The American president is eighty years old.
Eighty. Years. Old.
We are ruled by a gerontocracy. Chuck Grassley, a senator from Iowa, is 89 years old and was just re-elected to another six-year term.
Nancy Pelosi, House Speaker, is 82 years old. She too was re-elected.
Darrell Brooks, the Waukesha hit and run murderer, was sentenced this week to six consecutive life terms on the six convicted counts of first-degree murder, plus an additional 762 years for seriously injuring dozens of other victims.
Such a sentence is difficult to imagine, in an additive sense, for none of us know what will happen tomorrow. We do, however, have a very accurate picture of the past.
In 1260, 762 years ago, Kublai Khan became the great Khan of the Mongol empire. Barbers and physicians were indistinguishable, for another five hundred years the two professions were joined. The Black Death would not reach Europe for more than another century.
No Christians were protestants. The Fifth Crusade had failed nine years previously; Jerusalem was controlled by the heirs of Saladin. Arab and Christian rulers shared the Iberian peninsula. The Eastern Roman Empire would endure for another two hundred years or so; the crescent moon of Islam would not be raised over the city called Constantinople until 1453. The Most Serene Republic of Venice was a world power and would be for another 500 years.
Middle English was the language of England and would not evolve into today’s intelligible Modern English for another two centuries. Scribes copied books onto a relatively new material called paper, movable type printing was two hundred years in the future. The educated world communicated in Latin, a language in which a young Heloise composed poetry sent to her lover and husband Abelard prior to her death, only a century before.
The Christian Kings would not expel the Arab emirs from their Kingdom of Granada and fund an Italian sailor’s dream for another two centuries and three decades. Unaware of these matters, Aztec kings ruled over large parts of what today is Mexico while making blood sacrifices to their gods.
Brooks is forty years old and may live at most only another half century. We may think that the world of 2072 will be very different from our own, and in some ways it will be, but whatever changes that come to us are nothing compared to those occasioned over the last seven-tenths of a millennium.
If Twitter:
–starts charging $8 for verification to meet KYC (Know Your Customer) anti-money laundering requirements
–layers on #Ripple/#XRP
–restricts access to verified accounts
–now you have a profitable payment ecosystem from/to verified users anywhere in the world.
To make Twitter a payments platform like WeChat/TenCent you have to verify users.
It will disrupt the international remittance business and provide cheap banking services for the unbanked.
Would you pay $8 to let anyone send you money from anywhere in the world?
Without percentage-based transactional fees?
I bet a lot of merchants would.
If government at all levels permits payment by Twitter, and merchants get on board, and utilities, and employers
then:
-Visa/MC
-Western Union
-Moneygram
-Paypal
-retail banks
-credit unions
all have a big problem.
The above is an edited copy of posts I made on Twitter on this subject; it has been one of my most popular posts with hundreds of likes and re-tweets.
Perhaps the US would be wise to stop insulting the Saudi petroleum minister and attacking the Saudis generally and instead solicit their help with respect to Brittney Griner.
The predilection for writing letters did not begin in Bahrain. In another lifetime, I worked for the Panama Canal. One of the benefits, at least as seen by one who suffers the affliction of writing letters, was a provision of the Panama Canal Treaty which gave employees of the Canal access to the military postal system until the end of the so-called “transition period,” which began on the treaty’s effective date of October 1, 1979 and ended on April 30, 1982.
The incidents of sovereignty were slowly being cast off, and like Y2K (though no one had heard of that then, obviously) no one was really sure if all the bases had been covered in the treaty, the implementing agreement, the newly renamed Canal Zone Code and any other regulations, instructions or memoranda that were flitting about. Taking down a flag is easy, but not everything else that needs to abolish a jurisdiction is so simple—e.g., they retained limited criminal jurisdiction but forgot to provide for federal public defenders. Typical.
In those days, the idea of privatizing a national post office was unheard of. The flag followed mail carriers as they made their rounds, historically it was one of the few federal institutions that touched people’s lives (at least until the income tax became law) and stamps were as good as currency. The Canal Zone had its own post office. When, on October 1, 1979 they took down the flag, that post office went out of business and was turned over to the Republic of Panama’s own postal system.
So, for thirty-one months, Panama Canal US citizen employees had access to the military postal system. The idea, I suppose, was that this would cause as little impact as possible on those who wrote letters, read magazines or received Jenny Craig diet products through the mail. Sending letters overseas in those days was complicated; half the time the postal clerk would have to pull a black binder from a shelf in someone’s office to check if there were any special mailing requirements. During the Canal Zone days, mail from the US was domestic; similarly, mail that traveled through the military postal system was also considered domestic for the most part. You had an APO (Army Post Office) address in Miami and were charged parcel rates to Florida.
I quickly read the writing on the wall and knew that I, along with about 1700 others, would soon lose military mail. This was disconcerting. I sent a questionnaire around to military post offices in different countries to see how they handled things and if there was any regulatory holes into which we might, in the future, place letters.
