, every minute spent, every app opened. The results, published in his research and in Psychology Today, were the same across every group he tested.

The students were unlocking their phones, on average, every 15 minutes. All day. From the moment they woke up until the moment they went to sleep.

The strange part was not the frequency. It was that almost none of those unlocks were triggered by a notification. There was no buzz. No ding. No alert. The hand just reached. The thumb just authenticated. The eyes scanned a home screen with nothing new on it. The phone went back in the pocket. The brain had no record of any of it happening.

When Rosen took the phones away, the students became visibly anxious within ten minutes. Heart rate up. Hands moving toward an empty pocket. Eyes flicking to the table where the phone used to be. The behavior was not driven by what was on the phone. It was driven by the absence of the phone.

Newer surveys have only made the picture worse. A 2022 Asurion survey found Americans were reaching for their phone an average of 352 times a day, once every 2 minutes and 43 seconds of waking life. A separate Reviews. org survey put the average at 144 phone checks per day in 2023, climbing to 205 in 2024. About 80% of people now check their phone within ten minutes of waking up. About three quarters take it into the bathroom.

These are not addicts. These are everyone. Your mother. Your boss. The person across from you on the train who claims they “barely use it.” The teenager who insists they only check social media “once or twice a day.”

Here is what is actually happening inside the body during these zero-content unlocks.

The brain has two attention systems. One is voluntary. You decide to check the time, you check it. The other is automatic. It runs underneath conscious thought. It is the same system that scratches an itch you didn’t know you had, that makes you cross your legs at a meeting, that makes you tap a pen while reading. When a behavior is performed thousands of times in the same context, with even an occasional reward, that behavior gets handed off from the voluntary system to the automatic one. The hand starts reaching before the mind decides.

The reward in this case is what behavioral psychologists call a variable-ratio schedule. Sometimes you unlock the phone and there is a message from someone you love. Sometimes there is nothing. Sometimes there is a like. Sometimes there is a stranger being mean to you for no reason. The unpredictability is the entire point. It is the same schedule that makes slot machines the most addictive machines ever invented. It is also the schedule that makes pigeons in a Skinner box peck a button until they die of exhaustion.

Your phone is the slot machine. Your pocket is the casino. You are the pigeon, and the lever is your own thumb.

The companies who design the operating system know all of this. They have known since the first iPhone. The lock screen, the badge counts, the haptic buzz, the pull-to-refresh gesture, the red dots — all of these were tuned, A/B tested, refined, and shipped because they increase the probability that your hand reaches into your pocket without your permission. The behavior is not a bug. It is the product.

Now the part nobody tells you.

The fix is not a digital detox. Detoxes fail because the moment you reintroduce the phone, the automatic system picks the habit right back up. It was never gone. It was waiting.

The only thing that breaks the loop is removing the cue, not the device. The cue is the phone in your pocket, on your desk, on your nightstand, in your hand while you watch a movie. As long as the phone is within reach of the automatic system, the automatic system will reach for it. That is what automatic means.

A 2017 study from the University of Texas at Austin tested this directly. They had participants take a cognitive test with their phone in three different positions. Phone face-down on the desk. Phone in a bag in the same room. Phone in another room entirely. Performance got measurably better at each step, even though the phone was off and silent in every condition. The participants who left the phone in another room scored highest. They also reported that they “barely thought about the phone.” They were wrong about that. Their brains were thinking about it the entire time. They just used less mental fuel doing so when it was further away.

So the real five-rule reset is not about willpower. It is about distance.

One. Charge the phone in another room at night. Not on the nightstand. Not in the bed. Another room with a door between you and it. Buy a 12-dollar alarm clock if you need one. The first night will feel like the first night you ever quit anything. By night four, you will sleep better than you have in years.

Two. When you sit down to do anything that requires your brain — writing, reading, eating with a person, watching a film — put the phone in a drawer or another room. Not face-down on the table. The face-down phone still costs you about 10% of your working memory, according to that Texas study. The drawer phone costs you almost nothing.

