Category Archives: Mythology
Most of us, having grown up on Saturday morning cartoons, had a pretty simple idea of heroism as kids. The frames by which we understand Star Wars or Batman are some of the first narrative templates we acquire, and as children it seems to pervade the romanticized accounts we have of various historical events; not least the John Wayne “good vs. evil” frames by which we see the American Revolution, the American Civil War, and World War II. Movies such as Abraham Lincoln Vampire (which I haven’t seen, but know enough about the plot to talk about) are a prime example: the first scene in the movie shows Abraham Lincoln as a kid getting into a fight with a slaveowner as an act of protest against the racist forces of his time (in reality, even Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of the most influential abolitionists of all time, had opinions about blacks that would rightfully make her a bigot by today’s standards), and later on his wife is shown as admiring his allegedly anti-racist sentiments (in reality, his wife’s family owned tons of slaves.) But you don’t need me to tell you that those childhood tales in which only the truly and irredeemably evil were killed were mere fantasies; the ugly complexities and horrors of the world quickly come into view when one starts reading more in adolescence, and while the problems initially seem like inexcusable acts that can be resisted with simple, albeit difficult, actions, it becomes more clear as time goes on that the modern world, in its vast complexity and interconnectedness, takes us along for the ride whether we like it or not.
Such thoughts led me to wonder about what is and what should be considered ethical in a world that has created a horrifying synergy between violence and complexity. While an analytic approach would leave us fruitlessly looking for axioms and leave us running in circles from the inevitable creep of unexamined assumptions, a lot can be learned by examining the cultural archetypes that shape our unstable consensus about morality: particularly the hero, a figure that stands at the intersection of morality and agency. For our more complex and cynical postmodern age, however, there is another trope that fascinates me: the antihero. While the antihero has arguably existed as long as the hero (I think back to the seemingly ambiguous ethics of Hellenic heroes such as Odysseus), today’s ubiquity of antiheroes in TV, movies, and novels seems to reflect some of our collective confusion while simultaneously paying tribute to more timeless ideas that may have been overlooked in moments of idealism.
Where the stereotypical selfless hero serves the Apollonian ideas of order and generativity, contemporary antiheroes are Dionysian destroyers; sometimes selfishly so, other times for a more nuanced version of what we might tentatively call “The Greater Good”. The use of such terms is not just pretentious window dressing either: the labels of “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” refer to the two main archetypes in Friedrich Nietzche’s The Birth of Tragedy, respectively representing creation and destruction. While Nietzche was primarily concerned with aesthetics, his archetypes later found themselves conceptually re-imagined as the essential conflict between creation and destruction known as dialectic and has since shaped many writers such as Hegel, Marx, Schumpeter, Boyd, Derrida, and Taleb among many others. It’s the key concept behind my entry on allostatic economics, and it also underlies one of the most common templates for understanding the heroic archetype: The Hero’s Journey, as elucidated in Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Before getting into that, however, let’s talk about “The Greater Good” (before we continue, here’s some comic relief in case you need it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2qRDMHbXaM)
Feel Locally, Pause Globally
The issues of morality that we struggle with have more to do with scale than anything else. While we may occasionally debate about whether to tell someone a “white lie” or tell them the harsh truth, our knowledge of morality on a micro-scale is hardly ever topic for debate. Anyone with half a brain can tell you that if someone is in danger that helping them is the right thing to do, or that it’s not okay to murder someone. The kinds of ethical rules that we follow when dealing with our friends and family and those who are in our immediate vicinity are what make up micro-morality. Micro-morality is instinctive: it’s based on the response we have to what is up close and personal: our horror at seeing abused animals or starving children, or our instinct to run to help our child when they scrape their knee on the playground. Rather than being derived from any kind of logical inference, we choose our responses based on our sentiments.
Our sentiments do very well for handling the specific, but they are utterly clueless when it comes to the general. While it may seem that we are horrified by the wreckage of a natural disaster far away or the casualties of a major war, this cringing of ours only happens when we are thinking about a specific image or story about the event; one in which we can imagine a specific person that is affected by the tragedy; thus the dreary aphorism that “one death is a tragedy, a million a statistic.” Unfortunately, an individual story can never be an appraisal of the big picture: the world is too complex, and more than just the aggregate of many statistically independent vectors. Nor does utilitarianism fare any better (in fact, it fares much worse when we consider the kinds of utopian delusions it can lead to), as there is no simple numeraire, let alone method of calculation, that can tell us what is categorically best in the big picture. Even if we could, it would likely look horrifyingly callous to our sentiment-based instincts: for every isolationist who sees Obama’s drone strikes as a heartless calculated slaughter, there’s a neoliberal who sees Ron Paul’s fiscal conservatism as an economic nightmare for those whose survival would be threatened by the resulting contraction of the world economy. Even in the cases where one measure could obviously do more good than another, it often contradicts our basic moral instincts: the second set of casualties from the September 11th attacks came from people avoiding flying and driving their cars more often. Cars are literally over 50 times as dangerous (in casualties per million miles traveled) as planes, and tens of thousands of people in the US die in car crashes every year, but we’ll unfailingly feel more terror at the instant one-time taking of 3,000 lives.
One might consider that to be a case for moral relativism: but this is something that I strongly disagree with. The tired argument that there is no logically provable system of first principles for “right” and “wrong” runs in direct contradiction to our instinctively defined ideas about how people ought to be treated. Those who say “well just because our genes are fooling us, doesn’t mean it’s true” somehow miss that our subjective experience as humans is fundamentally incorrigible, and that saying that logic trumps our experience is like saying that someone crying out in pain isn’t “actually in pain” because the wrong area of the brain is lighting up. This has always been very tough for me to argue, and I blame it on how we currently use the dichotomy of “subjective” and “objective” to mean “relative” and “absolute”–but that implies that there’s something inherently “relative” about experience and something inherently “absolute” about things that are defined independently of experience. Instead, I’d say that micro-morality is subjective but absolute due to its strict adherence to our emotional state, and macro-morality to be objective but relative due to the fact that it is something that we can reason about, but at the same time is too complex for us to ever find an absolute answer.
Of course, even if we had a good idea of what counts for “the greater good”, we still have the pesky issue of unintended consequences, which plague nearly every well-intentioned effort in our complex global civilization. If the risk of basing our macro-morality on sentiment requires us to be cold and calculating, then the futility of quantifying what serves the “greater good” requires that we be merely cold; to pause and think twice before we choose our actions. Put more simply: micro-morality is hot, macro-morality is cold. Unsurprisingly, the courageous and selfless heroes we see in stories are almost always hot-blooded: they feel anger, passion, indignation, and determination. Antiheroes (who, yes, I still have yet to define more clearly), by contrast, have cultivated a greater stillness; perhaps with the exception of their more personal hangups, which can serve to motivate them in their goals. This is no easy task: it is inescapably human to see a wound and want to bandage it; but sometimes this very urge can get in our very way when what’s necessary is not creation but destruction. The movie Batman Begins revolves around this idea, but rather than watch two hours of Christian Bale making funny noises (okay, okay, it was actually a good movie), I invite you to watch a ten minute presentation by Slavoj Zizek on the unintended consequences of charity. I don’t fully agree with him, but his argument is framed along the same lines, and acknowledges the unpleasant necessity of creative destruction:
Smith’s Telos vs. Schumpeter’s Deities
Seeing destruction as good is inherently counter-intuitive. Although we sometimes speak of “destroying” corruption or poverty or discrimination, these are gentle abstractions. Real destruction always comes with morbidity, and oftentimes with casualties. Our association of good with creation and evil with destruction is in fact a natural extension of our micro-morality, and is embedded deeply enough into our psyche that even Zizek, despite seeing charity as a tragic irony that keeps a failing system from being destroyed, immediately sees George Soros’ acts of economic destruction as a supposedly obvious example of why global capitalism is a morally problematic system (NB: I am not making a debate for or against capitalism, that’s an entirely different subject.)
Without such economic destruction, however, resources would be indefinitely tied up in places where they don’t do any good (for more elaboration, see my previous post Phenomenological Opacity, Accounting Identities, and Allostasis). That is not to say, however, that this destruction is not a dirty job. It is tempting here to even say that Soros is doing nothing wrong, that he is merely “allocating resources more efficiently”, but such an idea hearkens back to the flawed concept of utilitarianism by implying that there is something to be maximized, and by extension some final outcome that we get closer to with every improvement in efficiency. The result is not a cyclical view of history, but rather a teleological one; one that has arguably entered our own modern times in the form of our popular faith in the notion of “human progress.”
Although I’m no expert on early liberal philosophy, the philosopher John Gray, in his book Black Mass, has taken note of the teleology inherent in philosophers and economists of the liberal tradition. The popular notion of the “Invisible Hand” of the market originally was actually a reference to God, who he believed to be the guiding force behind the complex coordination of many individual actors. This might just be a pantheistic interpretation of the process of self-organization, but Smith’s devout practice of Christianity suggests that this process was nonetheless directed towards some final end. The presence of a divine benevolence behind these transactions also provides a comfortable means to reconcile our sentiments with the greater order of things, as God is a human face to put on what is otherwise an emergent network of individual heuristics. From this more teleological viewpoint, there is hope of a sound justification, and in the idea that should we choose wisely, or perhaps submit to a higher power, we’ll have done what’s ultimately correct; an idea that I’ll revisit in a bit.
