1. This morning we looked at wills & will writing but that is not the only component of inheritance. You can either die with a will or without one. Those who die without die intestate. And intestate comes in 3 ways.

2. a) If a person dies quiet a valid will,
b) if the person appointed to benefit from a will dies first & no substitution of heir is made
c) if the person appointed cannot take under a will.
The law focuses on the rights of the surviving spouse and the child if there is no will.

3. 2 major things affect intestate succession and these are date of death and marital status. This is because the current law ONLY affects people who died after 1 Nov 1997 & there are different laws that affect married & single people at death. The type of marriage applies too.

4. If you are married in terms of general law or what was once called ‘-Chapter 37’ & now ‘Chapter 5:11 or are married under ‘Chapter 5:07’ which is a registered customary marriage (muchato wekamudzviti) the Deceased Estates Succession Act applies. It’s only for registered 💍

5. If you are married under an unregistered customary law union (UCLU) which means having the traditional wedding without registration, the Administration of Estates Act applies. I don’t want to labour you with the technicalities but the distinction is very important.

Tony Blair is LOTO, behind the scenes, other Blairites are involved too. Keir Starmer is just a front man, Alexandre Samuel Barros-Curtis is Labour's version of Dominic Cummings, he's THE top man. Everything makes sense from this perspective. #LabourLeak #StarmerOut 👇 #BREXIT

According to his LinkedIn profile, Barros-Curtis’s day job is as a consultant solicitor “Providing specialised legal advice in the area of derivatives and structured finance” in particular “Hedging, project financings, securitisations, credit derivatives” #LabourLeaks #HedgeFund

He has worked extensively on derivatives and structured finance matters in Europe and Hong Kong; as well as formerly working for the Clinton Foundation. Asked to comment on Mr Barros-Curtis and his role in the party Labour said they do not discuss staffing issues. #LabourLeaks

Starmer's team members were accused of what's called "DATA - scraping" - seeking to obtain certain information from a wider set of data. Mr Barros-Curtis was also the DATA controller for Keir's campaign website. Who hired Asaaf Kaplan and When?.

Tony Blair has said he would not want a left-wing Labour party to win a general election.

The former prime minister said that even if he thought a left-wing programme was the route to victory, he would not adopt one. 2015

It's been twenty years, to the day, since I published my first blog-post.

I'm a blogger.

Blogging - publicly breaking down the things that seem significant, then synthesizing them in longer pieces - is the defining activity of my days.

https://t.co/lksXhU6HKM

1/

Over the years, I've been lauded, threatened, sued (more than once). I've met many people who read my work and have made connections with many more whose work I wrote about. Combing through my old posts every morning is a journey through my intellectual development.

2/

It's been almost exactly a year I left Boing Boing, after 19 years. It wasn't planned, and it wasn't fun, but it was definitely time. I still own a chunk of the business and wish them well. But after 19 years, it was time for a change.

3/

A few weeks after I quit Boing Boing, I started a solo project. It's called Pluralistic: it's a blog that is published simultaneously on Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, a newsletter and the web. It's got no tracking or ads. Here's the very first

I don't often do "process posts" but this merits it. Here's how I built Pluralistic and here's how it works today, after nearly a year.

I get up at 5AM and make coffee. Then I sit down on the sofa and open a huge tab-group, and scroll through my RSS feeds using @newsblur.

5/

How to Read Better and Gain More From It

// A THREAD //

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero.”

— Charlie Munger

...but maybe you don't and would like to.

That's why I put together this thread.

What will I cover?

1) The biggest myths about reading
2) Why should you read
3) How to find time for reading
4) How to gain the most from your reading

1) The biggest myths about reading

Let's start with briefly debunking some of the biggest myths out there.

"I don't have time for reading."
- We all have the same 24 hours. The reading may not be the priority for you, but that's a choice. The choice you made.

"Reading is boring."
- It doesn't have to be. As @naval puts it: "Read what you love until you love to read".

