EU Spectacle
The word spectacle is carefully chosen, since this is what the current drama of which Greece is the symptom, not the cause, has become. It no longer bears any relationship to coherent democratic leadership or process of governance in a workable political and currency union. The cancellation at a moment’s notice of a summit of all EU leaders is extraordinary.
There is a problem with Greece, but it is not that difficult to solve. Indeed this blog working alone would be able to negotiate a workable solution. What is proving impossible is to find an acceptable solution, because the institutions normally established to process decision making at national and international levels are not there, or there in such abundance nobody can detect who is in charge. And to make matters worse the structure of the currency itself is unsustainable as it lacks a treasury and a finance minister answering to an elected government. A committee of finance ministers at loggerheads, elected by only one member state in each case, on conflicting mandates and to differing electoral timetables will work only in the good times and becomes dysfunctional under pressure.
So all we know at this moment is that Greece may or may not go bust tomorrow, the euro looks more like an impediment to growth than an engine of it, and the reputation of the EU as a coherent political union is severely damaged. Beneath that a big gap is developing between the north and the south of Europe, between the politicians and their electors everywhere and between those in the eurozone who want to stand firm to high principle even if it brings the whole thing down, led by the Germans, and by those who feel pragmatic reality demands compromise, led by France and Italy.
At the heart of of this crisis now engulfing the whole EU are three violated principles. You cannot have a democratic political union without an elected forum from which all authority flows. You cannot have a currency which cannot be printed. You cannot have capitalism which does not permit debtors to go bust. The first is violated because the whole EU is wrongly configured. The last two are rescinded because Germany says No.
message 1101:
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Linda
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Mar 09, 2016 07:32AM
When we were in England three and a half years ago and visited Salisbury Cathedral, we noticed that it was either not getting any government support or it was getting minimal support. They had to charge admission, sell food, and sell souvenirs as well as charge for wedding receptions to support themselves. Why not the BBC?
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When you say that the American public is ignorant about world events because of the poor quality of the media, you have got it backwards. The media delivers what the people want to hear. They are not victimized by the media. The media is "victimized" by the people shaping it and dictating to it exactly what they have ordered up.The reason people in America are misinformed about world events is that they are not interested in anything outside their own borders. As I have said before and say again, Americans are isolationistic. This is not divided along party lines either. It has been true since the time of Jefferson who talked about "no foreign entanglements". It almost kept America out of WW2.
Linda wrote: "TV "licenses" sound like something that needs to be abolished, not extended or continued. The government in Great Britain has no business getting mixed up with the media in any way. If the BBC need..."The government has nothing to do with the BBC.
Apparently the government does have something to do with the BBC. I don't know why you say it doesn't. For one thing, the BBC would not have the authority to charge a tax on everybody in Britain by itself. It could not collect it either. And the money collected first goes into some sort of government fund. I looked it up yesterday and put it in an email. Something called the Government's Consolidated Fund. Also the government supposedly pays the tax for people over 75. The government is getting involved.
Right now Gary is about to have a hearing at 11:30AM. He is getting ready. But after that I'll have him look it up and write a short essay about it at lunch time. He should be able to figure out exactly what is going on here. It sounds scandalous to me.
I remember the Yes Minister series had an episode (probably more than one) about the BBC. There was something about how the government was asking somebody in the BBC to say something or not to say something. At first they refused and announced their independence. Then they went along with it. Or something like that. There must be something to it that is foul.
Linda this discussion is going round in circles. Britain is not America and our institutions are very different. Our relationship with our government is very different as well. I have replied in more detail in an email which you will find in your inbox and I hope you find it helpful.There is nothing foul or scandalous involved. There is no tax on everybody in Britain. You have to have a licence to receive broadcasts. If you have no TV you do not pay. It is likely to change because of the changes arising from the digital revolution.
Parliament could change how the BBC is paid for or change its structure. But no government can interfere with its content any more than one can interfere with the findings of a Court.
