So, we now know the date-certain for defeat in Afghanistan thanks to the West Point session President Teleprompter held a couple of days ago. I haven’t seen Vegas’ over/under for the number of innocents slaughtered in Afghanistan in 2011 but they’re coming I’m sure. In the meantime, The One’s dithering on another war front. It’s invisible to most of us, but it’s just as real and more immediately dangerous to ordinary Americans than the Taliban’s activities.

We’ve heard a lot in the recent past about the vulnerability of our nation’s infrastructure — roads, railroads, utilities, ports, airports and so forth– to attack, both physical and electronic. Some of you may also be aware that China, especially, and to a lesser extent North Korea, have made probing attacks against the electronic infrastructure that binds our economy, and in the case of the electric power grid, our homes, together. There’s a thing lurking just over the horizon called ’the smart grid‘ that’s been under development for some time now. Briefly the idea is that by intelligently deploying full fledged computers, chips, and custom software throughout the grid, we can more efficiently deliver electricity to the ultimate point of consumption, build fewer power plants, let government snoops into your home network and cut pollution among many supposed benefits. The internet, the ‘network of networks’ comprised of business, personal, academic and governmental computer networks, will at some point almost assuredly become so closely intertwined with the electricity transmission network (not that it perhaps isn’t already) and then the smart grid eventually, so as to render them indistinguishable. That makes for one fat juicy target, one that’s already been attacked both in the US and elsewhere. Forget suitcase nukes– try to imagine the havoc wrought by shutting off the entire electric grid in a city like Chicago. (Another reason to avoid O’Hare, as though one were needed.)

But never fear, The One is on the job. Recognizing our vulnerabilities, T.O. did what he does best– made an announcement. The computer industry press is just as susceptible to TLS (Tingling Leg Syndrome or Matthews Disease) as anyone else so it dutifully reported how important T.O.’s May announcement of a cybersecurity initiative was because “… the largest benefit of Friday’s announcement was that Obama lent his name to the fight against cybercrime.” Some years ago I lent my name to the fight for the two day workweek but we can all see how that turned out.

Obama announced that he will appoint a national cybersecurity coordinator, who will report directly to the president, and the U.S. government will collaborate with private groups to create a comprehensive national cybersecurity policy. The White House will also designate cybersecurity as a key management initiative and develop metrics for measuring improvements, Obama said.

Is there anything sexier than a czar? Listen, I’ve worked in the computer industry for more than 30 years and I can tell you that calling something a “key management initiative” and developing “metrics” to measure “improvements” is the corporate version of a politician calling for a Blue Ribbon Commission. Not a meaningful thing will be done.

And six months later, as always, T.O. hasn’t disappointed. Today I came across the headline ‘Cybersecurity efforts stalled as Obama eyes Afghanistan’. What’s been accomplished so far? Same as Afghanistan– nothing. No czar, no nothing. I guess navel gazing for an alleged strategy for the Afghan war took up so much time it didn’t leave any for navel gazing his way into a cybersecurity strategy either.

Wasn’t it President Teleprompter that lectured Senator McCain during the campaign about the need for someone who could manage more than one crisis at a time? Too bad this is Onion satire and not real; the only thing wrong I guess is he didn’t take Joe and Nancy with him, but, so it goes. My point here is, one of these days, the lights are likely to blink out on you and it’s not going to be because some drunk ran into the power pole down on your corner.

I found The One’s invocation at West Point of the situation in Vietnam a generation ago like much or maybe even most of what he says– one of his many increasingly weak fabrications. I could go off on a riff just demolishing his entire description of why they supposedly bear no resemblence to each other– I mean, it’s not hard– but instead, I thought I’d pass along a few thoughts about a Stratfor analysis that demonstrates how in many key aspects the situation in Vietnam parallels our engagement in Afghanistan as it relates to the end game.

As Stratfor writes,

The core strategy adopted by Richard Nixon (not Lyndon Johnson) in Vietnam, called “Vietnamization,” saw U.S. forces working to blunt and disrupt the main North Vietnamese forces while the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) would be trained, motivated and deployed to replace U.S. forces to be systematically withdrawn from Vietnam.

… Nixon faced two points Obama now faces. First, the United States could not provide security for South Vietnam indefinitely. Second, the South Vietnamese would have to provide security for themselves. The role of the United States was to create the conditions under which the ARVN would become an effective fighting force; the impending U.S. withdrawal was intended to increase the pressure on the Vietnamese government to reform and on the ARVN to fight.

