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 The last two are rescinded because Germany says No.
Yes, but your son still has to fly around the world. What I'm saying is that people could conduct business online without ever seeing each other at all. Besides, most jobs still require people to be physically present in an office building, etc. Granted if you are teaching minors and you are in loco parentis you have to be physically there. Besides as a teacher of young kids you are in effect also their babysitter. Ditto with librarians who are minding kids, too. And obviously cooks and waitresses have to be there. Ditto dentists. But many office jobs and white collar jobs, why are they in the Freedom Towers in NYC for instance? Why do any publishing companies still have employees in offices in NYC? Why do agents have offices? Why are there buildings in town here called real estate offices? Why do they waste the money?
People like to be shocked and appalled. It is riveting. They pay attention to the TV set and the TV's numbers go up in the ratings. It's not going on where they are. They find it escapist, not too real. In reverse Americans probably sit in front of their giant TV sets on the walls of their houses and apartments and gawk at the migrants running amuck around Europe. It's not happening in their own backyard --- you can't imagine how parochial people can be and how short sighted --- so they watch the news as if it were a real life drama akin to a movie. They probably even eat popcorn while they are watching the news.
Of course there are some occupations where people have always worked from home since ancient times and nothing has changed. For instance, Virgil worked from home writing poetry. You work from home writing novels and nonfictions books. I work from home, too. Writers are among the first original freelancers that give meaning to the term itself. In olden days writers could have patrons, but still no one ever hired or employed them. Originally there were no publishing companies and no literary agents. But the writer's life has been the same for thousands of years. That's the sort of continuity I like.
Linda wrote: "Yes, but your son still has to fly around the world. What I'm saying is that people could conduct business online without ever seeing each other at all. Besides, most jobs still require people to b..."Yes I do see your point. I think new start ups spend a lot less on offices than they used to.
It depends upon what you mean by a public building and security. I can walk into the post office any old day without any security at all. And although Buckingham Palace has security, I don't know about Windsor Castle. Last summer I entered the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal just as I would enter a department store. There was not a bit of security. You had to go through a metal detector to board the ship but nothing to enter the building itself. And I wonder about St. Peter's in Rome. Do they put people through security before they enter the church? It all seems very random, this security thing.
Yes, the start ups spend less on offices than they used to. Certain start ups hardly have a physical presence at all. For instance I get my books printed by lulu.com. We looked them up. They have only one building and it looks as if it is shared by other companies. Their presence is totally online for the most part. Upwork may have a building but it isn't very big or very tall. But supposedly Amazon is old fashioned. They keep on acquiring more office space in downtown Seattle.
I don't think it does much good to have all this security. A little goes a long, long way. If a terrorist wants to get inside or blow up a building he will find a way. All this security stuff just placates the public and fools them into thinking that the government is doing something for them. Really they should not be picking on their own population and inconveniencing them with this sort of nonsense. They should go to where terrorism is and pull it out by the roots. By the way, this is what the ancient Romans would have done if somebody was attacking Rome. Remember what I said about Pompey and the Pirates. You say ancient Rome doesn't matter anymore? Again the more things change, the more they remain the same.
For example,I'm sure you don't have a border patrol in England, but we have one in Arizona for sure. If you drive on I-10 towards Las Cruces you can see the border patrol in the opposite lane on the interstate. If you go from Las Cruces back to Tucson you get stopped. There's no way to avoid it. But all they ask you is if you are an American citizen. But I've seen them with dogs examining cars and pickup trucks in front of us. The same thing is true if you drive on I-8 towards California. I don't know what all this inconvenience and slow down of traffic accomplishes. And now I've heard that you had better turn off your laptop when you're going through a border patrol stop. They can pick up through wi fi what's on your computer.
Nor do I understand what they were accomplishing last summer when the Queen Mary 2 was held up in Boston. They had some stupid thing that nobody was allowed to disembark until they went through some customs thing on the ship. They wanted to see your passport. It caused a huge bottleneck as you remember me describing to you. And we were thinking of disembarking there and going to Cape Cod! They ruined it. People didn't make their shore excursions either. Even the customs service ended up thinking it was stupid too. When we arrived in New York they apologized and shooed us through customs. They even forgot to stamp our passports that we had arrived back in the US. Since then I've had to get a new passport but the old one still doesn't show me arriving back. As far as customs is concerned I could still be in Europe.
