Everything you know is a lie

What happens if all of life becomes performative art?

Gemini 2.5 (w/Nano Banana)

There is an opinion piece by Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY) in today’s Washington Post: Who used the Maduro raid to earn $400K? The pool of suspects is alarming, that I recommend you spend some time with. It’s a window into a truly twisted turn of events that may portend the future.

It turns out that just hours before U.S. special forces ousted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, last week (based on a 25-page indictment alleging drug trafficking, corruption, and narcoterrorism), an anonymous trader, using a newly created account on the prediction market website Polymarket, wagered more than $30,000 that Maduro would be out of office within three weeks. That trader reaped more than $400,000 in profit within days. Nice work, if you can get it.

Although this did not go without notice, it appears to have ultimately amounted to little more than a blip in a news cycle. That won’t do. This is but the tip of a vast, unrecognized political iceberg of influence and corruption, if not even much worse. Martha Stewart was sentenced to several years in prison for significantly less. Whoever did this can buy Alcatraz and convert it into a private, luxury resort with just a few more well-placed bets.

This is well beyond the normal insider trading style of corruption that makes the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Ilhan Omar, Kelly Loeffler, David Perdue and others of their ilk richer than Croesus after a few years of mediocre toil in Congress; this is more than just profiting from insider information—this is violating every basic tenet of public service by potentially influencing the outcome of public affairs not for the greater good, but for making out like a bandit in betting markets.

Regular readers will know that even I, a person of well-established libertarian bent, have some issues with the what were once vices are now habits ethos currently en vogue. In a world where morals and ethics, the guidelines that make civilization possible, are under considerable duress, what could possibly go wrong when these get tossed to the wayside as old-fashioned and out-of-date?

Please show me how legalizing recreational drugs, gambling or various other vices has made society better. Legalizing vice might be just and even easy, but I have many reasons to doubt that it’s wise. Especially when I see evidence to the contrary every day. Even my small mountain town in the Northern Rockies, formerly one of the nicest, safest places imaginable, is now filled with zombies who self-medicate serious mental illnesses with heroin and fentanyl and shit on sidewalks. Bigger cities are far worse.

That’s not progress—despite the claims to the contrary of every sanctimonious virtue whore advocating for laissez-faire social policies. It’s very easy (and cheap) to experience faux virtue by handing a homeless person twenty bucks on a cold day. It’s much more difficult to part with thousands of tax dollars required annually to address the root cause of why they are there in the first place as opposed to merely ameliorating a symptom of the problem.¹

Yet on we go, fumbling toward some illusion of apotheosis. Meanwhile, in the real world, when you remove guardrails, things tend to go sideways.

A sports betting scandal recently emerged involving more than 30 people, including two NBA players, an NBA coach, and two MLB pitchers, who are alleged to have participated in criminal schemes to rig sports bets with organized crime. It’s noteworthy that those championing legal sports betting maintained that, despite removing guardrails, legal gambling would come with sufficient scrutiny to prevent such a scandal. How’s that working out?

Most of the trouble in sports betting involves proposition bets, which allow bettors to wager on not only the outcome of a game or the point spread but also on outcomes at a granular level: a shot, a field goal, a hit, a swing, a pitch, a penalty, etc. Since prop bets are based on the results of individual effort, something that is very difficult to police, they are ripe for abuse. Unless a very unusual pattern of betting is detected on an individual performance (which is how the principals in the current scandals were caught), it’s all but impossible to discern between a simple swing and a miss or malfeasance.

And now, so it seems, this has metastasized to include betting on the outcome of world affairs far more serious than a pitch outside of the strike zone.

The number of things obviously wrong with this Maduro bet is what my youngest grom would call infinity to the infinity power. She’s not wrong either. This is messed up on many levels. Whoever placed this bet should probably be identified, shot and have their carcass hung on a fence post to discourage further trespass on human affairs.

Let’s just go down the list. First off, given the combination of timing and anonymity, this was almost certainly a spec ops regime change equivalent to insider trading. It certainly appears that someone with intimate knowledge of what was about to happen in Caracas either made a bet themselves or tipped someone else off, reaping nearly half a million for about a day’s wait.

What would have happened if this insider possessed decision-making power and a last-minute detail surfaced that suggested the loss of American lives? How many spec ops soldiers are worth sacrificing to prevent a loss of $30k? The murder rate in a lot of American cities suggests that the going rate for this is substantially less than $30k, much less an opportunity cost of over $400k.

Lest you think that I’ve gone daft, I recognize that people and institutions bet on outcomes of political and financial events all of the time. The stock market, a vehicle that has made a comfortable retirement available to me and many other retirees, is based on a series of bets as to how markets are going to function in the future. There’s nothing wrong with this.

It’s even possible to bet against, or to “short,” markets without nefarious intent. Michael Burry, founder of the hedge fund Scion Asset Management, famously bet against Wall Street banks during the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis and did a lot better for his investors than Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and anyone else holding CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) did for theirs.

But Burry's actions were completely legitimate, in contrast to Magnetar, which bet against some CDOs that it held on behalf of its own investors. Intent and degree matter.

I never tire of ranting about the fact that in all of the immoral assholery and pushing the envelope of legality involved in the subprime crisis, only one person, Kareem Serageldin, a low-level executive at Credit Suisse, was convicted and sentenced to jail. One thing leads to another. I think that one can draw a line from there to here without breaking a sweat.

I’m already half-convinced that major professional sports are, integrity-wise, about a half-click away from being professional wrestling. That saddens me. But what terrifies me is that betting is on the verge (if not already past it) of rendering all of life a version of performative art where everything that you think that you know about how things work is wrong.

Once you let that genie out of the bottle, I’m not sure that there’s any putting it back in.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, climber, skier, motorcyclist, musician, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time raising four kids. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.

1. My colleague Jim Trageser wrote a terrific op-ed on this topic that I recommend.