It’s Good to Be The Queen

Since it is Christmas, it is time for the annual message from Queen Elizabeth II, and as a semi-loyal ex-colonist….I listened to it.  It was, as expected pretty much as follows:

Yada, Yada, Yada….we are all in this together….Covid….We are inspired….next year.

It was a nice speech, and at 94, the Queen looked great and did it well.  I will admit to being a little partial to the Queen.  I’m not exactly a monarchist, but a woman who has dealt with a couple of dozen presidents and Prime Ministers, who slapped down Winston Churchill a few times, and is—extraordinarily—the last head of state in the world to wear a uniform during World War II, deserves a little respect.

Having said that, the Queen is not exactly in this with the rest of us.  If the rich are different from us, the Queen is different even from the rich.  According to Forbes, Jeff Bezos of Amazon is the richest person in the world at $230 billion (which shows you how incorrect Forbes can be).  The queen easily has several times the wealth of Bezos.  

I did a little back of an envelope figuring and not even bothering to list the assets worth less than a measly billion dollars, such as those piddly minor items like the shiny trinkets in the Tower of London or the diaries and notebooks of Queen Victoria.  I stopped adding up the big stuff when the total topped $505 billion.

The Queen owns BIG stuff…. like Antigua and a half dozen other Caribbean Islands.   And as the monarch, she owns the English seacoast and the seabed under the seas surrounding the country (In fact, she owns about 1.4% of all the land in the UK).  The value of mining rights to this property has been estimated at more than $100 billion.  And back in the 17th century, Charles I started a royal art collection every monarch since then has added to it.  Today, the collection consists of some 150,000 pieces, valued at more than $10 billion.  There are more than 600 Faberge eggs.

The monarch has six castles, three shopping centers, and more real estate than anyone could visit in a lifetime, over six billion acres.  And who cares?  That’s not the interesting stuff that fascinates me.  Because of tradition, archaic and forgotten laws, and the longevity of the royal family, the Queen owns some really cool stuff that you have probably never heard about.

On the vast Balmoral estate, valued at more than $50 billion, there is a bat colony.  These are not your regular cave dwelling bats—these bats inhabit Balmoral Castle.  While most property owners would chase them off, the Queen likes the bats and has ordered the castle staff to leave the windows open so the bats can come and go as they wish (except when she catches them in a butterfly net to release them outside).  Cool!—especially in winter.

Actually, the Queen owns a lot of animals.  Besides a stable of race horses—and the Ascot Racetrack—the queen owns a couple of Corgis, two black jaguars, a sloth, all the dolphins in the United Kingdom, and two giant Aldabra tortoises.  Though no one knows exactly how many of them there are—the queen owns all the swans on the River Thames.  And while she technically does not own all the mussels and oysters in Scotland, she does own the fishing rights to them.  

It is almost impossible to list all the incredible classic cars the Queen owns.  Evidently, the monarchy rarely sells any of their cars.  So, the girl who worked as a truck mechanic during the war, now owns three Rolls-Royces, two Bentleys, a couple of Aston Martins, and a gold Royal State Coach.  What the Queen may not own, however, is a driver’s license.  There is some question whether the license she was issued during the war is still valid.  In any case, she’s not likely to get a ticket.

I guess you could say that the Queen has her own money, since her picture is on it.  According the Guinness Book of World Records, her likeness has appeared on more currency than anyone else’s in history.  And if she needs access to any of that cash, her bank had conveniently installed her own personal ATM in the basement of Buckingham Palace.  I’m at a loss, however, to come up with a reason why she would ever need to get any cash.  If she wanted to sneak out of the palace one night for a hamburger, she could go to a nearby shopping center where she owns the local MacDonald’s franchise.  

The Queen’s grandfather, King George V, started a stamp collection in the 1890’s and when the public learned of the King’s hobby, he received large numbers of gifts to add to this collection.  The Royal Philatelic Collection is now the largest stamp collection in the Commonwealth, comprising hundreds of albums.  Leafing through the volumes must be sort of like looking at a family album, since a sizable portion of the stamps bear the image of someone in her family.

I have no idea how big the Queen’s closets must be, since she has an incredible collection of gowns and uniforms.  Besides her own clothes and an estimated 200 Launer handbags, she owns the wedding dress of Queen Victoria and the suit of armor for King Henry VIII.  And somewhere, she has to keep the 40 leather suitcases and 9 leather briefcases she travels with, each with a yellow luggage tag that says “The Queen”.  (You have to ask yourself why she bothers with the tags, it’s not like she has to identify her bags on an airport carousel.)