The looniest thing I think I've ever seen was when we came back from Canada in 2004 and crossed the border into Montana from Alberta. The customs officers boarded our RV to look for dog food of a particular type that they didn't want people to bring back from Canada. They were searching through all the cabinets, and of course we'd never heard of the brand they were talking about. It was absolutely insane.
It does all sound very disruptive for you. I think here the terrorist threats are pretty well quantified because of the massive surveillance operations of GCHQ and MI5 (our internal security services) and so the checks we have a pretty well focused and have wide public support. Nobody is after dog food.
I don't know why the border patrol were after dog food. Didn't they have anything better to do that day? I don't think it was a terrorist threat. It might have been something else much sillier. Remember American politics? They might have been trying to find a dog food that was being sold illegally here. But even that doesn't make a lot of sense either.
I don't know what they thought they were accomplishing in Boston last summer either. The US customs should have been on the ship since it set sail from Southampton or at least Liverpool. That's the way it works with the British customs and German customs. British customs is on the ship when we set sail in New York. The first day at sea they check passports in the morning on deck 3. They set up in the upper level of the Britannia Restaurant before lunch. You can visit them at your leisure. No big fuss. The German customs officials are on board from Southampton to Hamburg to look at passports. They don't inconvenience the passengers. The US Customs is the BIG BADDIE of all customs. They disrupt everybody all the time. They wait until you get to the US and drive you nuts. For instance if you are a Brit taking a roundtrip cruise from Southampton to New York and back to Southampton (don't ask me why but this is a very popular cruise for Brits) they make you get off the ship in New York just to go through customs. Nuts!
As a matter of fact the New York customs is so tyrrannical that when the ship arrives in New York everybody must disembark even the crew, even the captain. I've never been in another port like this. If any other port were like this is would disrupt the whole cruising industry.It wasn't just 9/11 that did this. I remember this going on when I was a kid. I didn't cruise then, but I flew on airplanes. Back then you might go through a short customs in a place like London or Frankfurt, but if you went to Rome they were all on strike or were mysteriously absent from their posts. In the Athens Airport there didn't seem to be any such thing as customs at any time. In fact there was no one to tell you which airplane to get on or to assist you in any way. My whole tour group senior year in high school almost got on a plane going to Istanbul when we were supposed to be returning to Rome and then Frankfurt. I was the one who saw a lady holding a ticket in front of us that said Istanbul, and I told the teacher.
But not the US Airports. They had a long, long customs. They searched suitcases and did everything else, too. They once questioned my sister because she had a self-made handbag with too many pockets. We almost missed our plane.
Customs often make big drug seizures here etc, but not by searching everybody's bags. They have powerful intelligence, they know who they are looking for and they pull them aside. Most people go through the Nothing To Declare exit. They are watching all the time, There are CCTV cameras everywhere.
I can't say what a modern airport looks like. I haven't been inside one since before 9/11, not even to pick somebody up. I don't know if American airports have a Nothing To Declare exit. But having cameras everywhere that are watching you is not what I would call a pleasant experience. Last summer when we were on our mega trip (right about now was when we left the house) we had the strange experience of being in a Western Sizzlin Restaurant in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. They apparently had cameras inside the restaurant watching the customers of all things! I stuffed some paper napkins inside my purse before we left (mind you, we had already paid for everything) simply to wrap up three cookies that we were taking to eat later (we had already paid for those, too) when we were stopped just outside the door by the manager running after us. This was the panhandling manager story. He said he was going to call the police if we didn't give him more money. This was outrageous since we had already paid. But apparently the whole thing was kicked off by surveillance cameras! They somehow thought I was stealing something because they saw me put something inside my purse. They seem to have never heard about "doggie bags" at restaurants!
