Our Socotra Legal Section said we had to run a disclaimer first thing this morning. Leon got all puffed up about it. So, there it is, first and foremost.

What we are disclaiming, specifically, had to wait until Section Leader Miles had something like a quorum in the Conference Room up on the 4th Floor at The Trillium Conference Center. He took a sip of Flat Yank coffee from his imposing white ceramic mug emblazoned with a red dragon’s face.

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“I had hoped to bring some of your acute analysis to what is actually going on these days. Everything the Boomers know as “Normal Activity” conducted by “Average People” in a world that works in “Regular Order” is wrong.”

That got the disclaimer out of the way. He then felt confident enough to have both the ‘Law’ and ‘Finance’ notifications out of the way as well. And then get quickly to the funny stuff. Except for the Finance part. That had been one of the Red Lines we have heard about and we were going to make some gentle notation about those changing numbers that go in the disclaimers. Which are naturally changing as well.

Creative Section Leader Miles had declared it an early Happy Hour yesterday after the end of what the Boomers still called the ‘working week.’ The Dow had left everyone a little giddy, since it hit fifty thousand for the first time in mid-afternoon. That caused Splash and Rocket to poke Vic and see if they could go up to Zola’s a little early on a record-setting day.

The building people use Zola’s as a place to advertise as a full-service building for the independent-living fand business folks on 7-12, even though it doesn’t open up until almost dinner. We like the convenience and dress and act accordingly to avoid trouble with the Socotra working spaces down on the 4th Floor.

Consumption of adult beverages had been radically minimized after a Boomer-Zoomer conflict in the morning meeting on Monday. The matter at hand had been whether the President had made a major policy announcement in his Tuesday remarks about “$19 Billion” in the current Minnesota Fraud Affair.

A quick Google check indicated it was not a mis-statement but a major policy address.

The Boomers got agitated, since that number was more than double the “$9 Billion,” or “Nine Thousand Million Dollars” it was last week. To give you a little concept on the scale of things, there are a little less than six million people living in Minnesota. Men, women and kids. The new higher fraud estimate is double the total from last week, which is double what they started the week before that.

We could be in trouble if it keeps doubling, according to the Finance Crew.

Just as a snap-shot, mind you, the numbers we are talking about amounts to more than $3,100 dollars per person this weekend. without starting to consider everything else that normally makes up the state government. Or the Federal one in which we participate. The Government Accounting Office (GAO) estimates the larger scope of fraud across the country, Blue and Red, could amount to between 3 and 7% fraud. That is a staggering amount, even if it is not actually double that amount, which is what all the other numbers seem to do, week-over-week.

The annual budget of the United States is a little over $9 Trillion, so could conservatively be talking about something more than a rounding error. Like a few hundred billion bucks just in fraudulent skimming.

That could mean another disclaimer is required, so we will just let it sprawl on the couch next to Splash and on Melissa’s good side. Here goes:

Speed wins every budget cycle. For example, Crises, moral urgency, elections, news cycles all reward deployment, not verification. Money that isn’t spent quickly looks like failure. Money spent badly looks like a rounding error until years later. We are in rounding errors right now.

Oversight is always downstream from the Good News, since audits always lag appropriations. By the time the numbers harden out front in the headlines, the political moment that justified the spending has passed. When funds move from National down through State and eventually to the open-handed contractor, no single actor owns the full chain. Everyone can plausibly say, “That wasn’t my lane.” That architecture is not an accident. “Hi, Governor Walz.”

It is a design made by clever people. We say that with a certain amount of admiration for the sheer scope of it. Certainly with no disrespect and make no accusation that anyone did anything intentionally. This is simply an observation that you shouldn’t b surprised that our government can have money moved quickly but not well accounted. Like the Covid emergency that apparently now continues all on its own without actual patients or medical issues.

As a disclaimer, it demonstrates that you cannot have both functions at scale without slowing politics to the pace of the auditing. Which no modern political system is willing to do.

So, we are pleased to share some disclaimers with you this morning and hope it helps us all deal with what happens when the numbers all double this coming Monday. It is designed to work that way.

Copyright 2026 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com