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I came across an article on the Wall Street Journal with the title His Ex Is Getting His $1 Million Retirement Account. They Broke Up in 1989, and I immediately knew what this was about given it was in my estate planning wheelhouse.

In the 1980s, Jeffrey Rolison and Margaret Sjostedt dated. Now, nearly four decades after their breakup, Sjostedt might inherit his $1 million retirement account. This is because Rolison listed Sjostedt as the sole beneficiary of his workplace retirement account in 1987 and never updated it before his death in 2015.

Rolison’s brothers, who discovered Sjostedt’s claim weeks after his death, are contesting this in federal court against Procter & Gamble (P&G), Rolison’s former employer, to prevent Sjostedt, now Margaret Losinger, from receiving the funds. This case underscores the importance of beneficiary forms for retirement accounts, life insurance policies, and bank accounts, which can override wills even if filled out years ago.

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thousands dead in Afghanistan and Iraq: both countries are now controlled by Islamic terrorists.

Many top current and former defense officials who oversaw both disasters, despite a track record of zero wins, have been criticizing Israel for not following in their footsteps.

Taking advice from losers: The new American model for success.

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The new Nancy Pelosi?

Don’t you wish you were a Congresscritter, so you could own a California winery?

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This is a strange story: the driver of a train near Mannheim in Germany stopped his train and left the cab to sexually molest a young woman who was jogging alongside the tracks. In the media accounts about the incident, the only way we can determine that the molester is a culture-enricher is that he is said to have spoken “broken German”.

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None of the Saturday night newscasts mentioned Hunter Biden at all, and most of them failed to report the breaking news of thousands of pro-Hamas protesters demonstrating outside the White House. They were not fans of President Biden, describing him as an enabler of genocide. Twitchy has a roundup of video and commentary. ABC, CBS, and NBC all dutifully publicized President Biden’s state dinner in Paris. No Republicans were heard.

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Protesters from across the country descended upon Washington, D.C., on Saturday afternoon, surrounded the White House, and clashed with police officers while calling for Hamas terrorists to kill Israelis.

“We don’t want no two states, we’re taking back 48,” the keffiyeh-clad demonstrators can be heard yelling in video taken by the Washington Free Beacon. The demonstrators blocked traffic for several hours as they stretched around the White House, holding a red banner symbolizing a “Red Line” they say Israel crossed. The agitators blocked exits used by the Secret Service, called for the destruction of Israel, scaled monuments, and vandalized nearby statues.

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Columbia University has closed its investigation into the individuals who threw water at a group of Jewish students amid the anti-Israel encampment that plagued campus for weeks without identifying those involved in the incident.

Columbia notified the student who reported the incident on Thursday that the school had been unable to identify the individuals who threw water at Jewish students during a night of anti-Israel demonstrations on April 20 that included violent clashes and explicit calls for terrorism. The email said that while Columbia’s public safety department “conducted a thorough investigation” it was “unable to identify specific individual respondents,” and would thus “be closing this case.”

“Columbia Public Safety conducted a thorough investigation into other reported incidents at the Sundial on the evening of April 20, 2024, specifically the individuals that made remarks, and that allegedly threw water at students, and we were unable to identify specific individual respondents. As a result, we will be closing this case,” Columbia interim hearing officer Jeremy Liss said in the email.

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President Joe Biden’s humanitarian pier off of Gaza is out of commission and needs at least $22 million worth of repairs to return to service, Pentagon officials said this week.

The U.S. military-run project to deliver aid to the war-torn enclave was torn apart late last month after just one week in operation when it was struck by rough waves. The structure will require between $22 million and $28 million in repairs, two Pentagon officials told the Washington Post.

The humanitarian pier project, which Biden announced during his State of the Union address in March, has faced setbacks and disasters since its delayed installation last month. Days after the Army installed the pier, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said no aid had reached the Gazan population because shipments were “intercepted by some people who took that aid off those vehicles.” Before the pier was damaged, three U.S. service members were injured, one critically, in a forklift accident.

Why are we spanding money to support people who would kill us if they could?