Three. Delete the apps you check unconsciously from the home screen. Move them into a folder three swipes away, or remove them entirely and use the browser version. Every extra second of friction between thumb and feed gives the conscious mind one more chance to ask “wait, why am I opening this?”

Four. Turn off every notification that is not from a human being you actually know. No app updates. No “your week in review.” No news. Nothing red. Nothing buzzing. Your phone should be silent unless a person is trying to reach you.

Five. The first thirty minutes of your morning are sacred. No phone. Not for the weather. Not for the time. Not for “just one quick thing.” Use those thirty minutes to put your feet on the floor, drink water, see daylight, and let your nervous system come online without being hijacked. You will feel different by day three. By day seven, going back to the old way will feel insane.

That is the whole protocol.

There is no app that fixes this. There is no premium feature. There is no $80 distraction-blocker that will save you. Every one of those products is sold to you by the same industry that engineered the problem in the first place. The cure is just space. Physical, literal, measurable distance between your hand and the device.

The next time you catch your hand reaching into your pocket for no reason, do not feel guilty. Do not lecture yourself. Just notice it. That moment of noticing, repeated a few hundred times, is the first thing the automatic system has not seen before. It is the first crack in the loop.

Send this to one person who you have watched do that exact pocket-reach in front of you and not even know they did it.

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ECP NetHappenings Naked Short Sellers Are Criminals

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arrest Billionaire Les Wexner, founder of Victoria’s Secret, is now unredacted and listed as a co-conspirator.
He gave Epstein power of attorney and a Manhattan mansion.
Redactions had been protecting him.

The FBI said it destroyed evidence from the Palm Beach raid to save storage space. The case was still open. No trial had occurred. Federal law requires preserving evidence in ongoing cases.

NAKED SHORT SELLERS ARE CRIMINALS

“SHORT SQUEEZES AE THE WAY THE MARKET DISCIPLINES BAD BEHAVIOR”
Stephanie @stephmase22
NAKED SHORT SELLERS ARE CRIMINALS BUT SEC PROTECTS THEM
SEC doesn’t want to create Short Squeezes.
But they don’t want to stop the ability for Short Sellers to Naked Short companies entire floats.
Truth is if the SEC actually did their job there wouldn’t be a risk of a short squeezes.
Illegal Naked Short Selling creates counterfeit shares that can’t be delivered because they don’t exist.

TRADE SETTLEMENT
SHOULD BE MANDATORY

BYTES

Actor Matt McConaughey
“If Kamala Harris had become president of the U.S., Trump would be in prison, the Straits of Hormuz would be open, Ukraine would be victorious, gas would be under $3 a gallon, and the U.S. would STILL be respected and supported around the world!”

Another criminal pardoned by Donald Trump! They can lie, steal, cheat, and get pardoned. While you get 0 breaks as a working class American… have you had enough yet?
Trump Pardons Joseph Schwartz, Nursing Home Executive Convicted of Stealing $38 Million from Workers Across 11 States
Joseph Schwartz, a nursing home executive, was pardoned by President Trump after serving three months in prison for stealing $38 million from workers’ paychecks, healthcare funds, retirement accounts, and life savings across 11 states.

Samuel Alito Quoted Fake Data in His Ruling Gutting Voting Rights Act
https://newrepublic.com/post/210174/samuel-alito-bad-data-ruling-voting-rights-act
Justice Alito’s opinion noted Black voter turnout now matches or exceeds whites in recent elections, a point disputed by advocates who say adjusted data shows gaps. Alito cited data provided by the Department of Justice that used faulty methodology.

Lying in a legal briefing would get you disbarred as a regular lawyer. But when you’re an unelected, lifetime appointee with powers to write decisions that completely undo & remake the Constitution, the decision gets to stand & you get to keep your lifetime position. Outrageous. How come only one political party owns virtually every seat election after election even before the illegal gerrymandering? What is that foul smell? Our once proud #SCOTUS has lost any and all integrity it once had, and it’s because of the Heritage Foundation judges. Bought and paid for to do their bidding.