If you are wondering what the Queen carries in her handbag, you might be surprised to learn that she always has a camera with her to “take pictures of celebrities”.  And though it is now against the law in England, the Queen has carried a pocket knife in her purse since the days when she was a ‘Girl Guide’ in 1937. 

Regardless of how many luggage carts the Queen needs when she travels—she also owns the award for the “most-traveled head of state in history”.  Traveling over a million miles, she has been to over 120 countries—a list far too long for this blog so it’s far easier to just say she has not yet visited Madagascar, Cuba, Peru, or Israel.

Yet, despite all of her travels, there is one thing that the Queen does not own now and never has owned:  a passport.

The Atlantic Crossing

As soon as the sailboat rounded the point of land that for generations sailors had called “The Lizard”, Steve raised the sails and cut the small diesel engine.  With any luck, for the next three to six weeks, the crossing would be done with wind power alone.

As soon as the diesel died, Steve was struck by how comparatively quiet the boat was.  To be sure, there was still plenty of sound, but each sound meant something:  it was if the waves and the boat were talking to him (and it was not just the pounding racket of what his father had called the ‘iron spinnaker’).  

Steering south, Steve thought the 42’ ketch should reach the Canaries in roughly a week.  From there, it was roughly a month to Fort Lauderdale.  The long-range weather forecast was favorable—not that Steve really trusted it for more than a few days into the future—and as long as the November winds stayed favorable, the small boat should average roughly 7 knots throughout the crossing.

Steve made minute—and admittedly, probably unnecessary--adjustments to trim the sails, then reached a hand over to the instrument panel.  For long seconds, his hand hovered just over the switch, as if the hand itself, was unwilling to flip it on.  “Quit being stubborn,” he thought to himself and flipped the switch with more force than necessary.

For a moment, the only sign that the electronic brain was working was a green light on the instrument panel, then Steve heard the soft hum of electric motors as the autopilot adjusted the sails.  Steve felt, rather than saw, the bow of the ship move slightly to port.  For the next few weeks, Steve’s main job was to watch the computerized autopilot like a hawk, for all of the steering and navigation would be accomplished by a computer relying on GPS data provided by satellites circling the earth.

Steve’s main navigation job was to select the three waypoints for the computer to plot a course.  The first was 50 miles south of the Canary Islands, the second was the channel marker buoy outside Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the third and last waypoint was a mile past the channel marker when manual control would be returned to him.  Other than hovering over the computer like a worried mother, Steve’s main jobs would be keeping an eye on the weather and feeding himself.  Well, that and the other endless maintenance jobs required by any vessel afloat. 

Though impressed with the accuracy of the new computerized system, Steve wasn’t really sure he trusted the new autopilot.  A writer by trade, Steve knew all about the old mechanical wind vane autopilots he had used ever since his father had taught him how to sail.  You could watch one of the old contraptions and within five minutes, could learn exactly how it worked and intuitively could know what it could and could not do.  A relatively simple system, its very simplicity inspired trust.  These new systems, however, bordered on magic.  At any given moment, the computer brain could tell you exactly where you were, your present speed, your average speed, and even make an accurate prediction of when you would arrive at your next waypoint.  But, the entire operation happened inside its little computer chips, something no captain of a ship could watch.

Steve had written an article praising the old mechanical steering systems for a popular sailing magazine, admitting his bias and stating that the main reason he didn’t like the new computerized steering systems was that he probably didn’t understand them.  He had pointed out that in the early days of sailing, man had trusted to magic to guide his ships.  Then for hundreds of years, sailors had increasingly used technology and math to navigate:  their compasses, sextants, and chronometers were scientific instruments.  Now, with computers and satellites whose workings you couldn’t see—it felt like a return to magic.

Almost immediately, one of the larger manufacturers of GPS navigation devices had made him a proposition he really couldn’t refuse.  The company would install a new computerized autopilot on his boat and would retrofit it to handle the automatic steering system, in return for which, Steve would sail his boat across the Atlantic, then write a new magazine article about the trip.  The magazine was equally enthusiastic and Steve really couldn’t afford to pass up the opportunity.

In due time, his boat was modified to accommodate the new system, the largest changes having been the installation of solar panels and additional storage batteries to power the system.  Unless the weather changed and the solar panels didn’t get enough sun to sufficiently recharge the batteries, it would probably not be necessary for Steve to start up the diesel motor at all.

