Jul 282024
Jul 272024
Just recently (and possibly triggered by the £45 million pound share of the Crown Estate income that the monarchy is getting), there has been a lot of republican jumping up and down about how the king owns the sea (i.e. off-shore wind farms pay rent to the Crown Estate).
I get it. Although I’m not an active republican, I do think selecting the head of state by being the first-born into the right family is a bloody daft way of picking one. I just think there are more important matters to sort out first. Just remember, if we elect a head of state we could wind up with a lettuce.
Well, I say first-born child of the monarch, but in reality parliament decides who gets the crown even if it is the first-born by default. It has been that way since parliament demoted the first Charlie with an ax.
Ever since that time, control over the Crown Estate has effectively been under parliament’s control. That control became explicit when George III explicitly passed control over the Crown Estate to parliament in return for no longer being responsible for the expenses of government.
That last bit is significant – the third Charlie has two fortunes – his private fortune and the Crown Estate. Why two? Because the Crown Estate is supposed to serve a special purpose – it is supposed to be used to pay for government.
And it does. The overwhelming majority of the Crown Estate income goes into the Treasury; Charlie gets 15% supposedly to pay his expenses as head of state. Now this may well be too much (especially as it has risen to £45 million), but some is perfectly reasonable. If we were to pick a random person to be the monarch (perhaps not a bad idea), paying them something out of the Crown Estate would be only sensible.
An attack on the Crown Estate is not an attack on the monarchy; if we abolish the monarchy, the crown estate will still exist. It might go through a name change and it might not be quite so generous to the head of state, but it exists independently of the monarchy.
Jul 272024
Jul 272024
If you turn on Youtube, you could easily be swamped by videos poking fun at dumb Americans. But why?
Well it is certainly true that there are dumb Americans – the existence of a political party that has been hijacked by a conman who previously won the presidential election pretty much conclusively demonstrates there is plenty of stupidity in America.
But many of the examples are not stupidity (or “dumb”) but ignorance. And ignorance about Europe, Asia, or Africa – not their home continent. Such ignorance is perhaps unfortunate but reasonable.
There are plenty of folk from all over the world that are dumb – both ignorant and stupid. The average person isn’t too bright and half of us are dumber than that. No, dumb Americans are simply more noticeable simply because they’re speaking English.
English is by far the widest spoken (and read) second language to make it the most widely understood language in the world – even exceeding Mandarin (which is by far the largest first language).
And yes that means the dumb British also stand out, but not to quite to the same extent – Americans simply outnumber us.
Having said that, all those Trump voters do kind of undermine the notion that Americans aren’t really dumber than anyone else in the world.
Jul 212024