Alito’s brain is scrambled… just like every @FoxNews viewer.
They literally have no clue what *actually is happening. Their entire worldview is warped by 35 yrs of deliberate propaganda.
It’s one thing if your crazy uncle is ‘Fox-brained’… but 1 of 9 Scotus’s?…unacceptable.

Montana Court BLOCKS law reducing the window to register and vote in one trip to the polls on Election Day from thirteen hours to just five hours. Another victory for Elias Law Group, its clients and Montana voters.

GLORIA BOOOOOOOd off stage by the college graduates 
The VP of a private investment firm, Gloria Caulfield, speaking at UCF’s graduation: “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” The entire graduating class responded with loud boos highlighting the growing frustration with AI rapidly replacing jobs. The U.S. ruling class is so insulated from reality they cannot see the revolution that is brewing for a new way of life that prioritizes our people and our communities over profits.
https://x.com/ProudSocialist/status/2053855448541823088

DATA CENTERS ARE SURVEILLANCE CENTERS

THEY ARE BUILDING THESE IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES.

THEY WILL MONITOR YOUR SPEECH, AND BEHAVIOR, YOUR  PURCHASES, YOUR SOCIAL POSTS, ALL YOUR CHILDHOOD SCHOOL DATA, YOUR DRIVING BEHAVIOR, YOUR BANK ACCOUNTS, YOUR JOB HISTORY, IT WILL HARVEST YOUR BIOMETRICS,  THIS WILL CREATE YOUR ENTIRE DIGITAL PROFILE FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIVES.

The QTS data center campus in Fayetteville, about 20 miles south of Atlanta. Residents started complaining about low water pressure, which led to the discovery of two unmetered industrial water hookups—one installed without the utility knowing, the other not billed. The facility had used nearly 30 million gallons of water without paying, owing about $147,000 in retroactive charges. The county billed them but didn’t fine them, calling QTS their biggest customer and a partner. The story only came out after a resident got the letter through a public records request.

ESSAY

Ricardo @Ric_RTP
https://x.com/Ric_RTP/status/2053842000705696026″

Big Tech is destroying American farmland to build $700 BILLION data centers filled with chips that will be worthless within 3 years.

They’re literally lying to you about what the math actually looks like:

Nvidia releases a new chip architecture every two years and now ships upgrades annually within each generation. Every release makes the previous generation economically dead for cutting-edge AI.

Jensen Huang literally said it on stage: “When Blackwell starts shipping in volume, you couldn’t give Hoppers away.”

The next generation, Vera Rubin, ships later this year.

10x the performance per watt. 10x cheaper inference.

A Princeton study found that GPUs running standard AI workloads physically survive one to two years, three at most, before thermal stress destroys them.

So the chips die fast and become obsolete even faster.

But here’s the accounting trick that makes the whole thing look profitable:

Microsoft, Google, Meta, and Amazon are depreciating these chips over 5 to 6 years on their books. They used to use 3 years but they extended the schedule right as AI spending exploded.

Meta alone extended its depreciation timeline 3 separate times in 3 years, each extension conveniently boosting quarterly earnings by billions.

If you depreciate a chip over 6 years but it becomes worthless in two, your reported profits are FAKE.

You’re spreading the cost over years where the asset generates zero value. Your earnings look incredible on paper while the actual hardware sits in a rack burning electricity for no economic reason.

Michael Burry ran the numbers on this:

He estimates that from 2026 to 2028, depreciation across the hyperscalers will be understated by $176 billion. That means these companies are overstating profits by over 20%.

He put 79% of his final portfolio into bets AGAINST Nvidia and Palantir before shutting down his fund entirely.

Now here’s where it gets criminal…

These data centers need to go somewhere. And Big Tech is shoving them into rural communities that have ZERO power to fight back.

67% of new data centers are being built outside cities on farmland and in small towns. Trump signed an executive order streamlining permitting for any project over $500 million, which effectively lets developers bypass local opposition entirely.