This is almost precisely what The One prescribed for us last night. In this case, Afghanis get the ARVN role and Pakistan is the stand-in for Cambodia. As we know, combined with the Democrat Congress cutting South Vietnam off at the knees after the US withdrawal, ARVN collapsed and not terribly long after our exit, Russian tanks went cruising through Saigon. In the immediate aftermath millions died in fleeing South Vietnam and in Pol Pot’s communist paradise. Truly, who can’t see this coming to pass again in a different venue?

Certainly, ARVN flopped and probably would have even if we’d continued to prop them up with arms and money. Why?

… the failure of the ARVN was not primarily due to hostility or even lack of motivation. Instead, it was due to a problem that must be addressed and overcome if the Afghanistation war is to succeed. That problem is understanding the role that Communist sympathizers and agents played in the formation of the ARVN.

By the time the ARVN expanded — and for that matter from its very foundation — the North Vietnamese intelligence services had created a systematic program for inserting operatives and recruiting sympathizers at every level of the ARVN, from senior staff and command positions down to the squad level. The exploitation of these assets was not random nor merely intended to undermine morale [sic]. Instead, it provided the NVA with strategic, operational and tactical intelligence on ARVN operations, and when ARVN and U.S. forces operated together, on U.S. efforts as well.

You don’t have to be von Clausewitz to see that this rotting-from-within will inevitably become an issue as we try to pull a hurry-up exit from Afghanistan. In fact, I’m giving even money that the al-Qaeda fifth column Democrats in Congress will cut Afghanistan off from the money teat even faster than their brethren cutoff South Vietnam in the 1970s.

The construction of an Afghan military is an obvious opportunity for Taliban operatives and sympathizers to be inserted into the force. As in Vietnam, such operatives and sympathizers are not readily distinguishable from loyal soldiers; ideology is not something easy to discern. With these operatives in place, the Taliban will know of and avoid Afghan army forces and will identify Afghan army weaknesses. Knowing that the Americans are withdrawing as the NVA did in Vietnam means the rational strategy of the Taliban is to reduce operational tempo, allow the withdrawal to proceed, and then take advantage of superior intelligence and the ability to disrupt the Afghan forces internally to launch the Taliban offensives.

Stratfor neatly sums up the reasons for the entire failure in advance,

The challenge lies in leveling the playing field by inserting operatives into the Taliban. Since the Afghan intelligence services are inherently insecure, they can’t carry out such missions. American personnel bring technical intelligence to bear, but that does not compensate for human intelligence. The only entity that could conceivably penetrate the Taliban and remain secure is the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). This would give the Americans and Afghans knowledge of Taliban plans and deployments. This would diminish the ability of the Taliban to evade attacks, and although penetrated as well, the Afghan army would enjoy a chance ARVN never had.

But only the ISI could do this, and thinking of the ISI as secure is hard to do from a historical point of view. The ISI worked closely with the Taliban during the Afghan civil war that brought it to power and afterwards, and the ISI had many Taliban sympathizers. The ISI underwent significant purging and restructuring to eliminate these elements over recent years, but no one knows how successful these efforts were.

The ISI remains the center of gravity of the entire problem. If the war is about creating an Afghan army, and if we accept that the Taliban will penetrate this army heavily no matter what, then the only counter is to penetrate the Taliban equally. Without that, Obama’s entire strategy fails as Nixon’s did.

By never using the dreaded “V” word last night, The One signaled surrender in advance. It’s impossible to not draw the conclusion then that he doesn’t care about the safety of Americans. This has already been demonstrated many times over. The operant example here is persecuting CIA operatives for their efforts to keep us safe. Now given the zero morale level no doubt rampant in the agency what are the odds they can work effectively with the ISI? About fifteen minutes after the last American leaves Kabul, the executions will begin.

This is all neatly packaged up to be The One’s Vietnam. For those of us of a certain age, it’s obviously destined to be a gruesome rewrite of a tragedy already experienced.

No, this isn’t a commentary on last night’s interesting play calling at the end of another instant-classic Colts-Patriots game, but rather the astonishingly bad? … dumb? … pointless? … idiotic? … silly? … sorry, I’m just trying to pick out the right deprecative adjective for the idea presented in a story on the front page of the Indianapolis Fishwrapper Star this morning, titled “Is African boarding school the answer for Indiana’s inner-city kids?”