In the absence of efficiency, utilitarianism, or any kind of anthropomorphic teleological force, morality takes on a quality of absurdity. With no cosmic plan on which to anchor our macro-morality, we are left to look at Soros’ creative destruction through the micro-moral lens of sentiment. It would almost seem here that he really is doing no good through his acts of destruction, but as my peer Greg Linster put it, without death, there cannot be life. Forest fires burn down trees and spread the nutrients contained in the ashes, genes improve through natural selection, and failed businesses go bankrupt and cede their resources to new ventures. This is the essence of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction”** History, in this view, is cyclical rather than teleological; a fundamentally allostatic process where the flattening out of its cycles are mere death rather than any grand revelation. In this view of things, destruction is necessary, but not in any way that is unambiguously reconcilable with our sentiments. There’s no grand plan that tells us what to destroy, just destruction happening for its own reasons that vary with each case.
Even then, it is not only human, but also morally imperative that we do not entirely disconnect from our sentiments, as they still serve as the sole reason for our macro-morality; we still ought to cringe when we witness the suffering of individuals. For this reason, the contradictions of macro-morality do not suggest moral relativism so much as they reveal some fundamental absurdity about the world. Where Adam Smith’s invisible hand can be equated with a benevolent God that will eventually liberate us from a petty and convoluted reality, Schumpeter’s blind and ubiquitous creative destruction more closely resembles the rowdy and debauched deities of the classical era. According to the Hero’s Journey, the hero always submits himself to a higher power; the antihero, should they take on their mission, does the same for Schumpeter’s raucous band of supernatural knaves.
The Dionysian Journey
While the concepts of dialectic and creative destruction may only have been formalized a short time ago, they’ve been passed down tacitly through myths for countless generations according to Campbell. The central theme of the hero’s journey is rebirth: death symbolizes a fundamental rite of passage. Thousands of years later, the same wisdom applies in the exact same way: in order to grow, your old self needs to be put to the test and broken; you need to die so you can emerge as something stronger. Every adaptation is a kind of death, and those who become too fearful of such death inevitably submit themselves to a slow and painful process of atrophy. The hero undergoes this transformation after he is given the call to action, in which some force has thrown the world out of balance. In order to bring the world back into balance, he must undergo a process of transformation, after which he is able to restore the world as he knew it. The same task is incumbent upon the antihero, but his transformation is a far harsher one that tests the limits of his very humanity. For each antihero, it is different, and they fall into a number of different archetypes.
The most straightforward kind of antihero may be the ones that are known as “lawful neutral.” They are not necessarily unethical, but their primary drive is a relatively rigid sense of duty rather than sentiment. James Bond is a textbook example: many of the villains he faces are agents who were previously betrayed by either him or the organization in favor of the mission. In newer incarnations of Bond, he is a much more dark and brooding character who’s learned the hard way that sentiment is a liability, and has stoically resigned himself to serving as an apparatus of order. His duty is simultaneously his remaining connection to humanity–not necessarily teleological, but the priority of saving human lives is a micro-moral one that keeps some semblance of reason. Jack Bauer is another good example of such a character: he is willing to kill, torture, and break the law in order to protect the country from existential threat; but not without a heavy moral toll that exacts itself upon him and culminates in his ritual of atonement with an Imam at the end of the penultimate season. The link to humanity is nonetheless a precarious one: both Bond and Bauer have enemies who were originally on their side who have suffered too much from the violence of their role. Some, like Alec Trevelyan and Tony Almeida, have simply taken too much damage from what they’ve been through (a near-death experience and the loss of a wife and kid respectively.) Others, such as Stephen Saunders from the third season of 24, have lost faith in the system that they support, and decide that something drastic must be done. They, too, are a kind of anti-hero, and one that I consider to be the opposite of the lawful neutral: the fundamentalist.
Where the lawful neutral usually plays the role of hero, the fundamentalist more often than not takes up the role of villain. They are almost always seeking a kind of finality; unlike the conventional hero who works to keep the world in a kind of balance, the fundamentalist is looking for dramatic changes, revolution, and in some cases either apocalypse or utopia. For this reason, they are oftentimes the villain of stories, as they cross the line from respecting Schumpeter’s deities to delusionally believing in Smith’s benevolent telos. Saunders, whom I mentioned just a minute ago, is one such arguably delusional fundamentalist. After years of torture in a POW camp in the Balkans, his perspective changes and he finds the system upheld by Bauer and his counter-terrorist friends to be morally abhorrent. His grievances against the United States, although arguably valid (NB: not making an anti-American argument here, just acknowledging that empires commit large scale crimes), are taken to an extreme in his plans to cripple the American empire once and for all by releasing a deadly contagious virus that kills 90% of its victims. A more subtle example can be found in Alan Moore’s graphic novel The Watchmen, in which a former superhero by the name of Ozymandias stops an impending nuclear war by faking an alien invasion that results in the death of hundreds of thousands in the city of New York. His act was very likely necessary for the survival of civilization, and his own words show just how aware he was of the gravity of his actions:
“What’s significant is that I know. I know I’ve struggled on the backs of murdered innocents to save humanity… But someone had to take the weight of that awful, necessary crime.”
It would seem from this moment of alleged self-awareness that he had indeed grown from an idealistic young crime-fighter who believed that violence could be solved like a simple optimization problem, to a man who embraced the worst violence imaginable to prevent an even bigger catastrophe. His utopian hubris, however, is shown in full view as he gloats to his would-be saboteurs about what he has supposedly done for humanity:
“My new world demands less obvious heroism, making your schoolboy heroics redundant. What have they achieved? Failing to prevent Earth’s salvation is your only triumph, and yet that failure overshadows every past success! By default you usher in an age of illumination so dazzling that humanity will reject the darkness in its heart…”
The lawful neutral and the fundamentalist both find manifestations in real life as well. Modern warfare exacts suffering on a horrifying scale, but it most likely continues to be a necessary action even in the best of cases. Two people could spend a lifetime arguing whether Henry Kissinger was a war criminal or a national hero, but for our purposes it suffices to say that he felt obliged to keep peace by maintaining a balance of power between the world’s two superpowers and protect the well being and safety of the American people. The fundamentalist also embraces this ambiguity in real life, though I’m convinced that fundamentalist organizations such as Al-Qaeda are engaging in a much more unambiguously senseless brand of violence that comes from utopian fantasies; a matter that I may revisit in later posts.
Perhaps most true to the antihero is a third kind, which taking a note from Venkatesh Rao’s essay, The Gervais Principle, I have labeled the sociopath. Rao’s sociopath is not so much a sociopath in layman’s terms as he is someone who has withdrawn from the socially constructed reality of his former companions (who make up two other subgroups, the “losers” and the “clueless”) in order to answer to what he considers a higher ethical code. In this way, he is very similar to my own description of the antihero, but differs in that he gains a more fundamentally nihilist outlook and may find himself completely disconnected from any trace of human sentiment. Having already addressed order and revolution as two different antiheroic moral codes, my own categorization of the sociopath is one that has abandoned much of their morality to seek their own personal gain. Unlike the villain, however, they are usually more sympathetically presented and are ultimately looking for some kind of redemption. Walter White, the main character in the show Breaking Bad is a prime example: originally cooking meth in an attempt to save his family’s finances before he dies of cancer, he slowly slips away from his loved ones and becomes caught in a struggle against his own addiction to the new-found power he feels as he ascends to the status of drug kingpin. In the realm of video games, Sarah Kerrigan, one of several protagonists in the Starcraft franchise undergoes a similar transformation; originally an idealistic freedom fighter with a past history of family deaths, abduction, and experimentation, she is eventually mutated into an alien-human hybrid who quickly becomes known as the scourge of the sector. Consumed with rage at the betrayal that led to the incident, she is seen as a sympathetic character despite this status as arch-villain. When she miraculously regains her humanity, she quickly realizes that it is her inevitable fate to transform back in to the hybrid, and while her actions become more moral, she nonetheless decimates entire worlds in order to get back at those who betrayed her and prepare her army to face a greater power that threatens to the entire sector.
An arguable sub-category of the sociopath is the narcissist; although in real life the narcissist is different than the sociopath, they are very similar in my current taxonomy. They are both self-interested, but the quest of the narcissist is more particular: it is a quest for identity. Walter White in fact falls under this, because his quest for power is ultimately one for validation. A more striking example, however, is Don Draper of Mad Men; a man whose only purpose is to build an inhabit his new identity. Prior to faking his own death, he was Dick Whitman. Since then, he will do everything in his power to prevent anybody from finding out his past, even declining to tell his first wife and keeping traces of his old life in a locked cabinet. It is not just this overt scam that he is trying to preserve, however: everything from his marriages, to his affairs, to his quest for power are part of his quest to create a convincing identity to inhabit that is as far away as possible from his old self. As the facade breaks down in various places, he ends the most recent season by making plans to move to California, yet another scheme that gives him the hope of truly “starting over.” The narcissist, interestingly enough, could be seen as a cross between the sociopath and the fundamentalist, since their own quest for identity is its own utopianism; a belief that if only they could play the perfect role, all would be well.
Like all antiheroic quests, however, it is not one that lends itself to clean endings and revelations. Some antiheroes, like the lawful neutral, are more likely to understand this than others such as the fundamentalist. Like the hero, however, the antihero undergoes change, and so the fundamentalist can always take on a less ruthless goal than utopia while the lawful neutral may one day become disillusioned with the continual injustice he decides to prop up. At the end of The Watchmen, we are left to wonder what choice Ozymandias will make when he asks the godlike being Dr. Manhattan about the true significance of his actions:
Ozymandias: I did the right thing, didn’t I? It all works out in the end.
Dr. Manhattan: “In the end”? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.