While waiting for November (the start of the best season for Atlantic crossings), Steve had spent his time learning about the new self-steering system and planning for his crossing.  While this was his first solo crossing, he had been a crew member on a similar crossing three years earlier, as well as on numerous shorter trips between England and the Canary Islands.  Waiting for the weather to be right for a crossing, Steve had found himself increasingly excited about the trip.

Now, with the boat underway and being piloted by a computer that Steve both admired and feared, he decided to do something useful and eat lunch.  Making his way to the companionway leading below deck, he took the first two steps and disconnected the safely line from his harness.  Since Steve was sailing alone, he had no intention of taking a single step above deck without wearing the harness securely attached to the safety line.

The safety line was connected to a jackline that ran down the centerline of the ketch.  If he somehow still managed to fall overboard, the harness also had a CO2-inflatable flotation device.  He had once talked to the captain of an American Coast Guard Cutter who told him that fully half of the bodies the Coast Guard fished out of the Gulf of Mexico were men with the fly of their pants down.  The assumption was that the men had walked to the stern to relieve themselves when sudden motion of their boats had sent them overboard.  Steve had no intention of dying so foolishly.

Until he had rounded the Canary Islands, Steve had done little more than double check the systems, tracking the boat's progress on an old-fashioned paper chart.  Now, on course from there to Fort Lauderdale, Steve had twice inputted small corrections into the system to avoid squalls in the distance, neither of which was a serious threat to his crossing.  Steve knew that he had decided to input the two small detours into the system more to play with the computer than for any actual necessity.  He was forced to admit that he was having some doubts about who the captain of the vessel really was.

Five weeks into the crossing, Steve was just 5 nautical miles off the US coast when his cell phone rang for the first time in weeks.  Answering the call, Steve learned that the magazine had arranged for a photographer to meet him at the marina, Bahia Del Mar, in Fort Lauderdale.  For the first time since leaving Portsmouth, Steve suddenly thought about his appearance and how the photos would look in the magazine article.

Steve unclipped the safety line from his harness and rushed to the head to do a quick wash and shave—he would have to hurry, as the boat was nearing the next-to-last checkpoint, the channel marker buoy.  A single mile past that point, the self-steering system would turn itself off, returning manual control of the ship back to Steve.

Steve was on his hands and knees desperately searching the head’s small locker for his razor when the collision occurred.

Three weeks later, at the Coast Guard hearing in conjunction with the Broward County Sheriff, it was determined that the self-steering mechanism had (as it had been programmed to do 3,000 miles earlier), steered directly to—and right over—the channel marker buoy, rupturing the sailboat’s fiberglass hull in multiple locations.  The collision had probably knocked the captain of the sailboat—the only occupant—off his feet and knocking him unconscious.  He had drowned when the vessel sank in the channel within sight of the shore.

-------------------------

Note.  This is a work of fiction, based loosely—very loosely—on an actual accident that occurred near Fort Lauderdale about a decade ago.  And, the part about sailors falling off the sterns of their ships while relieving themselves?—It’s also true, unfortunately.

This blog was started 12 years ago on a whim that turned into a stubborn habit, and since then has become an obsession.  It so happens that the first story was about a sailboat.  Since this is the 600th entry in a row without missing a week, it felt only right to make up another story about a sailboat.

O Canada, O Canada

There is a great line in the movie Paint Your Wagons where Ben Rumson is discussing ethics with his partner, Clint Eastwood.  “I’ve coveted my neighbor’s wife whenever I had a neighbor and whenever he had a wife.”

This pretty much encapsulates America’s view on territorial expansion.  Far more often than is comfortable to recount, America has desired a little elbow room.  Call it empire building or manifest destiny, or whatever you like, but at one time or another America has seriously considered annexing all of North America and even parts further south.  

President Polk wanted to try Nicholas Trist—our negotiator to peacefully settle the Mexican-American War—for only acquiring California, Texas, and the rest of the Southwest to end an unjust war we started.  Polk thought such a puny settlement was treason, as he had wanted all of Mexico, at the very least.

Congress has at various times discussed annexing Cuba and the Dominican Republic, as well as making a state out of Puerto Rico.  One senator even took to the floor to make an impassioned speech that once the US flag had started “it’s march southward, it was inevitable that it would reach the southernmost tip of Argentina”.  And we have indeed invaded southward more often than most Americans realize.  The U.S. has invaded Mexico so many that times I’m kind of surprised our neighbors to the south aren’t the ones insisting on a wall.  We even invaded Mexico once with a streetcar.  