Linda wrote: "I can't say what a modern airport looks like. I haven't been inside one since before 9/11, not even to pick somebody up. I don't know if American airports have a Nothing To Declare exit. But having..."Yes I am afraid that is how things are now. Cameras are everywhere and play a major part in preventing/solving crime. It is cheaper than having cops on patrol. In airports they are needed to combat the terrorist threat. There is no shortage of law enforcement at every level in airports
If they are watching you all the time on the Cunard ship they are doing a good job of not letting you know. They certainly don't care if you take food out of the Britannia Restaurant or the King's Court. No one rushes up to you and tries to arrest you. Passengers do it all the time.
Next they will have cameras inside your hotel room, and you won't have any privacy at all. In my Edward Ware thriller novels, Edward yanks Dora back into the room and pulls her into the shower to talk in secret in case the room was bugged. Nowadays even Edward wouldn't have a chance. There would be cameras everywhere watching everything he did.
You would think that people have more of a right to privacy than is indicated by the constant presence of cameras and screens, in other words surveillance equipment. Inside a store you would think they would have someone hired to watch for shoplifting if that is what they are concerned about. Even inside airports they would benefit from having more people hired to watch everybody coming and going instead of just cameras.
Too bad the Founding Fathers didn't put that in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution --- the right to privacy. But in the 18th century people probably didn't know what privacy is in the modern sense. Privacy in fact was invented rather recently. I remember taking a tour of Versailles when I was a kid. They showed us how you had to walk through other bedrooms to get around since there was a lack of hallways.
Just think how all this surveillance could be abused! The use in fighting terrorists is dicey at best. They still seem to perform terrorist attacks despite all the cameras. But surely somebody soon somebody who collects all this video and all this information on others is going to sell it or leak it to some company or individual who shouldn't have it. People will be blackmailed and robbed of money to prevent private information from leaking out or to preven others from finding out where they were at a particular time. When it happens it will create a huge scandal and there will have to be some change.
When I was in Santa Fe two summers ago I don't think I saw a single surveillance camera. Not that there wasn't one somewhere that was inconspicuous. But I think it's important to find a place like this. (There weren't as many TV sets in restaurants either, something else that I don't like). Why would this be so? First of all Santa Fe is a small city. The population is no more than 70,000, making it about the same size as Charlottesville, Virginia minus all Charlottesville's extra population from surrounding counties and cities because population is denser in the East than in the West. Outside Santa Fe you have nothing but a few Indian reservations until you go sixty miles south to Albuquerque. Secondly as in all of New Mexico you have lots and lots of Hispanics and Mexicans. As I've mentioned before they seem much more conservative. Thirdly there are a lot of kooky artists hanging around town who are philosophically opposed to such things. Fourthly there are a lot of small restaurants, small shops, and small lodgings and frequently they display there wares outside on in the plaza area in the center of town. It's not the sort of atmosphere that's conducive to a lot of spying on others. (Not that there wasn't any spying going on with the Russians during WW2). Fifthly, there are a lot of tourists there from New York who have big bankrolls of cash. They don't like to be insulted with surveillance.
Linda wrote: "When I was in Santa Fe two summers ago I don't think I saw a single surveillance camera. Not that there wasn't one somewhere that was inconspicuous. But I think it's important to find a place like ..."Yes I think you are dead right. These are interesting observations and I will return tomorrow. A lot on this evening.
Are there TV sets in all the restaurants in Great Britain? I've been in only two in recent years, and they were associated with historical, nonprofit attractions: The Refectory Restaurant at Salisbury Cathedral and the restaurant at the Tudor House and Gardens. Neither one had TV's that I remember. But what about commercial establishments? There were a few in Germany, but there weren't as many as I find here. And sometimes they were playing programs that even I found more interesting such as the TV set playing inside the Vetro Italian Restaurant in Dortmund. It was playing a program about Hitler and where to find the remains of the Third Reich. Not in America!