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Law reviews are typically sleepy, student-edited journals that publish turgid scholarship. The articles may be read by specialists, and they are often read by no one beyond the author and editors. But Columbia University law school’s law review has received a rare burst of public attention this week.

According to various media outlets, the law review’s board of directors, composed of faculty and alumni, tried to censor an article critical of Israel. Except that’s not what happened at all. The true story involves a faction of the law review secretly breaking all procedural rules and customs to publish a piece of ideologically driven claptrap.

The claptrap in question is an article by graduate student Rabea Eghbariah, “Toward Nakba as a Legal Concept.” To say that the article is of poor quality not worthy of an elite law review like Columbia’s, considered one of the three or four most prestigious legal journals in the United States, would be an understatement. The article reads as if one asked ChatGPT to disguise a lengthy, biased, inaccurate propaganda piece as legitimate scholarship, making it a dull read and throwing in hundreds of footnotes to dubious sources.

The corruption of our educational system is being matched by a corruption of our legal system.

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Competency crises seem to be brewing left and right and are constantly on public display of late. Consider the self-interested testimony of Fani Willis. Jared Bernstein, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, caused an interview to go viral by struggling to explain monetary policy. Several previously 100% effective Covid vaccines have been withdrawn from the market (Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca). Lastly, consider the inspiring image of our own Secretary of Defense triumphantly marching off his plane in the Philippines wearing his Covid mask and face shield. It is not-so-reminiscent of the image of General MacArthur triumphantly marching onshore at Luzon to liberate the Philippines. It is difficult to observe these things and think, These are competent individuals.

In Ayn Rand’s novel, the competent individuals who build businesses, products, and industries all go on strike and suddenly disappear. The resulting world becomes increasingly bleak. Government takes a larger role. Simple things start to break. Less value is provided and at the same time, everything is more expensive. That sounds much like the world we begin to find ourselves in today.

Rand witnessed all of this herself. She was born in the city of St. Petersburg in pre-revolutionary Russia, the daughter of a pharmacist. After the revolution, her father’s pharmacy was nationalized and they fled to Crimea which was under White Army control during the ensuing Russian Civil War. Afterward, they returned to St. Petersburg and were forced to live under desperate conditions. Nearly starving, she was granted a visa to visit Chicago. She managed to stay in the US and chose to leave her family behind. She watched as incompetent men destroyed her father’s business, needlessly broke up her family, and repeated this disaster society-wide.

NavalNews.

The decommissioning schedule for the U.S. Navy’s remaining 13 Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruisers has been set. Next to leave service will be the Vicksburg (CG 69) in June 2024, followed by the Cowpens (CG 63) in August, Antietam (CG 54) and Leyte Gulf (CG 55) in September. Overall, the last two cruisers will likely be Chosin (CG 65) and Cape St. George (CG 71), both to be decommissioned in fiscal 2027. The close of their careers will bring an end to the service life of the class, the world’s first to be equipped with the Aegis combat system.

Vicksburg and Cowpens had been two of the seven cruisers inducted in the mid-20-teens into the Navy’s Cruiser Modernization Program, and the cost of their protracted, never-finished modernizations has approached nearly one billion dollars. Although Congress had directed otherwise, the U.S. Navy in early 2024 ordered all further work on the ships to stop and they were placed on the decommissioning list. Of the seven cruisers in the program, only Gettysburgand Chosin have been redelivered, with work continuing on Cape St. George. Two other ships in the program, Hue City (CG 66) and Anzio (CG 68), were decommissioned in 2022 in poor condition and far from completion.

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Who says YouTube can’t be entertaining?

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The first clinical trial to administer gene therapy to both ears in one person has restored hearing function to 5 children born with a form of inherited deafness, astounding the research team..

Two of the children even gained an ability to appreciate music.

The success of the new approach is detailed in a new study published in Nature Medicine. The work builds on the first phase of the trial, published earlier this year, in which children were treated in a single ear.