*This is one of the reasons why I continue to see literary analysis as a field that is far from irrelevant, even if it produces a great deal of frivolity in the process.
**There was some philosopher well before Schumpeter that came up with this idea, but I don’t remember who that is. Whether we like it or not, the concept is popularly attributed to Schumpeter.
This entry was posted in Culture, Mythology, Semiotics on July 26, 2013 by alexboland.


Caulfield, Missouri
Updated on Apr 20, 2018
County Howell
Area code Area code 417
State Missouri
Elevation 1,027 ft (313 m)
GNIS feature ID 715508
Local time Monday 6:22 PM
Weather 19°C, Wind S at 26 km/h, 76% Humidity
Caulfield missouri tornado
Caulfield is an unincorporated community in western Howell County, Missouri, United States. It is located on U.S. Highway 160 and Missouri Route 101 about fifteen miles west of West Plains. The Ozark County line lies just to the west of Caulfield.
Map of Caulfield, MO 65626, USA
A post office called Caulfield has been in operation since 1929. The community has the name of Missouri governor Henry Stewart Caulfield, who took office in 1929.
On March 1, 2007, a tornado hit Caulfield, killing 7-year-old Caulfield resident Elizabeth Croney.
Caulfield, Missouri Wikipedia
Runar Bauer
Lew Cirne


Justia Regulation Tracker Department Of Homeland Security Federal Emergency Management Agency Final Flood Elevation Determinations, 73482-73485 [2014-29090]
Final Flood Elevation Determinations, 73482-73485 [2014-29090]
Download as PDF 73482 Federal Register / Vol. 79, No. 238 / Thursday, December 11, 2014 / Rules and Regulations investigation to assess the nature and extent of public health and environmental risks associated with a release of hazardous substances, pollutants or contaminants. The NPL is of only limited significance as it does not assign liability to any party. Also, placing a site on the NPL does not mean that any remedial or removal action necessarily need be taken. K. Congressional Review Act This action is subject to the CRA, and the EPA will submit a rule report to each House of the Congress and to the Comptroller General of the United States. This action is not a ‘‘major rule’’ as defined by 5 U.S.C. 804(2). Provisions of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) or section 305 of CERCLA may alter the effective date of this regulation. Under 5 U.S.C. 801(b)(1), a rule shall not take effect, or continue in effect, if Congress enacts (and the President signs) a joint resolution of disapproval, described under section 802. Another statutory provision that may affect this rule is CERCLA section 305, which provides for a legislative veto of regulations promulgated under CERCLA. Although INS v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919,103 S. Ct. 2764 (1983), and Bd. of Regents of the University of Washington v. EPA, 86 F.3d 1214,1222 (D.C. Cir. 1996), cast the validity of the legislative veto into question, the EPA has transmitted a copy of this regulation to the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House of Representatives. If action by Congress under either the CRA or CERCLA section 305 calls the effective date of this regulation into question, the EPA will publish a document of clarification in the Federal Register. List of Subjects in 40 CFR Part 300 Environmental protection, Air pollution control, Chemicals, Hazardous substances, Hazardous waste, Intergovernmental relations, Natural resources, Oil pollution, Penalties, Reporting and recordkeeping requirements, Superfund, Water pollution control, Water supply. Dated: December 3, 2014. Mathy Stanislaus, Assistant Administrator, Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. 40 CFR part 300 is amended as follows: PART 300—NATIONAL OIL AND HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCES POLLUTION CONTINGENCY PLAN 1. The authority citation for part 300 continues to read as follows: ■ Authority: 33 U.S.C. 1321(c)(2); 42 U.S.C. 9601–9657; E.O. 12777, 56 FR 54757, 3 CFR, 1991 Comp., p. 351; E.O. 12580, 52 FR 2923, 3 CFR, 1987 Comp., p. 193. 2. Table 1 of Appendix B to part 300 is amended by adding an entry for ‘‘Colorado Smelter’’ in alphabetical order by state to read as follows: ■ Appendix B to Part 300 National Priorities List TABLE 1—GENERAL SUPERFUND SECTION State Site name * * CO ............................................. * * * Colorado Smelter .......................................................................... * * * City/county * Notes a * * * * Pueblo. * * * * * * * * Notes: = Based on issuance of health advisory by Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (if scored, HRS score need not be greater than or equal to 28.50). aA * * * * adopt or to show evidence of being already in effect in order to qualify or remain qualified for participation in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). * [FR Doc. 2014–28979 Filed 12–10–14; 8:45 am] BILLING CODE 6560–50–P DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY Federal Emergency Management Agency 44 CFR Part 67 [Docket ID FEMA–2014–0002] Final Flood Elevation Determinations Federal Emergency Management Agency, DHS. ACTION: Final rule. tkelley on DSK3SPTVN1PROD with RULES AGENCY: Base (1-percent-annualchance) Flood Elevations (BFEs) and modified BFEs are made final for the communities listed below. The BFEs and modified BFEs are the basis for the floodplain management measures that each community is required either to SUMMARY: VerDate Sep<11>2014 17:05 Dec 10, 2014 Jkt 235001 The date of issuance of the Flood Insurance Rate Map (FIRM) showing BFEs and modified BFEs for each community. This date may be obtained by contacting the office where the maps are available for inspection as indicated in the table below. ADDRESSES: The final BFEs for each community are available for inspection at the office of the Chief Executive Officer of each community. The respective addresses are listed in the table below. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Luis Rodriguez, Chief, Engineering Management Branch, Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, 500 C Street SW., Washington, DC 20472, (202) 646–4064, or (email) Luis.Rodriguez3@fema.dhs.gov. DATES: PO 00000 Frm 00022 Fmt 4700 Sfmt 4700 The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) makes the final determinations listed below for the modified BFEs for each community listed. These modified elevations have been published in newspapers of local circulation and 90 days have elapsed since that publication. The Deputy Associate Administrator for Mitigation has resolved any appeals resulting from this notification. This final rule is issued in accordance with section 110 of the Flood Disaster Protection Act of 1973, 42 U.S.C. 4104, and 44 CFR part 67. FEMA has developed criteria for floodplain management in floodprone areas in accordance with 44 CFR part 60. Interested lessees and owners of real property are encouraged to review the proof Flood Insurance Study and FIRM available at the address cited below for each community. The BFEs and modified BFEs are made final in the communities listed SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: E:\FR\FM\11DER1.SGM 11DER1 Federal Register / Vol. 79, No. 238 / Thursday, December 11, 2014 / Rules and Regulations below. Elevations at selected locations in each community are shown. National Environmental Policy Act. This final rule is categorically excluded from the requirements of 44 CFR part 10, Environmental Consideration. An environmental impact assessment has not been prepared. Regulatory Flexibility Act. As flood elevation determinations are not within the scope of the Regulatory Flexibility Act, 5 U.S.C. 601–612, a regulatory flexibility analysis is not required. Regulatory Classification. This final rule is not a significant regulatory action under the criteria of section 3(f) of Executive Order 12866 of September 30, 1993, Regulatory Planning and Review, 58 FR 51735. Executive Order 13132, Federalism. This final rule involves no policies that have federalism implications under Executive Order 13132. Executive Order 12988, Civil Justice Reform. This final rule meets the applicable standards of Executive Order 12988. List of Subjects in 44 CFR Part 67 Administrative practice and procedure, Flood insurance, Reporting and recordkeeping requirements. Dated: October 31, 2014. Roy E. Wright, Deputy Associate Administrator for Mitigation, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency. 73483 PART 67—[AMENDED] 1. The authority citation for part 67 continues to read as follows: ■ Authority: 42 U.S.C. 4001 et seq.; Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1978, 3 CFR, 1978 Comp., p. 329; E.O. 12127, 44 FR 19367, 3 CFR, 1979 Comp., p. 376. § 67.11 [Amended] 2. The tables published under the authority of § 67.11 are amended as follows: ■ Accordingly, 44 CFR part 67 is amended as follows: Flooding source(s) Location of referenced elevation *Elevation in feet (NGVD) +Elevation in feet (NAVD) #Depth in feet above ground ∧Elevation in meters (MSL) Modified Communities affected Platte County, Missouri, and Incorporated Areas Docket Nos.: FEMA–B–1178 Approximately 1,110 feet downstream of Main Street ....................... +781 Bee Creek ..................................... Approximately 0.76 mile upstream of Highway 45 ............................. Approximately 0.83 mile downstream of the Bleazard Branch confluence. +804 +863 Bee Creek Tributary ..................... Approximately 0.74 mile upstream of Maple Leaf Road .................... At the Bee Creek confluence .............................................................. +883 +878 Benner Branch .............................. Brills Creek ................................... Approximately 1,325 feet upstream of Interurban Road .................... At the Bear Creek confluence ............................................................ Approximately 75 feet upstream of Highway 45 ................................ At the Benner Branch confluence ....................................................... +889 +783 +803 +791 Brush Creek .................................. tkelley on DSK3SPTVN1PROD with RULES Bear Creek ................................... Approximately 150 feet upstream of Highway 45 .............................. At the downstream side of Northwest 76th Street ............................. +814 +792 Burlington Creek ........................... Approximately 1,500 feet upstream of State Highway 152 ................ At the Missouri River confluence ........................................................ +820 +759 Approximately 850 feet upstream of North Helena Avenue ............... +800 VerDate Sep<11>2014 17:05 Dec 10, 2014 Jkt 235001 PO 00000 Frm 00023 Fmt 4700 Sfmt 4700 E:\FR\FM\11DER1.SGM 11DER1 City of Weston, Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. City of Dearborn, Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. City of Dearborn, Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. City of Weston. City of Weston, Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. City of Parkville, Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. City of Riverside, Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. 