Let's leave it at that.
It has suddenly occurred to me you do not know the history of broadcasting in the UK.Until 1955 only the BBC was allowed by law to transmit TV. In 1955 ITV, which is paid for by advertising, was allowed to function for the first time.
Radio was entirely BBC by law until 1972. So the license was paid but the service was free of government and commercial interests.
It has only really opened up in recent years, but any broadcaster has to have an operating license and is allocated a wavelength or channel.
So all through the war all the famous Churchill speeches came over the air via a single legal broadcaster. Just like Berlin. There was no other legal radio until 1972. There is a lot about Britain that not like America.
I have sent you Gary's email about the subject. He has uncovered absolutely scandalous events going on in England about the BBC and the so-called infamous TV license. People get arrested. People are in jail about something as silly as that. There are protest movements in your own country about it. It has to change.
The history doesn't excuse anything. It makes it sound more outrageous when you say radio was entirely BBC by law until 1972. When you compare it with Berlin and Hitler (Churchill speeches, that is) that is very telling and shocking. It makes you wonder why it was so.What about the Yes Minister episode? What about the grassroots protest movements in Britain about it?
To be free of commercial interests is damning for a TV station, radio station, or for a newspaper or periodical. If you take it to the extreme, government should not be involved in endowments for the humanities, cultural institutions, or museums of any kind either. It is hard to tell where to draw the line to keep government out of things. But apparently Thomas Jefferson (we looked this up last night) believed that the federal government and state government should not erect or support libraries or museums either. It is kind of ironic considering that his own personal library collection became the core foundation of the Library of Congress. And of course there is the Smithsonian. Jefferson apparently would not have approved of either. And he has a point. He thought that wealthy individuals should endow such institutions instead. In Pittsburgh in particular but also in other locations you have the Carnegie Libraries brought to you by none other than Andrew Carnegie. In Pittsburgh the opera house was founded by the Heinz family and called Heinz Hall. The best endowed art library in the world is the Getty in California again founded by a billionaire. Jefferson would have approved of these.
There are protests movements about everything, but the reason the licence fee has survived thus far is because the majority support it. I suggest you read my two emails which I hope you find helpful.
Really Jefferson was drawing upon a history of patronage for the arts that stretched back to ancient Rome. During the time of Augustus there was a wealthy patrician named Maecenas. He became the patron for the poet Virgil while he wrote the Aeneid, which was the epic poem about the founding of Rome about pious Aeneas. He was also the patron for the poet Horace. Jefferson did not think it was honest for government to be involved in the arts. And there must be at least some people in England who think the same way. There is a Jefferson Institute at Oxford. Why are we so big on Jefferson? We once lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, that's why. That was his home town.
Government is contagion except when it performs a few functions that no one else could possibly perform such as defense meaning the military, foreign relations, the FED, printing money or minting coins, and designing and funding most but not all of the interstates. I am sure I am forgetting something. But my review of government is extremely conservative. I think taxes should be cut to a bare minimum and government’s power should be cut, too, along with it. Government should perform only basic functions. If you allow government to expand you get socialism which I consider inherently bad. It “levels things out” as my Grandmother Doris Benner Lappe (the model for Dora Benley in my novels) used to complain all the time and you “can’t accumulate anything” as she used to say. It might sound theoretically good and just to level things out, but the problem is that is it anti human nature. It breeds abuse and corruption. Everything becomes slow and inefficient. You don’t get much done. People behind the scenes insist on accumulating money and “things” anyway, particularly government officials.
The more money government has, the more jobs it creates just to have something to do. For instance the Border Patrol has been growing in recent years. Now because they have an increased budget they have finally moved away from just the southern border with Mexico. They are setting up checkpoints in New England and anywhere within one hundred miles of the coastline.
Your example of people coming around to people’s houses with warrants to look for TV’s is another example of government having too much money and hiring people to cause trouble.