"Reading is procrastination."
- If you apply what you read, this is non-sense. And if you don't... I still think it's time well spent.

#WednesdayWagner Hoiho! Missing your weekly thread on Wagner's leitmotifs and composing strategies? Here I am! This week, we start talking on a leitmotif that appears in every Wagner's opera:
ONE LEITMOTIF TO RULE THEM ALL (part 1 out of 3)
#TwitterCultural

#WednesdayWagner Although each Wagner's creation has its own "sound world", and although leitmotif technique was not exactly exploited since the 1st one, there is a short gesture/motive that appears in ALL Wagner's operas. Don't you believe me? Keep reading ⬇️
#TwitterCultural

#WednesdayWagner This is the recurrent leitmotif: the 4-pitch gesture that can be listened to right at the beginning of Lohengrin 
#TwitterCultural

#WednesdayWagner In this first thread, let's go through the first 3 Wagner operas ("Der fliegende Holländer", "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin") to identify this small but powerful melody
#TwitterCultural

#WednesdayWagner Note that I would just mention the main appearances of this gesture or melodic idea, without digging bar by bar into the whole operas
#TwitterCultural

Did you know:

—in old-timey-times women got abortions w no constraints?

—ads for abortion were so common in the 1800s they were blasé?

—native women controlled their fertility & men had no say?

Today's @OrdEquality ep will blow your freakin’ mind

There's this perception that women didn't have abortions in the past— that we were somehow better & more “moral” in the past— but, that could not be further from the truth.

Women have always controlled their fertility throughout the entire history of time. — Dr. @lmacthompson1

We interviewed @LorettaJRoss Prof, Co-founder @sistersong_woc & Godmother to the reproductive justice movement:

"Emperor Augustus was complaining about elite Roman women not having enough children... Roman women were using knowledge from Egypt to practice fertility control..."

"I discovered that the kidnapped, enslaved Black women who were brought over in the slave trade actually brought knowledge about abortifacients with them. And so, they were secretly controlling their own fertility on these plantations." — @LorettaJRoss on @OrdEquality

"Black women have been fighting for reproductive self-determination since our arrival in this country." —@LorettaJRoss on @OrdEquality

The Final Destination (also known as Final Destination 4) is a 2009 3-D supernatural horror film written by Eric Bress and directed by David R. Ellis, both of whom also worked on Final Destination 2.

Released on August 28, 2009, it is the fourth installment to the Final Destinationfranchise, and the first of which to be shot in HD 3-D.
The Final Destination is rated R by the MPAA for strong violent/gruesome accidents.

Eight years after the explosion of Flight 180, seven years after the Route 23 pileup and three years after Devil's Flight derailment, college student Nick O'Bannon has a premonition of a car crash while watching a race at McKinley Speedway for a study break.

which sends debris into the audience, crushing some spectators and resulting in the stadium partially collapsing, killing almost everyone present in the 180 section.

In a panic Nick convinces his girlfriend Lori Milligan, and friends Hunt Wynorski and Janet Cunningham to leave, with the quartet being followed by a handful of others who become angry with Nick after he pushes past them to escape.

A quick primer on the #MorganWallen fallout for country radio:

To those stations that have pulled Wallen's music: You've done more than I expected the country industry to do at all. That matters.

But you have taken only the *first* step here. You do not get to now act as though you've washed your hands of a problem that is bone-deep.

This is, as our friend @AndreaWillWrite has noted, a moment for action. Not for hashtags or vague social media posts about how "this" is "not who we are."

Because you, country radio, know damn good and well that it is who "we" are. And it always has been.

So now you have giant racist sized holes to fill in your playlists.

What you do *not* do right now is fill those holes with other white dudes. Particularly not other white dudes you know are exactly like Chucklefuck McMullet but just haven't been caught on video.

You do *not* fill those holes in your playlist with callow calls for "unity" or bridging a "great divide" that come from white dudes who benefit most from the status quo because you, country radio, protect them at the expense of literally everyone else.