73484 Federal Register / Vol. 79, No. 238 / Thursday, December 11, 2014 / Rules and Regulations *Elevation in feet (NGVD) +Elevation in feet (NAVD) #Depth in feet above ground ∧Elevation in meters (MSL) Modified Flooding source(s) Location of referenced elevation Burlington Creek Tributary 2 ........ Approximately 950 feet upstream of Northwest Platte Drive ............. +764 East Creek .................................... First Creek .................................... Approximately 1,275 feet upstream of Northeast Platte Drive ........... At the Line Creek confluence ............................................................. Approximately 100 feet downstream of Northwest Vivion Road ........ At the Clay County boundary ............................................................. +768 +768 +769 +864 Grove Creek ................................. Approximately 0.82 mile downstream of Northwest 128th Street ...... Approximately 0.74 mile downstream of Platte Avenue ..................... +895 +815 Jumping Branch ............................ Approximately 150 feet upstream of State Highway Z ....................... At the Line Creek confluence ............................................................. +848 +756 Line Creek .................................... Approximately 200 feet upstream of I–635 ........................................ At the Missouri River confluence ........................................................ +819 +756 +772 +877 Missouri River ............................... Approximately 300 feet downstream of I–29 ...................................... Approximately 650 feet downstream of Northwest South Shore Drive. At the downstream side of Northwest South Shore Drive ................. Approximately 850 feet upstream of the Clay County boundary ....... +791 Platte River ................................... Approximately 0.53 mile downstream of the Buchanan County boundary. At the Missouri River confluence ........................................................ Rush Creek ................................... Approximately 0.48 mile upstream of I–29 ......................................... At the Missouri River confluence ........................................................ +782 +760 Second Creek ............................... Approximately 0.56 mile upstream of the Walnut Creek confluence Approximately 750 feet downstream of State Highway 92 ................ +771 +822 Todd Creek ................................... Approximately 3 miles downstream of State Highway 291 ................ Approximately 1,600 feet downstream of Water Treatment Plant Road. +881 +822 Approximately 1,400 feet downstream of Water Treatment Plant Road. +822 Line Creek Tributary 2 .................. tkelley on DSK3SPTVN1PROD with RULES Communities affected VerDate Sep<11>2014 17:05 Dec 10, 2014 Jkt 235001 PO 00000 Frm 00024 Fmt 4700 Sfmt 4700 E:\FR\FM\11DER1.SGM +937 +756 +769 11DER1 City of Riverside, Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. City of Riverside. Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. City of Edgerton, Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. City of Riverside, Village of Houston Lake. City of Northmoor, City of Riverside. City of Lake Waukomis. Village of Iatan, City of Parkville, City of Riverside, City of Weston, Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. City of Platte City, City of Tracy, Unincorporated Areas of Platte County, Village of Farley. City of Parkville, Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. Federal Register / Vol. 79, No. 238 / Thursday, December 11, 2014 / Rules and Regulations *Elevation in feet (NGVD) +Elevation in feet (NAVD) #Depth in feet above ground ∧Elevation in meters (MSL) Modified Flooding source(s) Location of referenced elevation Walnut Creek ................................ At the Rush Creek Confluence ........................................................... +768 Wells Branch ................................ Approximately 1,600 feet upstream of Northwest Eastside Drive ...... At the Bear Creek confluence ............................................................ +876 +781 White Branch ................................ Approximately 150 feet upstream of County Road JJ ....................... At the Rush Creek confluence ............................................................ Approximately 0.67 mile upstream of East 6th Street ........................ Approximately 950 feet upstream of the Todd Creek confluence ...... +830 +760 +855 +856 Approximately 0.46 mile upstream of I–435 ....................................... +945 Wildcat Branch ............................. * National Geodetic Vertical Datum. + North American Vertical Datum. # Depth in feet above ground. ∧ Mean Sea Level, rounded to the nearest 0.1 meter. ADDRESSES: City of Dearborn: Maps are available for inspection City of Edgerton: Maps are available for inspection City of Lake Waukomis: Maps are available for inspection City of Northmoor: Maps are available for inspection City of Parkville: Maps are available for inspection City of Platte City: Maps are available for inspection City of Riverside: Maps are available for inspection City of Tracy: Maps are available for inspection City of Weston: Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 101 3rd Street, Dearborn, MO 64439. at City Hall, 411 Front Street, Edgerton, MO 64444. at City Hall, 1147 Northwest South Shore Drive, Lake Waukomis, MO 64151. at City Hall, 4907 Northwest Waukomis Drive, Northmoor, MO 64151. at City Hall, 8880 Clark Avenue, Parkville, MO 64152. at City Hall, 400 Main Street, Platte City, MO 64079. at City Hall, 2950 Northwest Vivion Road, Riverside, MO 64150. at City Hall, 208 2nd Street, Tracy, MO 64079. at City Hall, 300 Main Street, Weston, MO 64098. Unincorporated Areas of Platte County: Maps are available for inspection at the Platte County Courthouse, 415 3rd Street, Suite 115, Platte City, MO 64079. Village of Farley: Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 1116 River Road, Farley, MO 64028. Village of Ferrelview: Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 205 Northwest Heady Avenue, Ferrelview, MO 64163. Village of Houston Lake: Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 5417 Northwest Adrian Street, Houston Lake, MO 64151. Village of Iatan: Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 125 Main Street, Iatan, MO 64098. [FR Doc. 2014–29090 Filed 12–10–14; 8:45 am] tkelley on DSK3SPTVN1PROD with RULES BILLING CODE 9110–12–P VerDate Sep<11>2014 17:05 Dec 10, 2014 Jkt 235001 PO 00000 Frm 00025 Fmt 4700 Sfmt 9990 E:\FR\FM\11DER1.SGM 11DER1 73485 Communities affected City of Parkville, Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. City of Weston, Unincorporated Areas of Platte County. City of Parkville. Village of Ferrelview.
[Docket ID FEMA-2014-0002]
Final Flood Elevation Determinations
AGENCY: Federal Emergency Management Agency, DHS.
ACTION: Final rule.
SUMMARY: Base (1-percent-annual-chance) Flood Elevations (BFEs) and
modified BFEs are made final for the communities listed below. The BFEs
and modified BFEs are the basis for the floodplain management measures
that each community is required either to adopt or to show evidence of
being already in effect in order to qualify or remain qualified for
participation in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).
DATES: The date of issuance of the Flood Insurance Rate Map (FIRM)
showing BFEs and modified BFEs for each community. This date may be
obtained by contacting the office where the maps are available for
inspection as indicated in the table below.
ADDRESSES: The final BFEs for each community are available for
inspection at the office of the Chief Executive Officer of each
community. The respective addresses are listed in the table below.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Luis Rodriguez, Chief, Engineering
Management Branch, Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration,
Federal Emergency Management Agency, 500 C Street SW., Washington, DC
20472, (202) 646-4064, or (email) Luis.Rodriguez3@fema.dhs.gov.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The Federal Emergency Management Agency
(FEMA) makes the final determinations listed below for the modified
BFEs for each community listed. These modified elevations have been
published in newspapers of local circulation and 90 days have elapsed
since that publication. The Deputy Associate Administrator for
Mitigation has resolved any appeals resulting from this notification.
This final rule is issued in accordance with section 110 of the
Flood Disaster Protection Act of 1973, 42 U.S.C. 4104, and 44 CFR part
67. FEMA has developed criteria for floodplain management in floodprone
areas in accordance with 44 CFR part 60.
Interested lessees and owners of real property are encouraged to
review the proof Flood Insurance Study and FIRM available at the
address cited below for each community.
The BFEs and modified BFEs are made final in the communities listed
below. Elevations at selected locations in each community are shown.
National Environmental Policy Act. This final rule is categorically
excluded from the requirements of 44 CFR part 10, Environmental
Consideration. An environmental impact assessment has not been
prepared.
Regulatory Flexibility Act. As flood elevation determinations are
not within the scope of the Regulatory Flexibility Act, 5 U.S.C. 601-
612, a regulatory flexibility analysis is not required.
Regulatory Classification. This final rule is not a significant
regulatory action under the criteria of section 3(f) of Executive Order
12866 of September 30, 1993, Regulatory Planning and Review, 58 FR
Executive Order 13132, Federalism. This final rule involves no
policies that have federalism implications under Executive Order 13132.
Executive Order 12988, Civil Justice Reform. This final rule meets
the applicable standards of Executive Order 12988.
List of Subjects in 44 CFR Part 67
Administrative practice and procedure, Flood insurance, Reporting
and recordkeeping requirements.
Dated: October 31, 2014.
Roy E. Wright,
Deputy Associate Administrator for Mitigation, Department of Homeland
Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Accordingly, 44 CFR part 67 is amended as follows:
PART 67--[AMENDED]
1. The authority citation for part 67 continues to read as follows:
Authority:  42 U.S.C. 4001 et seq.; Reorganization Plan No. 3 of
1978, 3 CFR, 1978 Comp., p. 329; E.O. 12127, 44 FR 19367, 3 CFR,
1979 Comp., p. 376.
Sec.  67.11  [Amended]
2. The tables published under the authority of Sec.  67.11 are amended
*Elevation in
feet (NGVD)
+Elevation in
feet  (NAVD)
Flooding source(s)               Location of referenced       #Depth in feet    Communities  affected
elevation               above ground
[caret]Elevation
in  meters (MSL)
Platte County, Missouri, and Incorporated Areas
Docket Nos.: FEMA-B-1178
Bear Creek...........................  Approximately 1,110 feet                    +781  City of Weston,
downstream of Main Street.                        Unincorporated Areas
of Platte County.