America has occasionally glanced northward with a little envy, too.  Everyone remembers the War of 1812, but that wasn’t the only time we tried to wrest Canada away from Great Britain.  

During the Civil War, both the North and the South tried to curry the favor of Great Britain.  The South desperately needed the English to continue to buy its cotton, to officially recognize the Confederate States of America, and perhaps most of all, to use the powerful British navy to keep Southern ports open for trade.  When the war started, the pitiful US Navy was more of a threat to itself than to any potential enemy.

The North, on the other hand, desperately wanted the English to stay neutral and not recognize the South.  As long as the Brits didn’t formally recognize the Confederacy, the merchants of England were forbidden by international treaty from selling military goods to the South.  Since establishing a naval blockade of Confederate ports was a major part of the North’s strategy, if the South could continue to export its cotton and import necessary military supplies, the chances of the South being successful in the war improved enormously.

If the South had really wanted to win, say if it were really focused on issues like state’s rights….All it had to do to gain British recognition was to abolish slavery.  Great Britain had fought the slave trade around the world and was never going to recognize the South until it emancipated its slaves.  And freed slaves could have been enticed to enlist and help relieve the manpower shortage hindering the Southern Army.  You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d almost think the South was just fighting to preserve slavery…

The Confederates couldn’t buy war goods from England, but they could buy non-military supplies.  Of course, there was the small problem of getting anything past that the growing number of Yankee ships guarding every port, making blockade running possible only if you had a sea captain with the skills of a Rhett Butler.  

Still, the South could purchase goods that weren’t going to be sent home...Say, a large, fast ship that had no cannons, but had empty gun ports, could be sailed to a different country where Confederate gold might buy black market cannons that could turn a peaceful ship into a powerful and fast warship.  Technically, the British merchants weren’t breaking any laws, just bending the crap out of them.  

Great Britain did everything it could to help the Confederacy without technically violating its neutrality.  It didn’t take a genius to see that the United States was growing more powerful with every passing year, and the prospect of splitting America into two nations would help assuage England’s growing fear of an enfant terrible just across the Atlantic Ocean.

So, the Confederacy bought ships in England, sailed them to the Azores and refitted them with cannons, turning fast merchant ships into warships.  These auxiliary cruisers or commerce raiders, like the CSS Alabama (right), were very successful in attacking unarmed Northern merchant ships.  In its first 21 months after being launched in England, the Alabama cruised 75K miles and took 64 Northern ships worth more than $6.5 million.  All this happened without its ever once getting within 100 miles of the South, much less the state of Alabama.  The Alabama was the most successful commerce raider among the small fleet the South developed using this same method.  The  US Navy was thus forced to divert ships from the blockade to patrol shipping lanes around the world.

After the end of the Civil War, the United States was a little angry with a few nations.  It was angry with France for violating the Monroe Doctrine and seizing Mexico while we were a little busy killing each other.  President Johnson sent 50,000 troops to the Southern border and suddenly Napoleon III decided to pull his troops out of Mexico.

Besides France, America was also a little peeved at Great Britain, for having sold the Confederacy ships that any fool would have known the South would convert to warships.  In the case of the Alabama, the American ambassador to England, Charles Francis Adams, son and grandson of American presidents—had explicitly warned Prime Minister Lord Palmerston not to allow the ship to be was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Sumner demanded that Britain not only pay for the loss of the ships and cargo, but pay punitive damages for extending the Civil War and increasing the number of Americans who died.  For this, Sumner demanded that Great Britain pay $2 billion! 

Today, Washington throws money around in large denominations—a billion here, a trillion there—but in 1869, this was not only more money that Great Britain would pay, it was more than she could pay.  Senator Sumner understood this and had a simple solution—the United States would accept Canada in lieu of a cash payment.  

This was not quite as insane as it sounds.  Remember, just twenty years earlier, we had accepted California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and a chunk of Oregon in payment of a debt that Mexico didn’t really owe us.  And though a decade earlier, we could not have militarily enforced such a measure, after the Civil War, we momentarily had the largest navy and the most powerful army on Earth.  True, our navy was mostly a coastal defense force, but Canada was just up the coast.

