The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
Check it out! An actual, real, amazing, positive event.
Don’t you just love this kid? Every time another woman runs up and hugs him, he gets this kind of surprised look on his face. Adorable!
Would that we could clone Temar Boggs and Chris Garcia (whose name is given in news stories elsewhere) and populate the world with them. Or maybe at least populate the halls of Congress? 😉
You don’t have to be poor to be snookered by con artists. One of the guys in my Thursday morning business group, affectionately known as George the Elder, is a financial manager. He has a client, an old gal who’s been with him for 20 years and has plenty of money in IRAs. He had things set up so that she was getting about $6,000 a month from now unto the end of time, with the fund unlikely to run out before she croaks over.
Somehow, this woman got involved with a scam artist who persuaded her that the world economy is about to crash in flames and that to save herself she must convert all her investments into gold!
Our guy tried his weenie-wurst to persuade her otherwise, but she simply would NOT listen to him — the crook had her convinced that George was ripping her off! — and so she has unloaded all her IRAs, sold all her equities, and drained her savings, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes, and is madly buying freaking gold coins!
George is beside himself, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He thinks she’s alzheimering out or otherwise has taken leave of her sanity…but she lives alone and there’s apparently no one to challenge her competence.
The obvious message here is don’t believe anyone who advises you to do anything drastic with your money. Anyone who tells you the world is coming to an end or the stock market is headed for an irrecoverable crash is either a nut case or a scam artist, especially if the person is trying to get you to change your way of doing business.
But there’s a subtler message. We are about to see millions of people enter old age. Following in their tracks will be millions of scam artists trying to take advantage of them. If you have any assets at all — even if it’s just a paid-off house, to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings — you and your spouse or partner should set up your estate to protect the survivor and your children from predators and their own stupidity.
Even if you’re not among the 1 percent, you can set up a trust to protect just about any kind of asset, be it cash and investments, real estate, or your beloved mattress filled with Krugerrands. These entities exist in a variety of forms, among them the irrevocable living trust, the revocable trust, the Kiss trust, and the like. Some work as tax shelters, because in effect you no longer own the assets — the trust owns them. Thus if you have a child who’s trying to get college aid, sheltering your family’s money in a trust can erase wealth that would be held against him or her in the application process, and you can draw funds from the trust without paying large taxes on them. The Kiss trust lends itself to this strategy, especially for middle-income families that are not wealthy, and it has the advantage that more than one person can contribute to it.
A trust should be set up by a lawyer. As with any decision involving your life savings, it pays to get professional advice — and to ensure that the adviser actually is trustworthy. Don’t do business with “experts” who want to sign you up in your living room. Hire a good lawyer and check the person’s credentials. Bear in mind that AARP does not endorse any living trust products, and so if someone tries to play the AARP card with you, walk away. Also don’t walk but run away from anyone who tries to high-pressure you or speed you through some sales pitch.
In setting up a trust, be sure that you as the grantor have the say over how the funds will be invested; that you retain the right to decide how assets will be distributed among beneficiaries; that you retain the right to remove a trustee if you’re not satisfied with his or her services; and add a provision ensuring that after your death beneficiaries must appoint a qualified trustee from a legitimate bank trust department. Also bear in mind that it’s possible to set up a trust so that assets outside of it are transferred into the trust after you pass away.
If you have a complicated estate or a lot of money, setting up a trust will cost something in lawyers’ fees, although a Kiss Trust can be organized very inexpensively. But you get what you pay for. Consider: if George had his client’s investments set up so she was receiving 4 percent of principal, she had $1.8 million. All of which she is busily converting to gold coins… The savings on taxes alone would be more than the cost of having hired a lawyer to protect those assets with a trust. It’s worth checking out the pro’s and cons and exploring whether one of these instruments might help protect you or your heirs from questionable schemes and bad ideas.
Do you ever ask yourself…Why do you want to do that?
Bet you do.
This afternoon that question crossed my my mind. It followed a twisting path to get there, but eventually it arrived, and I guess it brought a little enlightenment with it.
My friend and fellow editor, Tina, lives in a kind of extended family commune. Her relatives and SO think, often (from what I can tell) about how kewl it would be to acquire a good-sized chunk of land and build a compound on it, one with separate living a quarters for each individual or dyad or triad or whateverad, but with a community hall where people might meet and prepare meals together and party together and plan their shared trajectory together.