No you would not normally find TV in restaurants but a lot of pubs have TV so that people come in to watch football etc. Instead of staying at home. Some restaurants will lay on a special deal at things like the World Cup or Olympics.I don't know about fast food outlets, maybe they do for the eat in customers but I have not been in one for twenty years and they are not classified here as restaurants.
I was in an Applebees Restaurant last year that had so many TV sets up on the walls that you wondered where you were. They had one posted over every few tables, and the noise was such that you couldn't carry on a conversation. I don't know where they got the bizarre idea to begin with that there should be TV's in restaurants. It doesn't seem at all appropriate, and again it invades your privacy.
At least they didn't have TV's in the restaurants on the ship. The main dining room, the Britannia Restaurant, didn't have room or time for such things. Even the more cafeteria-like place on deck 7, the King's Court, didn't boast one TV set. Again I don't know where they would put them. They had lots of windows that looked out on the deck and then out to sea. They also had lots of paintings.
It depends what you consider a "fast food restaurant". If you mean just McDonalds, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Arby's, etc, almost all of the ones like that in the US have TV sets and many of the ones in Germany of that type. But is Applebees a fast food restaurant? It is a sit down family restaurant of the chain restaurant variety, not the sort you seem to patronize. But in the US in most localities it is about the best restaurant type you can expect. Remember most restaurants in the US are in chains. And many of these now are adopting TV sets, too.
It is interesting that you make that distinction about pubs. On the ship the only restaurant that did have a TV set was the pub down on deck 2. They featured sports coverage while you ate. The Brits crowded into the restaurant and left no room for anybody else. We only got to visit it once on four voyages. The Wimbledon coverage was particularly popular.
As far as fancy restaurants in America go, since I don't patronize those restaurants I don't know if they have TV sets or not. Somehow I doubt it. The last time I was in a place resembling something fancy it was in San Diego at the Del and it was outside on a verandah overlooking the sea, so TV's wouldn't have worked anyway. I do remember being in smaller mom and pop restaurants in various places around the country that are not part of chains. It varies enormously whether they have TV sets or not and when they turn them on. There is a Viro's Restaurant in Tucson that we used to patronize a lot. They had a TV set but rarely had it on. We visited a Log Cabin Restaurant in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee just off I-40 several times last year. Despite the fact that a lot of truckers patronized the restaurant, I don't remember any TV sets. In Charlottesville we visited a restaurant we remembered from when we used to live there named Carmello's. I didn't see a TV there either. There was also a Vinny's Italian Grill. I think they might have had a TV set.
The place in San Diego was called the Sheerwater Restaurant at the Hotel del Coronado. I should send you some photos. The view was great.
Have you ever been to Palma on Mallorca in addition to Ibiza? What do you think of it? Which place has the better beaches? Does Ibiza have a cathedral the way Palma does? Is Ibiza a cruise port, too? I know Palma is.
You should go on Trip Advisor and review the things you did in Ibiza, the restaurants you visited, etc. Then you could upload some of your photos to that website. They make it easy. Then I could see your vacation photos.
You came up with a really good idea about making a postcard out of my photo of HH on the Obersalzberg. Do you have any other good ideas about games, giveaways, questions to ask, movies to show, or anything else to do at a Facebook party themed around Hitler and Captive at the Berghof. You have a novel that is really relevant to this topic, Hitler's First Lady. What would like to do?
Would you believe that I am having Captive at the Berghof translated into German? I am doing it chapter by chapter and I am planning to post it on my website under Captive at the Berghof under Installments. It will be a serial sort of publication chapter by chapter the way they used to do in the 19th century. Then I will collect the chapters and publish them in book form on Amazon as a German edition of the work. I've never done this with any previous novel.
Really good photo of the cruise ship. What were you doing in Palma 53 years ago? Hope you can manage to to upload your photos somehow either to Dropbox or something else. The way I share photos with you when you get albums from me is by uploading them to a place called Shutterfly.com. I don't know if they operate in Britain. It's a website where you purchase photo gifts but they let you store you photos there for free even when you aren't purchasing something. They make it really easy to share photos and send them to you by email. It's so easy I can do it by myself.
