United Liberty

How’s the for a great use of taxpayer funding. The United States will be dropping $1 billion to build a moat (you read that right) at the embassy in London:

The United States has unveiled plans for its new $1 billion high-security embassy in London — the most expensive it has ever built.
[…]
A moat 30 metres (100ft) wide and rolling parkland will separate the building from the main road, protecting it from would-be bombers and removing the need for the blast barriers that so dismayed the people of Mayfair.

The State Department sought to play down the cost of security measures, noting the expense of London building work. But the price puts the London embassy above the US’s most fortified missions, including the Baghdad embassy, which cost $600 million (£390 million) but required a further $100 million of work on air conditioning, and the Islamabad embassy, still under construction, which has cost more than $850 million.

It also does not include the 17.5 per cent VAT demanded by the Treasury on all buildings in Britain and which the US has refused to pay.

Um, this is ridiculous.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s comments regarding skeptics of man-made climate change are very inflammatory:

There is an anti-science group, there is a flat Earth group, if I may say so, over the scientific evidence for climate change.

I was forwarded that story by a reader and found myself really getting riled up by it, bringing to fruition this post. Gordon Brown’s comments are totally ridiculous. Most climate change skeptics have very nuanced views that basically argue that climate change is occurring, but that the Al Gore style zealotry is totally inappropriate because 1) CO2 is totally natural even in massive quantities, (in Washington state, it was a common statistic that volcanoes such as Mt. St. Helens emitted more CO2 in one eruption than Washington state’s car drivers did in one year) and 2) the world is in a constant state of climate flux, evidenced by the fact that ancient history describes the Middle East as green and abundant when it’s barren and sandy now. None of these points refute climate change, but instead refute the arguments that man’s activity on earth is the cause for it.

The view of skeptics is much more complex and nuanced than that of Prime Minister Brown, Al Gore or the like. By referring to skeptics as “a flat Earth group,” Brown seems to be comparing us to the Church as it persecuted Galileo Galilei. Brown has the comparison reversed. It’s really him, the United Nations, Al Gore and all those who are trying to silence and deligitimate criticism and dissent that are acting in an authoritarian and regressive manner.

During a time of economic unrest, British chain Woolworth’s has closed after a century of business.

An interesting video reveals that during the late 1970s the United Kingdom was unprepared for any potential Soviet aggression.

A peculiar story takes shape in the United Kingdom:

Human rights advocates, parliamentarians and Holocaust memorial organizations are among those vocally condemning a plan to broadcast a Christmas speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on BBC’s Channel 4 as a counterpoint to the Queen’s traditional message.

It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it: in Newspeak, “doublethink.” - George Orwell (1984)

Over the weekend the United Kingdom’s internet regulatory agency, The Internet Watch Foundation, blacklisted Wikipedia over concerns of “indecent images” of minors under the age of 18. The image is of the album art for a 1976 Scorpions album titled “Virgin Killer”. Beyond the problem of a centralized authority having the fiat power to blacklist sites without court order, this particular case is quite intriguing because while the image itself is quite disgusting, according to Wikimedia Foundation-

“We have no reason to believe the article, or the image contained in the article, has been held to be illegal in any jurisdiction anywhere in the world,”

MSNBC is reporting that the United Kingdom’s House of Lords rejected, in what opposition leaders called a “crushing defeat”, a government plan to increase the amount of time that the state can hold suspects without charges from 28 to 42 days.The pre-9/11 maximum length to which the government could hold suspects without charge was 2 days. This most recent proposal going down in a 3-to-1 defeat hopefully will send a warning message to Gordon Brown and others that they will not be allowed to reign unchecked.