Approximately 0.76 mile                     +804
upstream of Highway 45.
Bee Creek............................  Approximately 0.83 mile                     +863  City of Dearborn,
downstream of the Bleazard                        Unincorporated Areas
Branch confluence.                                of Platte County.
upstream of Maple Leaf Road.
Bee Creek Tributary..................  At the Bee Creek confluence..               +878  City of Dearborn,
Unincorporated Areas
Approximately 1,325 feet                    +889
upstream of Interurban Road.
Benner Branch........................  At the Bear Creek confluence.               +783  City of Weston.
Approximately 75 feet                       +803
Brills Creek.........................  At the Benner Branch                        +791  City of Weston,
confluence.                                       Unincorporated Areas
Approximately 150 feet                      +814
Brush Creek..........................  At the downstream side of                   +792  City of Parkville,
Northwest 76th Street.                            Unincorporated Areas
upstream of State Highway
Burlington Creek.....................  At the Missouri River                       +759  City of Riverside,
upstream of North Helena
Burlington Creek Tributary 2.........  Approximately 950 feet                      +764  City of Riverside,
upstream of Northwest Platte                      Unincorporated Areas
Drive.                                            of Platte County.
upstream of Northeast Platte
East Creek...........................  At the Line Creek confluence.               +768  City of Riverside.
downstream of Northwest
Vivion Road.
First Creek..........................  At the Clay County boundary..               +864  Unincorporated Areas of
Platte County.
128th Street.
Grove Creek..........................  Approximately 0.74 mile                     +815  City of Edgerton,
downstream of Platte Avenue.                      Unincorporated Areas
upstream of State Highway Z.
Jumping Branch.......................  At the Line Creek confluence.               +756  City of Riverside,
Village of Houston
upstream of I-635.
Line Creek...........................  At the Missouri River                       +756  City of Northmoor, City
confluence.                                       of Riverside.
downstream of I-29.
Line Creek Tributary 2...............  Approximately 650 feet                      +877  City of Lake Waukomis.
South Shore Drive.
At the downstream side of                   +937
Northwest South Shore Drive.
Missouri River.......................  Approximately 850 feet                      +756  Village of Iatan, City
upstream of the Clay County                       of Parkville, City of
boundary.                                         Riverside, City of
Weston, Unincorporated
Areas of Platte
downstream of the Buchanan
County boundary.
Platte River.........................  At the Missouri River                       +769  City of Platte City,
confluence.                                       City of Tracy,
of Platte County,
Village of Farley.
upstream of I-29.
Rush Creek...........................  At the Missouri River                       +760  City of Parkville,
upstream of the Walnut Creek
confluence.
Second Creek.........................  Approximately 750 feet                      +822  Unincorporated Areas of
downstream of State Highway                       Platte County.
Approximately 3 miles                       +881
downstream of State Highway
Todd Creek...........................  Approximately 1,600 feet                    +822  Unincorporated Areas of
downstream of Water                               Platte County.
Treatment Plant Road.
downstream of Water
Walnut Creek.........................  At the Rush Creek Confluence.               +768  City of Parkville,
upstream of Northwest
Eastside Drive.
Wells Branch.........................  At the Bear Creek confluence.               +781  City of Weston,
upstream of County Road JJ.
White Branch.........................  At the Rush Creek confluence.               +760  City of Parkville.
upstream of East 6th Street.
Wildcat Branch.......................  Approximately 950 feet                      +856  Village of Ferrelview.
upstream of the Todd Creek
* National Geodetic Vertical Datum.
+ North American Vertical Datum.
# Depth in feet above ground.
[caret] Mean Sea Level, rounded to the nearest 0.1 meter.
City of Dearborn:
Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 101 3rd Street, Dearborn, MO 64439.
City of Edgerton:
Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 411 Front Street, Edgerton, MO 64444.
City of Lake Waukomis:
Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 1147 Northwest South Shore Drive, Lake Waukomis, MO 64151.
City of Northmoor:
Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 4907 Northwest Waukomis Drive, Northmoor, MO 64151.
City of Parkville:
Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 8880 Clark Avenue, Parkville, MO 64152.
City of Platte City:
Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 400 Main Street, Platte City, MO 64079.
City of Riverside:
Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 2950 Northwest Vivion Road, Riverside, MO 64150.
City of Tracy:
Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 208 2nd Street, Tracy, MO 64079.
City of Weston:
Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 300 Main Street, Weston, MO 64098.
Unincorporated Areas of Platte County:
Maps are available for inspection at the Platte County Courthouse, 415 3rd Street, Suite 115, Platte City, MO
Village of Farley:
Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 1116 River Road, Farley, MO 64028.
Village of Ferrelview:
Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 205 Northwest Heady Avenue, Ferrelview, MO 64163.
Village of Houston Lake:
Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 5417 Northwest Adrian Street, Houston Lake, MO 64151.
Village of Iatan:
Maps are available for inspection at City Hall, 125 Main Street, Iatan, MO 64098.


The Caribbean's Strongest Earthquake
On Wednesday, 8th February, 1843, the very day after the meeting of the Vestry, the island was visited by a most terrific and destructive Earthquake. . . .
Everyone within the Church after the first shock was compelled to escape for their lives. The Tower was rent from the top to the bottom, the north dial of the clock precipitated to the ground beneath with a dreadful crash, and the east parapet wall of the Tower thrown upon the roof of the Church. Almost the whole of the north east wall of the north gallery fell out in a mass. The north east wall was protruded beyond the perpendicular. . . .
Thus within the space of three minutes, the Church was reduced to a pile of crumbling ruins, the walls that were left standing being rent in every part, the main roof only remaining sound, being supported by the hardwood pillars."
"On Wednesday, 8th February, 1843, the very day after the meeting of the Vestry, the island was visited by a most terrific and destructive Earthquake. . . .
Everyone within the Church after the first shock was compelled to escape for their lives. The Tower was rent f
rom the top to the bottom, the north dial of the clock precipitated to the ground beneath with a dreadful crash, and the east parapet wall of the Tower thrown upon the roof of the Church. Almost the whole of the north est wall of the north gallery fell out in a mass. The north east wall was protruded beyond the perpendicular. . . .
-- The Minutes of the Vestry
Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine
Regarded as the strongest estimated intensity earthquake ever to occur in the Caribbean, this catastrophic magnitude 8.3 earthquake devastated Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe, leaving it in ruins. One third (1500) of its estimated 4000-6000 inhabitants perished. The earthquake also ravaged Marie Galante, Dominica, Montserrat and Antigua.
The violent 90 second shock at 10:35am was felt throughout the Antilles. A newspaper in Barbados reported that columns of water 100 feet high and several feet thick were ejected from fissures in the ground at Guadeloupe.
The Antigua Weekly Register reported that St. John's as well as the entire island suffered greatly. The sugar crop was lost and there were 12 to 40 fatalities. The sea rose 1.2 meters after the earthquake in St. John's, Antigua, then sank again immediately remaining calm throughout, possibly caused by a large chunk of the rock island Redonda breaking off and falling into the sea. At English Harbour, the wharf made on reclaimed land sank.
Sugar mills were severely damaged at Montserrat, Nevis and St. Kitts. A 1 foot X 1/2 mile long crack appeared in St. Eustatius.
Severe shocks were felt in Barbuda, St. Bathelemy, St. Martin, Saba and Dominica. Martinique and St. Lucia both experienced moderate shocks while lighter shaking was experienced in Tortola, St. Thomas, St. Vincent, Grenada and Barbados. The earthquake was reported as being felt as far as Trinidad and Guyana in the south and Bermuda and South Carolina in the North.


TIME FOR GRIEVING IS IN OFF-SEASON, BONDS SAYS
THE ORLANDO SENTINEL
Barry Bonds' teammates are leaving him alone, and that's the way the San Francisco Giants left fielder prefers it -- especially now. Bonds is grieving over the death of his father, Bobby Bonds, while trying to concentrate on winning the National League West title and keeping his body healthy for another October playoff run. He's also dealing with the pressure to pass his godfather, Willie Mays, for third place on the career home run list. Bonds had 655 entering Tuesday night's game against the San Diego Padres, five behind Mays. "I'm feeling better," said Bonds, who spent a night in a Phoenix hospital two weeks ago to be treated for exhaustion and an accelerated heartbeat. "I'm just tired. Talking wastes energy." Despite all the distractions, Bonds seems as focused as ever, blocking out his grief when the uniform goes on. "What other choices do I have?" he said. "I'll do that in the off-season."
ATHLETICS' GUILLEN WILL TRY TO PLAY WITH PAIN IN HAND
Oakland Athletics OF Jose Guillen is trying to make it through the regular season and possibly the postseason despite a broken hamate bone in his left hand. "It's too late in the season to give it up," Guillen told the San Francisco Chronicle for Tuesday's editions. "If I can, I'm going to try to swing the bat. Trust me, I don't want to be on the bench watching. I don't want to feel like I let the team down." If Guillen were to have the small hooklike bone removed now, his season likely would be over. Last season Anaheim Angels OF Darin Erstad broke the same bone during the World Series and later homered in Game 6 against the San Francisco Giants.