Some geniuses at my alma mater, Indiana University, have posited

Moving to western Africa (Ghana, identified elsewhere in the story), the professors say, could be just what’s needed for some children at risk of getting caught up in gangs or violence. They would see the world, get away from bad influences and be in a controlled setting focused on academics.

The classes would be taught by Indiana teachers using Indiana’s educational standards in a school overseen by the state of Indiana.

Just on a different continent.

OK, I’m confused here. Don’t libs always tell us we must spend more money on education? These guys have suggested shipping the state’s approximately $10k a kid it kicks in to the city of Indianapolis to Ghana so they can do the job that local teachers can’t do? (They think they can get $4M in donations to build a school.) Now as much as anyone I understand that the physical plant has nothing to do with what or how much you learn so let’s assume that’s not a factor here. However with a per capita income of slightly more than $700 I’m somehow guessing that even getting these kids a glass of clean water and a decent meal would end up being a daily adventure.

Leaving aside a host of obvious issues, like how we define “at risk” and then identify same, why Africa? What’s magic about Africa?

“The core idea is to pull kids out of an environment where they cannot thrive,” said Brown, an IU law professor, “and put them in one where they can.”

Really? Why can’t they “thrive”? What does it mean to “thrive”? Whatever happened to libs insisting we address “root causes”? Or does that force us to examine the responsibilities of parents and the teachers they seem to be anxious to run away from?

Is this why?

“It was often the case that an observer would say, ‘Why so far away, and why to Africa?’ ” he said. “That was not a question their parents would ask. They would say, ‘Wow, that’s exciting.’ “

Exciting? What’s exciting have to do with getting an education and learning life habits to carry you along? Any parent engaged in the real world, that should be their first question. Sending some kid from the inner city to Africa on the taxpayer’s dime is pointless. These parents would be much better served demanding accountability and results from that school down the block that’s apparently doing such a poor job that we have to ship the students to Africa to get it done.

BTW, does “jobs created or saved” include teaching gigs in Ghana?

As have many of you, I’ve been appalled, sickened and disheartened by what I’ve read about what was known– and not acted upon– before Hasan’s act of war against the United States last week. A lot of questions roll through your mind trying to wrap your head around the, for want of a better term, criminal malfeasance of the so-called leaders who came in contact with this thug and put career above country and the FBI that was handcuffed to prevent acting. A few moments ago, all of these were crystalized in a single question I read posed at the end of a Human Events piece:

… if the U.S. Army cannot even defend its own — against its own — then how can it defend the rest of us?

A couple of minutes ago I broke away from the electronic vineyard to make a Starbucks run. While waiting for my beverage, I was reading the ‘Starbucks Mission Statement‘ hanging on the wall. Since my eyes don’t work as well as they used to, about all I could read without squinting was the header …

To inspire and nurture the human spirit— one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.

Well, isn’t that just awesome I thought. I got a Chris Matthews tingle. So I get back to the vineyard and pull up the whole mission statement. It’s just full of pithy drivel …

We’re passionate about ethically sourcing the finest coffee beans, roasting them with great care, and improving the lives of people who grow them.

Q: do coffee beans scream when roasted? Object to rough handling? Lose sleep without a nightlight? Not a word about the taste of the product. The work environment?

Together, we embrace diversity to create a place where each of us can be ourselves.

Um, isn’t this basically what the chairman of the joints chiefs of staff said over the weekend when he excused mass murder saying diversity was more important?  I particularly liked the part about their stores:

When our customers feel this sense of belonging, our stores become a haven, a break from the worries outside, a place where you can meet with friends. It’s about enjoyment at the speed of life—sometimes slow and savored, sometimes faster. Always full of humanity.

I guess the bums at the public library don’t use the internet computers because surely if they read this, they’d be there in a flash. And this tripe just goes on and on …

In theory anyway, if they actually believed any of this, it would create tremendous problems for the store manager. “Jones, you’re fired.” “Why!?!” “For giving that bum, er, indigent, er … person two free cups of coffee.” “But I was nurturing his spirit and building a sense of neighborhood! It’s our mission!”

And that’s when I thought of Bob Stupak who, sadly, died about six weeks ago.

It’s coming up on about 13 years ago that my bride and I first went to Las Vegas. We had such a great time we acquired a time share there and we swing through there about once a year. Well, I do; she finds excuses to go with her sister and other cronies that I am (mercifully) excused from. I don’t think at the time we expected to find it all that compelling that we’d ever be back but we always have a good time. We’ve seen a lot of … strange and usual things, seen some fantastic shows and had some fabulous meals. And this last time the wife even won a few dollars. (Gamble? No. I’d rather sit there and tease her and watch the free floor show that is a LV casino.)