I think having to produce a profit in human relations keeps things honest. When you don't have to produce a profit (government activity that operates by sucking taxes out of people is a good example) then things become corrupt, and even lazy and dishonest.
If people want the government to protect them from business and industry, it sounds like the Middle Ages. It certainly sounds like a pre-capitalist economy. Capitalism depends on business activity. In fact it drives both the economy and the government. It certainly drives the communications industry including TV.
I also think the BBC sounds outmoded. Communications and TV in particular are being driven to the internet. People are getting accustomed to watching entertainment and news for free. I don't tend to watch TV programs. But I have heard that you can download them from YouTube for nothing. You can also download TV episodes from the BBC, I suppose. In this kind of enviornment how does it make sense to pursue people and arrest them for not paying a TV tax?
Also TV is becoming international. It spills over national boundaries. Great Britain can't invade the US and collect the TV tax here, now can it? It can't invade You Tube either. It can't stop people from recording programs and sending them to other people for free. So why try? It seems like a pointless exercise in futility. Really it is a corrupt way of making money.
Linda, you are overdoing this. You have never lived in England; you do not understand our customs, our lifestyle or our mindset. We are proud of our BBC. It may be that in the digital multi platform age its funding will have to change but this rage about tax and hatred of government may be fine in America, but it does not play here.Of course nobody likes paying tax, but it is only recently that the licence fee was designated a tax and the term is never used. Millions pay it and only a tiny handful resist. It all goes to fund the BBC which can produce programmes which might not attract advertisers or sponsors but which are of great interest and quality and its impartial news coverage world wide has no equal.
It is a strong counterbalance to the junk culture exported (like junk food) from America.
It does not matter if it is a junk culture exported from America. It does not matter if it is junk food (though English cuisine isn't much better than American so I don't know what you mean there). It is a pop culture produced from the grassroots up. Government has no business funding pop culture or culture of any kind let alone the communications media. That is supposed to be a free expression of the people. They don't need government money.
Why doesn't the BBC sell subscriptions? That would be more honest, now wouldn't it? They could make their programming available only to those who paid a monthly subscription fee. I am not sure how this works in the digital age. Probably somebody could still hack into the programming, but I don't really know. At least it would solve the problem in Britain about how you fund the BBC.
In other words, there should not be any need to come around and inspect people's properties and invade their households to see if they are covertly watching the BBC and haven't paid the tax. If they don't pay the subscription the programming would automatically cease. It sounds crazy to just broadcast BBC everywhere and say you have to pay a tax to watch it. That sounds like the BBC is asking for trouble.
Linda wrote: "It does not matter if it is a junk culture exported from America. It does not matter if it is junk food (though English cuisine isn't much better than American so I don't know what you mean there)...."The BBC is not pop culture. It's a public service broadcaster, mostly news and current affairs and documentaries. There is some drama which is hugely popular overseas and earns about £100 million a year back to the BBC in royalties from the US stations which buy the programmes.
Nobody's home is invaded by the government. Almost everybody pays without a problem. Any frauds are picked up by detection equipment. As I have said because of the huge diversity of transmission and reception now, including the latest smart TVs the system will change to some form of subscription which you activate with a code. But as I keep saying the present deal has been going since the nineteen twenties.
But I flatly and utterly reject the notion that the government is somehow bad evil and an enemy. Here we have a partnership between government and people. Of course there is opposition because that is how the system works. But not the hatred which seems to grip America. Here we consider that the government belongs to the people. In your country everyone seems to be trying to escape from it as if it is a threat.
Gary picked up evidence that people's homes are indeed being invaded by the BBC cops trying to collected the TV tax. He has also collected evidence that people are imprisoned for not paying it sometimes up to one month. You cannot pretend that this is not so. This is definitely an invasion of people's human rights.
