Monthly Archives: May 2026

Throw Money at it

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The letter-writer seems to be writing from the Left. Opening with Praise for Ohio’s Republican candidate for Governor Vivek Ramaswamy’s proposal for attacking Medicaid fraud, he quickly pivoted.

States need more funds to address fraud….

How typical.

No, States do not need more funds to combat and drastically reduce, much less “address,” fraud. Were States actually to get serious about combatting and reducing Medicaid, they’d uncover 10s of millions, if not billions, of dollars of fraud, and they’d recover significant percentages of those dollars. Those dollars then could feed back into the program to help keep Medicaid fraud down to an absolute minimum.

To address the problem for long-term of vastly reduced fraud and commensurate reduced fraud recovery funds, States need only to reallocate existing spending. They most assuredly do not need more money blindly and blithely tossed over the transom at the problem.

The Nub of the Matter

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An article concerning the nature of “sex work” and the debate over whether it ought be decriminalized and destigmatized, there was this characterization:

On [one] side are those arguing for total decriminalization, which lifts all laws regulating the buying and selling of sex acts.

And this, from a woman who ultimately escaped from the environment:

Prostitution is someone using their money and power to get someone else to provide a service for them. You’re literally paid to be a product that is used and discarded.

There it is, in all its glory, from the life of an individual once in the environment and from the broad movement looking to decriminalize “sex” work. It isn’t about sex; it’s about faceless male gratification, for whom the woman isn’t even a human being; she’s just a body temperature, organic inflatable sex doll. It’s not even a matter of buying a selling sex; it’s only renting a warm doll for a hour or a night, otherwise akin to renting a power tool.

Say, though, that in an amoral yet otherwise ideal world, this work is entirely legalized. On what basis would we believe the women involved really are engaging in it on their own initiative and entirely free of coercion? Pimps will still be there, now legalized as agents or brokers for the firms renting these commodities. And they’ll still control the women, who they engage with, what they’ll do—be required to do under the terms of their employment—during those engagements.

Would a woman be free to leave one…employer…for another whenever she chose to do so? Would she be free to leave the…industry…altogether and seek employment doing other things wholly apart from being a rented sex doll? Those answers seem obvious.

Tellingly, too, the movement wholly ignores the men who are trafficked or pimped out as male prostitutes, and worse, the movement wholly ignores the children, of both sexes, who are trafficked for sex.

The answer to “sex work” isn’t to legalize it. It’s a multipart question: help the women (and the men and children) recover from the damage done by their present strait and then learn other means of earning a living—a legitimate living and one in which they keep all of their wages. In parallel, hammer severely the traffickers and pimps making these victims—and that’s what the women (and men and children) are to five nines significance—”available.” Hold criminally liable the customers of these pimps and traffickers for receiving illegal goods. They’re certainly not customers of the women; they’re receivers of the pimps’ and traffickers’ product. And publicly shame those customers for their abuse of the women whose bodies are the product they rented.

The Strength and the Weakness

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In a Wall Street Journal article regarding Binance’s complicity, allegedly unwitting, in financing Iran’s behaviors despite sanctions to the contrary, there’s this tidbit that is the subject of my post.

The funds are part of billions in crypto transactions that have flowed through Binance to networks financing Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in the two years preceding the current US-Iran war, according to Binance compliance reports, blockchain data, foreign law-enforcement officials who track terrorism financing, and other crypto researchers and nonpublic documents.

It’s those blockchain data and their role in backtracking to the source of the funding that concerns me.

Blockchain is a highly useful, incorruptible means (so far; hackers and ever-improving computers include blockchain in the cyber arms race between the good guys and the nefarious) of proving the provenance of what’s being tracked, which is mostly financial transactions (again, so far). But that surveillance capability, in the hands of a government (and at bottom, there’s no practical way to keep it out of the hands of government) can be very dangerous to individual privacy, even to individual liberty.

We the People, and free citizens elsewhere in the free world, need especially to be vigilant and to respond quickly when government misuses that capability.

Sitzkrieg

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As President Donald Trump (R) seeks a deal with the terrorists reigning over Iran, two primary problems continue: the need to foreclose altogether the terrorists’ ability to acquire, even to do research and production of preliminary materials for, nuclear weapons, and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz without constraint—viz., tolls,  “protection” fees, etc, any semblance of Iranian control over this international water—and those terrorists’ insistence that Iran should be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons and should have control of the Strait.

In pursuit of that deal, Trump and Iran’s thugs agreed and have largely maintained a ceasefire for these last five weeks, to allow space for negotiations to proceed. During this time, all the terrorists have done is repeat their demands in varying terms: they will continue their drive to acquire nuclear weapons and they will continue to control the Strait and charge their tolls and protection vig. Oh, and they will have all sanctions lifted and frozen accounts unfrozen.

Those reigning over Iran are continuing to demonstrate their bad faith and their decision to not negotiate in any serious manner. The terrorists are, in Trump’s own phrase, just tapping us along.

It’s time to put an end to this sitzkrieg. It’s time to begin reducing to rubble the terrorists’ ability to move oil and natural gas from their wells to their refineries and ports by breaking the pipelines at the wells, destroying those refineries, and closing those ports while destroying the pipelines, roads, and railroads entering them. It’s time to eliminate the factories that produce war materiel and civilian/military dual use materiel and to destroy those factories’ input sources and routes. The terrorists’ missile and drone stockpiles, launching facilities, and production ability must be eliminated. The terrorists’ mosquito fleet of small boats must be sunk, and the naval and naval-usable ports must be destroyed. The assault must continue apace and without letup until the terrorists are physically incapable of continuing or have agreed terms.

If the terrorists decide to engage in serious negotiations, they must send decision-makers, not intermediaries, to the table. Safe passage can be granted to these persons while the attacks on the terrorists’ war-making and shipping-threatening capabilities continue apace.

The “Anti-Weaponization” Fund

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I have some thoughts on this and how it might work. Of course, I’m speculating; no criteria for eligibility or payout have been set, the five-person “adjudication” panel has not been stood up, and it’s possible the funding will not survive Congressional purse-control oversight. Within that, here I go again.

Payouts, I expect, will be limited to actual loss, with no add-ons related to punitive matters. In many respects, this will be straightforward, but there are a number of areas where losses are not clearly specifiable and/or the alleged losses are highly subjective. These latter include losses from loss of jobs, loss of business revenue, closure of the business. Courts have gotten fairly adept, if widely variable across jurisdictions, in assessing this sort of loss.

Even hazier are things like loss through death of a spouse, loss of the spouse’s income (which is separate from his/her death, even if the income loss resulted from the death), loss of conjugal relations or alienation of affection resulting from divorce or the affair that led to the divorce—and yes, some divorces have occurred as a result of many of the J6 prosecutions and, in the present context, persecutions. Courts make guesses at these losses, but only guesses; they’re not very good at it.

The next, and the overwhelmingly most important, problem, though is this. Given provable or even merely articulable loss that meets fund eligibility criteria to this point, it’s going to be deucedly hard to prove the political targeting, lawfare nature of the cases for which an applicant is seeking recompense. At best, satisfying a court, most likely satisfying the succession of courts, appellate courts, the Supreme Court, with the potential for remands to lower courts for further consideration or for reconsideration, will take years and years to reach a final decision. And that decision may well be that the matter at hand was not, in fact, political targeting, and so no payout is due.

And one more question. Given a final decision, whence the monies for the legal costs of getting to one? Will the Fund pay the government’s legal costs apart from any payout ordered? If not, where will the government’s funding come from?