One would think there should be some other way to sieze the assets fo failing businesses without virtually declaring them enemies of the state. But maybe there isn’t. Perhaps we’ll see a whole spate of such actions – and perhaps we’ll see the parties involved become ACTUAL enemies, hopefully not the shooting kind.
Maybe various governments ought to get cracking on creating laws to sieze assets without such, er, politically charged, terminology. I doubt this will be the last failure of one government-backed bank in another country’s territory.
Best guess then it was some “shot across the bows” warning. If the ships were so close they hit each other, it’s hard to imagine how gunfire would have missed unless it was an intentional miss.
Question about the Cod War. Why would Iceland fire on British ships. I mean, let’s say they did kill someone, would they really be able to stand up to the might of the British navy?
Also a question about Iceland financial trouble. Could the United States pulling out of the island have effected it? Less military means less money being pumped into the economy.
Actually, I was rethinking my own post about this. I agree with you about the bad form, but it is also possible that the shooting and the collision in a storm might have been entirely separate incidents.
I don’t know about that, but this may be yet another incidence of English-Icelandic rivalry, which has been going in spurts, off and on, for about a thousand years. In the Viking era, there were no doubt many Icelanders among the raiding parties besetting the English coast. At the turn of the modern era, it was the turn of English seafarers to terrorize the Icelanders and kidnapping coastal dwellers (which in Iceland must be just about everyone) back home to work as servants in their houses. A lot of the bad blood during this era was the result of squabbles over that most delicious finny denizen, the cod. Why am I suddenly talking like Dr. Smith from Lost In Space? I don’t know.
It kind of amuses me that the current web page at first glance appears to be designating the International Criminal Tribunal for The Former Yugoslavia as a terrorist organization. Now I’ve got this picture of a gang of distinguished international jurists brandishing AK-47s on a hijacked airliner, announcing they will execute one hostage every hour until Ratko Mladić is delivered into their custody.
I elect governments to protect my rights. Governments can do that by not seizing your assets based on charges they know to be false. It might help the government to seize my assets, but for them to pretend I am a drug smuggler (knowing full well I am not) so that they can seize my assets under forfeiture laws would be an outrageous criminal act on their part.
Didn’t we lose the War on Terror? (And by “We” I included all nations from USA, Spain, & the UK to Australia & Palau…)
All I know of Iceland comes from The Amazing Race, the Sugarcubes “Motorcrash” video, and various documentaries about volcanoes & glaciers & stuff. What a gorgeous country, its “moonscape” geography looks like no other place on Earth. I hope Icelanders are surviving their current Great Depression – frankly, all Americans & Europeans should breathe a sigh of relief that we did not suffer the same fate in mid-October. We came VERY close to joining Iceland; so close, you probably don’t even want to know about it. :eek:
Never in this process, it seems, has the UK declared Iceland an enemy of the state. They were officially ambiguous enough about it to allow the Icelandic government to spin it that way, but hey, that’s the fault of Iceland for spinning it that way. No one held a gun to their cod boat, so to speak.
Actually, the new secret war is the War On Religious Fundamentalism. (This includes both Islam AND Christianity, BTW.) It’s so secret, I’m not even sure if it’s started yet or if it will ever be officially announced, or even if I’m just making shit up in my head for the new novel I’m writing…
Well, if I have to choose between being governed by terrorists, drug lords, or a coalition of atheists, agnostics, and religious moderates, I think the choice is pretty clear.
[sings]Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow![/sings]