Number 4. RedState. Anti-ICE fraud fund is besieged by fraud. I know you were not expecting this, but fraud runs rampant in Minnesota. It is by now no secret that the immigrant community in Minnesota, represented for the most part by those hailing from Somalia, has long been a target of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal entry. The Somali position has not been helped by allegations—and outright convictions—of some $9 billion in fraud. The high-profile targets of investigations centered on Feeding our Future ($250 million in falsified meal distribution), senior housing, Medicaid, autism, and the highly publicized children’s “Learing Centers” where no children were found to be present. Besides the fraud furor, or maybe because of it, Minnesotans rallied against the efforts of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to detain and deport illegal immigrants who had made The Land of 10,000 Lakes their new home. Now that the ICE effort there has largely disappeared from the front page, a new cause célèbre has taken its place: First, let’s assume that ICE activities had unrighteously damaged some legitimate businesses; Second, let’s give them state money to compensate for federal wrong-doing. Thus was launched the Hennepin County Small Business Recovery Fund (aka Anti-ICE Fraud Fund), supported with two million dollars in grants. Owners whose small business profits had been harmed by the ICE invasion were invited to submit applications for remuneration. Gov. Tim Walz has approved the Fraud Fund grants, admitting that on his watch his state has proven rife with fraud. Now it appears that the Guv was not wrong: Of the 300 Recovery Fund applications received to date, 200 have been deemed fraudulent. The program has been shut down. To add icing to the ICE issue, most of the bogus applications for grant money were deemed to be written by AI agents, not by humans. Fraud site taken down by fraud. I am not sure how much more Orwellian irony I can stand. Let’s move on to the next article. Number 3. People. Michigan residents receive new driver’s licenses with wrong photo. That last one was so much fun, let’s stay in the upper Midwest. The mundane quadrennial task of renewing a driver’s license was given a bump of adrenaline earlier this month. Some 8,000 Michiganders received their renewed licenses in the mail only to discover someone else’s photo staring back at them from the card. The license also offered a generic birth date—no telling whether that meant an actual date selected at random, or merely a placeholder such as “mm/dd/yyyy”. The reverse of the license includes the place for the driver’s name, but not actually the driver’s name, showing “LASTNAME, FIRSTNAME, MIDDLE”. The organization printing the licenses has been identified as Idemia, and according to my AI source their website claims their software system is “specifically designed to catch issuance errors.” I would validate that, as I do most claims that ChatGPT offers, except at this writing www.idemia.com returns a “This site can’t be reached” message. But, not to worry, the State has a solution: Drivers can simply go to their local DMV—in person—and ask for a temporary printed substitute license. Advance appointments are recommended. Oh boy. But the larger question might be: How did 8,200 licenses get printed with the same generic photo, and then mailed, and no one noticed? So much for the specifically designed software. What follows is a slightly off-color tangent, parents beware. Nothing graphic, but this may require some ‘splainin’ for your young children: In about 1995 I learned there had been a problem printing monthly telephone bills by the Baby Bell which employed me. All bills were of course on hardcopy paper in those pre-TCP/IP days, and were sent through the U.S. Mail. Telephone bills routinely included informational items along with the dreaded invoice for services. In this particular month, there was a one-page insert advertising upgrades to public telephones… the kind of phones that sat in archaic enclosures called telephone booths. (Where Superman changed clothes.) We never called them payphones, as almost everyone did, because that would remind customers that they cost money. No, they were phones graciously made available to the public. When this batch of bills was printed, folded and stuffed into envelopes, one of the clerks designated to oversee the machinery engaged in her usual boring “proofread everything” task… and discovered that “public telephones” had been misspelled. Somebody left the “L” out of “public”. “Stop the presses!” was a shout virtually never heard at the telephone company, but it was on that day. Eventually, the bills, with corrected inserts, went out on time. Number 2. The Gateway Pundit. DSA candidate for U.S. House prepares to represent Mexico in Congress. It is becoming increasingly difficult to be shocked by outrageous