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Identifying hit songs is notoriously difficult. Traditionally, song elements have been measured from large databases to identify the lyrical aspects of hits. We took a different methodological approach, measuring neurophysiologic responses to a set of songs provided by a streaming music service that identified hits and flops. We compared several statistical approaches to examine the predictive accuracy of each technique. A linear statistical model using two neural measures identified hits with 69% accuracy. Then, we created a synthetic set data and applied ensemble machine learning to capture inherent non-linearities in neural data. This model classified hit songs with 97% accuracy. Applying machine learning to the neural response to 1st min of songs accurately classified hits 82% of the time showing that the brain rapidly identifies hit music. Our results demonstrate that applying machine learning to neural data can substantially increase classification accuracy for difficult to predict market outcomes.

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In the years following the revolution, hundreds of thousands of Cubans left the island nation for South Florida, setting the stage for what would become one of the most important linguistic convergences in all of the Americas.

Today, the vast majority of the population is bilingual. In 2010, more than 65% of the population of Miami-Dade County identified as Hispanic or Latina/o, and in the large municipalities of Doral and Hialeah, the figure is 80% and 95%, respectively.

Of course, identifying as Latina/o is not synonymous with speaking Spanish, and language loss has occurred among second- and third-generation Cuban Americans. But the point is that there is a lot of Spanish – and a lot of English – being spoken in Miami.

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Nuclear plant construction is often characterized as exhibiting “negative learning.” That is, instead of getting better at building plants over time, we’re getting worse. Plants have gotten radically more expensive, even as technology has improved and we understand the underlying science better

…

Most nuclear plant cost increase in the 1970s-80s can be attributed to increased labor costs. An estimate by United Engineers and Constructors found that from 1976-1988, labor costs for plant construction climbed 18.7% annually, while material costs escalated by only 7.7% annually (against an overall inflation rate of 5.5%) Of those labor costs, over half were due to expensive professionals: engineers, supervisors, quality control inspectors, and so on.

…

Why did labor costs increase? According to most observers, increasing regulation made plants increasingly burdensome to build. During the late 60s and early 70s, regulatory requirements steadily increased.

 

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On the cover of Lisa Birnbach’s “The Official Preppy Handbook,” a tongue-in-cheek 1980s guide to looking, acting and thinking like a US prep school elite, a pattern along the border depicts a fabric that has become synonymous with casual American luxury: madras.

The colorful plaid cotton cloth has been used by brands like Ralph Lauren and Brooks Brothers for decades. Think light summer dresses, shirts and shorts worn at the country club or on sailing holidays in the Bahamas — the kind of attire that might be complemented by a pair of leather boat shoes.

But this staple of preppy American fashion has humble origins, far from Martha’s Vineyard or the hallways of Yale or Harvard, in Chennai, India, the coastal city from which it takes its name. (Chennai was known as Madras during British rule.)

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Take a look at the average corporate car park and it will look like a still from a black-and-white movie. The vast majority of cars sold in the United States continue to be grayscale colors: black, white, gray, and silver—and it’s getting worse. According to data from iSeeCars, there’s been a 20% increase in grayscale cars over the past 20 years.

In 2004, grayscale cars made up 60.3% of the new car market, which is an understandable number. Grayscale colors are simple, widely liked, and look good on most cars. However, in 2023, that number jumped to a staggering 80%. And, according to iSeeCars, automakers offer the same number of different colors now as they did in 2004, with an average of 6.7 non-grayscale colors. So it isn’t that automakers are afraid of interesting colors. Customers just don’t seem to want them.

Wall Street Journal.

Why are so many Americans forgoing new vehicles? Used cars are not just a better bargain, they retain designs and features more coveted than their high-tech replacements.

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Like every regulator grant of power to the administrative agencies of the executive branch, the agency has grabbed the power and expanded it beyond its original intent. Take the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards imposed by the Department of Transportation/National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — please. The origin of federal fuel economy standards dates to the oil embargo of 1973-1974 imposed by Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and the subsequent tripling in the price of crude oil. Americans could not be trusted to seek cars with better mileage on their own.

