That's just friggin' amazing:
The scale of the task facing UK legislators as they try to extricate Britain from the European Union was revealed on Thursday when the British government set out how the process would work.
Unveiling plans to convert EU law into domestic law, the government disclosed that 12,000 EU regulations are in force in Britain. About 7,900 "statutory instruments" -- government orders -- have implemented EU directives. Some 186 acts of Parliament passed between 1980 and 2009 "contained a degree of EU influence," the government said.
I assume Putin, who considers the dissolution of the Soviet Union a historic catastrophe, is really jealous.
The Soviet Union relied on lots of tanks and secret police to keep their restive imperial provinces in line. And in the end it was not enough.
Who knew that 10,000 cheese regulations would have been more effective in tying the imperial provinces to the motherland?
UPDATE: This makes me wonder about how successful a California secession movement (or Texas, or wherever) could be given the huge role the federal government has now in every state and local government, unlike in 1861 when the federal government had the post office, customs, and the military, with not much else really entangling the states.