People in America have thought government was a threat from the very beginning. I have mentioned Thomas Jefferson in this regard in the past few days. I will try to find the exact quotes from one of the Founding Fathers to show you what he thought of government taxes for things like newspapers, TV's, and cultural institutions.
You keep getting farther and farther away from the dangers of government being involved with supporting media. Whoever pays for something expects influence in how something is run. For instance companies on the stock exchange are owned by the stock holders. They are beholden to the stock holders and pay dividends. The government should not become a "stock holder" in TV and especially not the chief stock holder. If the BBC is mostly supported by this tax, the government is just that. If a controversial issue came up or something concerning the current government it is possible that they would making receiving money conditional on towing a certain line. This is what is to be avoided at all costs.Here, for instance, the Washington Post recently sold to Amazon.com not the US government.
It is odd that the world's most complete democracy has this view of government. It is also true that it is a privileged view because the better off do not need the government.Here we believe the institutions like the BBC and the NHS are the property of the people. We also believe the government is the property of the people too. So it is us, our laws, our licence and our edict that it should be paid. Those who watch but don't pay are cheating.
But our government does a lot more for us than in the US. And because we can get rid of it and it is more responsive to public opinion we do not fear it. The founding fathers created a deadlock which could only be broken by consensus. Therefore your government does little good for anybody and people hate it. It falls back on power projection across the world because in its own country it does not have any.
Here is the latest blog on the primaries. It is beginning to shape up.http://malcolmblair-robinson.com/word...
It is not odd at all that America as the view that the less government you have the better or the government which is the best is the one that governs the least. Government is not something given to man by the Almighty. It is not perfect in any way but is composed of mortal beings, or people. Humans want power. And when you set them up in a power structure like government they grab for as much power and influence as possible. Any time the government creates a new agency it wants funded. It hires people. Those people form a constituency that wants to sustain itself and grow. Government grows and grows. And how does it grow? It wants more and more TAXES. That is how government funds itself. And how does it get taxes? It charges each company, especially the companies and the bigger the better, and each individual who has a job more and more all the time. This slowly but surely kills off the money for investment and research into new products. It also kills off slowly but surely employment in the private sector and more jobs there. Eventually such a government would kill itself off it would become so big and bloated because the underlying capitalist structure that supported it would die and all employment would be in the government with nothing to sustain it. I have never seen a "good tax". I don't even support the federal income tax, and that was imposed one hundred years or more ago on a slippery slope principle. At first it was supposed to be only for wealthy individuals and then it spread to the middle class and even the lower middle class. You have to be impoverished to be exempt from the long reach of government.
Then there are the "decorative taxes" which show the government flexing its muscles wherever it can. Something like your TV tax is one of these. It is purely superfluous. There is no reason for it except that your government can tax and will at every possible opportunity. It is taxation gone mad.
The BBC should become a commercial TV station like all the others. If it cannot survive that way then it should not exist. It is the only honest route to go.
My views about taxation and government are inherited from my grandfather who had his own company that sold fire bricks to blast furnaces in Pittsburgh for steel making and also gravel and other products. They are also inherited from the great-grandfather who was the model for Winthrop Benley in the Edward Ware Thriller Series. He was born in Saux Center,Minnesota and grew up with the American novelist Sinclair Lewis. He later became Vice President of Lee Tire and Rubber Company which was later sold to Goodyear. Both were entrepreneur types who liked business and hated government and taxes. But this was the sort of thing that built America.