A Michigan farm town just found out what that looks like in practice:

Saline Township voted NO to a $16 billion OpenAI-Oracle data center. The board rejected it 4-1.

But two days later, the developer sued. And the developer is Related Digital, founded by billionaire Stephen Ross, and one of its vice presidents is married to Michigan’s Secretary of State who is now running for governor.

The township couldn’t afford a legal war against OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. So they settled – and construction started immediately.

Over 100 communities across 12 states have tried to block data center builds this year. Electricity rates are up 32% in 5 years. And every few years the entire computing infrastructure inside these buildings gets ripped out and replaced with the next generation, consuming more power, more water, and more of the local grid each cycle.

The buildings are permanent, the disruption is permanent, but the chips are disposable.

These towns are not hosting infrastructure. They’re just absorbing the physical consequences of a financial model that needs permanent construction and permanent replacement to keep quarterly earnings looking right.

The executives will simply move on and throw away the chips.

But the damage will stay.

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ECP NetHappenings Consumers are literally running out of money

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NETHAPPENINGS NEWS BYTES

WARREN BUFFETT: “I can end the U.S. deficit problem in 5 minutes.”
“Just pass a law that any time there’s a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”

SAMSON MOW:
“The more tools Strategy holds, the fewer angles its adversaries have. A firm with real optionality is hard to game: it might sell, hedge, issue, or buy. A company that has publicly vowed to only ever do one thing has handed a map to short sellers and arbitrageurs.”
The IMF had a hand in slowing Bitcoin adoption in El Salvador. The World Bank did the same in Suriname. According to @Excellion inertia and lack of understanding are the bigger blockers now, and both are changing faster than anyone expected.
Gold almost doubled. Silver quadrupled. And they’ve already done their run.
#Bitcoin is next, and unlike metals, its supply is finite, quantifiable, and being absorbed by buyers who are completely insensitive to price.

Musk gets upwards of 8 million dollars *A DAY* from the US TAX PAYER – and he does everything he can to avoid paying into the system he leeches from.
The audacity of the broligarch welfare class is INSANE.
Elon Musk just said he wants to cut Social Security and Medicare, calling them “entitlements”: “That’s the big one to eliminate.” https://x.com/Mbakaza4L/status/2052364191051264083

Steve Martin @UnrealBluegrass
We all know, as much as anything human can be known, that Epstein created and ran a worldwide pedophilia ring. Worldwide! Very rich and successful old white guys were frequent offenders. Trump and that foul ilk were “gold card members”. Are UFOs real? Don’t know . Maybe. Epstein victims are very real. The abusers should be in prison. It’s time for action not UFO files or ballrooms. The world is disgusted. #EPSTEİN
https://x.com/mjfree/status/2053499217436451225

ESSAY

Bull Theory @BullTheoryio
“Consumers are literally running out of money.”

This is the statement given by the CEO of Kraft Heinz, a company whose products sit inside almost every American household, speaking from direct sales data across millions of homes every single week.

After COVID, supply chain disruptions, energy costs and raw material shortages pushed food prices up sharply for four consecutive years.

Consumers absorbed as much as they could and then stopped buying.

Kraft Heinz lost volume every single year for four years straight. People were not eating less, They were spending less because they had no choice.

The industry has been cutting prices and shrinking package sizes for two years just to get people buying again.

And now the Iran war is threatening to undo all of that with another wave of food inflation before American households have even recovered from the last one.

Consumer staples don’t lie — when Kraft Heinz sees volume erosion for four straight years, that’s not a shift to private label, it’s demand destruction at the kitchen-table level. The real warning is the Iran war threatening to reignite food inflation before households have rebuilt any buffer. The macro looks fine on aggregate; the micro’s been screaming for years. #ConsumerHealth #Inflation #KraftHeinz #Macro

Shaping Society’s Character: The Role of Schools in Developing Social and Emotional Skills
Schools shape skills like cooperation, trust, and perseverance beyond cognition. Evidence suggests school interventions can build social capital and support cohesive societies.

 

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