In my experience, a lot of these politics are purely performative. Politicians get elected on the promise of ‘reducing regulations’ to ‘release the economy’, without any connection to reality. In office they than have to do something that looks like the thing they fought for. We’ve seen the same after Brexit. The ‘bad and idiotic’ EU regulations were dropped and untreated sewage was let into the sea.

Maybe they mean lupus? I think wolfes were already extinct in the 1600s on the British isles.

The numbers were code for emperor Nero. If you assign every letter in the alphabet a number based on the alphabetical order and add up the values for the name, you get 666. But only if you use the Greek name NERON CAESAR, in Latin, he would be NERO CAESAR, and the missing N gives you only 616. So some scribes in the western part of the empire would calculate in their head and write down 616. So we got two versions of the number going around in manuscripts from the time.