I am not sure what the NHS is. I looked it up on line. The first entry was the National Honor Society. I don't think you mean that. I saw a reference in The Guardian which sounds British. I think they were talking about health. Is that what it is? If you are in any way talking about socialized medicine, that is a national disgrace for Britain. That sort of thing works in Germany but it is not adapted to Anglo countries. The US is starting to go down that slippery slope in a very sloppy way. Gary has been involved in fighting it step by step with legal proceedings for another lawyer named Martin Palmer who represents doctors whose practices are being ruined by it. Recently Gary did a Medicare hearing (not quite the same thing, older, Johnson era, but still a sort of socialized medicine) and it is TERRIBLE the way it doesn't work at all. The providers have some sort of scam where they cut off all patients after an arbitrary number of days and then claim they have to be sent home even if they should be in a wheel chair. Most patients don't fight them, but most of the few who do win. During this hearing just like week the judge said she had been hearing this complaint again and again that patients were just cut off for no reason at all and sent home. What is really going on, of course, is that the providers are trying to make a profit. The government isn't paying them back. So they cut off patients. The system can't pay for itself and hopefully will collapse.The best thing would be to have the system that you have for dentists. Dentists are not part of this new socialized medicine crap. So they compete with each other even about prices. They have to charge real rates that patients can actually afford to pay. They have to take credit cards and the like. They have plans like if you come ten times you get the 11th teeth cleaning for free. That sort of thing just like a fast food restaurant.
It is not because the government does little good for anybody that many people in the US distrust it. It is because they distrusted government from the beginning so designed the system with checks and balances so that the government cannot do much without consensus and even then you have a Bill of Rights to protect minorities. The government is supposed to perform basic functions such as defense, foreign policy, that sort of thing that no private entity can handle. The argument is about what else it should do.But I do think that all western countries are moving towards socialism at different rates including the US. I just don't think it is a good idea.
You believe in minimal government and you are right to say that your country not only does not like government, but it is pretty ineffective. It is tilted far too heavily towards foreign interventions and the military because that is just about the only area where it has any power.I accept you are a hard core capitalist. I am not. I prefer a mixed economy and if I have to choose I lean left and prefer socialism. I think the government belongs to the people and is judged on how it improves their lot and advances their cause.
I think there are beginning to emerge deep flaws in the American structure and certainly the country is more unhappy within itself than ever in my lifetime. We shall have to see how it resolves.
I suppose this is why I always favoured the Confederate model of a looser union with State sovereignty and a president elected by the Congress. It suits the American dream better and is more in accord with the notion that the individual is bigger than the state.
I also do not think the Union will sustain in the long term. Maybe another hundred years, but unless it reforms there are just too many problems building up for it to work, for which it cannot find answers. And it is right that it should fail. A Union forged together by force should not sustain in the end. The price for the million dead in the civil war will have eventually to be paid.
This does not mean that America will become a diminished nation. It just means that it will change its format. Rome had several incarnations.
The NHS is our National Health Service. It is paid out of taxation and free to everybody. All healthcare is free whatever your financial state. It is underfunded so there are delays in some areas but it is still a remarkable achievement set up in 1948. It is the biggest employer in Europe and doctors and nurses come from all over the world to work in it.The Americans hate the whole idea but the Brits love it so much that any government which tried to get rid of it would be toast.
Magnificent article about the primaries and how they are shaping up. You should be doing TV commentary.
Linda wrote: "Magnificent article about the primaries and how they are shaping up. You should be doing TV commentary."Thanks! That's a really nice compliment.
What do you mean by Rome had several incarnations? Of course it depends upon what you mean by Rome, but if you mean ancient Rome you had an empire from about 27BC when Augustus became the first emperor to about 476AD when Rome fell. Of course there was the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium which didn't fall until 1453AD. Of course the Catholic Church is sort of like Rome, too, which means it hasn't fallen yet. America doesn't have the same kind of empire. There is no tribute or direct taxation of Europe, for instance. But there is an economic empire of sorts.
Gary and I listened to a lecture on the ship not last summer but almost 4 years ago now mostly about the British socialist health care service. I thought it sounded very foreign but interesting. But it sounded as if the whole thing were somehow an exponent of WW1. It all seemed very sad and self-delusional when they talked about limited care and limited resources and how inadequate everything was. Somehow they thought it was destined to remain that way.At the end of the lecture the speaker asked if there were any Americans in the audience who could explain what had just happened with the US health care effort with the US Supreme Court deciding that forcing citizens to buy plans was somehow a "tax". Gary and I rushed out of there very quickly (at least we were in the back row near the doors) so we would not have to try to explain the idiocy that goes on in Washington DC.