After that first trip we then watched a number of pieces about Vegas on Discovery and the Werhmact History Channel and so forth. This was also about the time that Vegas went through it’s brief “family destination” incarnation. We had been appalled at that time with seeing people pushing baby carriages down the Strip at midnite. As we said then and I’ll tell you again now — if you have a kid with you and it’s midnite, the Strip is not where you’re supposed to be. We also knew it wouldn’t last. Having once had kids in strollers we intuitively knew that those folks don’t always have the deepest pockets and Vegas is about trading money for fun, not making Mom happy shoving her baby down a crowded sidewalk at midnite, fending off the Mexican guys passing out the hooker business cards. But I digress.

Amidst all these TV shows there was a few brief moments of an interview with this character Stupak, a guy who’d been up and down, was rough around the edges but at heart was a gambler. He spoke a great truism amongst all the pastel pablum of ‘Vegas is for families!’ happy talk. He uncorked a statement along the lines of: “Vegas isn’t for families. If you want to go somewhere that caters to families, go to Disneyworld. You want to gamble, come to Vegas.’

So as I thought of Bob I realized Bob would have snorted at Starbucks mission statement: ‘If you want a sense of belonging, join the Marine Corps– if you want a cup of world-class java, come to Starbucks.’ Further, it would say something like, ‘Our mission is to sell the most coffee at the highest price possible and maximize profit and return to shareholders.’ Period. If Starbucks and other companies want to save the planet, then, don’t take people’s investment money.

Bob’s investment advice would be– if you can’t decipher the business plan without running it through the leftie translator, take your money and run the other way.

Thank goodness the 2d shift manager at McDonald’s can still get into that McMansion he’s been lusting after. From today’s Washtimes:

While private lenders learned a lesson from the mortgage crisis and are shying away from easy-money loans, the FHA has stepped into the breach. The agency has provided backing for 37 percent of all mortgages used to buy homes this year.

After the collapse of much of the private mortgage market last year, Congress and the George W. Bush administration greatly expanded the FHA’s original Depression-era program aimed at assisting sales of modestly priced homes by more than doubling the ceiling on loans that the agency can insure to $625,500 while maintaining its loose lending terms - ensuring that nearly any home sale could be covered by the agency.

The FHA’s predominance was enhanced further this year when Congress lifted the ceiling to more than $729,000 for major urban areas and passed an $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers that can be accelerated for borrowers to use as a down payment on FHA loans and avoid any cash commitment to their home purchases.

I feel like an even bigger chump today than I did a few months ago. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but in hindsight, I should have known that it was inevitable.

Back in the spring when The One first started wrecking the economy and throwing away our hard earned money the jackass move that Congress pulled that made me the angriest, at a personal level, was this business of sticking me with someone else’s mortgage.

Like most newlyweds my bride of 32 years and I hadn’t the proverbial pot when we were first married. I had a lousy job and she couldn’t find one. Living in a rural area of IL with few housing options, the first winter we were married we partially spent living in an unheated trailer. Things like this tend to trigger Scarlett O’Hara reactions in me (you know, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again”) and of course, better days came. But we were always highly sensitized to the roof over our heads, so through scrimping and saving we managed finally to acquire the house we live in now and paid it off in 11 years.

Boy, were we stupid. We busted our humps and did without and now we’re going to have to pay some fool’s mortgage because Barney’s and Chris’ collective IQ and knowledge of the marketplace and economics, their moral sense of right and wrong, would rattle around in a thimble.

So this morning I read this pithy editorial in the IBD about the nuclear option on “health care” that’s about to be rammed down our throats–

In the age of the Internet, Congress refuses to post for computer access the most consequential legislation in history, as far as its effect on human lives (and deaths) is concerned, before voting on it.

The people will have to wait until it’s all signed, sealed and delivered before finding out exactly how this government-imposed monster will devour health care as Americans have known it for all their lives.

–and I realize I’ve been punked again, only much worse. Punked is the wrong word for this betrayal of 300,000,000 people, but I don’t know what the right word is.

I’m 56 years old. The other thing that my beloved and I have scrimped and saved for is the freedom of our older age together. I thank the Lord that I have smart friends who got me out of the market before it tanked last year. I thank the Lord I had enough sense to get out of the market before the internet bubble burst. I thank Him for having given me a love of reading such that I read, and understood, Einstein’s aphorism that compound interest is the strongest force in the universe– and took it to heart. Consequently, I actually still have our nest egg. We should be looking forward to kicking our shoes off and having some fun. But I can see that that’s not in the cards.

