That's Wrongly Using Your Head

The Detroit Free Press: Man busted in airport smuggling cocaine under toupee

Cocaine makes you do dumb things.  Smuggling cocaine even moreso. Indeed, it can make you wig out.

A Colombian man was arrested for attempting to smuggle cocaine worth thousands under his toupee, officials announced on Monday.

The suspect was caught before taking a flight to Amsterdam from Cartagena's Rafael Nunez International Airport, according to Reuters and Sky News.

He had about $10,000 worth of coke under his wig. 

Maybe he should have just opted for a comb-over.

Hamas Perfidy And A Michigan Connection

So Hamas murdered Ariel (age 10) and Kfir Bibas  (age 4 months) by strangling them to death and then disfigured their bodies, and then to add insult to injury handed over coffins that were locked, stuffed with Hamas propaganda along with the bodies, and did not actually return Shiri Bibas' body, instead putting an unknown woman's body int the coffin (The body of was later handed over Friday night).

Hamas, with Iranian backing, also attempted to carry out a massive series of bombings in Israel, only failing due to setting the timers to 9pm rather than 9 am.

Hamas is yet again violating the ceasefire with these acts and expecting to get away with it, as more and more Hamas terrorists are released to kill again in return for live and dead hostages.

Meanwhile, our own Governor Whitmer of Michigan is busy gallivanting around Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates  on a junket with a Hamas apologist and Hezbollah supporter, Osama Siblani, that she brought along for the visit: 

Washington Free Beacon: He Said He'd Take Jews 'Back to Poland.' Gretchen Whitmer Took Him on an Official State Trip to the Middle East. Details of the trip and who she is meeting on it while hanging out with Siblani makes it even worse.

Words would fail to express the disgust that I have right now for our dear  governor half-whit. 

To be jaunting around with a Hamas apologist as Hamas commits terrorist attacks and continues to hold people hostage is beyond the pale. 

Some 51st State Humor

President Trump was in the Oval Office when his telephone rang, "Hello, President Trump," a heavily accented voice said, "This is Archie, up 'ere at the Harp Seal Pub in Badger's Cove, Newfoundland, Canada, eh?

"I am callin' to tells ya dat we are officially declaring war on ya!"

 

"Well, Archie," The Donald said, "This is indeed important news!  How big is your army?"

 

"Right now," said Archie, after a moment's calculation, "there's myself, me cousin Harold, me next-door neighbour Mick, and the whole dart team from the pub.  That makes eight!"

 

Donald paused.  "I must tell you Archie that I have one million men in my army waiting to move on my command."

 

"Wow," said Archie.  "I'll have t' call ya back!"   Sure enough, the next day, Archie called again.

 

"Mr. Trump, the war is still on!  We have managed to acquire some infantry equipment!  We have two combines, a bulldozer, and Harry's farm tractor."

 

President Trump sighed.  "I must tell you Archie, that I have 16,000 tanks and 14,000 armed personnel carriers.  Also, I've increased my army to one and a half million since we last spoke."

 

"Lord above," said Archie, "I'll be gettin' back at ya."   Sure enough, Archie rang again, the next day.  "President Trump, the war is still on!  We have managed to git ourselves airbourne!  We up an' modified Harrigan's ultra-light wit a couple of shotguns in the cockpit, and four boys from da Legion have joined us as well !"

 

Donald was silent for a minute and then cleared his throat.  "I must tell you, Archie, that I have 10,000 bombers and 20,000 fighter planes.  Huge.  My military complex is surrounded by laser-guided, surface-to-air missile sites.  And you need to know, since we last spoke, I've increased my army to TWO MILLION!"

 

"Jumpins, Lord tunderin!"  "Two million, ye say!!" said Archie.  "I'll have ta call youse back.

 

Sure enough, Archie called again, the next day.  "President Trump!  I am sorry to have to tell ya dat we have had to call off dis 'ere war."

 

"I'm sorry to hear that," said Donald.  "Why the sudden change of heart?"

 

"Well, sir," said Archie, "we've all sat ourselves down and had a long chat over a bunch of pints, and come to realize dat dere's no way we can feed two million prisoners."

Now, it is true that the Canadian Forces are small but mighty.  They are rather confident in their capabilities, and they do punch far above their weight. 

Indeed, apocryphally, the Geneva Convention was started because of the Canadian military, who refer to it even today as the Geneva Checklist.

But in reality, should the Canadians kick off Defence Scheme No. 1 and  War Plan Red ever gets dusted off and updated in return, this can only end one way:

 

Inflation Isn't Rearing It's Ugly Head Again, It's Just Being Actually Accurately Reported Again

Right on time for President Trump to take office, the data now shows inflation increasing.