ROYALS PLAN TO KEEP MANAGER, GM AROUND
The Royals plan to talk with Manager Tony Pena and General Manager Allard Baird about contract extensions after this season, The Kansas City Star reported. Both are signed through the 2004 season. "They've earned that, but the timing would be bad to talk about that at this time," owner David Glass said from his home in Bentonville, Ark. "Right now, we want to concentrate all of our energies on making the playoffs."
AOL TIME WARNER TAKES FOR-SALE SIGN OFF BRAVES
The Braves, whom AOL Time Warner reportedly has considered selling, may be off the market, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Terry McGuirk, a Turner Broadcasting System executive, said the company is not marketing the Braves amid "growing satisfaction" with the team. According to Rutherford Seydel, Ted Turner's son-in-law and one of the new owners of the NBA's Hawks and NHL's Thrashers, "The Braves are not on the market."
DODGERS' ASHBY TO MISS NEXT YEAR AFTER ELBOW SURGERY
Los Angeles Dodgers RHP Andy Ashby will have reconstructive elbow surgery and won't return until 2005. He will have surgery during the week after the regular season ends Sept. 28, Manager Jim Tracy said.
PHILLIES ADVISE ADAMS TO HAVE ARTHROSCOPIC SURGERY
Philadelphia Phillies RHP Terry Adams might need season-ending elbow surgery. Team doctor Michael Ciccotti recommended arthroscopic surgery to repair the "loose bodies" that were found.


No more survivors on New Zealand island after volcano eruption
Wellington (AFP) – New Zealand police have said no more survivors were expected to be rescued from an island volcano that erupted suddenly on Monday, suggesting as many as two dozen people could have died.
Police said some 50 people were visiting White Island when it exploded in the early afternoon — hurling ash and rock high into the air.
Some 23 people made it off the island, five of whom have since died, the rest were being treated for injuries, including severe burns.
It was earlier estimated the number still on the island was in double digits.
Police said early Tuesday that despite several aerial reconnaissance flights to try and find those trapped “no signs of life have been seen at any point.”
“Based on the information we have, we do not believe there are any survivors on the island. Police is working urgently to confirm the exact number of those who have died.”
As night fell, deputy commissioner John Tims said volcanic activity made a rescue attempts by land too dangerous.
“I’ve got to consider the safety of our people and emergency services staff,” he said.
The New Zealand military is expected to make a pass of the island at first light in the hope that people may have survived against the odds.
The eruption occurred just after 2pm (0100 GMT), thrusting a thick plume of white ash 3.6 kilometres (12,000 feet) into the sky.
Seconds before, live camera feeds showed a group of more than a half dozen people walking on the crater floor. Then the images went black.
A “considerable number” of those caught up in the disaster are believed to be Australian, according to officials in Canberra.
As many as 30 of those involved are also believed to be cruise passengers on a day trip from the vessel Ovation of the Seas, Kevin O’Sullivan, chief executive officer of industry body the New Zealand Cruise Association told AFP.
The ship’s operator Royal Caribbean — who had billed the trip to White Island as “an unforgettable guided tour of New Zealand’s most active volcano” — said “a number of our guests were touring the island” but did not confirm that number.
The ship has a capacity of around 4,000 people and set sail from Sydney last week on a 12 day voyage.
– Scene of terror –
Tourist Michael Schade, made it off the island just in time and was able to capture footage of the devastation.
His videos showed groups of startled tourists clustered by the shoreline, waiting to be evacuated as the ground around them smouldered, the sky filled with white debris. An ash-caked helicopter lay damaged nearby.
Volcanic Air said they had landed a helicopter on the island shortly before the eruption carrying four visitors and one pilot. All were now accounted for.
“It had landed on the island. What happened after that we don’t know, but we know that all five made it back to Whakatane on one of the tourist boats,” a company spokesman told AFP.
Guillaume Calmelet, the co-director of Skydive Tauranga, saw the eruption from above as he took a customer on a tandem skydive from a plane 12,000 feet above the Bay of Plenty.
“As soon as the parachute opened there was this huge cloud that was really different to whatever we’ve seen before,” he told AFP. “I could see it coming out in freefall, so probably about 30 seconds for the whole cloud to form, if that. It was pretty quick.”
The country’s National Emergency Management Agency described the eruption as “moderate”, although the plume of ash was clearly visible from the mainland and from satellites flying overhead.
White Island — – also known as Whakaari — is about 50 kilometres (30 miles) offshore in the picturesque Bay of Plenty and is popular with adventurous tourists willing to don hard hats and gas masks.
It is New Zealand’s most active volcano cone and about 70 percent of it is underwater, according to government-backed agency GeoNet.
Around 10,000 people visit the volcano every year. It has erupted frequently over the last half-century, most recently in 2016.
In August of that year the New Zealand Defence Force airlifted a 2.4-tonne shipping container onto the island to serve as an emergency shelter in case of an eruption.


Minimal counterexample
In mathematics, a minimal counterexample is the smallest example which falsifies a claim, and a proof by minimal counterexample is a method of proof which combines the use of a minimal counterexample with the ideas of proof by induction and proof by contradiction.[1][2][3] More specifically. in trying to prove a proposition P, one first assumes by contradiction that it is false, and that therefore there must be at least one counterexample. With respect to some idea of size (which may need to be chosen carefully), one then concludes that there is such a counterexample C that is minimal. In regard to the argument, C is generally something quite hypothetical (since the truth of P excludes the possibility of C), but it may be possible to argue that if C existed, then it would have some definite properties which, after applying some reasoning similar to that in an inductive proof, would lead to a contradiction, thereby showing that the proposition P is indeed true.[4]
If the form of the contradiction is that we can derive a further counterexample D, that is smaller than C in the sense of the working hypothesis of minimality, then this technique is traditionally called proof by infinite descent.[1] In which case, there may be multiple and more complex ways to structure the argument of the proof.
The assumption that if there is a counterexample, there is a minimal counterexample, is based on a well-ordering of some kind. The usual ordering on the natural numbers is clearly possible, by the most usual formulation of mathematical induction; but the scope of the method can include well-ordered induction of any kind.
Examples[edit]
The minimal counterexample method has been much used in the classification of finite simple groups. The Feit–Thompson theorem, that finite simple groups that are not cyclic groups have even order, was based on the hypothesis of some, and therefore some minimal, simple group G of odd order. Every proper subgroup of G can be assumed a solvable group, meaning that much theory of such subgroups could be applied.
Euclid's proof of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic is a simple proof which uses a minimal counterexample.[5][6] Another proposition whose proof involves a minimal counterexample is the principle of mathematical induction itself.[7]
^ a b "The Definitive Glossary of Higher Mathematical Jargon". Math Vault. 2019-08-01. Retrieved 2019-11-28.
^ Chartrand, Gary, Albert D. Polimeni, and Ping Zhang. Mathematical Proofs: A Transition to Advanced Mathematics. Boston: Pearson Education, 2013. Print.
^ Klipper, Michael (Fall 2012). "Proof by Minimum Counterexample" (PDF). alpha.math.uga.edu. Retrieved 2019-11-28.
^ Lewis, Tom (Fall 2010). "§20 Smallest Counterexample" (PDF). math.furman.edu. Retrieved 2019-11-28.
^ "The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic | Divisibility & Induction | Underground Mathematics". undergroundmathematics.org. Retrieved 2019-11-28.
^ "The fundamental theorem of arithmetic". www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 2019-11-28.
^ "The Well-ordering Principle | Brilliant Math & Science Wiki". brilliant.org. Retrieved 2019-11-28.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Minimal_counterexample&oldid=928401693"
Mathematical proofs
Mathematical terminology


Singapore-based Water Prize Draws 39 Nominations
The inaugural Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize, a prestigious international water prize named after Singapore’s founding father, received 39 nominations from more than 15 countries when nominations closed in December.
The prize is the highlight of the Singapore International Water Week, which will be held for the first time in Singapore in June. It honors outstanding contributions toward solving the world's water woes by applying innovative technologies or implementing policies and programs that benefit humanity.
Nominations were only accepted from experts in the water industry.
“We are extremely pleased with the quality and geographical spread of the Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize nominations. There are a few very outstanding works amongst them, and the highest number of nominations has been received from the Asia Pacific region,” said Tan Gee Paw, chairman of the nominating committee.
The nominations will go through two rounds of rigorous selection and the eventual laureate will be decided by a council of high international standing from the academia, international organizations and multi-national companies. The first Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize Laureate will be announced in March 2008.
The prize recipient will receive S$300,000, an award certificate and a gold medallion at this year's Singapore International Water Week, held from June 23-27.
The Singapore Millennium Foundation, a philanthropic body supported by Temasek Holdings, is the sole sponsor of the Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize, pledging S$1.5 million over five years.


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SECURE Act Promotes IRAs to Testamentary Unitrust Plans
SECURE Act Encourages Saving for Retirement
By a bipartisan vote of 71 to 23 on December 19, 2019, the Senate passed the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement (SECURE) Act. The SECURE Act was part of a larger appropriations bill.
Both House Ways and Means Chairman Richard Neal (D-MA) and Ranking Member Kevin Brady (R-TX) supported the bill. Brady noted, “Our bipartisan legislation makes it easier for main street business to offer retirement plans to their workers by easing administrative burdens, cutting down on unnecessary and often costly paperwork. In this bill, we also offer local businesses the flexibility to tailor retirement plans to best fit the needs of their workers, not to the needs of Washington.”
The bill includes many provisions designed to facilitate and enhance savings for retirement. These changes have bipartisan support and are helpful for workers who desire to save for retirement.