Having been punked again, I’m an even bigger chump than I thought I was. What we want to do won’t matter. Being an ant and not a grasshopper? Stupid. I also realize that our feelings about our home weren’t about keeping a roof over our heads– it was about our freedom. And now I realize, all our freedom is truly about to be destroyed, forever. Not only that, my personal nightmare is quite possibly going to come true. As my pals bs and bk, contributors here, would tell you, my worst fear is dying on a gurney for no damn reason or worse. I’ll die of something treatable because being too old, too white and too conservative, I’m a useless mouth. In fact, I’m an enemy of the people. Check that– enemy of the planet. That’s exactly what these fascist scum have in mind for me and millions like me.

I have actually been eligbile for early retirement from my job for a couple of years now. Continuing to work just incrementally adds a few bucks a month to my pension check; it won’t top out until I’m 65 and I never intended working that long anyway. I’ve always been a big believer in the idea that if you’re going to retire you need to have something to do that first Monday morning after the party and I’ve never had that, so, I’m still working. But, I think I know what to do on that proverbial ‘next Monday’ now.

Monday morning I’m going to call Evan Bayh’s office and tell the gopher that answers the phone that if he votes to pass this grotesquerie that I am going to go ahead and take my early retirement and invest my remaining days in seeing that he is run out of public office at the first available moment. In a perfect world, he’d be strapped to a satellite and launched into low earth orbit… sorry, I’m getting carried away. I’ll call Lugar’s office too, but it’s probably pointless because the man is borderline senile and he’s all done in elective office next go ’round anyway.

Obiviously, I’m a chump. But I’m going to be a chump with a purpose.

All Nippon Airways. This is so dumb I’m having a hard time actually believing it’s not actually a hoax, but according to this story, as an experiment, the geniuses at ANA are going to save the planet by having you urinate before you board the plane. Given this is Japan’s domestic airline, there’s a green tea joke there but I’m leaving it to you to come up with it.

Airline staff will be present at boarding gates in terminals to ask passengers waiting to fly to relieve themselves before boarding, The Independent reported.

ANA hopes the weight saved will lead to a five-tonne reduction in carbon emissions over the course of 30 days.

Leaving aside the hoax of global warming, if you read the rest of the story and do the math yourself, you find the ‘idiot with a calculator’ in there without too much trouble.

Let’s take their contention that the average bladder carries 15 ounces of liquid at face value as well as the unspoken assumption that everyone showing up at the gate really has to go! Now if you accept my assumption that the weight of urine’s about the same as water that means, on a 150 passenger airplane, if everyone gets on empty … and their kidneys don’t function for the duration of the flight… then you didn’t haul about 141 pounds of urine on that flight. (OK, you realize that if you asked everyone to dispense with 10 pounds of carry on luggage you’d be 10x more green, but that’s not what I’m carping about here.)

They say they’re going to do this on a whopping 42 flights over the course of a month. Well, if you continue with their math, that’s 150 people times 15 ounces of urine times 42 flights or 94,500 ounces of urine, equating to 5,906.25 pounds or 2.95 tons.

Hold the phone. According to the story, not hauling 2.95 tons of urine through Japanese skies “will lead to a five-tonne reduction in carbon emissions”? A “tonne” is a metric ton, that is, 1,000 kilos. At 2.2 pounds per kilo what the contention is here is that not hauling around 2.95 tons of urine keeps 11 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere?

We have one of two things here– either we should just give up on all this green baloney because the planet and the human race is doomed or, we have an idiot with a calculator in charge at ANA.

I see Fiat’s Folly, a.k.a. Chrysler, is tossing their hand picked management team overboard already. According to AP, one guy has “has resigned to pursue other interests” and another one “has resigned for personal reasons.” I think that’s press release code for escorted-out-by-security. They’ve taken the step to spin off their trucks into their own Ram division and left the car operation in the hands of their head design guy, Robert Gilles, which would be fairly innovative if Government Motors hadn’t already done something similar with their Caddy design guy. A guy named Diaz will head up the car operations, coming in from something called the Denver Business Center, whatever that might be.

But the reality is, it probably doesn’t matter because the impact of cash for clunkers is now evident. I think everyone– except the legacy media of course– realized that auto sales would crash back to earth when cash for clunkers expired. In the case of Chrysler and Government Motors, it’s more of a case of crash for clunkers.