As I said yesterday it would be much better if you took a capitalist outlook on this and got rid of almost all government programs. Then the price would fall (now it is artificially high). Dentists don't have artificially high prices nor do vets. They compete on the open market place and there are plenty of them on every street corner at least in the US. There used to be a lot more private practice doctors, too, and now according to Gary there is an increasing doctor shortage, artificially created by Washington and its beginnings of socialized medicine.
I remember just a few years ago when I first moved to Tucson, a local grocery chain called Bashas offered free vaccinations to customers if you could show a store card. This sort of thing should be encouraged, not discouraged. It would make everything cheaper and more available just like hamburgers or in England fish and chips.
The local pet store we go to, Petco, has shot clinics for dogs where you can get low cost vaccinations. They should do this with people, too! Government and health care doesn't mix, private efforts do.
You think that socialized stuff serves the people. But in reality it creates a two tier system where wealthy people can afford to buy the best and everybody else gets second or third best. This is absolutely ludicrous. If you are a true socialist you should vote against such things, not for them.
The Confederate model never had a chance, and most of the people in the Confederacy knew it. A loose union of states would have fallen apart. And what they were trying to defend, slavery as an economic model, was becoming way out of date and could not successfully spread to the West. Lots of the soldiers walked away from the southern armies and returned to their farms. Even the Confederate Museum in Richmond admits this. It was doomed by the Industrial Revolution if nothing else.And as a Brit you should be glad that the North won the Civil War. If the US had been a loose confederation of states it would never have been able to enter WW1 and WW2. Right now you might be doing that long-armed salute to the Nazis.
You say in Britain the "government belongs to the people" and somehow that justifies capitalism. But who are the people and what if they don't all think alike? I think socialism works best in countries where the population is more unmixed and not as diverse. This would certainly not be America. For instance, supposedly California is the most ethnically diverse place on earth. It was invented in Germany and Scandanavia and works best there. The population is not as diverse.
As far as all this foreign intervention and the military, that was not how America was just a little more than a century ago. It has mostly happened since WW2. America inherited it from Britain when the British Empire fell. What you frequently see is a conflict between America's core isolationism and its new responsibilities inherited from Great Britain.
We tend to get involved in foreign places where England was involved before us.
All empires rise and fall. I don't think much about the future, especially the far flung future. Most of my planning and thinking only involves the very near term such as the next year or so. So I have no idea how long America will last as a nation. I could make all sorts of predictions based on all sorts of scenarios, some more far-fetched than the next. What if space aliens invade Washington, DC next year and take over? America won't outlast the year in that case. And it will fall for reasons you never predicted. One thing I could observe, though. I think America has succeeded so far because of the economy and capitalism. When you get to the time period where innovation slows down and you don't have new start up companies with new ideas and new markets like Facebook, Microsoft, and that sort of thing, then Americans might start to turn inward and start to notice and resent things that they now take for granted such as their neighbor's ethnic background, religion, and skin color. In other words I think the world wide origin of prejudice about race, religion, etc is economics. (If everybody were rich, nobody would really care about it). When this happens America as we know it would indeed begin to fall apart.
Linda there are a lot of interesting comments here, many that I agree with, especially about innovation being a driver of American power. Unfortunately today I have a very busy day with a schedule of must do things a bit more than my comfort zone likes, so i am going to go quiet for 24 hours or so and catch up over the weekend.