The idea was popular with a number of politicians, even drawing the support of Secretary of State William H. Seward, who had just finished purchasing Alaska from Russia, and when it came to northern territories, Seward obviously wanted to collect the whole set.

The situation might have resulted in a war, but several things occurred that cooled down the situation.  First, the United States rapidly de-militarized, mothballing ships and disbanding army units.  By the middle of the 1870’s, the US Army was down to 17,500 men, making it slightly smaller than the Bulgarian army (or to put this in more modern terms, roughly equal to the number of servicemen that today are stationed in Anchorage, Alaska).  After the horrors of the Civil War, the American people were in no mood to fight a country in Europe.

In 1871, the United States and Great Britain signed the Washington Treaty, in which England paid $15 million to settle claims.  This is generally recognized as the beginning the “special relationship” between the two countries.  Since then, the United States has abandoned any plans to annex our northern neighbor.

For now.

A Sense of Decency

Every American deserves to feel secure in their vote, to believe that their vote was counted and that it wasn’t “stolen” or lost.  It is the duty of government to ensure that our votes are counted honestly and fairly.  And is the duty of every American to aid in this process.

Personally, though I live on the US-Mexico border and know quite a few immigrants, I don’t think the occasional immigrant voting illegally—either maliciously or mistakenly—is really a large enough problem to worry about.  I’m sure that voter fraud occasionally takes place, but not to an extent that it changes the outcome of any election.  And though I think requiring voter identification is a solution in search of a real problem, the practice is all right with me if it will help reassure voters and can be accomplished without suppressing voter participation.  If requiring voter ID will increase voter confidence in the process, I’ll play along.

Voting machines have been shown to be far more accurate than any paper voting system.  Eliminating human math errors while tabulating results pretty much ensures better voting accuracy.  Extensive studies have been done on whether the machines are more accurate than paper ballots, and the machines always come out on top.  But, there appear to be a number of people who think that these machines are being hacked by little green men in spaceships or something—so if it will make everyone feel more secure—let’s use paper ballots until the technophobes get over their irrational fear of overgrown adding machines.

I’m sure that somewhere a mail-in ballot was used by a recently deceased family member to send in an illegal vote.  I do not believe that people have ever gone to graveyards and written down the names of dead people so they could be used for fraudulent voting purposes.  The whole idea is ludicrous—there wouldn’t be enough recently dead people still on the voting rolls to matter, and if you are just looking for made up names to register—there has to be a better way to make up names than wandering around a cemetery with a clipboard.  Computer generated lists of random names are within the means of anyone with moderate technical skills and the everyone else could just use out of town phone books available at any public library.

There have been countless studies done trying to find any real proof that dead people have voted in any significant numbers—and it simply hasn’t happened.  Though having said this, I can guarantee that someone will write me telling be about a cousin who had a friend whose first job on the police department of a small Southern town in New York was to write down the names on tombstones…  But, I am certain no one will write me with hard evidence about an actual case.  

America needs to rest assured that we still have the most honest, fair, and accurate elections possible.  There are occasional errors:  after all, in the last election, over 167 million people voted.  If the odds of an accident happening were only one in a million, then there statistically had to be occasional errors.  Errors that most likely balanced themselves out.

Relax, America.  We can live with this and work together to improve our elections.

But, we cannot fix the problem if high ranking election officials—And yes, I mean President Trump—seek to further their chances in a future election by trying to convince us that this last election was stolen.  Or is it simply the need to be the center of attention that forces the President to scream about a fraud that never was?

Creating serious doubt—unfounded and ludicrous doubt—about the accuracy of our electoral process is not only immoral, it is deliberately damaging to the foundations that our society is built on.  As Edward R. Murrow once said, “Accusations are not proof.”

Trying to convince the governor of Georgia to overthrow the results of the election, while technically legal, is a heinous act.  And it’s fairly stupid, too, since the governor does not have the legal right to do so.  (Something that the governor, to his credit, has wisely admitted publicly).

During the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, Senator Joseph McCarthy publicly defamed an innocent, good man to make political points.  And, in a nation that had more than grown weary of the constant chaos of McCarthyism, a brave man, Joseph N. Welch, finally said publicly what so many had been thinking.  Joseph N. Welch spoke for all of America when he asked the senator, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"

It is now time for someone, preferably in the Republican Party—a party long held hostage by a man who is obviously more concerned with himself than his country—to have another Road to Damascus moment and publicly denounce our president’s continued undermining of the democratic process.  

Mr. President, at long last, have you left no sense of decency?