THIS & THAT VI

A young lady I know teaches Spanish in a charter school in Philadelphia, and many of her students are Puerto Ricans. She mentioned the other day that she knows two pairs of twins with exactly the same names. In other words, there are twins in one of her classes who are both named Juan Carlos Menendez. In another class, there are twins who are both named Louisa Lopez. (I'm making up the names, but you get the idea.) She hypothesizes that this twin-naming practice is a (goofy) Puerto Rican custom.

I asked my co-worker Benny (my main source for all things Puerto Rican) about this, and he immediately started chuckling. “Yeah, it's true,” he said. “I have twin cousins and they're named Nina and Lena. I never saw twins with the exact same name like your friend did, but Hispanics love their little jokes when they name kids. My mother is a twin and her name is Carmen Maria. Her sister is named Maria Carmen. I never thought it was a Puerto Rican thing, though. Mexicans do the same thing.”

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There is one day each year when virtually all Chinese restaurants in America are closed---Thanksgiving. If you and your fiance work in Chinese restaurants (and most of your friends do, too), it might well be the day you pick for your wedding.

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One of the more arcane legal doctrines thrust upon first year law students is the Rule Against Perpetuities, which arose in the Duke of Norfolk's Case in 1682. The Rule is often stated as follows: “No interest is good unless it must vest, if at all, within 21 years after the death of a life in being at the creation of the interest.” The gist of it is that there is a limit on the length of time a man may exert control over his property through his Will or trust instruments. A dead man cannot tie up title to land or other property forever.

As part of the Common Law we inherited from England, the Rule Against Perpetuities became part of the law in every state until twenty or thirty years ago when several states repealed it by statute. In one of these states, South Dakota, bankers quickly realized the potential of attracting enormous fortunes into the state by creating trusts that were practically eternal.

To simplify (actually, to oversimplify), what happens, a Very Rich Guy pours his assets into a trust and names his heirs (children, grandchildren, etc.), beneficiaries thereof. At that moment, the VRG doesn't own the assets anymore, so they do not pass through his estate (and probate) when he dies. Over the years, earnings from the trust will be paid to the heirs, and those sums will become subject to personal income tax, but the trust assets themselves never come under the Federal Estate Tax.

Avoidance of the feds is the purpose of the Dynasty Trust, as these things are called. If the heirs actually came into possession of the VRG's assets under a standard Will, the Federal Estate Tax would snag about 40% of it. And that process would be repeated for each succeeding generation. Instead, the repeal of the Rule Against Perpetuities in South Dakota means that the descendants of VRGs will be able to live off the trust assets for hundreds of years.

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cybernation, n., (cyber + hibernation), the avoidance of harsh wintry weather by remaining indoors to shop, play games or view entertainment on line.

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There was another school shooting in Colorado a few weeks ago, which means there are new demands for “gun control.” There are many ways in which schools might be secured, of course, but the Left doesn't seem to have any interest in doing that. Instead, they prefer to use these public shooting events as yet more fuel for their continuing campaign to disarm the innocent.

I have written before about “gun-free zones,” but there are actually two types of them.

The first type (let's call it Type-A), typically includes schools, many other public buildings, malls, and restaurants. Virginia Tech was this sort of “gun-free zone.” These are the most dangerous places in America, and they are where virtually all mass shootings occur because the only people who take guns into Type-A gun-free zones are killers and psychopaths. Decent, law-abiding types like me would never do so. It's against the law. The result is that when a lunatic decides to take down a dozen of his fellow humans in a festival of blood, he does it in a Type-A gun-free zone because he knows it will be a long time before anybody there stops him.

There is another kind, however. Type-B gun-free zones are places where serious efforts are made to keep guns out. Type-B zones exist, and they don't have any guns in them.

Federal courtrooms are Type-B gun-free zones, for example. You can't get into one without going through metal detectors that are manned by armed guards. Airplanes are also Type-B zones. We are often annoyed by the process of checking everyone and feeling up your nine-year-old daughter and searching in grandma's Depends, but passengers on planes don't have guns anymore, whether they are nuns or consigliores for the Gambino family or 20-year-old jihadists. Once you get to your seat on an airplane, you can be reasonably assured the guy sitting next to you will not shoot you..

The same process could be put in place in schools. It wouldn't be cheap, and it would take a long time to get every child in America through a metal detector every day, and with 100,000 schools in America, there would be weak spots and guards who become complacent, and the people who run many of our schools are often hopelessly incompetent so it would still be possible for a determined and clever madman to fight or trick his way into a building full of helpless children and kill a pile of them. But it would be a lot more difficult.

I'm not exactly recommending this, you understand. It's not a very good solution to the problem because of the trouble and cost and the very real danger that the system could be breached and that if it were breached, the body-count in a particular incident could be much higher. A much safer alternative would be to have lots of guns in schools, like they do in Israel. There is no such thing as a gun-free school in Israel. Some schools have armed guards, some have armed teachers or administrators, but all of them have guns in the house. It's a different situation, to be sure---they are worried about terrorists rather than loonies---but the goal is the same. Protect the kids. And Israel does a much better job of it.

But here in the USA, where the Left will not allow teachers or guards or anyone to fight back against people who want to kill children, maybe the Type-B gun-free zone is the best we can hope for. It seems a shame we have to tolerate these attacks, which average about one per month, just to provide the Left with ammo for their political arguments, but this situation has been in stasis for some years now. Considering the political impasse, metal detectors and TSA-like bureaucracy may be the only way America can address the problem.

Copyright2013MichaelKubacki