Meanwhile another pair of friends, La Maya and La Bethulia, occasionally voice the same thought: how amazing would it be to find a way to get a group of like-minded people together in a kind of shared housing?
And gazing into the past, some other old friends of mine — a couple and a single woman — came amazingly close to throwing in together with me to buy a gorgeously tricked-out triplex in Fountain Hills, a far suburb of Phoenix gifted with peace, quiet, gorgeous views, relatively cool temperatures, and proximity to the upscale environs of north Scottsdale. Fortunately, we couldn’t figure out the legalities of a tiny co-op — I say “fortunately” because we fell out and went our three different ways. But still…as ideas go, it was interesting.
So this thought proceeded to an e-mail to La Tina: why not look and see if those of us who can support ourselves remotely, through the various gigs and online businesses we exploit, could purchase some ash-covered acreage in Yarnell and build our own compound on it? The Yarnellites no longer welcome trailers, but…what about modular homes? I could, for example, live real happily in this little fella, especially if it had some room for a private garden or two around it.
And as I was shooting those links off to her, there it was, the thought occurring: Why do you want to do that?
Me?
Well, I don’t think I’m going to live all that much longer. And I suspect the time left to me is not going to lend itself to fully independent living.
I can’t take care of my house anymore. If this back pain doesn’t go away, and go away damned soon, I’m not going to be able to live here in my home. I can barely vacuum the floor, much less mop the grime off it. I haven’t dusted in weeks. It’s all I can do to drag myself out of bed in the morning, stumble around for a few hours, and then drag myself back into the bed, there to sleep all afternoon.
After I discovered that the blood pressure med is known to cause a) rashes like the nasty number that broke out on my face right after I started it, b) fatigue and listlessness, c) joint and muscular pain defining the excruciating agony that ramped up within three weeks after I started swallowing the stuff, and d) dizzy spells that make it dangerous (read “almost impossible”) for me to drive, I decided to experiment by quitting it. After all, I’ve had high blood pressure for several years and am not going to die in a month or two.
The rash went away within five days after I stopped taking the drug. So did the dizziness and light-headedness. Three weeks after quitting the damn stuff, the back pain is down to a .25 on a scale of one to ten. And the blood pressure is up to 130 to 140 on the home monitor, which means it’s over 150 on the higher quality units at a doctor’s office.
So I risk a stroke or I make myself so sick taking the damn stuff that I can’t take care of myself anymore and would just as soon shuffle off this mortal coil at the earliest possible moment.
That reduces the choices, de facto, to either
a) I get rid of Cassie, sell my home, and move into a life-care community where there’s someone to watch out for me, fix my food, and do the light housekeeping; or
b) I take my chances with death or permanent godawful disability.
But suppose the choices included c) I throw in with a bunch of other people who can more or less take care of themselves but can’t (or would prefer not to) go it completely alone? Now we have a whole new take on why do you want to do that…
Why would I want to live in a commune in Yarnell? Not just “it’s quiet,” “there are no effing cop and nooz helicopters buzzing the house every ten minutes,” “the air is clean(er),” “hawks and eagles and buzzards ride the cold columns of air overhead,” “the weather is never blinding effing hot,” “you can sleep with the windows open at night,” “you can hear the coyotes call in the middle of the night,” “there are no pawnshops for gangbangers and meth-heads to stick up,” “there are no cops to chase the gangbangers and meth-heads into your garage,” or any of that claptrap.
Put all the claptrap together and then add to it “my life might be shorter, but at least a fair amount of the last part of it will be better.”
Now you’ve got the picture. What is that you want to do, and why do you want to do that?
Here’s something to entertain you, here in our Brave New World: with some question about the survival of Barnes & Noble, loyal B&N customers are beginning to wonder what will become of their Nook e-books if the company goes kaput?
Barnes & Noble has already deep-sixed the color version of the Nook, and some observers think, along with technology expert Jeff Kagan, that “the Nook may become the Betamax of e-books.”
Huh. Think of that.
Therein lies the reason this old troglodyte clings to her wallsful of real, paper-and-ink analogue books. Unless it’s a PDF that you’ve bought and downloaded into your computer and backed up externally, these e-book things are ephemeral, and you “own” them at someone else’s pleasure. Barnes & Noble selleth and Barnes & Noble taketh away. Ditto Amazon.
