So, I asked some friends and co-workers for some feedback about this site, and a former co-worker asked me what the purpose of it was. I recognized this was a real gap – after all, while “Mr. Sanctions” is catchy, should folks read it, and why?

In fact, even naming this page was a bit of a challenge. I considered “Why Read Mr. Sanctions?”, but part of me didn’t want to make this a marketing “sell” – other than informing folks. For the same reason, “Is this for me?” and the like ended up in the trash can (Mac guys don’t use Recycle Bins).

So… is this for you? Depends on what you’re looking for, of course.

I am not a lawyer nor do I work for the U.S. Treasury and the like. What I have been for much of my career is someone who tries to make the complexity of sanctions accessible. And that’s really what this site strives to be: a way to read sanctions-related info in a more easy-to-digest way, removing layers of complexity, reformatting information so the pieces you care about are easier to identify, and using summarization to provide quicker reads. Of course, we provide the links to the original in case you want more detail.

This is also a working space for leveraging AI tools (most notably, Google Gemini) to find insights and trends. The ability of these tools to scour for information and organize it is impressive – no way could I have come up with the insights derived about Executive Order 14024 by myself.

As you may have seen, my first attempt to find parallels between enforcement actions wasn’t awful, but could surely use refinement. As I’ve already seen, trying to build all the most basic models is, at best, a matter of trial and error. And, as my wife reminds me, the more you direct a model, and the less you leave it free to “experiment”, the more predictable the results are. I will be sharing the technical details, like my prompts, for those who want to experiment on their own dime.

Oh, and the image on the home page? Also Gemini – but the first output had 2 left hands and 1 right hand Easy enough to fix, but it gave me a chuckle.