Civilian US employees in Korea were unionized and active; perhaps they had figured something out. We were theoretically a part of the Department of Defense, after all, but just barely. The fight over the Canal Zone was in the past and the focus was now on obtaining Panamanian support, or at least no-objection, for our backing the Contras in Nicaragua, not to mention the FMLN unpleasantness in El Salvador.
The Gipper took to the airwaves and showed the public how close Nicaragua was to Texas; communists could any day now be at our shores. Cuba was closer, of course, but that conflict had long been back-burnered.
I obtained no results and no hope from what the Pentagon called my “unauthorized world-wide survey” of military post offices. I thought they were being a little dramatic. April 30, 1982 was rapidly approaching and with it, the likelihood of weight gain if Jenny Craig’s tasty meals became uneconomical due to an increase in postal rates.
What then, to do? I was completely out of ideas and could only dread the inevitable. That day in April finally came and with it, an extraordinarily rare ceremony was held, the closing of a United States District Court. As far as I know, only two US district courts have ever closed. The US District Court for China was closed when the Japanese invaded Shanghai in WWII, and the US District Court for the Philippines was closed when the Imperial Japanese Army displaced General MacArthur. Neither court was ever to open again.
No violence attended the closing of the Canal Zone court. The ceremony was presided over by the Fifth Circuit’s chief judge, Charles Clark. The general staff of the Panamanian Defense Forces filled up the jury box. Judge Morey Sear, the last Canal Zone district judge, sat next to Judge Clark.
My boss, Dwight McKabney, later wanted to prosecute Judge Sear for “donating” a bench from the court to Tulane Law School. McKabney felt this was an unauthorized transfer of government property. His own boss wanted only for Canal affairs to be run smoothly. Making an accusation against a federal district judge with life tenure was not, in his view, a good idea. With the end of the transition period Sear lost his diplomatic passport and sinecure in the Canal Zone. But he was still a sitting judge in New Orleans of the District Court of the Eastern District of Louisiana, where I used to spend time in Tulane’s library while preparing for the Louisiana bar exam. No accusation was ever made against Sear. In 1987, the bench was still in Tulane’s law library and as far as I know, remains there today.
On that April day I met Colonel Manuel Noriega for the first time. He was our ally then. General Torrijos had died in a plane crash less than a year before and the military general staff were still jockeying for position. I shook his hand but didn’t have any conversation other than perhaps exchanging mutual “mucho gustos.” The Canal had good relations with the Colonel, who at that time was powerful but not formally in a leadership position. The Canal had a special liaison office with the Panamanian Defense Forces and things ran smoothly, at least until we decided to ignore the treaty and invade Panama eight years later—a treaty violation, I’d like to point out.
On the day after the ceremony, there was no more mail. Everyone’s post office box—for there never was door to door mail service in either Panama or the Canal Zone—was closed.
Or was it? For some strange reason, and clearly a violation of the blessed treaty reached by two sovereign nations—my box continued to receive mail. It was just a regular post office box—PSC (Postal Service Center) Box 843, APO Miami 34002. Against all odds, somehow my box had remained open at Albrook Field.
I felt like a criminal when I went to pick up my mail. I wasn’t supposed to be there. If they asked for the military ID which authorized me to pick up mail, I had nothing to show. It is hard to act surreptitiously in a large post office with circular mirrors where the walls meet the ceiling bathed with white light from the batteries of fluorescent tubes illuminating postal customers from above. For a month or so, I pretended like I had a right to be there, found my box and turned the combination knob. Twice to the right, once to the left and the box opened.
But one day the combination stopped working. The box wouldn’t open. There was no mail for me. I went to the former Canal Zone post office in Balboa. For a little more than two years it had been an unused outpost of the Panamanian postal system. I signed up for a box and was assigned Box 2914; but I had to call the box “Apartado” because English was no longer allowed. Day followed day without mail.
In these days of instant communication, e.g., “I texted you five minutes ago. Why haven’t you answered?” and free international voice calls (WhatsApp, Line) the isolation that separated people at a distance is forgotten. But it was isolation and that distance caused friendships to be lost. When someone left town they were, in effect, gone for good, unless they returned. This effect was magnified when anyone left for overseas. Mail was one way to breach the distance and stay in touch.
Though it had nothing to do with the unauthorized survey, by pure coincidence I found out that US citizens in Haiti had access to the State Department diplomatic pouch to send and receive mail. The privilege was restricted to government employees working in Haiti. There was an alternative mail system after all.
I didn’t see any reason why this couldn’t work in Panama. The effect of the Treaty was to deprive US citizen PanCanal employees of their access to the mails as a consequence of the disestablishment of the Canal Zone. Without a political entity, there could be no post office. The mail was an incidence of sovereignty and a vestige of a now-objectionable colonial period. Soldiers might get US mail, but civilians? Unthinkable.
The concept of privatizing government assets had not yet reached the Western democracies. Instead, the pendulum swung the other way: “nationalization” was the way that governments took the assets of foreign companies, usually American companies at that. The American attitude was that this was just a few steps away from socialism or communism and must be resisted at all costs.
Privatization was not a word in anyone’s vocabulary. Had it been, the Canal Zone post office might have been sold to FedEx or DHL, except back then, the former didn’t exist and the latter was a messenger service that only delivered documents after-hours to attorneys in Northern California.