The Day After Tomorrow is a 2004 American climate fiction-disaster film co-written, directed, and produced by Roland Emmerich. The film was made in Toronto and Montreal and is the highest-grossing Hollywood film to be made in Canada (if adjusted for inflation).

in this film Los Angeles was destroyed by tornadoes and New York City was destroyed and engulfed by a tidal wave and froze by the ice clouds.

On an expedition in Antarctica, paleoclimatologist Jack Hall and his colleagues Frank and Jason are drilling for ice-core samples on the Larsen Ice Shelf for the NOAA when the shelf breaks off.

Later, Jack presents his findings on global warming at a United Nations conference in New Delhi, but fails to convince diplomats or Vice President of the United States Raymond Becker.

However, Professor Terry Rapson of the Hedland Climate Research Centre in Scotland believes in Jack's theories.

A North Korean terrorist may be responsible for taking the president hostage, but it’s Bulgarian-made CGI that does the most damage in Antoine Fuqua’s intense, ugly, White-House-under-siege actioner Olympus Has Fallen.

Cut past the pic’s superficial patriotism, and the message is ironically clear: Never outsource your visual effects when a domestic shop will do.

Courageously representing the human element in this mostly digital assault on American soil, Gerard Butler holds his own as a one-man-army. Millennium was wise to push this grim act-of-war movie out three months ahead of Columbia’s like-minded “White House Down.

Olympus Has Fallen” helmer Fuqua, who’s known for bringing an unflinching toughness to inner cities (“Training Day”) and ancient history (“King Arthur”), sticks to the “Die Hard” model here, minus most of the tossed-off one-liners.

In ex-Special Forces pro Mike Banning, Butler presents a gritty but humorless hero who cusses, bleeds and occasionally pauses to remove shards of glass from his wounds.

In my book, American Oligarchs, I write extensively about Charlie Kushner. In the 1990's he was an ambitious real estate developer on the rise. Like Donald Trump, he found that political contributions enhanced his status, power, and money 1/

He began giving enormous amounts to Democrats. He gave over $3 million to New Jersey Democrats when Jim McGreevey was running for NJ Gov -- about the same as Enron gave to George W. Bush 2/

Bill Clinton came to his office in Livingston, as did Al Gore. But it turned out some of those attention-getting contributions were illegal, made in the name of others, including some of his family members.

3/

His brother sued Charles Kushner. A young and ambitious Republican prosecutor, Christopher J. Christie, began investigating, a standard white collar prosecution...of a big supporter of the NJ Gov. It probably would have been quietly adjudicated, except...

4/

Charlie concluded the whole thing was a hit job cooked up by his siblings & Christie. So Charlie hired an East Orange cop to procure a sex worker to entrap his brother-in-law. Charlie held on to the tape a while. Then, grand jury letters started to go out.

5/

When you break down the lives of extremely successful people, you find that their success didn't come from an earth shattering break-through.

Rather, it came from obsessing about a simple idea, fanatically.

Time for a thread about one such idea. 👇👇👇

1/ During world war II, a eleven year old kid checks out a book from the nearest library. The book's title was "1000 ways to make 1000 dollars".

After he reads that book, he makes a statement that by the time he was 35 years old, he'd be a millionaire.

2/ By the age of 35, his net worth was roughly 7-8 million dollars. The library was Omaha public library. That kid was Warren Buffett.

How he got there is an interesting story.

As soon as he reads that book, he decides he should have 1000 dollars before he finishes school.

3/ While looking for business ideas, he goes to his friend Dan's house one day.

He watches Dan fix an old pinball machine (that he bought for $15) in two hours.

Warren asks him if he can fix more.

Dan says yes.

4/ Warren and Dan set up a company (of course no incorporation and all that legal jazz).

They call the firm "Wilson Coin Operated Company".

They go to local barbers and pitch the barbers an ingenious business plan.

OK, let's start talking about the House's 80 page brief on impeachment. It really is an incredibly well-done piece of work. There are some things I'd do differently and some pieces I didn't love, but overall, it's very very good.