I am doing a giveaway on Goodreads for Captive at the Berghof, the paperback edition which has a different cover from the ebook edition and is being offered on a different site from Amazon. The giveaway is supposed to start in five days. You should enter it. It doesn't cost anything. Have you ever held a giveaway on Goodreads? It seems to be one of the primary things they do. They are supposed to be offering a digital giveaway of books pretty soon. Right now it's just paperbacks and hardbacks unless you're being published by Amazon Publishing.
Go on your dashboard on Goodreads. That is where you set up ads and start giveaways. Right now you have to give away physical books or audio cassettes unless you are being published by Amazon Publishing. They have a beta program right now to give away Kindle books. Pretty soon they are going to roll it out for everybody to use. Yes, you have to pay for the paperback books you give away. You even have to wrap up the packages yourself and pay for the postage. I figure it will cost me about $60.00 to manufacture my 15 paperback books, especially since I have broken down the novel into part 1 and 2 and this is part 1. Lulu.com will ship the books for me at extra cost, and I have elected to have books sent to the US, Britain, Canada, and Australia so I will probably be charged for international postage, too, but at media mail rates. When they launch the new Kindle giveaway program they've already said they are going to charge the authors something like $175.00 to give away 100 free downloads of Kindle.
Email: Try One Hour Translation. They are the cheapest. I got a tip from my Russian translator acquaintance. I'm working at it one chapter at a time. If your chapter is about 6-7 pp long(I went through the book and arranged the scenes so that the chapters were shorter and there were more of them) you can expect to spend about $162.00 to $166.00/chapter. It is sort of like a long term project. But it works with publishing one chapter at a time on my website and then collecting them into a volume later. You might be able to get an even cheaper rate per word, but then you'd have to give them the whole novel at once and pay several thousand dollars upfront instead of spreading it out.P.S. Of course it is nothing new to me to see my books in German. Remember that my publisher Cora Verlag always translated the young adult novels. But I didn't have to pay for it either. And those weren't adult novels.
Email: One Hour Translation comes out to about $162.97 for 1986 words. That is about 8 cents/word. Supposedly that is cheap for translation. Usually it is closer to 12 cents per word. A premium rate would be 20 cents per word.
I'm setting up a section under Captive at the Berghof on my website called "installments". That is where I am going to publish one chapter at a time of the German edition of the novel. Since I've already had two chapters translated, I'm going to post the first one any day now. Not that I expect to attract many readers. I have to figure out where to post information about the installments on German websites, maybe even on Amazon.de. Supposedly I can set up an author's page there where I can announce it in German.
Do you have an author's page on Amazon.de? That is something you could do for free. You could put up your photo and your list of works. I don't think it has to be in German, but I don't know how people would read it otherwise. You might even try a book trailer and post it there on your author's page. You could include that video presentation I saw of you.
I think any of the Europeans have a more realistic idea about Hitler just because they were there, and Europe is where he was. They know he was real and really existed. In America I wonder. Hitler is a cartoon character. He's not very real. If I told somebody here that he was a vampire or a warlock, they might believe me. It's that bad.As far as national socialism in Britain, at one point it was fashionable among the upper classes and in Whitehall. There was a British National Socialist or Fascist Party. In America nobody liked dictators. It was as simple as that.
The world might hold Germany guilty for the Holocaust. But the shocking truth is that America is largely responsible. Do you know why? Do you know what I am going to say? We will end this on a cliff hanger. I want to see what you say first before I tell you what I am thinking.
One of these days historians are going to have to do a better job of evaluating Hitler. First of all they have to recognize that there was more than one Nazi leader. For instance, the audio book I just listened to this past winter emphasized Himmler and the power he had in shaping the SS and why he was responsible for the Nazi atrocities. The link there was harkening back to Tacitus's Germania. The audio book made Himmler sound like a real nut case. He cut his hair in a certain way to look like a Germanic warrior. He wanted to be able to do certain athletic feats to imitate an ancient German warrior. He thought the Jews were enemies of the native Germans. He once raided an Italian villa to look for a manuscript of Tacitus's Germania. He wanted the SS to use emblems and symbols from ancient Germany. The same audio book said that Hitler used to make fun of this attitude and even said to others that he thought Himmler was crazy. Hitler said that the ancient Germans weren't as civilized as the Greeks and shouldn't be imitated. Considering that Hitler actually socialized with Jews and actually lived with a Jew as a friend at the Berghof, i.e. his dietician, what was going on here is not what people think.In the last days of the Third Reich Hitler actually issued an order to get rid of Himmler. But it wasn't carried out.