A hard-copy book can be eaten by crickets or printed on acidic paper that rots away… but by and large, once it’s bought, paid for, and parked on your bookshelf, no one can barge into your house and grab it away from you.
In the virtual world, however, Amazon can and does do exactly that, as we’ve known since 2009 when it yanked George Orwell’s 1984 off the Kindles of customers who had already paid for it and begun to read it. In 2012, Amazon deleted over 4,000 e-books when one of the largest distributors in the country declined to accept a change in terms of service, and then a little later that year it remotely wiped a customer’s Kindle, “accidentally” revealing that it can erase purchased and paid-for ebooks at will.
And because you don’t own those books at all — you own a license to look at them — all those hundreds and thousands of dollars worth property cannot be passed down to your heirs. If your whole collection of learning and knowledge exists in the form of e-books, you have no right to give them to your children and grandchildren.
Now, it has to be said that about 99.8% of published books could be disappeared without harming the course of humanity’s intellectual progress. But… The potential for censorship — we could call that thought control — is obvious.
And IMHO the potential for thought control already looms way too large in our electronified culture. This morning a member of our business group gave a presentation on the pervasive electronic surveillance the government has slapped on the entire country and probably on most of the rest of the world — how they’re doing it, why they’re doing it, and why it’s way too late to for anyone to do anything about it. It’s scary stuff.
Those of us who blithely fork over our privacy and our rights to corporations and secretive government agencies assume too much in imagining that these entities will always be benign.
So far, though, it’s not too late to buy a real book. Preferably with cash. 😉
Image: Selling the Nook. Tomwsulcer. Public Domain. Photographer warrants identifiable subject has consented to publication of image.
Having fallen off the Diet Wagon three times today and never managed to climb onto the Exercise Wagon at all, I’m feeling generally fat and cranky again. However, the day was partially saved by a bowl of a wonderful veggie dish I stumbled upon, by recipe and by improv.
A week or so ago, I came across a New York Times recipe for something called mujadara, a kind of Lebanese comfort food made with lentils dosed copiously with cumin and oniony stuff. Times food writer Melissa Clark describes the dish as made with leeks and flavored with (among other things) allspice and bay leaf. Having none of these things on hand, I made a few substitutions. She also calls for 2¼ teaspoons of salt, about twice as much as anyone should be adding to their food. There’s a reason for that: lentils and rice call out, piteously, for salt. But lo! there’s a very tasty fix for that, too.
Check it out:
You need:
• 1 cup green or brown lentils (not the orangey ones)
• 1 large onion, sliced thin
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• dash of salt
• 2 large garlic cloves, minced
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup rice
• 1½ to 2 tsp ground cumin
• 1/8 tsp ground cloves (more, if desired)
• leaves of a small sprig of rosemary, finely chopped
• dash of cayenne or red pepper flakes, to taste
• 1 cinnamon stick
• a couple of fistfuls of spring greens (chard, kale, spinach, mustard, or combination), chopped
• water
• 13.5-ounce can of coconut milk
• fresh lemon (optional)
Place the lentils in a large bowl and cover generously with warm tap water. Allow to soak while you prepare other ingredients.
Heat the oil in a Dutch oven or large, deep skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring, until they turn deep golden brown, about 10 or 15 minutes. You want these to get pretty dark, with a few strands maybe even turning black. To accomplish this without burning the onion, the heat should be on the high side of medium but not too hot.
When you decide these are done, lift about half of the onions out of the pan to a plate or bowl and set aside.
Stir the garlic into the pot with the remaining onion and cook briefly, until fragrant. Then stir in the raw rice and sauté for a few minutes, until the grains turn opaque and begin to toast. Stir in the cumin, clove, and cayenne; sauté for another few seconds.
Drain the lentils and stir them into the pot. Add 4¼ cups water, the rosemary, and the cinnamon stick, and bring the liquid to a simmer. Cover and cook over low heat for 15 minutes.
At this point, take a taste. Add about half the can of coconut milk; gently mix this in and taste again. Add a dash or two of salt, if desired, and then add a little more coconut milk to taste. For a little more zing, squeeze the juice of half a fresh lemon into the pot and stir. Cover and allow to cook another couple of minutes.
Rinse the greens and chop them finely. Spread the greens over the top of the rice and lentils. Cover and cook another five minutes. Remove from the heat and let stand, covered, for another five minutes.