Like the old Temporary North of Mines Building at the University of Minnesota, it’s a long way to temporary. The CAFE standards have now become a tool wielded by the Biden administration to club Americans into submission to electric vehicles. We want nothing more than to be left alone, but they want to run our lives. Count the ways.

It’s a long list that includes the displacement of cars powered by internal combustion engines by electric vehicles. We love the former and reject the latter. Thus the latest edition of NHTSA’s CAFE standards, announced yesterday.

Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

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Sow the wind, reap the tornado.

Washington Poop.

An arrest affidavit for Junior Geneus Bazile, 29, was filed in March but did not name the woman. However, Paola Garcia told Local 10 News this week that she was the passenger involved in the incident at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. According to the affidavit, the pink suitcase contained an Apple MacBook, an iPad, an Apple Watch, jewelry and high-end women’s clothing, worth more than $5,000 in total.

The affidavit from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office says Garcia’s flight was canceled and passengers were advised to retrieve their luggage from a carousel at the airport. She told the local news station she stood waiting for the bag, which contained a laptop she needed for her university studies, at a carousel for at least two hours. But it never arrived. Garcia told Local 10 News that she normally carries the bag on board with her, but on this occasion, Spirit Airlines employees forced her to check it.

Yet another reason not to fly commercial. There are services that will hook you up, Uber-like, with idle corporate and personal jets.

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Community broadband advocates have scored a major victory in Minnesota as state lawmakers there have repealed the state’s preemption laws that prevented cities and towns in the Land of 10,000 Lakes from providing municipal broadband services.

The new legislation, signed into law yesterday by Gov. Tim Walz, took aim at two statutes that sought to protect large monopoly telecommunications providers from competition.

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Why do we like Tolkien’s stories? This question has puzzled many authors who have dedicated books, studies, and essays to Middle-earth. Even some of the critics who have downplayed the value of the British author, considering him an unserious writer who invented escapist fairy tales for adults, could not suppress their curiosity when The Lord of the Rings trilogy was declared by Waterstones to be the most read novel of the 20th century. “How is this possible?” they wondered. “A storyteller, even if he is an Oxford professor, became the most influential author of the 20th century? Surely Hesse, Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway, Marquez, and many others were the most read, the most beloved citizens of the Republic of Letters. Why do readers like Tolkien’s stories?”

If you have to ask, you’ll never understand the answer.

StrategyPage.

The IEA (Islamic Emirate Afghanistan) government praised neighboring Kazakhstan for accepting the current Afghan government rather than considering it a terrorist organization. At the same time the IEA continues its policy of limiting education for women. Currently girls must leave school when they reach 12 years of age. For the third year in a row, women were not allowed to take university entrance examinations. Women continue to be banned from working outside their homes. Over the last few decades many Afghan women have been educated and found jobs in the economy. Banning women from these jobs disrupted the efficient operation of the economy. IEA leaders refuse to recognize this problem, much less fix it.

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The world’s largest math education organization is injecting identity politics where it doesn’t belong—and undermining math education in the process.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics told teachers to “regularly and intentionally integrate more equity, justice, and culturally centered mathematics education” in every math lesson in a May 20 position statement,

The council argues that math education must respond to the “culture” of students, represented in “multidimensional identities,” including “race, ethnicity, religion, generation, gender, sexual orientation, education, class, occupation and socio-economic status, and disability.”

“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” — Benito Mussolini

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When is a ban not a ban? When it’s a Biden.

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The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has put a group founded by a lesbian on its “hate map” because the group opposes the transgendering, mutilation and sexualizing of children.

Thank you, Justin “Benito” Trudeau.

UnHerd.

On 25 November 1970, the great Japanese novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima arrived for an appointment with the commandant of the Tokyo barracks of the Japan Self-Defence Forces, Eastern Command. With the help of four others who joined him on his visit, Mishima tied the commandant to a chair and then strode out onto his balcony to pour vitriol on post-war Japan. A crowd of bewildered recruits below heard Mishima effectively call for a coup d’état, accusing his countrymen of chasing economic prosperity while “forgetting the principles of the nation, losing their native spirit, pursuing the trivial without correcting the essential [and] leading themselves into spiritual emptiness”.

