Filed under: Bureaucracy, European Union, Pop Culture, Regulation, United Kingdom | Tags: BREXIT, Domenic Frisby, European Union, Great Britain
Well, Happy Brexit Day to our British friends across the pond. It’s a thing that seems to be going around. People aren’t too happy with giant bureaucracies trying to control their prized freedoms with ever more regulations and laws and nit-picking.
Whether government is elected or assigned, human nature intrudes, and once in power bureaucracies want to fix their subjects, make them behave better, become whatever they think will or might be an improvement. The people don’t mind some moderate regulation, but the regulators always go too far. Americans started off with a bit of that when the British initiated the Stamp Act and the taxes started interfering with daily life. America became it’s own nation with a unpleasant Revolutionary War just to make things clear. So we fully understand what the Brits are up to with Brexit. The Bureaucrats of the European Union went too far, and it wasn’t just regulating the proper size and curvature of bananas and cucumbers, but food regulations went so far by 2008 that shops were refusing to stock up to 20% of food and vegetables because it didn’t meet EU regulations. And it’s not just food, but illegal immigrants, refugees, who is or isn’t, and what to do about it. The EU has become a busybody and the fear, of course, is that other nations might follow Britain out.
If the complexities of regulation interest you at all, you might enjoy Matt Ridley’s speech to the House of Lords about Genome Editing. OK that sounds unbearably boring, but the speech is short and demonstrates just how the future can be fouled up with bad regulation. It really is interesting.
Filed under: Islam, Military, News, Syria, Terrorism, United Kingdom | Tags: Great Britain, ISIS Leader Decapitated, Special Air Service
An ISIS leader in Syria was teaching a class of new recruits how to behead a prisoner. A sniper from the elite British Special Air Service (S.A.S.) armed with a large-caliber rifle took off his head with a single head shot from over 3,000 feet away, according to The Daily Caller.
“One minute he was standing there and the next his head had exploded. The commander remained standing upright for a couple of seconds before collapsing and that’s when panic set in. We later heard most of the recruits deserted. We got rid of 21 terrorists with one bullet,” said a military official who witnessed the event.
S.A.S. is Britain’s most elite and most secretive combat force. S.A.S. members are the fictional heroes of many a thriller. A mystery sniper had been eliminating ISIS leaders in Libya, and it has been rumored that it may be a former S.A.S. sniper, but there is no confirmation.
Filed under: Economy, Environment, Europe, News, Politics | Tags: Global Warming, Great Britain
Great Britain now (2010):
Coldest December since records began as temperatures plummet to minus 10C bringing travel chaos across Britain
Swathes of Britain skidded to a halt today as the big freeze returned – grounding flights, closing rail links and leaving traffic at a standstill.
And tonight the nation was braced for another 10in of snow and yet more sub-zero temperatures – with no let-up in the bitterly cold weather for at least a month, forecasters have warned.
The Arctic conditions are set to last through the Christmas and New Year bank holidays and beyond and as temperatures plummeted to -10c (14f) the Met Office said this December was ‘almost certain’ to become the coldest since records began in 1910. [read more]
Great Britain then (2000):
Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.
…”Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said. [read more]
The only thing anthropogenic global warming advocates have proved is Maragaret Thatcher’s famous quote, “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” As we are now seeing, socialism has bankrupted much of Europe, and I submit the only reason those nations have been so enthusiastically pushing the United States to sign onto a global warming treaty is because every such agreement to date would have redistributed billions in American wealth to prop up those nations’ failing socialist programs.
(h/t Drudge)
Filed under: Foreign Policy, Progressivism, United Kingdom | Tags: Argentina, Foreign Policy Flub., Great Britain, The Falklands
The Obama administration has a very strange record in foreign policy. The snubs to Britain have been frequent, and now Hillary Clinton has done it again. This is just plain embarrassing. “Argentina celebrates diplomatic coup as Hillary Clinton calls for talks over Falklands.”
Argentina was celebrating a diplomatic coup yesterday in its attempt to force Britain to accept talks on the future of the Falkland Islands, after a two-hour meeting in Buenos Aires between Hillary Clinton and President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
Responding to a request from Mrs Kirchner for “friendly mediation” between Britain and Argentina, Mrs Clinton, the US Secretary of State, said she agreed that talks were a sensible way forward and offered “to encourage both countries to sit down”.
Her intervention defied Britain’s longstanding position that there should be no negotiations unless the islands’ 3,000 inhabitants asked for them. It was hailed in Buenos Aires as a major diplomatic victory, but condemned in the Falklands.
Britain insisted there was no need for mediation as long as the islanders wanted to remain British. “We don’t think that’s necessary,” a Downing Street spokesman said.
America’s traditional stance has been to stay out of the argument over sovereignty, but to offer logistical support. It sounds as if Hillary was perhaps just trying to be nice, and Argentina made more of her comment than it deserved. However, the British are offended. And it was all quite unnecessary. But apparently in line with Obama’s orders. Ralph Peters has the back story.
We had a hunch that Hillary’s visits to foreign states as First Lady were not quite what they were cracked up to be as embellishments to the resumé.
NHS Worcestershire ruled that Judith Roe, 74, did not qualify for NHS funding because her condition was a “social” rather than “health” problem, even though she was so ill she could not make a cup of tea and regularly left the stove on. She was forced to sell her £200,000 home to pay her £600-a-week nursing home fees, which would have been funded if she had been categorised correctly. Mrs Roe’s family appealed to the Health Service Ombudsman, which ruled that Mrs Roe’s assessment had been incorrect and her treatment should have been funded by the NHS…
Mrs Roe, a retired church warden and school teacher, was diagnosed in 2002 with severe Alzheimer’s and Parkinsons. Under English law, elderly people must pay for their own residential care unless their needs are deemed health-related. She was assessed but her needs were regarded to be social rather than health, meaning she did not qualify for funding. [read more]
Woman gives birth on pavement after being refused ambulance.
Today a spokeswoman for the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust said: ‘We are disappointed that Ms Blake was not happy with the advice and care she received and will of course investigate any complaint.
But look on the bright side! At least her pavement delivery was “free”!