Reason: Trump May Have To Grapple with Returning Inflation

We will note that Reason, an ostensibly libertarian publication is no friend of Trump.  Verily, Reason seems to be having vapors about his actually reducing the size, scope, and spending of government - something you would think a libertarian would cheer for, neh?

One would think so, but no. Basically Reason at this point is all about marijuana legalization and wide open borders, and damn little else. 

It is not "returning inflation", instead it is that inflation is now being reported accurately again after the books have been cooked and the data tortured the past four years.

Politico: How Democrats Were Tricked Into Believing the Economy Was Strong

The Democrats, pace Politico, weren't being "Tricked" -- they were the ones running the trick.  

The Biden-run government agencies were the ones massaging the data and running the scam under reporting inflation and messing with job statistics to give the picture of a rosy economy under Biden that wasn't. 

The Biden Administration and the media establishment (But I'm repeating myself) had been busy boasting and talking up how wonderful the economy under Biden has been, how Biden achieved a "soft landing" and  try to give him a boost for his reelection and then for Harris when even the massaged stats couldn't get him to the finish line.

The administration and media both made themselves busy asking Americans - "Who are going to believe Biden and the Media, or your own lyin' eyes?"

Now that Biden is out, the stats are being reported, presumably more accurately, just in time for President Trump to have to deal with the results of the massive overspending and effects of the policies Biden has left behind. 

The Fed's decision on setting interest rates - including reducing them right before the election which just so happened to assist Biden, was doing so based on the statistics being manipulated.  

The deliberate false reporting of government statistics,  statistics relied upon to set economic policy, should be seen as one of the greatest scandals of the Biden era.  

Perhaps one day it will be.

I Did Not Know That Michigan's Libraries Are

Heavily, and in some case majorly, funded by traffic tickets and penal fines. 

I had figured that library mileages on property taxes were responsible for the bulk of the funding. Apparently not.

Nor did I know, but I should have guessed, that Wayne County would manage to screw up the accounting and distribution for that funding. Badly.

The Detroit Free Press: Accounting errors have cost Wayne County libraries millions

Over the last decade, 18 libraries in Wayne County have been shorted as much as $1.9 million, while 11 saw an influx in cash, all because of staff turnover at the county level and subsequent accounting errors.

The money at issue flows through the state and comes from penal fines, which are paid to courts in criminal and some civil violations, including most traffic fines. County treasurers collect and distribute the fines to libraries. This funding is baked into state law and it can account for anywhere between 3% to 70% of public libraries' annual budgets, according to the Library of Michigan.

 Wayne County lost the employee who calculated penal fines and the county did not replace that position, according to a report the Library of Michigan prepared for public library directors and boards.

So interesting to know that a goodly amount of the fines from court goes to the state's libraries, hopefully helping the True Crime shelves be well stocked, and that Wayne County can impressively mess up the distribution of those funds.

Lawyer, Please

So the fun with the unpleasant lying lawyer continues.

In the first bit of the latest fun, she has refused to produce unredacted copies of the appraisals of some of the firearms she had appraised and attached to her petition (notably not the handgun that she now suddenly claims they had all along, nor another rifle that we're pretty darn sure her felon brother now has).

Each appraisal has an area blocked out.  One of them is not well blocked out and we can tell it is a copy of a drivers license, and with the phone number that is seen we're pretty darn sure who was handling the firearms appraisal on behalf of the co-trustee.

The felon brother. 

Bit of a no-no, that.

Not a good look for a trustee of a trust to enlist a felon to posses and handle firearms.

So a motion to compel it is, and I have filed it and asked for attorneys fees for having to being it as the refusal has no proper basis.  The hearing unfortunately won't be for over a month, but I expect the unredacted copies will be ordered to be turned over as there's no privilege for this kind of malfeasance. 

The second of the latest news is so much more fun.

Unpleasant lying lawyer now demands the house my co-trustee and beneficiary client is living in now has to be sold to pay for trustee administrative expenses - i.e. the costs of the frivolous lawsuit her client has filed and caused to accrue.

In other words, they want to drive my client out of her marital home now that she has been widowed, and probably grab a fair bit of the value of it, which I suspect was the plan all along.

I reply to her that no, that's not going to happen. 

Instead, I note that such expenses are, by law, paid from the residue of a trust and not from specific distributions like the gift of a house.

Since the co-trustees distributed all the residue as no one thought the Unpleasant Lying Lawyer's client would engage in this ridiculous lawsuit there is no residue at present remaining.

But, instead we will need to clawback the distribution made to all the beneficiaries to cover this which means her client, her client's felon brother, and her client's sister, and my client as well proportionately, will need to opay these "expenses" as the law requires.  

So, as a result.  her family gets to pay a share not only of her client's "administrative expenses" brought on by this lawsuit - but they get to pay my client's expenses as well.