politics these days, and this one proves it. Claire Valdez, candidate for U.S. Congress from New York, has declared that when/if she takes office in January, she will be representing Mexico, not the state of New York. Ms. Valdez has bragged publicly about Mexico’s successful fight for independence from Spain in 1811. (I don’t really know the date, but Claire said it was 215 years ago, and that’s what I came up with.) Now, she has declared she will “carry that fight with me to Congress.” Where she will presumably argue for freedom from oppression. To be free from… whom, exactly? From the U.S. Constitution, which created her position? From the Congress, where she will be paid? From the State of New York, which will have sent her there? Probably, her fight is to be free from Donald Trump. Well… give it time. Two years, to be exact, and you’ll be done with him. Claire Valdez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, DSA. According to one source, they are a small political contingent of 120,000 dues-paying members and about 250 elected officials across the country. Assuming a total of about 500,000 elected offices, that works out to be five-hundredths of one percent of electeds. Not many. Yet. But as I say… give it time. ¡Viva la revolución! Number 1. The Gateway Pundit. X users are inundated with unexpected crypto payouts. I understand that on X—which we used to call Twitter, and which some dinosaurs still do, because saying “X” sounds a little too smooth—a user can turn on a feature called X Money. X Money is not cryptocurrency. It is actual money: dollars. Behind those dollars, however, is cryptocurrency. Some X users who have X Money enabled have discovered unexpected deposits in their accounts. And not in small amounts. Peachy Keenan received more than $7,400. A user named Geoff has received more than $17,000. (The $8,000 shown in the headline was only his first payment.) I have no idea who Peachey or Geoff are, but they are real. So is the money. This is a perplexing subject, but here is what I gather is happening: Someone—not Peachy or Geoff—creates a virtual meme coin on a crypto trading platform. The creator can arrange for the trading fees generated by that coin to be sent to a service called UsePaid, and designate an X user to receive most of those fees. A meme coin is something like a senior military officer’s challenge coin, only virtual, tradable… and pretty much pointless. If you wanted one to commemorate your Caribbean vacation, for example, you could create a $VACAY meme coin, decide how many $VACAY coins will exist, and make them available for people to buy and sell. Online platforms make it possible to create one very quickly, at little or no upfront cost. (No one would want to buy one, but put a pin in that and we’ll come back to it.) If somebody buys ten dollars’ worth of $VACAY and tells his friends about it, and they decide this sounds like a fun, whimsical exercise, they can buy some too. If buyers are willing to pay increasingly higher prices for $VACAY, its market price rises. If enthusiasm disappears and sellers outnumber buyers, the price falls. All this trading creates fees, which is what UsePaid handles. UsePaid doesn’t actually sell the meme coin. Instead, it collects creator fees that have been directed to it. Eighty percent of those fees can be designated for an X account. UsePaid converts that share into dollars and sends the money to the designated person through X Money. The other 20 percent is used to buy and destroy—or “burn”—UsePaid’s own $PAID token. (The burn thing is fairly obscure, but let’s go with it.) When an X Money account is slammed with deposits, tech nerds have taken to calling it a DDOS event—for Distributed Denial of Service, an unpleasant tactic whereby thousands of phone calls are directed to a targeted business as a way of protesting some corporate policy. It effectively ties up the firm’s phone service and makes them unable to communicate with real customers. Now here is the absurd part: The person receiving the trading fees does not have to create the meme coin, or buy the meme coin, or even know the meme coin exists. This has prompted some X users to fantasize about receiving hordes of crypto money. A user named CassandraRules posted on X: “Please DDOS me!” In a short time she saw deposits of $174. Sources unknown. This is a practice which most of us barely understand, except that the phenomenon creates absolutely no value in society. It is not exactly gambling, but is probably a cousin. Or not… the one who benefits has risked nothing. So DON’T ANYONE create an Alligator News Roundup meme coin called, say, $GATOR, and certainly DO NOT designate the trade fees to my X account. (My handle there, incidentally, is @GhormleyCurt.) It probably wouldn’t do any good anyway. Late-breaking news is that UsePaid has suspended the service for a time. Probably while the SEC or some