Edmunds.com predicts GM will sell 152,000 units in September 2009, down 46.1 percent compared to September 2008 and down 37.8 percent from August 2009. GM’s market share is expected to be 20.6 percent of new vehicle sales in September 2009, down from 29.4 percent in September 2008 and up from 19.5 percent in August 2009.

Edmunds.com predicts Chrysler will sell 55,000 units in September 2009, down 48.7 percent compared to September 2008 and down 40.7 percent from August 2009. This would result in a new car market share of 7.4 percent for Chrysler in September 2009, down from 11.1 percent in September 2008 and flat compared with August 2009.

The chart that accompanies the story tells the year-to-year total sales story — Chrysler down nearly 51% from 9/08, GM down a shade over 48%. I think it’s fair to ask, with Fiat’s sales in Europe down more than a quarter and its parent company eyeball deep in debt, will Chrysler survive another year? The AP says it’s an 18 month slog to get to something the public wants to buy. Having heard this sort of happy talk from the used-to-be Big Three for years, I don’t see the next K car over the horizon. Neither do Chrysler partisans; at the Mopart news blog, as one guy put it,

It probably does not have the capital to wait through another year of low US car sales with a market share that is almost certainly to stay below 8%. It does not have models tailored to the current market tastes. Chrysler is going out of business. The company just hasn’t made it official.

The AP says the Treasury won’t pump any more money into this thing. Still it’s an open question in my mind whether The One will try to stampede everyone into sinking more money into this corpse of a company. I’d say it’s a toss up.

Reading about Iran’s thumb-in-the-eye rocket tests this morning, I was thinking about how hopelessly over-matched Little Lord Fauntleroy … er, The One … is in dealing with the thugs running Iran (and Russia, Venezuela, Afghanistan, North Korea, and on and on). The question is, why is he over-matched? It’s because of his squishy, utopian world-view. That world-view is well explained in a piece by Janet Daley in the London Telegraph, and I think she also began by capturing why his teleprompter-reading at Babel by the Bay, a clear case of preaching to the converted, aggravated so many Americans.

You are a political leader whose domestic programme is bogged down in messy controversy: what do you do? You go global. You walk the world stage with an air of supercilious moral righteousness…

I am not just talking about Gordon Brown. He is part of a great tradition of failing prime ministers and presidents at the fag end of their tenures going walkabout on the international circuit, in the hope that this larger arena will provide some sort of dignified final chapter to their historical story. But Barack Obama is at it too…

OK, admit it– when you read the phrase “… going walkabout on the international circuit..” a lot of you immediately were reminded of the Huckster from Hype’s interminable farewell tour, but I digress. Daley posits

There is a new discourse in the air which goes beyond the established understanding of the relationship between national and international politics: a language of “global governance” and an apparent consensus that all the interests of responsible countries are now “shared interests”.

She makes the point that that kind of talk is ignored outside the US because “older nations are sufficiently cynical” to realize it’s happy talk but is incendiary here because our poltical arena is defined by specific words found in our “sacred documents”. What makes “shared interests” governing dangerous isn’t the obvious downsides pointed out.

The idea of global governance is meaningless without mechanisms to enforce it, so what are we talking about here? World government? A system of laws and policing which would be beyond the reach of the electorates of individual countries, and therefore have no direct democratic accountability to the peoples of those nations?

Although Daley explores the implications of an unaccountable bureaucracy (EU, anyone?) in my opinion the real danger is summed up in her last paragraph:

But perhaps you find yourself convinced, in the present economic circumstances, that there are no national crises any more, only global ones – and that the governing of all nations must now be subsumed under some overarching international framework of law and supervision, to be monitored and policed by suitably empowered agencies. Maybe you think that is an acceptable price to be paid for stability at home and security abroad. But consider this: what if the new dispensation, once installed, fails to produce that stability and security, or delivers it only to certain nations (not yours), or does so only by limiting freedoms that you consider precious? What recourse will you have then to remove it peaceably from power, as you do your national government?

It seems clear to me– as much as anything The One says or does can be considered to be clear– that  mushy one-world government is what he loves. Well, assuming he’s in charge of it of course. Tragically, if it happened, it would inevitably become a massive despotism; with humans running it, it could be nothing else. Today, the UN is a toothless despotism, but it’s the model to be built from. Most dangerous for us, despotism is what most attracts the left. It’s why The One and his ‘bots will never stop. Otherwise, how do they achieve the New Soviet Man?