Traditional IRA Contributions – Individuals over age 70½ with earned income may continue to make contributions each year. Previously, only Roth IRAs could be funded after age 70½. All IRAs may now be funded at any age, provided you have earned income. These traditional IRA contributions may enable seniors to grow retirement accounts during their 70’s and 80’s.
Required Minimum Distribution (RMD) Age – For individuals who turn 70½ after December 31, 2019, the RMD age of 70½ is increased to age 72. Those who reached age 70½ during 2019 must still start their RMDs under the previous law. The increased age RMD rule will benefit many IRA owners who do not need to withdraw distributions. Because the IRA balances will be larger with one or two years of added growth, RMDs at age 72 and future years will be larger. Many loyal donors may choose to increase their IRA rollover gifts after age 72.
Part Time Workers – Those individuals who work at least 500 hours per year for three years will be able to participate in qualified retirement plans.
Retirement Plan Annuities – The rules are generally expanded to permit more qualified retirement plans to offer annuity payout options. Section 204 of the Act generally limits the liability of employers who offer annuity options in their retirement plans. This employer protection is likely to increase the number of annuity options in many larger retirement plans.
Retirement Benefit Disclosure – Retirement plan administrators are now required to offer an expanded disclosure of future retirement benefits to participants. These disclosures are intended to help employees better understand the benefits of maximizing their contributions to the retirement plans.
Stretch Distribution Reduced – Inherited IRAs for nonspouse beneficiaries will no longer be distributed over life expectancy, but IRA and other qualified plans of decedents must be paid out over a maximum term of ten years. There are exceptions for recipients with disabilities, minors and individuals who are within ten years of the age of the IRA owner.
IRA Rollover Limit Potentially Reduced – If an individual makes contributions to a traditional IRA after age 70½, the $100,000 per year qualified charitable distribution (QCD) limit is reduced by the amount of IRA contributions after that age. The IRA contribution amount is cumulative and specific calculations will eventually be published in IRS Regulations. QCD gifts in excess of post age 70½ traditional IRA cumulative contributions will be included in income and deductible if the individual itemizes deductions. It is probable that most donors either will not have earned income after age 70½, will have total income over the IRA phaseout limits (and may not fund an IRA) or may choose to make Roth IRA contributions.
Provisions of the SECURE Act generally take effect on January 1, 2020. While the age for RMDs from IRAs increases to 72, the qualified charitable distribution (QCD) age remains at 70½. IRA owners over age 70½ may transfer up to $100,000 each year to qualified charities. This transfer may fulfill part or all of an RMD.
Dramatic Increase in IRA Transfers to Testamentary Unitrusts
The SECURE Act reduces future taxes for IRA owners by increasing the age for required minimum distributions from 70½ to 72. However, to pay for the cost of this tax reduction, the taxes paid by future nonspouse IRA beneficiaries (typically children) will increase.
Married couples usually designate the survivor as the beneficiary of their IRA or other qualified plan. The survivor may roll over the plan into his or her IRA. However, when a single person or surviving spouse passes away, the IRA is transferred to one or more nonspouse designated beneficiaries. If there is a charitable beneficiary, that portion of the IRA is normally distributed in full to the nonprofit. However, distributions to children, nephews, nieces and other family members may be made over a term of years.
For individuals who passed away in 2019, an IRA beneficiary was able to “stretch” the IRA payout over his or her life expectancy. Assume mother Mary owns a traditional IRA and passed away in 2019 at age 90. She designated daughter Susan (age 60) as her IRA beneficiary and Susan could take distributions over her life expectancy. For a child age 60, the potential distribution period was between age 60 and age 87. By “stretching” the traditional IRA payout, Susan reduced her income tax and benefitted from tax-free growth for many years. Yet, even more tax deferral and growth was possible. A grandchild designated beneficiary may have stretched the tax-free growth and IRA payouts over 60 or 70 years.
However, if Mary passed away in 2020, Susan must take all distributions within ten years. She can wait and take the full payout in the tenth year, but that will greatly increase the tax rate paid on the IRA. Most children will choose to take partial payouts each year for the ten years. With a ten-year payout, the income taxes paid by Susan will be substantially higher than the prior “stretch” plan.
What plan could replace the 2019 “stretch” IRA distribution? Could a plan combine the tax-saving benefits of a "stretch" IRA with a term-of-years or life payout to children or other heirs? Could this plan also have the tax-free growth benefit of a stretch IRA?
While it sounds too good to be true, the IRA to testamentary unitrust plan includes all of these benefits. A single person or surviving spouse may create an unfunded lifetime unitrust or testamentary unitrust in a will or living trust. The IRA beneficiary designation is to the trustee of that unitrust. When the IRA owner passes away, the unitrust is funded with the traditional IRA. Because the unitrust is tax-exempt, there is a bypass of the income tax on the traditional IRA and any future growth.
Parents Desire to Protect “Creative Spender” Children
Some couples have three, four or more children. If one of the children is a “creative spender,” a parent may set up a trust. Without the protection of a trust, this child may take the full IRA payout, send a huge tax payment to the IRS and quickly exhaust the balance in creative and unexpected ways. To protect these children, many parents have created “conduit” trusts to pay only the RMDs to them.
Unfortunately, the SECURE Act eliminates RMDs for most children (there are exceptions for a disabled or chronically ill child). With some conduit trusts, under the SECURE Act there is no RMD and no payout to the child for ten years. At that time, the full payout is made and the child will face a huge income tax bill.
Jamie Hopkins is a financial expert with Carson Wealth, headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. He explains the conduit IRA trust problem and notes, “That is a complete disaster from a planning perspective. We just subjected most of that IRA money to the highest tax margin possible and locked up access to it.”
Because many parents have a “creative” child, but desire to treat all children equally, transferring the IRA to a testamentary unitrust is prudent planning. The unitrust for a term of 20 years or the life of the child benefits the recipient through tax-free growth in the trust and larger total payouts over the trust duration. This unitrust has many excellent tax benefits, especially when compared with the SECURE Act mandatory payout over ten years.
While the testamentary unitrust has better tax benefits than the ten-year mandatory payout, the primary reason most parents select a unitrust is to provide children with a steady payout stream for 20 years or life. The protection benefit will be primary, even though there are excellent tax benefits with a testamentary unitrust funded with an IRA or other qualified retirement plan.
IRA to a Unitrust for Children
A unitrust pays 5% or more for a life, lives or a term of 20 years. There are two basic options for transferring an IRA to a unitrust for children or other family members. One option is to transfer the IRA to a term of years trust for the children. The second option is to transfer the IRA to a trust that will pay each child for his or her lifetime.
With the increased estate exemptions and the charitable deduction from the unitrust, it is usually possible to create a unitrust in conjunction with a zero estate tax plan. This plan is well suited to both the inheritance and tax reduction goals of most IRA owners.
To use this plan, the IRA owner may create a unitrust during life for one life plus a term of years or a unitrust for his or her life and the lives of the children. The designated beneficiary of the IRA is the trustee of the unitrust. When the owner passes away, the unitrust is then funded.
While the unitrust may be a testamentary trust in either a will or a living trust, it is much easier to create the lifetime trust for one life plus a term of years and then change the IRA beneficiary designation to the trustee of that trust. The living unitrust may be unfunded in some states (California and others) or it may require nominal funding but no administration. Check the applicable state law for funding requirements.
Give It Twice Trust
A popular option is a "Give It Twice" trust. This trust is commonly funded with an IRA or other taxable retirement plan and is used with a zero estate tax plan. In this plan, a substantial portion of the estate of the surviving spouse is transferred outright to children. The IRA is the balance of the estate. It is transferred at death of surviving spouse to a term of years unitrust. Since the unitrust is tax exempt, no income tax is paid when the IRA is distributed to the trust. The full IRA value is invested and pays 5% income to children for a term of 20 years.
The 5% income is taxable, but over 20 years approximately equals the initial IRA balance. At the end of the term of years, the trust is distributed to charity. Therefore, this is a "Give It Twice" unitrust. It transfers the value once to family over the selected term of years and then distributes the value a second time to charity.
The "Give It Twice" unitrust not only saves taxes, but also effectively fulfills the family distribution goals. If a family has three or four children, it is very possible that one child is not as financially capable or responsible as the others. Yet, parents desire to transfer assets equally to children in the proper belief that equality is more likely to lead to peace in the family. While the initial distribution of estate principal may indeed result in expenditure by the less responsible children, they have a second opportunity to acquire financial skills by receiving income for a term of years from the trust. Thus, parents are able to treat all children equally and still provide them with additional opportunities to acquire financial management skills.
Anna Perez Funds a Testamentary Term Unitrust
Sam and Anna Perez raised four children. Sam passed away last year and Anna rolled over Sam's IRA into her own IRA. She now has an estate of $1.6 million. $800,000 is in her IRA and the estate balance is in her home, CDs and mutual funds.
Anna signs a one-life plus term of 20 years unitrust. She and Sam have always supported a local charity, and Anna would like to benefit her four children and the charity. She changes the beneficiary designation of the IRA to the trustee of the unitrust. When Anna passes away, the $800,000 IRA is transferred to the 5% payout unitrust, saving all of the income tax on the IRA. It is invested for a term of 20 years and pays out over $800,000 to the children during that time. After the 20 years, approximately $1 million will be distributed to Anna's favorite charity.
Each of the four children will receive $200,000 from the balance of the estate. Over a period of 20 years, each child will also receive $200,000 of income. Anna especially likes the way the plan is balanced. Each child receives principal when she passes away and then income for a term of years. Anna believes that this is a desirable plan for the children and a $1 million future gift from the trust remainder will help her favorite charity.