She's certainly not going to be happy with that, and it'll be fun to have her explaining to her family that they now need to cough up the money that they had been paid to cover both side's expenses as co-trustees in this ridiculous lawsuit.

Methinks her cunning plan just backfired a tad. 

But, this is what happens because when you FA, you get to FO.

So Hamas Violated The Ceasefire Agreement

And of course, they lied and claimed Israel had violated it. Hamas is now saying they will not release hostages until Israel makes new concessions.

This tends to be Hamas' modus operandi - agree to an agreement, violate the agreement while claiming Israel violated it, then make further demands beyond what were in the original agreement while only offering to do what they had already agreed to do under the agreement.

Unfortunately for Hamas, they don't have Biden in office anymore, and President Trump has agreed with Israel's demand that since Hamas has now violated the agreement, they must release all the hostages this week.

Given the condition the most recent batch of hostages were in when released, it may be that Hamas wants to delay to try and improve the health and enhance the appearance of the next set of hostages to be released - or there may not be any live hostages left to release.

 Oh, and USAID gave $3 million to a Hamas-affiliated rapper in Gaza (Which means $3 million was funneled to Hamas) to ostensibly create anti-Israel and anti-Semitic songs.

Because, of course they did.

You Can't Be Your Own Personal Representative, Even if You Select It Online

Or: Why doing an online Will may not work for you.

Had a client come in with his deceased brother's Will, and there is property that needs to be probated.

The brother decided to save some money, not hire an attorney, and do it himself online.  

He certainly had the right to do so.

But he lacked the ability to do it right.

He saved money, at least initially, but created a major headache and expense for his survivors.

The problem is he manged to name himself as Personal Representative (think Executor if your jurisdiction uses that term instead, its the person responsible for running the estate through the probate process) of his Will. 

Once you have shuffled off your mortal coil, you can't be personal representative of anything, much less your own Will and estate. It doth not work that way.

I don't know if the online tool he used glitched, or if he didn't understand what he was doing and filled it out wrong, or what.  But we now have a problem as a result.

But as a result, we have to do a lot of stuff that would otherwise be unnecessary and more costly than if it had been done right from the start. 

We now must do a formal probate process complete with a hearing before a judge rather, than the less expensive informal process, to get someone else appointed as the Personal Representative and allow the estate to get moving in probate.

Sometimes it makes sense to have a professional do things, and it can save a lot of time and money too.

Corruption And The Problem Of Scale

DOGE is finding an impressive amount of government corruption, fraud, and featherbedding networks in US Treasury payments.  Verily they are uncovering the Democrat-Progressive-NGO complex with their probe into USAID and Treasury spending.

In a single area of government spending, DOGE learned that $100 Billion (with a B) in entitlement payments were going out to people with no social security number or other identifiers attached to the payments. Treasury officials apparently stated that $50 Billion of that was outright fraud.  Yet the payments were made year after year. It is likely even more programs will show outright fraudulent transfers.

Now $50 Billion in fraud in a single program could be dismissed as just a rounding error in the US Treasury's annual spending of over 6 Trillion dollars. 

And therein lies the problem.  When $50 Billion in fraudulent spending in entitlement programs is just considered a rounding error, you've lost the plot.

 $50 billion is the equivalent of a an entire lifetime of income tax payments by 153,581 Americans. Every dollar in income taxes paid for their entire lives, wasted on fraud in a single program - in one year - every year.

This $50 Billion in spending isn't just a political disagreement over priorities or funding Democrat's friends and buddies in NGOs or throwing money at SPPL (Stuff Progressive People Like). It is an outright transfer of payments to fraudulent recipients.

One should note that $50 Billion is higher than the entire GDP in 112 countries!  

If the fraudulent payments were a country's GDP, the Country of Entitlement Fraudlandia with a GDP of $50 Billion has a GDP equivalent to 14 Haitis, and handily would beat out Bangladesh, Romania, Nigeria, Ukraine, and Morrocco in world rankings at 51st in the world.

The $50 Billion received by Entitlement Fraudlandia is far more than the amount of aid sent so far to North Carolina after Hurricane Helena, which is, depending on what source you look at as a clear answer is interestingly hard to find, anywhere from 3 billion to up to 9 billion total in the latest round of aid.

Even worse, a General Accounting Office report from late April estimated outright fraudulent spending by the Federal Government to be  233 Billion to $521 Billion each year.

That would make The Nation of US Spending Fraudlandia have a greater GDP than India and it would be a Country with the 11th highest GDP in the entire World.

Again, that's just from outright fraud, not even touching cutting what are arguably legitimate, while still being  rather objectionable, payments that are being made on rather questionable spending priorities and to reinforce the Democrat-Progressive NGO complex.