Serve the mujadara sprinkled with the reserved toasted onions.
Incredibly good to eat. The coconut milk adds a lovely mellow flavor that, especially with a spritz of lemon juice, obviates the need for a lot of salt.
Over at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Crystal has succeeded in losing 12 pounds in 10 weeks, in spite of a vacation in San Antonio. w00t!
So that’s encouraging. It shows what can be done, even with the occasional lapse. Before I came across Crystal’s post, I’d been reflecting on the whole weight loss experience. So far, I’ve lost 15.4 pounds since May 13, with 5.9 more to go. Hope to be down to 135 pounds by the end of August…actually, the target is slightly less than that, since I figure once I quit trying to lose weight, a few pounds will probably come back.
CardioDoc, that lithe old boy, remarked that you can’t lose weight unless you’re slightly hungry all the time.
Well. That’s just not my style. I’m too self-indulgent to go around hungry and cranky all the time. And it doesn’t appear to be true — I’m rarely hungry but, except for a week or ten days on the “plateau,” I’ve been losing weight steadily.
But one thing has become apparent: if you go to bed just slightly hungry, you do wake up a few ounces or a pound lighter. It’s not a matter of trying to sleep while you’re ravenous — just going to bed on a lightly packed stomach.
I think that means that you should eat your larger meals earlier in the day — at breakfast or lunch. Since I’ve been occupying myself most mornings with exercise (walking, until I went lame; now swimming or doing physical therapy exercises), I haven’t really felt like eating a lot in the morning. But by early afternoon I’m ready for a real meal…so that’s when I’ve been eating dinner, including a glass of wine. Today it was a gorgeous curry with chicken and lots of veggies…not too tacky.
Swimming seems to burn at least as many calories as walking. It only takes about 35 minutes to swim 30 or 33 laps of the pool in the backyard — about a half-mile. By contrast, the 3½-mile march around the park consumed about an hour and fifteen minutes. And now that I’ve fallen off the “plateau,” I’m losing weight as fast as I was with the walking.
Even at dawn and sunset, it’s hotter than the hubs of Hades out there. It was 112 when I climbed into the pool around 7 o’clock this evening. The water is now so warm that after about 15 laps, just when I’m getting on a roll (uhm…on a row?), I can feel my face getting red. I actually get overheated in the water! It’s like swimming in a bathtub.
But so far, I no longer look like a pregnant grandmother. My shorts are falling off. The jeans aren’t–but they’re made of a stretchy fabric, and besides, they were too tight to begin with. Now I don’t have to lay down on the bed or the floor to zip up the damn things.
The blood pressure is still under control at 107/66, despite my having abandoned the irbesartan several days ago. The little home blood pressure monitor runs about 6 or 8 points lower than the one in the doctor’s office, so the real systolic measure is probably around 113 to 115. However, the irbesartan’s effect on blood pressure persists for at least two weeks after you quit taking it. But…however x 2: it was never this low while I was on the drug.
So this brings us to the Big Question: Once you reach the target weight, how do you stop losing weight but not gain it back????
Obviously, the number one trick will be to work daily exercise into the fabric of my life. And if the back and hip pain don’t stop before the weather gets cold, that’s going to be a trick. Really, I can barely walk. Right now the hikes are flat out of the question, which is fine while it’s 95 at dawn and 112 at sunset. But when the pool is too cold for swimming…then what?
My friends gave me a perfectly fine bicycle, which I suppose I’ll have to start using. Problem is, I don’t think it’s very safe. You can’t get from point A to point B without having to navigate traffic. And Phoenix is decidedly not a bike-friendly city. Some of those crazies out there will swerve at you, cut you off, and behave as though they’re deliberately trying to hit you. Even wearing a helmet, with nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of jeans between you and the pavement, you run quite the risk of serious injury.
There are few things I dislike more than gyms. As the odd kid out, I grew up hating gym and the general miseries associated with coping with mean brats and air-headed PE teachers. Gives me the creeps to go into those places. No way am I gonna pay for the privilege of using unsanitary equipment in a place that would give me the willies even if it weren’t populated with lithe young narcissists. Yuck!
Nor am I at all interested in decorating my house with treadmills and stationary bikes.
Soooo…if I can’t walk by October, it looks like the only choice will be bicycling. Guess I’ll need to buy a better helmet.