Again - this thread will happen in fits and starts. I'm swamped at work and this will come in 10-15 minute chunks as I take a break

Let's start by taking a look at the table of contents. After a 4-page intro (that's relatively long, don't love it), the brief spends a solid 30 pages walking through the facts underlying the impeachment - and, the subheadings tell us, tying in Trump's general refusal to accept

the election results with everything that followed. This is a strong rhetorical approach, but it comes with dangers: the President not only had a legal right to contest the election results, but the GOP Senators pretty much all backed that right, strongly.

It's going to be important to thread a needle of saying "this set the stage for what came after" without putting yourself in a place where you're trying to convince the Senate that the challenges themselves were impeachable. That won't fly

Streetwear, Gorpcore & the future of menswear.

Menswear is changing. Even Virgil says streetwear's gonna die.

Meanwhile, there's this growing trend of urban dwellers wearing camping gear like they're headed Upstate...

Meet Gorpcore.

Is it replacing streetwear?

[thread]

So let's unpack:

1/ What Gorpcore is + where it came from.
2/ What makes something Gorpcore.
3/ Its place in the culture.
4/ Predicting just how mainstream outdoor-wear can go.

What is Gorpcore:

Ever heard of "good old raisins and peanuts?"

It's another phrase for trail mix. Yep, that's it.

So how's this related to Gorpcore?

Gorpcore is someone who wears a (trail) mix of: technical, utilitarian, function, outdoorsy-wear on the regular.

... you know, clothing *traditionally* reserved for trail runners. Hikers. Campers.

Kind of like this:

In 2017, The Cut's Jason Chen coined the phrase Gorpcore as a way of describing this budding species.

But it ain't new.

It's been around for years, gaining steam in the late 2010s.

Chen says Gorpcore represents a style-shift away from minimalism (what's known as Normcore).

1/ Marcus Bullock went to prison in the mid-90s at the age of 15.

Today, he's the CEO of Flikshop -- the "Instagram for the Incarcerated", an alternative to the outrageously expensive phone call system.

This is a truly inspirational founder story 👇👇

2/ In 1996, Bullock was living in Maryland. One night, he and a friend carried out an armed carjacking on a man sitting idle in a shopping mall parking lot.

It was the biggest mistake of this life.

3/ Several years prior to hit actions, there was the famed 1989 Central Park "Jogger Case", in which 5 minority youths were (falsely) accused of raping a jogger.

In the aftermath, nearly every state passed new laws that made it easier for courts to try youth as adults.

4/ For the carjacking, Bullock was charged as an adult and served 8 years in prison.

With onerous prison phone charges ($18 / 15 mins), Bullock's mother kept in touch with him by sending a photo or letter every day.

"She saved me," he says of his mom's efforts.

5/ The $1.2B+ prison phone system is dominated by 2 PE-backed firms (Global Tel Link, Securus Tech).

For the right to operate these phones lines, prisons effectively pay kickbacks to state and local government. The highest kickbacks win bids, which drive up costs.

Time for a BOOK LIST.

I've read over 250 self-help and business books..

Heres a list of the ones that have had the largest influence on my life and career.

A thread:

Never Split the Difference - @VossNegotiation

It outlines and reinforces the fact that business, negotiation and any human interaction is inherently very emotional. Mirroring, tactical empathy, starting with no and labeling are all phenomenal.

The E-Myth Revisited - @MichaelEGerber

The first stop for any beginner. This is a great book about the importance of creating a business that can thrive without you. Preaches a lot of my favorite business principles like working on the things that are important but not urgent.

Entreleadership - @DaveRamsey

This book just has non stop quality advice about how to build a business the right way. Dave doesn’t preach about politics or religion. He just tells it like it is and tells the stories of what worked for him. Phenomenal read.

Ego is the Enemy - @RyanHoliday

Ryan preaches stoicism and how to handle emotions, rejection and stress. Managing that split second between an event and your reaction is what life is all about. It shows the importance of remaining humble and the dangers of overconfidence.