Mary Smith Has a Creative Child
Mary Smith has three children and an estate of $1.8 million. She has an IRA that has grown to $1 million, and other property valued at $800,000. Mary would like to provide some principal to her children and then income for their lifetimes.
However, one of her three children has a long history of poor money management. Mary wants to treat her three children equally, but believes that this child will benefit from the protection of lifetime income.
Mary creates a four life unfunded 5% unitrust. The trust names her for one life (but there is no funding during her lifetime) and then pays for life to each of her children. The charitable remainder is over 10%, so the trust is a qualified charitable remainder unitrust. She changes the beneficiary of her IRA to: John Jones of Hometown, State, as Trustee of the Mary Smith Unitrust dated July 4, 2020, for the Benefit of Mary Smith and Her Children. When she passes away, the $1 million IRA is distributed to the trustee of the unitrust for the lifetimes of her three children.
The children receive the balance of the estate outright, with each child receiving over $250,000 (after costs). Each of the three children then receives one-third of the unitrust income. Over the lives of the children, the $1 million unitrust will pay out over $2 million of income. Each child will receive total income of about $750,000 during his or her lifetime. After all three children have passed away, approximately $1.6 million will be available for charity.
Document Options to Transfer IRAs to Unitrusts
With the future growth of IRAs and other retirement plans, there will be a dramatic increase in the number of individuals who choose to bequeath IRAs to charity or to testamentary unitrusts. Some of these persons will transfer an IRA to a unitrust for the life of a spouse or to a spouse and then to children. Other parents will transfer an IRA to a unitrust to benefit children for a term of years or for their lifetime.
What are options to create effective documents for a “Give It Twice” unitrust? In order to create a legal transfer of an IRA, 403(b), 401(k) or other retirement plan to a charity or charitable trust, certain legal procedures must be followed.
IRA Beneficiary Designation
IRAs and pension plans are transferred through a beneficiary designation. With the fairly rare exception of an IRA transferred to an estate, the IRA is not governed by the will of the IRA owner. Thus, it is very important that the IRA beneficiary designation be completed correctly.
IRA custodians provide beneficiary designation forms to select a primary and contingent designated beneficiary. In most cases, the IRA owner should enter the selected person as designated beneficiary on the form and should also enter the name of a contingent beneficiary. For many persons with charitable inclinations, it could be desirable to select a charity as the contingent beneficiary. For example, an IRA owner could select a spouse or child as designated beneficiary and a favorite charity as contingent beneficiary. Favorite charity should be designated by legal name, city and state. Depending upon the income and estate tax rules in effect at the time the person passes away, the designated beneficiary may determine that there would be substantial tax savings by "disclaiming" and allowing the distribution to be made to the contingent charitable recipient.
If an IRA owner decides to benefit a spouse, children or other persons through a testamentary unitrust, he or she must decide how to achieve the desired results. It is not acceptable to merely write a request on the beneficiary form, asking your executor to create a unitrust. The Internal Revenue Service has disallowed charitable estate deductions for such requests, since the unitrust must exist as of date of death of the decedent. Therefore, it is necessary to create an actual trust document, and then to designate the trustee of the trust as the beneficiary of the IRA. For example, a person could create a trust for himself and his spouse and then update on the beneficiary designation section with the following sentence, "To ABC Bank as trustee of the charitable remainder trust dated July 4, 2020, for the initial benefit of Mr. and Mrs. IRA owner."
There are three principal ways to draft the unitrust document. The options include a funded charitable remainder unitrust with an addition at the death of the IRA owner, an unfunded unitrust and a revocable trust or will with the required language.
Funded Unitrust
One of the favorable benefits of charitable remainder unitrusts is that an addition can be made during life or at death. In order to do so, there must be a provision in the trust instrument that allows contributions from an estate and requires the contribution to be effective as of the date of death, even though payments may not be made until after full trust funding.
A married couple could create and fund a two life unitrust during life. If one spouse were to pass away first, that spouse's IRA could be added to the unitrust for the benefit of the survivor. The IRA beneficiary form would merely designate the trustee as recipient under provisions of the charitable remainder unitrust. After payment of the unitrust amounts to the surviving spouse, the remainder is distributed to favorite charities.
A parent or couple with children could create a trust for one life plus a term of years or two lives plus a term of years. A one or two life plus term trust is permissible if all recipients are named and living when the trust is created and there is a termination provision that requires the trust to terminate if all named beneficiaries pass away prior to the expiration of the term of years. For example, a unitrust for a married couple with three children is in effect a trust for the lesser of the five lives or the period of two lives plus 20 years. Note that if children are named as beneficiaries, the Sec. 2056(b)(8) marital deduction will not apply. With community property or joint tenancy assets, one-half of the remaining income interest is included in each taxable estate. However, if one spouse contributes separate property to the trust, under the consideration-furnished rules, the income interest will be included in his or her estate.
With a one or two life plus term of years trust, the parent or couple may receive unitrust income distributions during life. For a married couple, the survivor will receive the required IRA distributions from his or her plan, plus the income payouts from the unitrust. After both parents pass away, the IRA designated beneficiary for the surviving spouse is the trustee of the unitrust. This trustee will then receive the IRA distribution, add the IRA proceeds to the unitrust and make payments to children for the term of years.
When the IRA is transferred to the trust, the IRA is terminated and the trust receives the distribution from the IRA. In most cases, a traditional IRA or other qualified retirement plan represents 100% untaxed ordinary income and the entire IRA distribution will be allocated to ordinary income. Thus, unitrust payouts to children will be ordinary income. However, because the unitrust is tax exempt, the trustee may invest full value of the IRA in order to maximize the new income.
With a funded unitrust, an addition may also be made from a profit sharing, retirement or 401(k) account. However, in these cases a spouse must sign a consent form for the beneficiary designation. As a practical matter, since spouses may either live in or move to a community property state, it is good practice for both spouses to sign consents to the plan to create a charitable trust that will later receive IRA or other deferred compensation distributions.
Creating a funded unitrust will require normal trust administration and accounting services. The trustee must invest and manage the trust corpus, track the four-tier trust accounting, make the correct payments to the income recipients and file the annual IRS Form 5227.
Unfunded Unitrust
Some individuals desire to create a plan for transfer of an IRA to a charitable remainder trust, but do not want to fund and administer the trust during life. For the individual who does not wish to operate the trust during life but would prefer that the unitrust is available to receive the distribution from an IRA, an unfunded unitrust may be created.
Under the laws of most states, it is permissible to create a trust with nominal or no funding. The IRA owner may sign an unfunded trust and designate the trustee as the IRA beneficiary. In a few states, applicable trust law may require funding of $10 or $20. In those states, the typical practice is to create and sign a trust document and staple a $10 or $20 bill to the trust instrument.
This unfunded trust is valid under state law, but does not require administration under federal statutes until it is funded at the death of the IRA owner. Since no investment or activity is required, Treasury has not objected to this practice.
An unfunded unitrust may be a two life unitrust or could be a one or two life plus term of years trust. The trust should be created prior to signing the beneficiary designation form and filing it with the IRA custodian. For a surviving spouse, the one life plus term of years unfunded unitrust is frequently selected.
Revocable Trust or Will
The final option for documentation is to include a trust document in a revocable trust or a will. The trust will generally be a one life trust for a surviving spouse, a term of years trust for children or a one life trust for a child. It should be clearly identified within the revocable trust or will as a separate charitable remainder unitrust effective only at the death of the testator. It should have a specific number or article designation.
After the living trust or will document has been created by the testator, it is then possible to designate that testamentary trust as the beneficiary of the IRA. The beneficiary designation could be similar to the following: "To ABC Bank as trustee of the charitable remainder unitrust for child A, identified as 'Article H' in the Mary Jones Living Trust dated July 4, 2001." The designation for a will could use comparable language.
The IRA limits on distributions under the SECURE Act greatly reduce the "stretch" plans for beneficiaries. The potential conduit trust disaster and the desire of parents to protect “creative spender” children require a positive solution. Transfer of an IRA or retirement plan to a testamentary unitrust combines tax-free growth, maximum income, protection of the trust principal and a future generous gift to charity. For thousands of parents and individuals who desire to protect and help other family members, the retirement plan to testamentary unitrust solution has enormous benefits for family and charity.
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DRAGONS RACING DOWN THE BAYOU
The 7th Annual Bayou Desiard Dragon Boat Festival is May 12 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Bayou Desiard at the corner of Loop Road and Forsythe in Monroe.
The opening ceremony is at 11 a.m. The Neville High School Band parades in the boat race teams. This year, the race features 27 teams, 9 of which are made of all youth rowers. The race then takes off at 12 p.m. Each boat has 20 rowers, lead by a drummer in the front of the boat. The drummer helps the rowers to keep a steady rhythm. Attendees can vote for their favorite team in the People's Choice Award Competition under the Children's Coalition tent.
"You're in the water for about three minutes, but it's the longest three minutes I've ever rowed," says Dr. Lynn Clark, Executive Director of the Children's Coalition. Proceeds from the event go towards the Children's Coalition, a non-profit organization dedicated to creating communities where children and families thrive.
The morning kicks off with a boot camp from INFIT Gym and a family health care fair featuring free healthcare screening and activities for children. Paddle H2O is giving paddleboard demonstrations at the dock all morning. Blue Sky Yoga is hosting an outdoor yoga class at 10:30 a.m., followed by a zumba class with MisFit1 at 11 a.m. Food trucks and children's activities are available all day.
More information about the Dragon Boat Festival is available here.