TIC’s Five Mega-subjects

A general and technical subject full of interest and importance to regular folk, businesses and professionals. TIC’s bread and butter.

The handling and mishandling of inheritances by executors, administrators, judges, law enforcement etc. — huge and underdone.

Estate planning, lifetime trusts, lifetime transfers, asset management, running out of money etc. and many more hot topics.

How sudden fortune can turn to misfortune. Inheritance theft. Elder abuse. Murder. Will challenges. An indefinite supply of content on the seamy side of wills and estates.

Schools, universities, museums, libraries, research institutions — how big and small philanthropists leave money conventionally and unconventionally

An inexhaustible supply of general and technical reading — the intentions, dispositions, assets, liabilities of actors, actresses, politicians, swindlers, public figures

The insanity of technical terms. The obsolescence of all genetic taxonomy, especially Linnaeus and Darwin, after 1869 (Miescher) or 1953 at the latest (Franklin, Crick, Watson). The absence of perfect clarity. TIC steps in.

Research; clinical practice. Exactly how is it done? Why not done more? For the rich and not the poor. For specific conditions. A huge universe of content.

TIC is very interested in epigenetics and the development and propagation of mutations. TIC will use super-computation to elucidate the hominid poly-genome.

The selective breeding of animals by humans and animals is ancient — fruit flies to Belgisch Witblauw. Where is it going, as animal food runs out? Super-sheep? Super-farmed salmon?

Similarly plants. Deliberate genetic modification of crops is thousands of years old. Modern hyper-scientific pesticide-sensitive GM crops are a fact of life. TIC looks into it.

TIC will maintain a list of some genetic diseases and take a close interest in their cure. Gaucher’s Disease, Progeria, Ogden Syndrome, Alkaptonuria to start.

Private and public archives and databases are the first resort. Some are well known and accessible; others not. TIC will look into providing directories of what’s out there.

Follow your family and you might find some unpleasant precursors. Slavery is one of the big stories these days. TIC will follow it.

Lots of DNA tests and testing techniques are now available. Numerous issues arise: accuracy, confidentiality, technology, etc. TIC will approach this systematically,

The incriminating and exculpatory uses of DNA continue to revolutionise prosecution and humiliate law enforcement. There are many lamentable cases. TIC is onto them.

Behind the yearning for undiscovered family, and ahead of it, are raw emotions. Why look for family at all, and what to do when you’ve found them?

First- and subsequent-generation displaced: it’s quite common to have been sundered from one’s family, and to be a close or distant descendant. Fascinating sagas.

From father to son: long-established family occupations that survive within the family are endlessly instructive and fascinating. TIC goes in search…

TIC is interested in the dark side of cultural behavior: affectation, pose, pretense, superficiality, baloney… TIC will be looking closely at some ridiculous examples.

Similarly, we are burdened from generation to generation with a lot of bad behavior that sticks: child abuse in schools and at home; psychoanalysis etc.

Also handed down: uncanny abilities such as Polynesian open-sea navigation, free-diving, the irrefutable living of a past life — to say nothing of extraordinary abilities in animals.

Human behavior between the generations is endlessly fascinating. American social inarticulateness; war; cowardice; dishonesty in politics; commercialised idiocy. TIC is onto it.

TIC proposes a simple work-in-progress of a directory and dictionary of heritage-style thriving and threatened arts and crafts globally. Quite a project.

Not-biodegradable plastic garbage is now with us forever, from gigantic Indian landfills and floating plastic islands to the microplastics in our brains and livers. Now what?

Activists and journalists are getting themselves killed systematically. TIC calculates the benefits of suicide activism, and investigates what environmental intervention does work.

Politicians and their failures are responsible for most pollution. The Flint Michigan saga is a vivid example. Where are the votes in it? And where is Middle East asbestos dust going?

Man’s treatment of our common inherited environment is enough to make anyone sick, and it’s bound to get worse, if only because of over-population. TIC asks, ‘What on earth will be left for future generations?’

TIC is nonplussed by gudda such as renewable gusts of wind, renewable sunbeams, carbon credits, biomass and sovereign debt. TIC asks, ‘Is there no way out of this?’

When it’s all over. We’re already down to our last few rhinos. The lists of endangered flora and fauna are unrelenting. TIC…