We started on doing an author's page for me on amazon.de last night. We didn't get any farther than posting a photo, but at least it is a start. I might write up what I want to say for an author's bio and have that translated along with the novel. But then again I don't think you have to do this, and a lot of Germans read English anyway.
As I mentioned before I am going to serialize Captive at the Berghof in German and put up one chapter at a time. I looked up publishing in installments online and saw details about how it was used in the nineteenth century. Apparently Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers was the first big bestseller of the genre. Dumas was the most extreme example of a writer who used the genre to his advantage. He knew how to stretch novels out to the max including the most scenes possible so that he could have the most installments and make the most money on works such as The Three Musketeers. But then apparently in the year 2000 Stephen King tried an experiment and self-published one of his works in this fashion.P.S. I know it is out of date in general, but have you ever queried magazines and asked if they wanted to publish the first chapter or two of Hitler's First Lady? as a kind of serialization.
During the past three years I have tried all sorts of online promotions. I tried doing ads on Facebook. I have tried ads on Goodreads and giveaways on Goodreads. I have tried blog tours and asking for recommendations from other authors as quotes to publish with the novels. I have done and am still doing monthly newsletters. Once I even paid for PR Web press releases. But the only thing that seems to produce additional sales is changing the keywords on Amazon and offering the books as free promotions on Amazon. If you haven't changed your keywords I would try that. I listened to an audiotape which revealed the existence of "secret Amazon keywords". It involves sub categories with their own special keyword requirements. Maybe I should try to send you a link.
Your family knew Mosley and his wife? Did you ever meet them? This is something you never mentioned before. If you ever did meet them, what were your impressions? Mosley is a character in my Dunkirk Plot novel that I mentioned, the alternative history thriller. In that novel Mosley was released from jail and became PM. But in real life I had the impression that Mosley wasn't much of a threat to Britain. I don't know why they bothered to jail him. He seemed harmless, in fact. He liked to dress up in uniform and parade around. Rather ceremonial, if you ask me. He seemed like a kooky upper class Brit. Do you think he was more serious than that?
Your view of the Holocaust is the one I see all the time. I've seen it since grade school and high school. What I believe is this: the Holocaust was largely unknown in Germany during the war just as it was unknown in Britain and in America. It didn't exist as far as these populations were concerned. I don't think Hitler knew about it either. Not at all. Nor did his secretaries. Nor did his valet. It was known only to people like Himmler and his SS associates as well as their confederates in the East who were carrying out the ethnic cleansing. My research in this area has only reinforced this view.Hitler knew about Jews being ushered out of Germany in the 1930's. But at this time period this was not considered to be scandalous. Even the Americans did not find it so. His signature is on the Madagascar agreement that never came about to transfer Jews to Madagascar. But there is no record that he knew about what was going on in the last years of the war under Himmler. Tradl Junge testifies that during those years he hardly ever met Himmler. Hitler was isolated at the Berghof. He met Himmler for lunch once. He did not meet him in private. Tradl Junge says Jews came up only once. Himmler talked only about how he was educating Jewish prisoners to run their own camps or some such story. That's all Hitler heard.
If you want to find a population where more knew about it look East. Those in eastern Europe still think like that now and still believe in ethnic cleansing. The Russians hold the real key to what went on at the end of the Nazi era. But they won't talk. They've sealed the records and destroyed many of them. Remember the historic relation between Russia and Germany.
Linda you are living in a world which does not exist any more. Of course there is security to get into Buckingham Palace as there is into any major public building that might be a terrorist target. There would be a public outcry if there wasn't.