By the time US mail service was cut off I was living with a parrot that had developed a fondness for the maid’s daughter, Katia. The parrot cried out Katia’s name at all hours of the day and night. Jungle parrots can hear each other’s shrieks at a distance of three miles. My living room was not that big. The parrot’s loneliness was contagious. I was discouraged only when there was no mail in the apartado but when Katia wasn’t around the parrot was inconsolable.
I formally submitted the issue of access to the diplomatic pouch to Canal management and was told that access was not possible. When asked for the legal basis for this view, I was referred back to the treaty. But the request as framed had nothing to do with the treaty. All that was in the past. Diplomatic pouch access was in the present and was common in Haiti as well as other countries. Those who were telling me this didn’t realize that they had no legal basis to say ‘no’ because if they said ‘no’ they would be admitting that we really weren’t a federal agency or that we weren’t really federal employees and that they could not do.
Negotiations continued but eventually I got a call. They had set up a new post office for the employees through the embassy’s diplomatic pouch. It was more restrictive than the military postal system, but now those who watched their waistlines could get their Jenny Craig again. Thomas Pynchon wrote about a mysterious secret postal system called the trystero in his novel, The Crying of Lot 49. My trystero ran for almost two decades.
In Panama I lost my respect for the Rule of Law. When you can pick and choose which laws to obey and which ones to ignore, whether the subject of your legal inquiry is a wooden district court bench or a lonely parrot shrieking for a friend, you lose respect for the supposed black and white Rule of Law very quickly.
An infant lay in a baby carriage in front of the photo studio. I was there to get visa pictures as was the infant’s father, who was from Malaysia.
A Thai-Chinese woman in her 80’s made a fuss about the infant, who I wrongly assumed was the child’s grandmother—or great grandmother. “She’s second generation Thai Chinese,” the Malaysian told me. She lives across the street but likes to hang out at the photo studio.
An Italian arrived on a motorcycle to get passport pictures. I told him he would have to ask the boss and pointed to the infant. He realized this was a joke and asked grandma, who had nothing to do with the shop except that she liked to sit on their stools. Old people are lonely, but people in their 80’s are really lonely.
The infant made faces and looked like at any moment might burst into a fit of screaming tears. “He doesn’t have a passport,” the Malaysian told me. “His mother is Chinese. Chinese passports are easy. Malaysia is a different story. He’s stateless.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “at this point he doesn’t know he’s stateless.” “Being born in Thailand doesn’t automatically make you a Thai citizen if your parents were born elsewhere. And Malaysia is so difficult.”
Grandma interrupted him. Pointing to me, she asked me in Thai, “where are you from?”
“Mei guo, I answered in Chinese. Why not? Except for the Italian, it was the majority language in the shop at the moment.
A few more minutes for your photos, the real manager piped in. “Did you say you’re from America? I used to live in Kansas.” His hearing was acute.
“Not sure what we’ll do about the baby,” the Malaysian said. “Without a passport, he can’t leave Thailand.”
“Mei guo?” Grandma asked. She said something quickly in Thai. Maybe she didn’t understand Mandarin. “Khaojai koh hua?” I asked her, mixing Thai and Chinese and using the Chinese phrase for Mandarin, koh hua or ‘common speech.’ She said no, the baby looked up and I asked “Guangdong hua? referring to Cantonese. She repeated the phrase, which I took to mean ‘yes.’
The Italian asked me what I was saying and I told him in English. “Do you speak any other languages?” he asked. I laughed. “I don’t speak those,” I said, “I just know a few words. But yeah, Spanish.”
In flawless textbook Latin American Spanish, the Italian announced that he had ‘good friends’ in Medellin. This rarely is a good sign. His familiarity with the show Narcos and the Italian Gamorra was less than reassuring.
Grandma was stroking the chest of the infant, who, perhaps startle by the confusion of languages around him, hadn’t said a thing.
“Got to get him a Malaysian passport,” he said to me before leaving. My pictures were handed over, so I left as well.
One undiscussed aspect of the pardon is whether those who are incarcerated on other offenses, but whose presumptive guidelines were calculated based in part on the now-pardoned conduct, are entitled to sentence reductions.
Under the Sentencing Guidelines scheme, a federal felony counts for three points and so boosts the defendant into the next column and can double the sentence.
Property owners who delegate rental management to local companies an who may never even have visited their leased property.
Since real estate agents claim that one of their core skills is showing a property and none of these properties are ever shown, perhaps they will unbundle their skills and give home owners a discount.
Don’t hold your breath.
In the US, it’s
.”
In the UK, it’s
”.
When writing Markdown, it’s
*. or
.*
Because it doesn’t matter if a full stop is italicized or not.
But after a while, the error ceases to leap out at you. Query: will this lead to the long-awaited unification of punctuation in the English language?
Typing envelopes is a practical use for a typewriter.
By the time you:
My envelope was already typed.
BTW, if you don’t use an ink-jet printer, because laser printers use plastic as ink, the plastic will wear off as the envelope passes through automatic sorting systems.
This isn’t an issue with impressions made using a typewriter ribbon.