The reaction among most Japanese to Mishima’s speech and subsequent ritual suicide — he plunged a samurai sword into his belly back in the commandant’s office, before one of his comrades beheaded him — was one of mystification and sadness. Others, both in Japan and around the world, found that Mishima’s message resonated.

Among them was the Italian philosopher Julius Evola, by this point in his early-70s. Disappointed by the demise, 25 years earlier, of what he regarded as the “miracle” of Japan’s fascist theocracy, Evola saw in Mishima’s final act a courageous call for his country to awaken from the prosperous slumber into which it had been cast by the United States, first as post-war occupier and then as partner in an uneven alliance.

To some people, there is no ‘right’ but the ‘far-right’. Many of these people work in ‘journalism’.

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Poland’s military affairs department is investigating the death of a soldier who was stabbed while protecting his country’s border. Meanwhile, the foreign ministry has summoned the Belarusian envoy in Warsaw to discuss the case.

The incident took place last week, on May 28th, and the soldier has since died of his injuries.

He was stabbed in the chest with a knife while trying to stop a group of migrants who were attempting to force their way across the Belarus-Poland border. The Polish Border Guard said that other officers had been injured earlier the same day while defending the border, including one who was hit with a broken bottle and another who was attacked with a “tool to which a knife was attached.”

NewsBusters.

Staunchly racist and anti-Semitic co-host of ABC’s The View, Sunny Hostin (the descendant of slave owners) was at it again; spewing her hate on Friday’s show and claiming that black Republicans didn’t exist at all, just like “unicorns.” She was joined by the liberal white ladies who lectured black Republican Congressman Byron Donalds (FL), who they suggested was ignorant of black history and should go back to school.

What had them triggered was Donalds talking to a group of black Republicans about black families and how liberal government policies work against them. They took an out-of-context, 27-second clip pushed by the Biden campaign and claimed he was romanticizing Jim Crow.

Hostin, who once scoffed that black Republicans was an “oxymoron” term, proclaimed that black Republicans simply didn’t exist and were mythical creatures. She also suggested that the black vote belonged to the Democratic Party.

NewsBusters.

The circus came to California a long time ago, and there are no signs it’s packing up any time soon. Some recent examples:

California lawmakers set up a reparations panel for “black descendants of slaves” even though California was never a slave state. California has a budget deficit of close to $50 billion, and some put the price tag of the panel’s reparations recommendations at $800 billion.

A former soap opera actor recently was shot and killed in downtown Los Angeles. He interrupted thieves attempting to steal the catalytic converter from his car. In response, a Democrat Los Angeles City Council member — there are no Republicans — blamed the automaker for failing to make the catalytic converters harder to steal. Councilwoman Nithya Raman said: “In this case, I think one of the things that infuriates me, is that we have a company — whatever, Toyota — who makes the Prius, that essentially has a device on their cars which is super easy to remove. It’s the value of a MacBook, right?”

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Retail stores are being shut down at a staggering rate all over the country. If we stay on the pace that we are on, the total number of stores closed in 2024 will be nearly 40 percent higher than the total number of stores closed in 2023. That is what you call a crisis! Meanwhile, banks are shuttering hundreds of branches from coast to coast, and a “restaurant apocalypse” is sweeping across the nation. Everywhere around us, “space available” signs are going up on buildings that were once considered to be prime commercial real estate. If someone tries to convince you that the U.S. economy is in good shape, just show them this article and ask them why so many once prosperous businesses are closing. Needless to say, they will not be able to win the argument after that.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

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Yeah–electric cars don’t need gas, and gas taxes are what they use to (not) repair their streets.

NewsBusters.

The New York Times’s latest attempt at a manufactured scandal — that a few years ago, a Supreme Court Justice’s wife flew a flag upside down — is among the most desperate election-year media ploys ever seen. It’s obvious what this non-story is about: the corporate journalists are attempting to conjure up a pretense for the Supreme Court to be “reformed,” which, in this case, usually involves adding five or more new seats and immediately filling them with far-left ideologues.