Innovation is a driver of American economic power only because of capitalism. If you have too much socialism and too many laws, too much government power, you will stifle start up businesses, new jobs, and innovation. I just saw an article last weekend on Fidelity --- the only kind of news I look at --- about a man who was a "fracker" in the oil industry. Ten years ago he was worth about 3 or 4 billion dollars and was listed as one of the 40 most wealthy individuals in the US. By last month he had lost a lot of that wealth. Why? He was being pursued by the US government who thought he had violated some sort of law about price fixing or something like that in the oil industry. He had hired a team of expensive lawyers and was getting nowhere with the Justice Department. They were bringing criminal charges against him for one of these white collar crimes.I think that sort of thing should stop. They should get rid of this idea of white collar crimes. I remember for instance a few years ago they were imprisoning Martha Stewart! This sort of thing causes businesses to have to spend too much money in legal compliance costs. You would think it would make businessmen paranoid, too. I am sure it is beginning to stifle smaller businesses. It is not the right environment for start ups either. It will cost everyone in jobs.
You keep on talking about how you admire the Confederate states, but I have never heard you talk about slavery. You obviously don't defend slavery. So how could you like the South? Their economic model was clearly outdated to say the least. They were entering the Industrial Revolution. Slavery was something practiced in ancient Rome. (different kind of slavery back then).
Speaking of ancient Rome, you would not believe some of the things I've been finding lately in my research. Just two days ago I completed the first draft of a novel I call The Cherusci Plot. The Cherusci were an ancient Roman tribe with a headquarters south of Hamburg and a little to the west. Arminius, or Hermann the German, was the head of that tribe in 9AD. But what I did not realize was that the ancient German and Norse religion used swastikas. It was a symbol of the sun god, or Woden, or Odin. Naturally the 20th century Nazis picked up on this. I had no idea that the Nazis were drawing on all this ancient stuff. I think it is absolutely fascinating.My novel of course is Edward Ware Thrillers in ancient Rome. I even have a map plot. The hero, who is supposedly a distant ancestor of later day Edward Ware, is fighting the Germans just as Edward was to do years later. In a far fetched way it seems as if he is fighting ancient Nazis which is ridiculous. The more things change the more they remain the same. As the author of The Most Dangerous Book said (the stuff about Tacitus's Germania) the "German question" is older than you think.
What do you mean when you say that the US is more unhappy with itself than ever in your lifetime? What are you pointing to exactly? Economics? Politics? Homeland security? Stories you have heard in the news? Gun control?
What I am doing with the Edward Ware Thrillers at War Series is taking it back in time. I envision the first book of the series being a novel that I already have up on Amazon called Cleopatra Caper. The hero is Marcus Antonius who works for Caesar during the Alexandrian War. He is the grandfather of the hero in the most recent book, The Cherusci Plot, the one about the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD, the one with the ancient map plot. Unwritten yet is one I pictured about Southampton in the late Middle Ages during a French pirate attack. Then you get to the one I just completed, Inn at the Crossroads, about Edward's great-grandfather at Waterloo. And then you have Edward Ware himself in the 20th century concluded by Dark 3, the novel I wrote last year bringing the series up to the present year with Leopold being involved in it.
By the way we have started to watch the Napoleon movie about Waterloo that I bought for Christmas, the one filmed in 1970 by some Russian director. Unfortunately I think it is horrible as a film. We can barely continue to watch it, and we have gotten to the beginning of the actual battle. What did you like about it? The only good point I can see is Orson Welles at Louis XVIII, and that is a small part with hardly any lines. The American actor playing Napoleon, Rod Steiger, is totally inappropriate. His version seems over the top with Napoleon as some half crazy, emotionally unstable weirdo. I'm shocked that Christopher Plummer as Wellington isn't doing much better for different reasons. His portrayal is very flat. It is probably the script which lacks forward drive and action. The pacing is way too slow. Also there is no point of view character, which makes battle scenes in particular hard to manage. Contrast it for instance with Gone with the Wind where most everything is from Scarlett's point of view. You may not see much of the battle scenes but you feel their impact because you take them in from her point of view and they become part of the forward thrust of the action.