Nobody’s buying it, because we know the media’s thoughts on the Supreme Court. As soon as Trump started nominating judges, they began questioning the court’s legitimacy and arguing that perhaps something needed to change.

MSNBC: Robust job growth in May once again exceeds expectations

ZeroHedge: Inside The Most Ridiculous Jobs Report In Years

Wikipedia.

In the year 2017, the United States has fragmented into post-apocalyptic wastelands with a few civilized areas. An ongoing economic crisis has led to the recycling of aging 20th-century mechanical and technological equipment. Society has also become averse to intimacy, as well as both increasingly hypersexualized and bureaucratic. Robotic technology has produced gynoids as substitutes for wives. The declining instances of actual sex among men and women is litigious, with one brothel having lawyers draft up contracts detailing the intended sexual rendezvous.

Only missed it by a couple of years. I blame COVID.

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Bind not the mouths of the kine who tread out the grain.

YouTuber hoe_math explains it all to you.

Takes ‘Do I need to draw you a picture?’ to a whole new level.

“What kind of person you are is the choices that you make. We have no way to judge you other than your choices, that’s what we can see.”

We are what we do.

• Not what we think.
• Not what we believe.
• Not what we say.
• Not what we wish.

WHAT WE DO. That is the thing and the whole of the thing.

Jesus knew this and made it quite clear–read Matthew 5: 31 et seq.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The real power of the media is the power to ignore, so noticing what they ignore is a good way to get a sense of what is happening in the regime. Sometimes they ignore something because it has no interest to the rulers and sometimes it is just to prevent anyone from discussing it. There are times when the media gives something a good leaving alone because the regime does not know how to respond.

The Trump verdict may be the last option. We had the usual stuff on the day it happened, but then the story sort of just disappeared. There were a few conservative cucks doing their normal cuckery, but otherwise the conservatives followed the crowd, which laughed and jeered the verdict. The kooks even had to accept that this was not going to be the winner they imagined. As a result, the story just died.

One possible reason is the verdict has created more problems for the regime, as no one has any idea what to do about it. The whole point of the lawfare gambit was to scare away Trump’s support or bully him out of the race. Instead, he has bulled his way forward to the nomination and he has more support than ever. Like Project Ukraine, the prophesies have not come true and there is no plan B.

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Yesterday morning the FBI raided the home of Abdiaziz Farah, one of the seven defendants in the Feeding Our Future fraud case that has now been submitted to the jury. Farah’s home in Savage was first searched in January 2022 when the FBI executed warrants on several of the homes and business locations related to the case. At that time the FBI scooped up cash and evidence from Farah’s home. What were they looking for yesterday?

The FBI remains mum. The warrant authorizing yesterday’s search is under seal. Last night the public affairs officer for the Office of the United States Attorney here directed me to the FBI for confirmation of the search, but KARE 11’s Lou Raguse first reported it yesterday afternoon via X. Neighbors confirmed the search for Lou.

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The United Nations world food price index rose for a third consecutive month in May, as higher cereals and dairy product prices outweighed drops in prices for sugar and vegetable oils.

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“Whether by mistake or fraud,” 334 deceased Michigan registrants are listed on government records as registering to vote after their date of death, according to a recent filing in the federal Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF).

Nearly four years ago, the PILF discovered 27,000 names of likely deceased registrants on the state’s Qualified Voter File (QVF).

The group asked Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, about her plan to remove them.

An ancient Democrat tradition.

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Just when you think the Democrats’ socialist utopia state of California can’t possibly sink any higher (sic), it does just that: first it was catalytic converters, now it’s fire hydrants.

According to CBS News, a California state water company has responded to a growing frenzy of fire hydrant thefts in Los Angeles by installing locked shields to cover the bolts on hydrants to stop thieves.

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On Wednesday, Senate Republicans blocked the Democrats’ “Right to Contraception” bill. The bill sought to provide more money to places like Planned Parenthood to facilitate more abortions and promote transgender surgeries on kids. Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) proposed the bill called “Right to Contraception.” Critics have more appropriately titled the bill as the “Payouts for Planned Parenthood Act.”